Samizdat - 10/20/2009

Lawyer: Oklahoma City Bombing Tapes Missing Key Portions

http://news.antiwar.com/2009/09/27/lawyer-oklahoma-city-bombing-tapes-missing-key-portions/

After a long, drawn out Freedom of Information Act battle, Salt Lake City lawyer Jesse Trentadue finally obtained video tapes from the area around the Murrah Federal Building for April 19, 1995, when a bombing killed 168 people...

The audioless tapes show periods before the bombing and the chaotic aftermath, footage taken from four cameras at four different office buildings near the attack. Trentadue, however, says “the real story is what’s missing.”

The video footage obtained by the lawyer shows all four cameras blanked in the few minutes leading up to the attack, and as a result there was no footage of the truck before the attack. The official explanation is that all four cameras just happened to run out of tape at the same time, though they all conveniently enough come back on just after the 9:02 blast...

Trentadue’s interest in the case came when his brother Kenneth was arrested and as matching the description of a suspect in the bombing. Kenneth Trentadue died in federal custody just days after his arrest, and while officials insist he committed suicide the Trentadue family won a wrongful death suit in federal court and Jesse maintains his brother was strangled during interrogation regarding the bombing.

For those unfamiliar with the OKC bombing, there are many parallels with 9/11 (almost a dress rehearsal):

1. Bomb-sniffing dogs pulled off duty during week before blast.

2. Initial reports by firefighters, police and news crews of "other bombs found in the building"

3. Physical impossibility of an ANFO bomb destroying reinforced concrete columns from the distance that McVeigh's van was parked (subsequent tests conducted at Eglin AF base by AF Gen. Ben Partin, an ordnance expert) confirmed this.

4. Video tapes of the attack sequestered by the authorities (similar to the multiple surveillance camera tapes of the 9/11 Pentagon attack still classified)

The definitive account of this false-flag terror attack was penned by journalist David Hoffman in 1998. Published online here:

The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror

http://www.constitution.org/ocbpt/ocbpt.htm

Hoffman's theory, and that advanced by many others, is that the militia movement ignited by the Randy Weaver and Waco tragedies was considered a serious threat in the Beltway. OKC effectively discredited the militia movement -- membership and recruitment declined dramatically in the aftermath... but it's back, more or less, with the Oath Keepers (http://oathkeepers.org/oath/). If this movement continues to grow, don't surprised by another homegrown terror attack attributed to this group.

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Princess Diana: death 'was not an accident' says leading lawyer
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was not an accident, according to the memoirs of lawyer Michael Mansfield who represented Mohamed Fayed at the inquest into the crash.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/diana/6124673/Princess-Diana-death-was-not-an-accident-says-leading-lawyer.html

He added: “There is still a widespread belief that the inquest was a waste of time and money and came to no different conclusion than previous investigations and inquiries. This is a serious misconception. “On April 7, 2008, the jury did not decide it was just a tragic accident but returned a verdict of unlawful killing by the drivers of both the Mercedes and the following vehicles. The ‘following vehicles’ element in the verdict was an aspect that very few commentators picked up on, or bothered with.”

The book also reprises other issues set out in the trial but were not “resolved by evidence, or reflected in the verdict”. These included the box of missing personal papers belonging to Diana, the missing driver of the white Fiat, the three hours on the evening of August 30, 1997, during which the movements of Dodi’s chauffeur Henri Paul could not be established and the unexplained regular and sizeable sums of money going into Henri Paul’s several bank accounts over the three months before the crash....
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Still Classified: Lee Harvey Oswald's and Marguerite Oswald's tax returns, 1957 – 1963

Many people are under the impression that the Assassination Records Reveiw Board, formed after the publicity generated by Oliver Stone's JFK, resulted in the release of all classified files about the JFK assassination. This is not true. The tax returns of LHO and his mother, Marguerite, were specifically exempted from declassification by the ARRB. What could be so sensitive about 50-yr. old tax returns? In 1997, researcher John Armstrong published his first articles detailing the parallel tracks of two Oswalds over a 9-year period, from his brief sojourn in New York to his arrest in the Texas Theater after the assassination; one "Oswald" in junior high in New York, another attending junior high in Ft. Worth. One "Oswald" working in New Orleans while the Warren Commission has him based in Japan with the Marines. Met with incredulity by assassination researchers at first, his work was buttressed by court, school and employment records, and interviews with witnesses over this period, assembled in a 1000-page book, "Harvey and Lee," now out of print (Armstrong is at work on a new book about the assassination). The following first chapter is an intriguing introduction to the Oswald mystery, and the use of doubles in other espionage cases.

Armstrong's theory: the two Oswalds were part of an intelligence operation to insert a false defector to the Soviet Union, at at a time when intelligence on that closed society was negligible (before the U2; most false defectors had been either doubled or killed). The "Harvey" Oswald was later hijacked in the assassination conspiracy.

An excerpt from "Harvey & Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald"

by John Armstrong

http://www.jfkresearch.com/jfk_101.html

Update: The segment in the last Samizdat about the two Oswalds was prompted by the following NY Times article on Oct. 16:

C.I.A. Is Still Cagey About Oswald Mystery

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — Is the Central Intelligence Agency covering up some dark secret about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

Probably not. [Note the unwarranted presumption] But you would not know it from the C.I.A.’s behavior. For six years, the agency has fought in federal court to keep secret hundreds of documents from 1963... The files in question, some released under direction of the court and hundreds more that are still secret, involve the curious career of George E. Joannides, the case officer who oversaw the dissident Cubans in 1963...

“The methods of defeating or deterring covert action in the 1960s and 1970s can still be instructive to the United States’ current enemies,” a C.I.A. official wrote in a court filing...

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Harr-harr. Who needs Comedy Central with these kind of statements? The NY Times, which unreservedly praised and published the Warren Commission report in 1964) is still digging with a teaspoon. There are still thousands of government documents -- CIA, FBI, Warren Commission, HSCA -- about Oswald and the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations that remain classified.

Here is some more of Armstrong's work in Harvey and Lee... he notes that Warren Commission members were troubled by these dual, conflicting records of two Oswalds -- an epidemic of discrepancies that could only be explained by the hand of a sophisticated intelligence op -- either CIA, KGB or both. It was the same baffling maze that still haunts us, and they opted for the simple "lone nut" tale, fearing both the possibility of Soviet involvement (leading to possible war), or the daunting task of exposing a powerful faction of right-wing fanatics within the US government.


From John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee:

The Warren Commission tells us Oswald attended only 24 days of school (in New York City) thru May 7, 1953. Yet WC Exhibit 1384 shows him attending 109 days of school at the same time. The court and school records are both Warren Commission exhibits...

Oswald was remanded to a Youth House for truancy. His mother, Marguerite, met with Lee's probation officer, John Carro, and the interview is part of the Warren Commission evidence (Vol. 19, p. 309) The summary of that interview:

Marguerite told Carro she was the youngest of 6 children, yet there were 5 children in the Claverie family. She gave Lee Oswald's father's name as Robert Lee Harvey, when his real name was Robert Edward Lee Oswald. She said Lee's father died at age 45, yet we know he was 41 years old when he died. She gave her marriage date as July 19, 1929, yet she married Robert Oswald in 1933. She gave her sister's name as Lillian Sigouerette, when we know her sister's name was Lillian Murrett. She said she formerly owned a house in Corning, Texas yet there is not and never has been a "Corning," Texas. She gave Lee Harvey Oswald's birth date as October 19 when the correct date was October 18th. She said Lee was baptized at the Trinity Lutheran Church in New Orleans, when the records show he was baptized at the Redeemer Lutheran Church in New Orleans. When she was asked whether Lee's father was right or left handed she replied "I do not remember, sir." (Warren Commission testimony). There is no reason for a 45 year old woman to make these kind of errors concerning her background. Would you, reader, make any of them? Had she forgotten, was she lying, or was this person truly Lee's mother?

This is one of hundreds of such "anomalies" in the documentary record of Lee Harvey and Marguerite Oswald. Armstrong closes his Probe articles with this curious revelation:

Jack Ruby's tax returns were published in the Warren Commission volumes while Marguerite and Lee Oswald's remain classified. Both Marguerite and Lee Oswald's income tax returns for the years 1956 through 1962 are listed in the National Archives master list of JFK documents. They are marked 'classified,' and are unavailable to the public . Curiously, the JFK master list shows that a John Smith and Minnie Smith also have tax returns for the years 1957 through 1962 listed and marked 'classified.' Certainly, the names of John and Minnie Smith can be found nowhere else in the entire expansive world of Kennedy assassination research -- not in the National Archives files, the Warren Commission documents, the HSCA files, or anywhere else. The only documents at all indicating the mere existence of John and Minnie Smith are the 'classified' tax returns listed in the National Archives master list of JFK documents (126).

One has to wonder if John and Minnie Smith might be pseudonyms for another couple, more mysterious than any we know. Could they be for Harvey Oswald's real mother and father? Or, if not a husband and wife, could they in fact be for the other Lee and Marguerite? If not, who are these people, and what possible relevance do they or their tax returns have to the assassination? (127)

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