Archive for May, 2005

Oklahoma City bombing coverup.

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

Based on the information summarized in recent posts, I have formed the conclusion that the government including the FBI is involved in a coverup of important information regarding the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. I intend to continue following this story here until it reaches a conclusion.

In other “conspiracy theory” cases, such as the JFK assassination, the evidence of a coverup or conspiracy is not sufficient to support a belief that a coverup or conspiracy ever existed.

In the Oklahoma City bombing case, there is enough bizarre and unexplained material to indicate that the official version of events is not true and correct in at least one important manner. What is not determined with certainty yet is what the government has temporarily covered up. It is my belief and intent that it will be discovered and published to the world.

Andrew Hagen

The state murder of Kenneth Trentadue.

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

Kenneth Trentadue was in prison in August 1995 for a parole violation for which he expected to serve six months. He had a family and showed no suicidal tendencies. He died in a suicide-proof cell in a federal prison in Oklahoma City on August 21st. Prison officials said it was a suicide. They telephoned his mother, not his wife, at 6:40 AM. At that time they offered to cremate his body at prison expense. (*) The Trentadues denied cremation and had the body sent for burial.

When the body arrived, it was caked in makeup. (†) The Trentadues had the makeup removed. They discovered horrible wounds on different parts of his body. Graphic photos are available on the Internet. The only possible explanation is that Kenneth Trentadue was savagely beaten to death by the government. (‡) This leads to the question of motive: why did they do it?

Paul Craig Roberts investigates the connection between the Trentadue murder and a coverup regarding the Oklahoma City bombing. (§) He also states that Kenneth’s brother, Jesse Trentadue, who has attempted to solve the murder, has been targeted by the FBI for a phony criminal investigation intended to stifle his efforts. (**)

Oklahoma City bombing notes.

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

Jayna Davis has reported that Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef met in Mindanao in the Philippines in the early 1990s. (*) Yousef is in prison for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Former US government counterterrorism operator Richard Clarke has noted that prior to Terry Nichols’s visit to the Phillipines, his bombs didn’t work. After his visit, they worked. (†)

Terry Nichols has accused a gun dealer, Roger Moore, of aiding the OKC bombing plot by providing explosive devices. (‡) This is a suspect allegation. Roger Moore testified against Terry Nichols in a prosecution of Nichols for theft. Roger Moore has denied Nichols’s allegation. No evidence other than the statement of Nichols’s exists. What is interesting is that Terry Nichols feels the need to make a new accusation. Why?

The day before the 2005 birthday of Terry Nichols (born April 1, 1955), the FBI searched his old house in Herington, Kansas. In a crawl space they dug down and found explosive materials. (§)

Jack Cashill reports that an FBI prison informant, Gregory Scarpa, tipped off the FBI about the hidden cache of explosives. (**) Cashill believes Nichols may have trained with Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines. Abu Sayyaf is a branch of Al Qaeda. Scarpa’s tip passed through Stephen P. Dresch, a forensic economist. (††)

Counterterrorism expert Yossef Bodansky has confirmed that Ayman Al-Zawahiri, currently Osama Bin Laden’s second-in-command of Al Qaeda, was in Oklahoma City in the spring of 1995. (‡‡)

Filipino law enforcement has a statement from Edward Angeles, a founder of Abu Sayyaf, that Nichols and Yousef did meet. (§§)

Finally, the mugshot of Jose Padilla, also known as Abdullah Al-Muhajir (***), looks strikingly like the person depicted in the 1995 police sketch of someone seen near the scene of the Oklahoma City Bombing. (†††) Al-Muhajir was arrested amid allegations by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft that he was tied to a dirty bomb plot.

Jayna Davis has undertaken a long investigation into the possibility of foreign terrorist ties to the OKC bombing. (‡‡‡)

FBI counterterrorism chief in OKC before the bombing?

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

World Net Daily reported in 2002 that a hotel receipt shows that Danny Coulson, “then-director of the FBI’s Terrorist Task Force,” was checked into a hotel in Oklahoma City around midnight prior to the bombing the morning of April 19, 1995. (*) Coulson had earlier claimed to be in Fort Worth, Texas.

New FBI documents on Oklahoma City bombing.

Thursday, May 26th, 2005

The FBI has produced 340 previously secret documents on the Oklahoma City bombing. (*)

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit and non-governmental organization, apparently was involved in the investigation of white supremacists in conjunction with the FBI. (†)

An allegation is that 48 hours prior to th Oklahoma City bombing, the SPLC and the FBI received word that the bombing was to take place. It is not known whether the documents substantiate that claim.

The documents were apparently released by the FBI in response to a FOIA suit filed by Jesse Trentadue, an attorney who was the brother of Kenneth Trentadue, who died in prison in 1995. Charges have been made that the government killed Kenneth Trentadue in a savage beating. The charges are that Kenneth Trentadue was mistakenly thought to have been an associate of Timothy McVeigh’s in a string of bank robberies, and that his killing was part of a coverup of what the FBI knew and when they knew it.

Law would jail those who do not report certain drug crimes to police.

Wednesday, May 25th, 2005

Influential Republican and Congressional Representative James Sensenbrenner has introduced the “Defending America’s Most Vulnerable: Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act of 2005,” also known as HR 1528. Incredibly, this law would send people to jail if they do not report certain drug crimes to the authorities within 24 hours. It is the kind of repressive tyranny that a free country shouldn’t have to put up with. (*) The legislation would allow the government to force innocent citizens to wear a wire to generate evidence against their own family members, or be sent to jail themselves. (†)

I support drug laws, but this goes way too far.

For what we fought.

Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

Keith Thompson is the latest to walk away from the Left. (*) (†)

He now blogs at Sane Nation. (‡) (§)

Newsweek puts American flag in trash can.

Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

Apparently their scurrilous behavior continues. The latest Newsweek Japan cover is abysmal. (*)

We can’t let the media do this to our country.

You know, at a certain point, we’re just not going to take it anymore.

Surplus males.

Tuesday, May 17th, 2005

Academic inquiry now backs the loose talk of how war could result in a decade or so from the disproportionately male populations of Asian countries, especially India and China. (*)

They are building the bombs to murder millions.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

The Bush Administration is not giving the nuclear threats of Iran and North Korea the attention they deserve. The New York Times editorializes that we should offer positive incentives to change the ambitions of the bomb builders in the remaining spokes of the Axis of Evil. (*)

Positive incentives to those bent on malign ends tend not to have benign results.

Iran could be dealt with by attacking political targets from the air and fostering revolution from within, following the example of Serbia in 1999/2000. The weapons program can then be destroyed from the ground or left with a democratic open society that poses no threat.

Kim Jong Il’s grip on North Korea depends on the flow of Chinese energy and goodwill. Diplomatically, we need to drive a wedge between Kim and China. America’s trade ties with China should be leveraged to achieve that wedge. Economically, we need to put a heavier squeeze on North Korea. At some point, Kim can be nudged out.

Space tourism.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

Burt Rutan says we are five years away from routine space tourism. (*)

It’s going to happen.

Many Saudi nationals suicide bombing Iraq.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

A recent Washington Post report finds that based on Internet data, a large chunk of the suicide bombers terrorizing Iraq are in fact Saudi citizens. (*) (†)

A tighter southern border watch would appear to be in order for the new Iraqi government.

Clock and calendar.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

Various proposals have been made to change Western Civilization’s traditional systems of keeping time.

Swatch introduced Internet Time some years ago. (*) No time zones and a simple, short, unique number like @172 make it appealing. I like Internet Time. It is simple. “The time is at 172.” It works as a supplemental time keeping device. If you are communicating with someone in a different time zone, it is an excellent central reference. Internet Time does not work as a replacement for the regular clock, because people living in different time zones would start work @83 or @274 or @940, for example, depending on where they lived in the world.

New Earth Time, or NET, strives to usurp regular time. (†) Unfortunately, its reliance on degrees as the main unit of time will not work. Degrees are already in use for temperature, geometry, and in metaphors (”degrees of separation”). NET will prove too confusing.

The reform efforts directed against the Gregorian calendar betray an anti-Christianist and anti-Western bias. Why not direct calendar reform efforts at the Muslim calendar, for example? The end result of most of these calendar reform efforts will be to end consecutive 7-day weeks. (‡) The losers here will be all the religions that require penitents to obey a holy day every seven days. If mass confusion is the goal, then I suppose messing up the 7-day-a-week system will work great.

Our timekeeping systems work pretty well. There is no great need to change them. Using Internet Time as a supplemental clock, however, has potential utility.

To get some perspective, we should realize that once men are permanently established on Mars, the real clock and calendar reform efforts will begin.

Mexico President Fox regrets race comment.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

President of Mexico Vicente Fox has stated his regret for making his disparaging, racist comments about African-Americans. (*) Fox had initially defended himself.

The US Embassy in Mexico City did raise the issue, reports CBS News.

Perhaps some dialogue will result, and some good will come out of it, anyway.

The Downing Street Memo.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

British PM Tony Blair’s recent reelection victory was a defeat for Iraq war opponents. They latched onto some leaked meeting minutes and portentously titled it “The Downing Street Memo.” (*) War opponents claimed the memo proves the war was a lie and so on.

In fact the memo offers little new. At one point it says: “But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

Libya has now given up its WMD program. Iran and North Korea continue to be thorns in the side of peace and liberty.

Opponents continue to misread the war aims of the allies. They were to deny the potential that Saddam would develop or acquire WMD, and also to deny to terrorists Iraq as a haven. The first aim is achieved. We are now tantalizingly close to achieving the second.

The best case against the Iraq war would be that we should have dealt with North Korea or Iran first. That is not the argument of most of the war’s opponent’s, however.

Koran abuse report retracted.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

Newsweek has now retracted their story about Koran abuse. (*)

Just great. If this spills over into world war, we’ll know who to thank.

Racist nonsense from Mexican President Fox.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

President of Mexico Vicente Fox has recently stated that Mexican immigrants to the United States take jobs that black Americans won’t. (*) That is simply outrageous hateful garbage. Unfortunately, President Fox made the statement to defend open borders immigration into the US.

Fox is now defending his comments about African-Americans.

Fox’s hateful statement is a stark and telling example of how the arguments of anti-immigration campaigners are not based on racism or appeals to prejudice. Indeed, contrariwise, Fox’s patently racist smear illustrates that the argument for open borders is based on a racial prejudice that would privilege those of Mexican nationality over American citizens.

To address the substance of Fox’s remarks, we begin with noting that illegal aliens do not have legal protections such as the minimum wage in the labor market. Since many illegal aliens are poor, they will take whatever job they can get, even working for $1 an hour if necessary. That is not a comment on the relative industriousness of illegal aliens, including many Mexican nationals. Instead, it is a comment on the market clearing price for low-end labor in the US.

In layman’s terms, if we didn’t have the minimum wage, American citizens would have $1 an hour jobs, too.

Vicente Fox should be ashamed and apologize.

I would like to see President Bush send an open letter to President Fox indicating great displeasure with the remarks.

False report on Koran.

Monday, May 16th, 2005

Newsweek is sorry. It falsely reported that US troops desecrated a Koran by putting it in a toilet. In Islam, that is one of the worst things anyone could ever do. After Newsweek published its report, based on an anonymous source, rioting shortly ensued in Pakistan and Afghanistan and beyond. (*)

Who knows what this will do to our Middle East relations?

The moral blame for the rioting must sit with the rioters themselves. Newsweek deserves blame, but for false reporting that has resulted in a major diplomatic problem based on the perception of Muslims.

With this, Newsweek has unwittingly fired another torpedo at the leaking luxury liner that is the US mainstream media.

Michelle Malkin has more on the situation. (†)

In the wake of the CBS News fiasco and the many other examples of their lies and blase attitude toward their own journalistic negligence, I would like to see the mainstream media call a nationwide conference, and send their top people. A big name institution would have to take the lead. There they would meet with bloggers and members of the general public. The conference would be a success if it impresses on the media of the need for accuracy first.

On the other hand, perhaps the media are just too consolidated and too centralized to remove the cancer of untruthfulness growing in their midst. Breaking up the industry may be the only solution.

Their ratings are down. The MSM has hit crisis mode. The American media is discrediting itself. We need a firm push toward fixing what is broken before our media “breaks a story” that turns out to be untrue and unnecessarily touches off a regional conflict or otherwise has grave real world consequences.

Judicial nominations and filibusters.

Sunday, May 15th, 2005

The controversy will soon come to a head over a few of President Bush’s judicial nominations, and the Senate Democrats’ filibuster of them. (*)

The essence of the controversy concerns the political views of the judges.

Conservatives define the issue as whether judges can be filibustered, or whether they deserve “an up or down vote.” In society, “up” is usually positive, “down” is negative. Bush wants an “up” vote.

Liberals might define the issue as whether “Bush’s radical judges should get a free pass,” but they are taking a lower-key approach.

The real problem is that these days judges in effect make numerous public policy choices for the country. Marriage, military policy, homeland security, the environment, civil rights, abortion rights, and many other of the most controversial issues of public affairs now rest on judicial determination. We are a free people who are too cowardly to make our own decisions on these troubling questions through the normal political process.

That is wrongful. It is too much to ask of judges, especially ones not accountable to the public at the ballot box. The law is not a battleground. The judicial branch should be an equal branch of government and not more and not less. We have judges to interpret the law and thereby to do justice. Judges cannot work miracles. They cannot make everyone happy.

American society remains deeply split between three groups: those deeply enmeshed in politics who identify with the red states, those deeply enmeshed in politics who identify with the blue, and those who are caught in the middle. The third group is the largest in number.

Why does this debilitating split continue to haunt the republic? It is because we citizens are lazy. Instead of engaging, discussing, debating, and contemplating, we resort to slogans and catch phrases.

If we reverse course and take on our challenges, we can eventually again reach a stage of basic political consensus. We can address those hot political issues in the course of elections and with our democratically-elected legislators. Judges can go back to their job of interpreting the law. Judges will still have brighter tints or darker shades in their personal political views, but once on the bench they will have less discretion and less policy-making power. It won’t matter as much who is judge.

Far from a great turning point in history, the filibuster controversy is but a symptom of the sickness that rots our country from within.

Trump: don’t build Freedom Tower.

Thursday, May 12th, 2005

On MSNBC today, Donald Trump excoriated the Freedom Tower, the design of the building meant to replace the twin World Trade Center towers. (*) We should either rebuild the towers one story higher or build a monumental park, he said. Just don’t build the Freedom Tower.

I agree completely. The Freedom Tower is a plastic pile of postmodern garbage that should never be built. The WTC site deserves better.