By Jack Cashill

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

The "Mega Fix" DVD is available now at the online store.

In the case of the Oklahoma City bombing, as we will see in the investigation of TWA Flight 800, the Clinton Justice department's most dazzling sleight of hand was to make the eyewitnesses disappear. The FBI refused to even look at the material Oklahoma City TV reporter Jayna Davis had gathered. Rather than put a single witness on the stand who could place McVeigh in or near Oklahoma City on April 19, the prosecution chose to build an entire case on circumstantial evidence.

Much as with TWA 800, the FBI lost all interest in the eyewitnesses as soon as the White House had established its talking points. The fault here, too, lies less with the FBI than with the White House. The political fix was in – the mother of all fixes ... the Mega Fix. To understand why America did not respond to terrorist attacks in the 1996 election cycle one has to understand the politics of the era.

I know something about this from personal experience. On April 19, 1995, I was co-hosting a point-counterpoint radio show on Kansas City's leading AM station, KMBZ. My partner and I followed developments closely. Early police reports and intelligence briefings led us all to believe that the bomb was the work of Islamic terrorists.

But when the police identified McVeigh as a suspect two days later, my partner was absolutely gleeful. This fellow is a wily and well-connected Democrat strategist. He went on the air and issued an all-points bulletin for McVeigh's "co-conspirators, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich." He claimed that their hate speech and talk of revolution had inflamed the allegedly right-wing McVeigh.

My partner was simply following the DNC's nationwide strategy. Democrats – the president included – were spreading this same message all across America. Clinton was subtler than his supporters. He merely blamed the "purveyors of hate and division." His supporters filled in the blanks.

This president was a master of strategic grief counseling. He descended on Oklahoma City with an approval rating in the low 40s and left town with a rating well above 50 and the Republican revolution buried in the rubble. Late in the 1996 campaign, he confided to reporters that his road back to the White House began in Oklahoma City.

"Could the al-Qaida explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for America?" writes Richard Clarke of Nichols' visit to the Philippines in his book, "Against All Enemies." "We do not know, despite some FBI investigation."

"Some FBI investigation?" Why was there not a massive FBI investigation? On Ramzi Yousef's laptop seized from that burning Manila apartment were plans for Operation Bojinka, a plot to blow up a dozen American planes over the Pacific. The following excerpt from a classified Republic of the Philippines intelligence report speaks to a subset of those plans:

The document [from Yousef's computer] specifically cited the charter service of a commercial type aircraft loaded with powerful bombs to be dive-crashed by SAEED AKMAN. This is apparently intended to demonstrate to the whole world that a Muslim martyr is ready and determined to die for the glorification of Islam.

Planes as bombs. Remember that concept. The reason Islamic terrorist links were ignored has more to do with politics than with security. Once arrested, McVeigh and Nichols served as poster boys for the natural progression of the "Republican revolution." If, however, they proved to be mere "lily whites" – that is, stooges recruited by Islamic terrorists to take the fall – they would lose their political value.

What's more, from Oklahoma City forward, our progressive friends were able to scold those who had publicly presumed that Islamic terrorists were behind the bombing. This included not only the political right, but also non-partisan terrorist experts like Steven Emerson, who had already been upbraided for "bigotry and misrepresentations" and "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs" for his prescient PBS documentary, "Jihad in America."

In fact, to the detriment of our national security, the orchestrated Democratic reaction to Oklahoma City shamed reporters and investigators from pursuing Islamic terrorism aggressively. This, Jayna Davis documents all too painfully from her personal experience in "The Third Terrorist." And the scary thing is the left is still trying to shame us.

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Those in the Los Angeles area who are interested in the fate of TWA Flight 800 are invited to attend a hearing for the case H. Ray Lahr v. National Transportation Safety Board & Central Intelligence Agency.

This hearing will take place Sept. 27, 2004, at 10 a.m. in U.S. District Court (312 N. Spring St., Courtroom 14, Los Angeles, Calif.) with the Honorable A. Howard Matz presiding.

The intrepid Capt. Lahr and his attorney John Clarke are seeking relief under the Freedom of Information Act for disclosure of aerodynamic records of the alleged "zoom-climb" of TWA Flight 800. For more information, please see http://raylahr.entryhost.com/.

Next in the series: Mega Fix Preview Part III: Croatia

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Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.