The Briley Series - May 8, 2004

Devvy
May 8, 2004

My recent article on 9-11, which presented material from Patrick Briley, brought a huge response. Pat has continued to send me his research and I'm making some of it available here and will continue to post groupings of it periodically. I deeply appreciate Pat allowing me the opportunity to get this information out. We are trying to save lives.

As was pointed out in my first article, Pat has been on the OKC bombing for a long time and has done deep, deep investigating. His research and involvement regarding 9-11 is extremely important and needs to be read by all concerned Americans.

In the future, these pieces from Pat will just be referred to as The Briley Series. I hope you will share them with your mailing list.

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Title: Corruption of FBI and DOJ Prosecutors in OKC Bombing Trials

UPDATE: Did Federal Prosecutors Risk Overturning of McVeigh and Nichols Convictions?

Crime/Corruption Front Page News Keywords: FBI, OKC Bombing, McVeigh, Bucella, Stephen Jones, US Attorneys

Source: OKCSubmariner
Published: April 1, 2001 Author: Patrick B. Briley

The article has extreme and chilling relevance today to the on-going Nichols trial in Oklahoma where the DOJ and FBI are manipulating an all too willingly compliant state trial judge, Judge Taylor in continuing the cover-up of foreknowledge of individuals in the FBI, CIA, DOJ and White House of the OKC bombing which was sadly a precursor of 9/11 and future terror attacks in America.

Major media sources including Fox News to this very day are deliberately helping individuals in the USG to cover-up their criminal behavior in the OKC bombing. If one is to believe CIA Director Colby, and I do believe Colby, then the media conduct is explained this way: "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - William Colby, former CIA Director

MY ARTICLE:

On page 241 of his book, “Others Unknown“, McVeigh defense attorney Stephen Jones wrote:

"According to some of our friends in media, the government's lawyers were at each others throats…..Meanwhile, some FBI agents had had enough of being jerked around by the prosecutors….and were openly showing their disdain, and ATF people were just as openly enraged with the FBI, saying its theory of the case was all wrong. Finally, each of the leading government lawyers had begun leaking stories to favored media sources---stories that pointed the fingers at the others.”

The Jones description of the prosecution team and the interactions with the FBI and ATF may have well been

an accurate assessment of the behavior of US prosecutors and FBI agents working for them. Jones gives numerous examples of questionable conduct by the US prosecutors throughout his book. Jones’ writings have now been bolstered by recently reported information about the woman who was in charge of the US Attorney prosecutors for the OKC bombing case.

US Attorney Donna Bucella announced her resignation under fire from the 11th US Circuit of Appeals on Friday, March 23, 2001 according to an article in the Naples Daily News “Central Florida's top prosecutor quits under fire” on March 24, 2001. The article was written by Pat Leisner of the Associated Press.

Bucella headed the executive office in charge of all 94 US attorneys including the US prosecutors who handled the OKC bombing case. In fact Bucella was sent by Reno and the DOJ to OKC the day after the Murrah Building was bombed to “initiate the nationwide investigation” that was conducted by US attorneys and the FBI. She was an associate of Janet Reno from the Southern District of Florida. In 1993 she went to work at DOJ for Reno and was responsible for the training of US attorneys and how they are to conduct Federal grand juries.

On March 16, 2001 the 11th Circuit cited prosecutorial misconduct by US prosecuting attorneys under Bucella and overturned a conviction won earlier by the prosecuting attorneys. The court criticized Bucella’s Assistant US Attorney Rubinstein “ for reportedly lying to a grand jury, rushing the panel and pressuring it to ‘rubber stamp’ indictments.” In

another case, the Naples Daily article reported that the Court also called into question the behavior of prosecutors under Bucella for their backing in court an investigation by detectives the Court said had been built “by lying, distortion and omitting facts.”

The recent findings and criticism against the US attorneys in Bucella’s Florida office by the 11th Circuit Court of appeals are remarkably similar to allegations that have been made against US Attorneys (prosecutors) handling the OKC bombing case for Bucella. And the findings against detectives in the Florida cases under Bucella are also very similar to

allegations that have been made against FBI investigators working for the US Attorneys in the OKC case.

For the OKC bombing trials, serious allegations have been made that US prosecutors and the FBI agents working with them were guilty of “lying, distortion and omitting facts.” Nichols’ defense attorney Michael Tigar made strong assertions of deliberate hiding, distortion and omitting trial evidence of FBI 302 interview reports by FBI agents conspiring with US

prosecutors. Tigar’s allegations were made at an appeals hearing with Federal Judge Matsch in July 1999. It was alleged that many of the accounts of John Does with McVeigh given by witnesses to the FBI were never adequately made available to the court at the trials by the US prosecutors or the FBI, in fact that they had been suppressed.

In fact two FBI agents working for the US prosecutors in Denver, Zimms and Odom, have been identified as suppressing witnesses and their testimony in the OKC bombing case.

Witness Debbie Burdick was called by Odom during the McVeigh trial and told not to talk to defense attorneys or news media even though she was never called to testify at the trial. Burdick saw McVeigh and Middle Eastern males in a brown Chevy truck, McVeigh’s Mercury Marquis and a blue vehicle moments before the bombing. Burdick’s story of being called and suppressed by Odom was reported on KTOK radio in OKC by news director Jerry Bohnen.

A key witness of a Middle Eastern man seen with McVeigh was brow beaten at the OKC FBI office and when he would not change his story, informed journalists close to the case report that Zimms falsified the FBI 302 interview reports with the witness. These FBI 302 reports are used as evidence by US Attorneys in trials. FBI agent Zimms was a key liaison between Federal prosecutors and the FBI in Denver starting in 1996 and throughout 1997. Zimms had previously worked closely with US Attorneys when he had worked for the FBI on mob cases in Chicago in the 1970’s.

Jones and Tigar complained bitterly about the US prosecutors and FBI agents working for them by accusing them of deliberately misspelling many names of key witnesses and suspects in indices and on important government documents during the exploratory phase of the case. The misspellings were done in contrived ways that Jones and Tigar claimed delayed the defense and in some cases kept important information from being found or known.

Was the Federal grand jury convened for the OKC bombing conducted in an illegal and improper way that resulted in “lying to a grand jury, rushing the panel and pressuring it to ‘rubber stamp’ indictments” as the 11th Circuit says was done by other US Attorneys also under Donna Bucella in Florida cases?

Federal Grand Juror Hoppi Heidelberg believed the answer is yes. Heidelberg complained of illegal conduct of US Attorneys during the Federal grand jury proceedings in OKC and was removed because of his complaints. Heidelberg claimed that he was not permitted to have the witnesses called he felt were important and that he was not properly permitted by the US Attorney prosecutors to ask questions of witnesses.

The day Heidelberg was removed, the lead US Attorney prosecutor Joseph Hartzler called Heidelberg and told him not to talk at all to a KFOR TV reporter on the way to his house that had just spoken to Heidelberg on the phone a very few minutes earlier. There is considerable evidence which suggest that FBI agents deliberately conspired with FBI informant Larry Meyers to help the US prosecutors remove Heidelberg from the grand jury because of his complaints.

Jones writes on page 190 of his book that another US prosecutor, Larry Mackey , admitted deliberately lying to Jones and claiming that others in the prosecution team had made Mackey lie to Jones. It is suspected that Bucella could have had a hand in Mackey’s lying to Jones. Jones also writes on page 128 of his book that he believes Mackey went to the Philippines and deliberately blocked Jones efforts to obtain information about Nichols’ involvement with terrorists

groups. Jones' story about this was confirmed to me by the former Pentagon terrorism advisor. Jesse Clear, who assisted Jones at one time and had been working with Philippine contacts for Jones.

OKC Attorney Tim McCoy recently testified at a pretrial hearing for the state trial of Nichols that another US prosecutor, Sean Connelly, on the OKC case refused around the time of the McVeigh and Nichols trials to accept evidence that had been collected about Middle Eastern John Does assisting McVeigh.

McCoy testified that Connelly told him that Connelly did not want to accept the evidence because Connelly thought doing so would be harmful to the prosecution's case. FBI agent Danny Coulson similarly stated to FBI sketch artist Jeanne Boylin that she should not do a certain sketch in the OKC case because doing so might harm the prosecution's case and this was told to her in 1995 at a time when Bucella was closely involved with the US prosecutors and the FBI.

Jones complained bitterly about US prosecutor Beth Wilkinson on KTOK radio in November 1998 for withholding evidence from Jones about German national Andres Strassmeyer’s involvement with McVeigh, the FBI and FBI director Louis Freeh.

Wilkinson visited General Benton Partin in June 1996 with the FBI's OKC Bomb Task Force inspector Danny Defenbaugh to discuss Partin’s analysis of the cause of damage to the Murrah Building. During the interview with Wilkinson, which was taped by Partin, Defenbaugh pointed to the location of what had been publicly shown as the truck bomb crater and said words to the effect: Suppose I were to tell you that is not the location of the crater from the source that did the most damage to the Murrah Building? Wilkinson tried to belittle and disparage Partin’s credentials during the

interview, actions which were extremely insulting and suggested intimidation and Federal cover-up to discourage Partin should he have been called as a witness at the McVeigh or Nichols trials.

Another US Attorney on the prosecution team was Patrick Ryan. I believe Ryan was in a position to mislead, intimidate, or suppress a number of material witnesses in the case including former day care center director Danielle Hunt, Journal Record building employee Gary Lewis, the Murrah Building engineers Don Rogers and Randy Ledger as well as a member of the OKC police K9 unit Don Browning. Ryan fell out of a tree and broke his hip so he was assigned by the

prosecution team to handle the victims who had also been witnesses during his hip recovery.

Browning has told me that Ryan interviewed him twice in OKC and told Browning he was not interested in much of the information that Browning knew including police dispatch instructions to Browning at 10:30 am on April 19, 1995 to go after two Iranians in blue jogging suits believed to have helped McVeigh do the OKC bombing.

Danielle Hunt told me that she believed Ryan dropped her from being a witness at the McVeigh trial when she started pointing out that 3-4 FBI agents normally dropped off children at the day care center and were in the Murrah Building by 9 am sharp on almost every day except the day of the bombing. Hunt was visited by McVeigh in December 1994 at the day care center and asked detailed question about security, fire escapes, elevators, etc.

Randy Ledger told me and Don Browning that he and Don Rogers were told to search the Murrah Building for explosive devices the evening of April 18, 1995. Ledger also told me that prosecutors and FBI agents had told him that his rescuer, OKC police officer, Terry Yeaky, should not be excused for committing suicide (he may have been murdered). Did this story about Yeakey come from Ryan? Ledger and Rogers were discouraged from talking at the trials and to the public. Did Ryan discourage them?

Gary Lewis saw McVeigh with a John Doe in the Mercury Marquis close to the Murrah Building moments before the explosion at the same time and place shown on FBI obtained surveillance tape photos as testified to by FBI agent John Hersley at the preliminary hearing on April 27, 1995. Lewis now has changed his story and does not want to talk to anyone after meeting further with the FBI and US prosecutors. Lewis’ original story was taped during a phone conversation with Glen Wilburn in 1995. I heard the tape.

I witnessed Ryan giving false statements to reporters at an Oklahoma Geophysical Society meeting in November 1995 about the Ryder truck bomb. Ryan told reporters that Dr. Ray Brown and Tom Holzer had concluded that only a truck bomb was recorded on a seismograph at the time of the explosion. Ryan made his false statement before the meeting had even started and later repeated his claim after the meeting when in fact Dr. Brown had stated in the meeting that demolition charges could have been used and that he believed there were two strong explosions with the second stronger than the first.

I was at the meeting and Ryan tried to slander me there by angrily and very loudly and publicly accusing me of working for the defense team when I had asked Brown some questions designed to understand his analysis. I never worked for the defense team.

If US prosecutors Hartzler, Connelly, Ryan, Mackey and Wilkinson took and knowingly carried out unlawful orders from Donna Bucella to engage in unethical and illegal conduct before and during the grand jury and trials, they cannot plead the Nuremberg defense. The same goes for FBI agents Odom and Zimms who worked closely with the prosecutors. What is extremely troubling about the US Attorneys and prosecutors and FBI agents in this case, is that their alleged conduct could have become legal grounds for getting two convicted bombers off. They may have risked the overturning of the convictions of Nichols and McVeigh, who now has confessed.

UPDATE:

At a Federal appeals hearing on July 7, 1999, the Nichols' defense attorney Michael Tigar presented evidence that the FBI and US prosecutors falsified FBI 302 reports and deliberately did not create 302 reports in many cases as well as withheld the reports from the court and the defense. Many of these 302s pertained to John Does in the case. Judge Matsch ruled that the Tigar arguments would not have changed the outcome of the case. Tigar did not appeal any further.

Two men mentioned in the appeal as mishandling the 302s were FBI agent Mark White who worked closely with

FBI agent Carlysle who generated hundred of 302s and also US prosecutor Sean Connelly who refused to receive much of the evidence from KFOR TV reporters on the ME connection.

I believe Connelly's actions were taken to avoid having 302s generated which would become part of the court record and have to be presented to the defense also. Another man not directly mentioned, but had a role in the mishandling

of the 302s was FBI agent Floyd Zimms, who was the liaison between the US Prosecutors and the FBI for handling witnesses and 302s. I contend Zimms and FBI agent Odom tried to keep witnesses from being presented such as Debbie Burdick. Zimms is also believed to have lied to OKC police officers and to have falsified the 302s he generated.

The recent revelation that the FBI just found over 3000 pages of FBI interviews concerning John Does is not a surprise. I do not believe they were lost, I believe they were withheld to protect the USG from liability over the bombing. But even if they were lost, many, many other 302s were deliberately withheld, not generated and/or falsified as indicated in the July 1999 appeals transcript and based on my personal research. I have many examples of this which I could write about in another article.

And remember, the FBI did not show key John Doe witnesses in OKC photos or try to have them do sketches with the FBI sketch artist. And these witnesses were not asked to sign witness statements. The sketch artist Jean Boylin wrote in her book that the FBI command center agent Danny Coulson told her not to make a key sketch of John Doe #2 because he did not want to hurt the prosecutions case. I doubt in these instances accurate 302s were prepared if ever.

Many witnesses were threatened by the FBI for the sightings of John Does with McVeigh in OKC. I have serious doubts that 302s were ever written up for the court and defense with these threatened witnesses and if they were, I believe it is likely they were falsified as we believe they were in many other cases.

By withholding and suppressing evidence about John Does, the FBI and DOJ and US prosecutors has exposed the public to future attacks by the John Does or by the groups they represent.

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Note from Devvy: Ben Partin is one of my closest friends. His full bio is available at:

http://independence.net/okc/partinbio.htm

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March 2, 2004

Pat Briley

MYLROIE statement excerpt before 9/11 Commission:

9/11: A Family of Masterminds or Terrorists with

Legends?

Following the 9/11 attacks, there was much speculation about Iraq's possible role. I won't address those points, although some information, like the claim of two Iraqi defectors that Iraqi intelligence trained non-Iraqi Arab militants to hijack airplanes at Salman Pak deserves more attention than it has received. That is particularly so, because when U.S. Marines took Salman Pak, they captured such individuals and learned from the interrogations that they were training as terrorists.

I want to focus on the terrorist masterminds. U.S. authorities have learned much more about al Qaeda since the 9/11 strikes, than they knew before them. That includes the key role played by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. As one U.S. intelligence official explained after Mohammed's capture (March 1, 2003), "It wasn't until recently that any of us even realized he was part of al Qaeda. . . . The big problem nailing him down is that the informants we relied on, especially

before 9/11, were mujaheddin. They'd been in Afghanistan, in Sudan, back in Afghanistan. Khalid was never a part of any of that." (emphasis added).

In addition, two of Ramzi Yousef's older brothers--Abdul Karim and Abdul Monim have been identified as al Qaeda masterminds, capable of assuming Mohammed's role. Also, an individual, Ali Abdul Aziz, who played an important role in the financial transfers involved in the 9/11 attacks, is said to be Yousef's "younger cousin."

Thus, according to U.S. officials, at the core of the terrible series of attacks against the U.S., starting with the 1993 Trade Center bombing and culminating in the 9/11 assaults, is an unusually talented and murderous family: Yousef, his uncle, his two brothers, his cousin, and his childhood friend.

This is without precedent; no terrorist organization has at its core a family. Also, all these masterminds are Baluch. And with the possible exception of the cousin, all are supposed to have been born and raised in Kuwait--and their identities are based on documents in Kuwait that predate Kuwait's liberation.

The Baluch and Iraq

The Baluch are a Sunni Muslim people, with their own language, who live on both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border. Like the Kurds, the Baluch aspired to a state of their own, but failed to achieve it. Most Americans know nothing about the Baluch, because the U.S. has virtually nothing to do with them. No Baluch organization is on the State Department list of terrorist states. Prior to the 1993 Trade Center bombing, no Baluch was ever involved in a terrorist attack on the U.S.

The Baluch have no evident motive for engagement in these monstrous assaults against the U.S.-save for one notable point: their ties with Iraqi intelligence. The Iranian Baluch have long been at odds with the Shi'a government in Tehran. Those tensions were much exacerbated by Iran's Islamic revolution in 1979. Iraqi intelligence has deep and well established ties with the Baluch on both sides of the Iran-Pakistan border and used them against Iran. So explained Gen. Wafiq Samarrai, who headed Iraqi Military Intelligence until 1991, before he later defected. Iraqi Military Intelligence ran the Baluch as spies during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) out of the Gulf shaykhdom of Dubai, according to Samarrai.

That is a critical point. The only apparent motive of these Baluch individuals for involve-ment in assaulting the U.S. would appear to be the ties that the Baluch have with Iraqi intelligence. That is particularly so as Yousef, Murad, and Mohammed do not really appear to be Islamic militants, judging from their behavior in the Philippines.

Let us consider two hypotheses to explain the identities of these terrorist masterminds. The official U.S. explanation is that they are a murderous family. There is another explanation: these individuals are elements of Iraq's long-standing Baluch network. And while Iraq occupied Kuwait, Iraqi intelligence used documents in Kuwait to create legends for these

illegals.

I recently asked a colleague, retired from the position of #2 in Israeli Military Intelligence, which explanation made more sense: a murderous family vs. illegals with legends. He replied, "It's obvious." Indeed, Jim Hoagland has suggested the same. Hoagland asked, "How did al Qaeda, within two or three years, go from obscurity to becoming super-terrorists capable of blowing up U.S. embassies, warships, and skyscrapers with astonishing precision?" He raised the question asked here: how did a group of Baluch who grew up in Kuwait acquire such remarkable skills as terrorist masterminds, and why would they devote their lives to killing Americans? He then hinted at an answer. "Could al Qaeda have been the target of a takeover operation by an intelligence service with good legend manufacturing skills and a great, burning desire for revenge on the United States?"

That is what happened, I think. After al Qaeda moved to Afghanistan, Iraqi intelligence became deeply involved with it, probably, with the full agreement of Usama bin Ladin. Al Qaeda provided the ideology, foot soldiers, and a cover for the terrorist attacks; Iraqi intelligence provided the direction, training, and expertise in the form of figures like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Both sides benefited: bin Ladin was able to carry out major attacks for which al Qaeda had previously lacked the skill and training; Iraq escaped detection and punishment, because every attack was blamed on al Qaeda alone.

This hypothesis is easy to test. How to pursue Ramzi Yousef's identity has already been explained in terms of Karim's teachers. In addition, certain documents should be obtain-ed pertaining to Yousef, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and the other Baluch terrorists. As for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, US records also exist, as there really was an individual, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, born and raised in Kuwait. After graduating high school, Mohammed attended college in the U.S.

The key question-- whether the terrorist known as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the same person as the student can be pursued, in a manner similar to the pursuit of Yousef's identity. If the terrorist is not the student, then Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is like Abdul Basit Karim--a legend for a terrorist, whose real identity we do not know. And the only party that, reasonably, could have created that legend is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait.

Please see: Third public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Statement of Laurie Mylroie to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States; July 9, 2003

Conclusion

A major misunderstanding regarding the nature of terrorism arose in the wake of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, with the claim that a new form of terrorism had emerged that was no longer state sponsored.

On the contrary, the major terrorist strikes against the U.S. that were attributed to "loose networks" of Islamic militants, including al Qaeda, are much better explained as Iraq, working with and hiding behind the militants. In short, the 1991 Gulf War did not end with the cease-fire declared back then.

The failure to pursue the question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds is a major lapse in the investigation. Most likely, if that issue were pursued it would provide a definitive tie between Iraqi intelligence and the 9/11 strikes, as well as other major attacks.

It is unlikely that these Baluch masterminds are a family; it is far more likely that they are Iraqi "illegals," given "legends" on the basis of Kuwaiti documents, while Iraq occupied Kuwait.

The principle reason this issue has not been pursued is strong bureaucratic obstructionism in the US and UK, by individuals who cannot (or will not) recognize they have made a major mistake. Almost certainly, neither President Bush nor Prime Minister Blair understands how easy it may be to demonstrate Iraq's link to the 9/11 attacks and other acts of terrorism. It may require intervention from such a senior level to overcome the bureaucratic obstructionism.