9:02 Central Time – April 19, 1995 ~ It’s been 30 years since Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols carried out their domestic terror attack, and no matter how righteous their cause in the beginning or how righteous their initial intent, somewhere along the line they got completely off track and lost their way, plotting out one of the most heinous attacks on America that is hard to imagine or really fathom.

Evil use to be not so obvious, and atrocities came seldom. But whether there is something in the water or humanity has simply taken destructive genetic path of late, evil seems to be prevalent and lurking just around the corner on any given day and any given moment. By and large, one can only surmise that it’s simply just a matter of the American people having lost their way and rejecting God and His righteous ways to their own detriment – leading the country down a path to Her own destruction.

Man’s inhumanity to man can be beyond any decent person’s imagination, to the point of taking one’s breath away and leaving one beyond shocked at the horror of it all.

One cannot help but wonder what set of circumstances or environment gives rise to such monsters.

As you know, I am not one to condemn violence when it is used out of a real necessity to secure one’s freedom and liberty and all other peaceful avenues have been exhausted; but I am a firm believer in taking the fight to those who have wronged you rather than any random attack meant to send a message that leaves all the wrong people dead, the innocent dead.

McVeigh was simply confused and muddle-headed or otherwise he would have recognized the contradiction between his words and the plan he ultimately planned and completed. There was no honor in his actions or those of Nichols. And far from patriots, they were actually traitors to America and the very principles they claimed to uphold.

This was one of the most twisted, convoluted episodes in U.S. history that we have ever witnessed. with more questions still left unanswered today than were answered in 1995 or the years that followed.

There wasn’t anything patriotic or brave about the deadliest domestic terrorist attack on America in history on April 19th 1995, which was planned and carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, killing 168 innocent Americans and injuring over 500 more – men, women and children – and in a way which has left deep scars in the national psyche that remain unhealed today. These men weren’t any kind of “heroes”, no matter how much they believed the carnage and destruction wreaked against innocent American citizens at Waco and Ruby Ridge by government agents justified this horrific, tragic response. Only cowards would have targeted such a soft target as the Murrah Federal Building and the innocent children under care in a childcare center in the building that day, in such an evil manner, rather than going after the FBI agents and the SWAT and other law enforcement they viewed as their enemies.

Today, many Americans who still remember this sordid day will come together at the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum to hold a ceremony marking the thirty years that have passed in remembrance of all those loved ones who met with so ghastly and tragic a death that day. Many millions more will mark the day in their own way, possibly stopping for a few minutes to pray for the family members still hurting all these years from the loss of a father, a mother or a brother or sister that day.

All one need do to get an idea of the pain suffered by so many that day is take a look at the photograph of little baby Baylee Almon’s lifeless body being cradled in the arms of Chris Fields, an Oklahoma City firefighter, and then multiply that by 167, multiply it by thousands who knew and loved each of the victims as friends and family members.

The bombing was a reality check for an innocent nation.

Tragically, the House of Representatives’ Terrorism Task Force had just issued a warning the month before, on March 3rd 1995, that terrorists from the Middle east were planning attacks on the “heart of the U.S.”, and it identified twelve cities which it viewed as potential targets, including Oklahoma City. It reported that the terrorists had recruited two “lily whites” individuals who had a clean criminal history and no obvious connections to the main organization heading the plot to bomb an American federal building. Somehow, this warning either went completely unheeded or it didn’t travel fast enough through the proper channels to allow for serious precautions to get underway and put in place.

On the morning of April 19th 1995, precisely at 9:02 A.M., the massive two-ton ammonium-nitrate/diesel fuel bomb constructed by McVeigh and Nichols exploded and ripped the entire face off the Alfred P. Murrah Building in downtown Oklahoma City. Given the government worries over Islamic terrorism, after the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing that killed six people, many Americans immediately suspected a Muslim connection, even after the FBI tracked Mcveigh down from the remnants of the Ryder rental truck he used to transport the bomb, which he parked in front of the building; he was four days short of his twenty-seventh birthday.

These two domestic terrorists – one a U.S. Army sergeant and an Iraqi war hero [McVeigh] and the other [Nichols] a bit of a Sad Sack soldier who requested a hardship release after a year in the U.S. Army – shared a fierce hatred of the U.S. federal government that was largely driven by the massacre of seventy-six Branch Davidian members [exact number remains unclear due to the intense heat of the fire and the co-mingling of the bodies], including twenty-seven children, near Waco, Texas on April 19th 1993, and the assault on Randy Weaver and his family in the mountains of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, during an eleven day siege, where his wife, Vicki, was murdered by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, as she held their baby [August 22nd 1992] and his fourteen-year-old son was murdered [August 21st 1992], shot in the back by Deputy U.S. Marshal Larry Cooper.

But they also harbored some resentment towards the U.S. government over its Middle East policy at the time and some sympathy for the Arab Muslims, which brings in another aspect of this terror attack, long in need of answers, as it pertains to an Islamic connection to the Oklahoma City bombing, half-heartedly investigated when investigated at all and largely ignored and scoffed at by the FBI, for some inexplicable reason, even though an abundance of evidence absolutely proves an Islamic connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing.

By all accounts, McVeigh wasn’t a very good bomb maker. Most of the bomb making was Nichols’ wheelhouse, and he put a lot of time and effort into studying his craft.

Credible evidence was revealed between 1995 and 2000 by Jayna Davis, an investigative journalist for KFOR-TV, that an Islamic terrorist connection existed in the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Murrah Federal Building between Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and expert bomb technician and engineer Ramzi Yousef [1993 WTC bomber] and Islamic terror cells in the Philippines, Oklahoma City and Chicago. This was sworn testimony presented to the 9/11 Commission and confirmed by investigative journalist Steve Emerson of Family Security Matters, Frank Gaffney (Center for Security Policy & ex-Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense) and the Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, who also compiled intelligence reports that implicated Osama bin-Laden as the financier.

Terry Nichols made several trips to the Philippines in the early 1990s, where he met his wife Mirafe Tores, and which has a significant Muslim population; and, he was even in Cebu City at the same time as Ramzi Yousef in December of 1994. Within days of Yousef’s Manila bomb factory being raided on January 6th 1995, Nichols quickly fled the Philippines, leaving behind personal effects including a book on bomb-making.

Yousef, a Wales educated engineer, had been training an Al Qaeda splinter group, Abu Sayyaf, in the 1990s in Davao City. In sworn testimony, and a top turncoat member of the group, Edwin Angeles, later gave sworn testimony that he had been in the room with Yousef, Nichols [aka “The Farmer”], Abdul Hakin Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah, an Uzbeki well-liked by bin-Laden. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss bomb making and handling.

As the evidence continued to mount so too was pressure applied to the members of Congress by numerous influential people. On December 22nd 2006, the House International Relations Oversight Committee, chaired by Representative Dana Rhorabacher (R-CA), released a report entitled, ‘The Oklahoma City Bombing: Was There a Foreign Connection?’ The probe was led by Staff Investigator Phaedra Dugan, and it exposed startling new material pertaining to the Ramzi Yousef-Terry Nichols connection, first detailed by Ms Jayna Davis.

From the report: Microsoft Word – Chairman’s Report

“Yousef was the perpetrator of the first World Trade Center attack as well as the mastermind behind the planning of other high-profile attacks on Americans. Furthermore, Ramzi Yousef’s phone records, from the months before he detonated the first World Trade Center bomb in early 1993, show calls placed to the Filipina neighbor and close friend of Terry Nichols’ in-laws in Queens, New York. The opportunity for interaction between American terrorist, Nichols, and al-Qaeda terrorist, Yousef, is evident. One indicator that this terrorist act had broader implications came directly from Abdul Hakim Murad, Yousef’s roommate, childhood friend, and fellow convicted terrorist. On the day of the bombing, Murad claimed responsibility for this terrorist act from his jail cell in New York. He bragged to his prison guards, verbally and in writing, that the bombing of the Murrah federal building was the work of the ‘Liberation Army‘.”

A name that came up early and often in the bombing investigation was Hussain al-Hussaini, a former Iraqi Army captain, and supposedly the second John Doe described by numerous eyewitnesses that led to a police all points bulleting being put out on a brown Chevrolet truck speeding away from the site with a couple of Muslim men. The police and the FBI didn’t seem to want to pursue this lead despite the fact that numerous people put him and McVeigh together in the days prior to the bombing, along with several other former Iraqi soldiers working for Samir Khalil, a Palestinian with ties to the PLO terrorist group. The FBI somehow found him to have no connection whatsoever, not that it means much given what we know of the FBI today and the fact that a mysterious would-be January 6th pipe-bomber is still walking around.

According to a former chief of human intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the tattoo Al-Hussaini has on his wrist – of an anchor with a snake wrapped around it — is a military tattoo that indicates he served in Saddam’s trusted Republican Guard and worked in Unite 999, an elite group tasked with clandestine operations at home and abroad.

One should also note that a Ryder truck just like the one used in the bombing was seen parked in front of Khalil’s real estate offices just prior to the terror attack.

Six months before the Oklahoma City bombing, this Palestinian immigrant, a convicted criminal [felony fraud], hired six former Iraqi soldiers to do maintenance on the four million dollars’ worth of rental properties he owned. On the morning of the bombing, American coworkers were disgusted and angered as these Iraqis expressed their pride and joy over initial reports that Islamic terrorists had taken credit for the bombing, and they excitedly pledged their allegiance to Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq.

While I’m not suggesting that Saddam Hussein was behind the bombing, it’s not really that large a leap of logic for anyone who did at the time, given the fact that the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 1990 over Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, a U.S. ally, even though Saddam had once been favored by the U.S. due to their support of U.S. policy targeting Iran. No one should forget that Saddam was also paying $25,000 each to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers at the time, and he regularly and consistently was giving sanctuary to some of the worst Islamic terrorists of the day, from Abu Nidal to Abu Abbas, who was responsible for hijacking the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship, and then murdering Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American, as he sat in his wheelchair.

Let’s not forget the two former Iraqi soldiers were caught in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2009 sending aid and arms to Al Qaeda in Iraq, while also plotting to kill a U.S. Army captain from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, one of numerous such plots between 9/11 and the present.

During his trial, McVeigh stated that he had been angered enough by events at Waco and Ruby Ridge to do something about it, and he decided to bomb the Murrah Federal Building to send a message to the federal government which he saw as being at war with its own citizens. He wasn’t wrong about the government being at war with us, not after we subsequently witness unfold in later years with an out-of-control Bureau of Land Management and FBI laying siege once more at Clive Bundy’s ranch in April of 2014 and the ambush and murder of activist cowboy and rancher LaVoy Finicum, by the FBI and Oregon’s Highway Patrol on January 26th 2016.

In court, McVeigh stated:

“I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead v. United States [1928] to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher, For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example’“.

The dissent of Justice Brandeis went further in concluding:

“Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that, in the administration of criminal law, the end justifies the means to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution.”

The public really started questioning the government after Ruby Ridge. They became extremely troubled over the unnecessary deaths of innocents at the Waco siege. A burst of new militias spread across America as Americans saw a corrupt federal government coming to disarm them, when all they wanted was to be left alone. They didn’t view Ruby Ridge and Waco as isolated incidents, because they had already witnessed too many other similar situations unfold in the years that followed, with warrantless raids by various law enforcement agencies that too often ended in the deaths of innocents, government seizures of property without due process of the law in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and the overreach of federal agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. And then American patriots, such as Ammon Bundy and LaVoy Finicum became righteously angry, and rightfully so.

Timothy McVeigh sought to punish the federal government for crimes against the American people, but in so doing, he killed some of the very people for whom he was supposedly so concerned to see live free from government abuse and harm. He was no better than the government he railed against and found to be so faulty and malicious and malevolent. He became the very thing he hated most, killing 168 innocent people who were simply minding their own business that morning and seeking to have a good day, a happy day, no matter the problems they faced. He was a murderous, cowardly monster, who was executed for mass murder, just as Terry Nichols remains a murderous, cowardly monster today, as he serves a life sentence, for his part in being McVeigh’s accomplice.

Rather than retribution against the U.S. government, McVeigh and Nichols cast aside all honor and righteous decency or even any justifiable argument for a “just war” against the U.S. government, and they engaged in the mass murder of innocents.

One might have had some good bit of respect for both men, perhaps, if they had led a band of merry warriors in a full-frontal assault of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in D.C. or the U.S. Marshalls Headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

However flawed their reasoning, one might not have despised them so much if they had gone after their actual enemies – those men they blamed for numerous needless deaths of innocent Americans, men able to fight back. But they went after America’s children and are deserving of America’s hatred forever and a day and whose memory should be spit upon whenever their name is spoken.

Editor’s NOTE: While preparing Justin’s column for publication, memories began to haunt me and I went to my file cabinet. The files that I have held on to for many years regarding the tragedies of Waco, the tragedy of the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge and the Oklahoma City Bombing have been maintained me for good reason – and now maybe those reasons are going to be shared once more, for all the records that I have maintained of the tragedy of this day – have been passed on to Justin O. Smith for his review.  I suspect that what are you are reading or will be listening to on my program this coming week – will be a forward to what I have sent to Justin. Stay tuned – for the records shall be shared! ~ Jeffrey Bennett, Editor

Today, there exists a parallel to the 1990s and all its political upheaval and turmoil as we see thousands of young anti-American Democrat Party Communists and pro-Hamas terrorist Muslims raising hell all across America, if a mirror image from an extremist perspective. The anti-government rhetoric is now coming from the far left instead of the right, and we’ve already witnessed a good deal of low-level violence from these groups to date, which isn’t to suggest that it cannot or will not escalate into something even more deadly than we’ve seen over the past eleven years. In the current political environment with such deep divides, there really isn’t any doubt that America will once more witness something just as vile and evil as the Oklahoma City Bombing in the future – it’s only a matter of time.

Oklahoma City firefighter Chris Fields had been on the scene of the bombing when a police officer suddenly appeared and handed him the lifeless body of Baylee Amlon. He would later tell how the iconic photo of him and this poor, dead baby was snapped as he waited for a paramedic to find room for the baby in a crowded ambulance, thinking to himself, “Wow, somebody’s world is getting ready to be turned upside down today.”

America has had Her world turned upside down far too many times. And for now, unfortunately, there’s no end in sight.

April 19, 2025

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.