Much ado about not very much

After going over the recent AP stories (Part 1 and Part 2) about Oklahoma City carefully, and comparing notes with colleagues, I have to say I'm more perplexed than ever.

It appears the AP writer, John Solomon, "uncovered" material that those of us who've been doing ground-level research on it since Day One have known since very, very early in the investigation, then combined it with J.D. Cash's questionable conspiracy-oriented material -- the thrust of which, as anyone familiar with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard knows (readers of Gene Lyons' work may recall the name), was essentially a milder variation on the Patriot theories that the bombing was actually an inside job ordered by Bill Clinton; Pritchard's Oklahoma City theories relied heavily on Cash's work.

How did the AP come to think it had anything new here?

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center had these thoughts:

You know, some of this stuff is interesting, but very, very little is new, and what there is certainly doesn’t amount to real proof. I’m not one who believes that every conspirator was necessarily caught -- there are a great many tantalizing suggestions that they were not -- but I also don’t think that this EC/ARA [Elohim City/Aryan Republican Army] scenario is anywhere near proven. It doesn’t inspire confidence when the writer of this series, for instance, confuses Aryan Nations (he wrote Aryan Nation) with the Aryan Republican Army. And I also can’t quite understand the breathless nature of some of this reporting. He acts like the McVeigh call to Elohim City is something he just discovered, via the FBI teletype that is quoted in several of these stories. Well, as most on this list will recall, that came out early on, in the months after the bombing. I personally went to Elohim City with a number of other reporters (I was with USA Today at the time) and heard Millar talk about that call. There are a number of other matters reported in this series in a tone that suggests a major scoop. I’m not dissing the series, but I fail to understand how AP’s A-wire can treat this like a major revelation. It certainly is not.

Unfortunately, as Mark is all too well aware (he is himself a former reporter and covered the OKC bombing for USA Today), what is carried on the AP wire -- because it literally appears in thousands of newspapers around the world -- becomes Writ Large, and in effect becomes a kind of reality. Particularly disturbing to me is the way the AP played up Cash as a kind of hero.

Talk Left notes McVeigh attorney Stephen Jones’ recent remarks on the case, which appeared in the second AP piece. What struck me as odd about these remarks is that Solomon neglected to mention that Jones has previously argued that the co-conspirators were probably Middle Eastern terrorists -- not the ARA or someone from Elohim City.

And then there have been all the Jayna Davis/Laurie Mylroie theories about a possible Iraqi connection getting all kinds of media play -- which were spun from Jones’ concoction -- notably in the Washington Times.

What's going on here?

Well, a lot of it has to do with the investigation itself. As I've explored in some depth in Salon, there are still some very important unanswered questions about the case. Some of them -- particularly the credibility of, and the circumstances surrounding, the eyewitness identifications of McVeigh and Nichols during the bomb-building phase in Kansas -- cut deeply against the government's own conclusions. (Mark mentions this in his note, and I know my colleague Kevin Flynn at the Rocky Mountain News feels passionately about this.) They are embodied, in fact, by the jury's finding in the Terry Nichols case.

And until the government takes another, longer, more thorough look at answering those questions -- including, I must add in all fairness, those raised by both the Carol Howe story and J.D. Cash's work -- then they will be out there.

Or, it could broker a deal with Terry Nichols to spill his guts in exchange for dropping the capital case pending against him in Oklahoma. That might work too. I am growing doubtful, however, that anyone in the Justice Department has either the cojones or the insight to pull that one off.

My friend Suzanne James puts it best:

For those of us who live within the bomb planning and building epicenter and who've spent a great deal of time doing *primary* research, there are simply far, far too many unanswered questions.

While any investigation typically leaves unanswered questions, the particular patterns of unanswered questions and apparently unexplored avenues is suspect and will remain so until those who assisted McVeigh and Nichols are identified and prosecuted.

We should already know that conspiracy theories thrive in an environment in which the government holds information back. That seems to be happening here as well.