McVeigh reference prompts response

McVeigh reference prompts response: "Responding to the Obama administration's attempt to justify a controversial 'right-wing extremism' report by citing Timothy McVeigh, a counter-terrorism group has posted a video statement by a prominent Democrat investigator who contends the Oklahoma City bomb plot was hatched not by right-wingers but by Islamic jihadists.

David Schippers, the chief counsel for the 1998 impeachment trial of President Clinton, probed the bombing with investigative reporter Jayna Davis, author of 'The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing', by WND Books. Davis asserts McVeigh and Terry Nichols were not the lone conspirators but part of a greater scheme involving Islamic terrorists and at least one provable link to Iraq. The explosion April 19, 1995, at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured another 684."

It's now clear, Rohrabacher told WND at the time, that the Clinton administration had "an aversion to any type of efforts by our government that would in some way require the use of force against foreign enemies, and especially in the Middle East."

Schippers points out McVeigh partner Nichols made several trips to the Philippines prior to the bombing, and there is evidence he met with Islamic jihadists tied to al-Qaida.

Former Clinton counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke notes in his book "Against All Enemies" that Nichols was in the Philippines in the same city at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of participation in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

"We do know that Nichols' bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned," Clarke writes.

Schippers contends the FBI failed to establish a tie between McVeigh and right-wing militias. Some independent investigators dispute that, including Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney who believes McVeigh was aided by a white supremacist group that had been infiltrated by the FBI.

Trentadue obtained FBI documents in his Freedom of Information Act suit against the agency, which he says bolster his belief the FBI had prior knowledge of the bombing.

Davis, who began her investigation while covering the bombing as a local TV reporter, dismisses the theory centered on a German national who was in the U.S. illegally in 1995, Andreas Carl Strassmeier, and domestic neo-Nazis at a white supremacist compound in Oklahoma called Elohim City.

"FBI agents have testified the neo-Nazi, Elohim City connection is nothing more than a dry hole," Davis argues. "There's not one motel log, one phone log, one fingerprint or eyewitness account that can tie any of these Nazi conspirators or Strassmeier to overt commission of a crime."