22 YEARS LATER: THE HEAVILY REDACTED TRUTH ABOUT THE SPLC
The federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has created shockwaves.
Jesse Trentadue was not surprised.
"The SPLC's urine is all over the Oklahoma City bombing," he told me after the April 21 indictment.
Back in 2004 twenty-two years before this indictment Trentadue's landmark Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit alleged that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was not lone-wolf terror by Timothy McVeigh. It was a failed joint FBI/SPLC sting operation that went horribly wrong.
The evidence included a leaked secret January 4, 1996 teletype from FBI Director Louis Freeh. It revealed that McVeigh called Elohim City the white-separatist compound that was the reputed headquarters for the bomb plot two days before the blast. The FBI only obtained that information through an SPLC informant inside the compound.
Even more damning: the same teletype showed the FBI knew the precise location of Andreas Strassmeir, a German militia trainer identified by another informant as a key figure in the plot. Yet the FBI made no move to apprehend or question him. Strassmeir who denies any role in the plot was allowed to slip out of the country via Mexico and return to Germany.
Oklahoma reporter JD Cash, featured in my book, "Blowback," confirmed that the SPLC had deep access inside Elohim City. When confronted, SPLC founder Morris Dees told him: "If I told you that, I'd have to kill you."
President Bill Clinton had vowed that justice for the 168 victims killed by the blast including 19 toddlers in the federal building's daycare would be "swift, certain, and severe."
"These people are killers, and they must be treated like killers," the president said.
Instead, McVeigh's real accomplices were never pursued, and the bombing victims were denied justice.
If the FBI and the SPLC ran an illegal surveillance operation on the Oklahoma City bomb plot and concealed it until now, is the SPLC indictment believable as a simple case of "cops and robbers"? What was the FBI's knowledge or role, if any, in the illegal flow of money to right-wing extremist groups alleged in the indictment from 2014-2023?
The Justice Department cannot investigate itself.
Congress must now demand the unredacted documents from Jesse Trentadue's 2004 FOIA lawsuit detailing the joint FBI/SPLC surveillance operation in the Oklahoma City bombing case. Under heavy blackouts upheld by the court, only one federal judge has ever seen the originals.
The same rogue FBI playbook of manufactured terror that allegedly produced the deadliest domestic terror attack in American history has seemingly been used again and again from the Governor Whitmer kidnap plot to January 6 and beyond.
