Iraqi connection to Oklahoma bombing: America's Arab allies do not agree with the president's inclusion of Iraq in the `Axis of Evil.' But new information about Saddam Hussein's involvement in the bombing of the Murrah Building may tip the balance

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 15, 2002 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah reportedly rejected a direct request from Vice President Dick Cheney during a March 16 meeting in Jeddah that Saudi Arabia support a U.S.-led attack on Iraq. Other Arab countries have followed suit. But new information linking Iraq to terrorist attacks against the U.S. mainland could at least change the equation -- or at least the U.S. resolve to move against Iraq unilaterally if necessary.

President George W. Bush and top administration officials have expanded the war on terror to include regimes, such as Iraq's, that are developing weapons of mass destruction. In testimony March 19 before the Senate Armed Services Committee, CIA Director George Tenet made clear that Iraq's ongoing nuclear-weapons program constitutes a clear and present danger to the United States. The president repeatedly has said the same. But until now the United States has taken no steps to deploy the forces most observers believe would be necessary to support military action to depose Saddam Hussein.

That was before an Oklahoma City lawyer named Mike Johnston, aided by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch, filed a federal lawsuit against Iraq on behalf of victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. The lawsuit alleges that "the entire plot to blow up the Murrah Building on April 19, 1995, in whole or in part, was orchestrated, assisted technically and/ or financially and directly aided by agents of the Republic of Iraq."

The facts Johnston and his team of investigators uncovered could blow the lid off the U.S. government cover-up of the "others unknown" who conspired with Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to murder 168 Americans. If proven, says Richard Perle, chairman of the Bush administration's advisory Defense Policy Board, "it would add a lot to the justification of what we do." However, Perle cautioned INSIGHT in an interview, "The case against Saddam is so powerful it would be unnecessary and unwise to pin our case on one single act, however heinous. We're looking at the aggregate of the indictment of Iraq: their weapons of mass destruction, their refusal to allow U.N. arms inspectors into the weapons facilities, their support for terrorism. If we clutched atone single act, some people might see it as an excuse."

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. district court in Washington on March 14, alleges that convicted Oklahoma City conspirator Nichols met repeatedly in the Philippines with World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Youssef, and that Youssef was an Iraqi intelligence agent. If these allegations are confirmed in court, they constitute a stunning indictment of Iraqi state complicity in murderous attacks on the United States well before Sept. 11.

As if anticipating new developments on the terrorism front, CIA Director Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee in unusually frank testimony on March 19 that the United States now is actively examining potential Iraqi and Iranian involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"As to where we are in [investigating] Sept. 11, the jury's out," Tenet told senators. "And it would be a mistake to dismiss the possibility of state sponsorship, whether Iranian or Iraqi, and we'll see where the evidence takes us."

The evidence could take the CIA and the White House to both Middle Eastern states, as Tenet made clear. "The distinctions between Sunni and Shia [Islam] that have traditionally divided terrorist groups are not distinctions you should make anymore because there is a common interest against the United States and its allies in this region, and they will seek capability wherever they can get it," he said. Saddam Hussein and his governing Baathist elite are predominantly Sunni, while neighboring Iran is majority Shiite. Both have helped Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, U.S. counterterrorism officials now believe.

Some of the evidence cited in the complaint was developed by Stephen Jones, the McVeigh defense attorney who first aired allegations of Iraqi involvement in his book Others Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy. But other facts will surprise even veteran Oklahoma City watchers, who long have known the government was withholding evidence, as Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn A. Fine admitted in an official report released on Match 18.

Jones tells INSIGHT that the new allegations, combined with evidence he had uncovered earlier, bear the weight of prima facie evidence of a broader conspiracy involving Iraq.

"We went to the Philippines four times to investigate Terry Nichols' meetings with Ramzi Youssef and other known terrorists," Jones tells INSIGHT. That evidence, now being expanded by Johnston and his investigators, includes testimony from Edwin Angeles, a Philippine-government intelligence operative who was infiltrated into the top echelon of the radical Islamic terrorist group known as Abu Sayyaf.

Angeles "turned himself in" to Philippine authorities in December 1994 and provided videotaped testimony to an American private investigator working for Jones who interviewed him in the Basilan provincial jail. On the tape, never admitted into evidence at the Oklahoma City trial, Angeles says he met on several occasions with Youssef, coconspirators Abdul Hakim Murad, Wali Khan Amin Shah and a visiting American known as "The Farmer."