Davis then set about looking for a connection to McVeigh, Nichols, Al-Hussaini, and other Iraqis. It came when a colleague located two eyewitnesses who claimed to have independently seen Al-Hussaini drinking beer with McVeigh in an Oklahoma City nightclub just four days before the bombing.
This convinced her station to run with the Iraqi-connection story. It was met with some controversy.
The Justice Department responded that the identification of John Doe No. 2 was merely a case of mistaken identity. Al-Hussaini contacted local reporters, claiming to be falsely accused. Davis did not back off because she believed she could repudiate Al-Hussaini’s alibi.
And she located two dozen witnesses who identified eight specific Middle Eastern men, the majority of whom were ex–Iraqi soldiers, who were seen with McVeigh and Nichols. Two witnesses named Al-Hussaini as the dark-haired, olive-skinned man they observed one block from the Murrah Building just before daybreak on the day of the blast.
She also uncovered evidence that implicated several of Al-Hussaini’s coworkers. One of these men was identified as sitting in the driver’s seat of a Chevy pickup at an Oklahoma City apartment complex hours before the truck was abandoned on the lot and towed to the FBI command post. According to police records, the truck had been stripped of its vehicle identification numbers and identifying body molding.
The story gathered steam. Here, it would appear, was the deserted pickup that was the same vehicle that was seen speeding away from the vicinity of the Murrah building with two Arab-looking occupants.
And there was more. Five witnesses independently fingered several of Al-Hussaini’s associates as frequent visitors to an Oklahoma City motel in the months, days, and hours leading up to 9:02 A.M. on April 19. On numerous occasions, the subjects were seen in the company of McVeigh, and during a few instances, associating with Nichols—at the same motel!
Davis spoke to the motel owner and a maintenance worker who said the men came within feet of a large Ryder truck parked on the west side of the parking lot at 7:40 A.M. on April 19. An unexplained odor of diesel fuel emanated from the rear carriage. Minutes later, McVeigh entered the motel office and returned the room key. The motel owner then saw McVeigh drive off the lot with a man identified as Al-Hussaini.
To this day, the Justice Department has refused to return the original registration logs for the motel.
Davis has 80 pages of affidavits and 2,000 supporting documents, and they suggest not only an Iraqi connection to the Murrah bombing, but also to the attacks against the Twin Towers.
For example, Nichols was a man of modest means. Yet he traveled frequently to the Philippines. Davis discovered that Nichols was there, in Cebu City in December 1994, at the same time as the convicted mastermind of the first World Trade Center attack, Ramzi Yousef.
She has also found evidence that Islamic terrorists boasted of having recruited two “lily whites” for terrorism.
Al-Hussaini had a very American response to Davis’s investigation. He sued for defamation. In a ruling on November 17, 1999, federal judge Timothy Leonard dismissed the case.
In 1995, the federal grand jury proclaimed in the official indictment that McVeigh and Nichols acted with “others unknown.” And several members of the Denver juries who convicted the two said publicly that they thought they had help.
Since 1997, Davis has repeatedly tried to interest the FBI in her investigation. She has been rebuffed.
As for Al-Hussaini, after leaving Oklahoma City, he went on to work at Boston’s Logan International Airport, the point of origin for several for the 9/11 hijackers, including Mohammad Atta.
One more thing. That motel where McVeigh, Nichols, and Al-Hussaini were seen together was later visited (pre-9/11) by Atta, Zacharias Moussaouy, and Marwan Al-Shehi.
AFTERWORD
As I said, I’ve never been big on conspiracy theories. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for JFK’s assassination, I believe we landed on the moon, and I don’t think 9/11 was an inside job. But for a while, I was consumed with this one. I still remember this night well—the event was at the old Adam’s Mark Hotel on City Line Avenue in Philadelphia. By the time Jayna Davis had finished presenting her case, the members of the audience (composed of my talk radio listeners) seemed ready to grab their pitchforks and invade Iraq themselves in retaliation for the Oklahoma City bombing. In retrospect, I attribute my own susceptibility to a pervasive lack of evidentiary thinking of the same type that made Americans willing to support the invasion of Iraq on the basis of WMDs. We wanted to hold somebody—anybody—responsible for the nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11.
Unfortunately, I didn’t let my interest in a possible Oklahoma City/Iraq connection end with this column. Instead, I cajoled U.S. senator Arlen Specter into meeting with Jayna Davis and receiving her evidence in his Capitol Hill office, an exchange that I broadcast live on radio on October 10, 2002. Senator Specter then asked the FBI for a formal statement about why the government discounted a link between Oklahoma City and Middle Eastern terrorism. Of course, some radio listeners let me know that they thought Specter was the wrong man for the inquiry, given that he was the author of the Warren Commission’s much debated “single-bullet theory” regarding the Kennedy assassination. Ultimately, Specter didn’t see any conspiracy with regard to Kennedy, or to Oklahoma City, and today, neither do I.
SUSPENSIONS: A WAKE-UP CALL
FOR PARENTS
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, December 19, 2002
MAYBE IT TAKES ONE to know one.
I am uniquely qualified to comment on the flap over a record number of kindergarten students who’ve been suspended in the Philadelphia public schools. That’s because I was once suspended from school—and I will never forget the experience.
The year was 1976.
Ford was president.
Rizzo was mayor.
The city was celebrating the Bicentennial, and I was an eighth-grade student at Holicong Junior High School out in the suburbs.
This was a relatively new state-of-the-art public school.
In the morning, we had a moment of silence and then some announcements via a closed-circuit television system. The station was student run.
One day, some of the cable geeks came into my gym class to film a commercial for the upcoming gymnastics show. With my buddies watching, I “flicked a moon” on camera. It was good for a laugh—up until the point that Vice Principal Roberts had a private screening. And that was it. I was given a one-day pass.
My father almost had a heart attack. When he got the call, he was told that his son had “exposed himself,” generating, I am sure, visions of me dropping my trousers while walking out of the men’s room.
Although he’s never said so, I suspect he was actually relieved when he figured out what I had really done. Not that he would have told me. Then, he was pissed. And I was afraid to go home.
Although we didn’t use such a fancy term, corporal punishment was a part of the drill at my house. So were chores. And getting grounded.
Which is exactly what has changed over the years and why the suspensions in the public schools—even for kindergarten kids—are welcome news.
School discipline was never worrisome in my day. It was what you faced at home that kept you in line. And that is what I suspect is lacking today.
I don’t think the 33 5-year-olds who have been suspended this year are the targets of the “zero-tolerance” program. I think it’s their parents. Guys like my dad are few and far between these days. Parents today are apt to be lawyers for their kids, not disciplinarians.
The fact that 33 young kids have been suspended this year—compared with just one last year—is very good news.
It says that chief executive Paul Vallas is getting tough and trying to get the attention of parents before it’s too late. It’s perhaps the only way he can get the attention of the parents while there is still time to save their kids. By middle or high school, it’s probably too late.
And I don’t buy the argument that suspensions traumatize the kids. I have a 2-, 4- and 6-year-old. They don’t remember today what they were punished for yesterday, and I seriously doubt any suspended kindergarten child is going to carry scars for life.
And it’s not like anybody is ever going to ask on a job application whether you were suspended from school at such a young age.
Instead, this program may cause parents to come to terms with serious behavioral problems while they can still be modified. Punching a pregnant teacher in the tummy and stabbing a classmate with a pencil are serious incidents. And exposing your genitals to other students is not, well, flicking a moon (which I haven’t done since).
AFTERWORD
At the time of my “mooning” incident, the AV department at Holicong Junior High School was run by a young teacher named Linn Brucker. His title was “media specialist.” Forty years later, we reconnected after he watched me hosting my own program on CNN and reached out. One day in the summer of 2016, “Mr. Brucker” came over to my house with his wife, Pat. We reminisced about Holicong Junior High, what had become of other students, and, of course, the incident. I asked him what he remembered, and he said:
I’m not sure to this day who exposed you. The first I heard about it was when Vice Principal Tom Roberts came to the TV studio and said, “We have a problem that we need to get to the bottom of fast.” I’m not sure I ever saw the tape, but I remember your mom had to view the tape in private with Mr. Roberts to identify your rear end. I think the administration covered up the incident for all the right reasons. But can you imagine how it would have played out today with social media? You would have been the butt of a lot of jokes.
I’d forgotten that my poor mother had to make the ID! When I recently emailed her to ask what she recalled, she replied:
I did not blink as it was soooo fast moving.
Love,
Mom
C’MON, MR. PRESIDENT,
SHOW US THE EVIDENCE
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, January 2, 2003
WHERE’S THE BEEF?
If I had the ear of the president, that’s the question I would ask him about Iraq because I don’t think it has yet been answered. In fact, I am terribly disappointed in the Bush administration’s public case for the war against Iraq.
And I am not some left-wing loony. I served in the administration of Bush the father. I am a consistent Republican sound bite. I’m a white guy in a blue suit with a red tie who is inclined to support this president.
But the administration needs to show me something before I can buy into the need to risk American lives to take out Saddam now. And if I have my doubts, it says a great deal about the poor public-relations face being put on the impending war.
My analysis is simple: (1) The world is a dangerous place. (2) One reason the world is dangerous is because of evil leaders who wield power capable of human destruction. (3) Saddam is such an individual. (4) We can’t take action against all those sick pups in the world; we need to focus on those who pose an imminent risk to our safety. (5) There must be some urgency in taking action against Saddam, now.
My question is why? No one is saying.
For months, I have been waiting for a presentation of the evidence of weapons of mass destruction akin to what Adlai Stevenson showed the U.N. at the height of the Cuban missile crisis. And I think the president owes us that before committing American troops.
On a recent day when Hans Blix and company were given unfettered access to a Saddam palace—an inspection that yielded squat—the president was quoted as saying that things in Iraq are not looking so good.
Huh? I’m left wondering what he’s talking about. And no one is asking. It’s akin to heresy to raise the question.
Contrast this lack of specifics with the situation in North Korea. On Christmas Eve, the media were filled with stories about North Korea opening a sealed plutonium-reprocessing plant. It could represent a dangerous reviving of the country’s nuclear program. Newspapers contained satellite photographs of the storage buildings that contained the pool where spent fuel rods were stored. The New York Times showed it to me on page A8.
And that’s what I want to see about Iraq. Because absent public evidence, I don’t think it’s appropriate to ask for an American commitment to war.
Now, don’t go lumping me with Sean Penn or anybody else from the Hollywood left. I believe that Saddam is an evil SOB who wishes bad things for my kids. But so do lots of others around the globe.
The question here is not whether he’s a bad guy with an agenda. The question, it seems to me when you’re contemplating a preemptive strike, is whether there is a viable threat that needs to be dealt with immediately. And that requires a show of evidence.
I’ll tell you what’s ironic. The president hates trial lawyers. He did them in down in Texas and hopes to do the same in Washington. But he would benefit from having a Philadelphia lawyer around him to stage a presentation of whatever he’s got on Saddam.
Where are the blow-ups of military installations that threaten us? How about some affidavits from ex-Iraqi scientists who will attest to a program of weapons of mass destruction? Give me something tangible, anything, that supports the risking of U.S. lives, and I will support the president in military intervention in Iraq.
But until then, forget it.
AFTERWORD
Two and a half months after writing this, I wrote another column in which I supported President Bush’s decision to use military intervention in Iraq as a preemptive measure to avoid another 9/11. I wrote: “So now we face a choice. We can do nothing, and risk a repeat of the events that culminated in the horror of Sept. 11, or we can act decisively and rid the world of another Osama bin Laden. The president made the right call.”
What changed my mind was Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5, 2003. I wrote in my book Morning Drive:
Just before the invasion, I bellied up to the administration bar and drank the Kool-Aid. What changed? Secretary of State Colin Powell unintentionally poured me a tall glass. The speech that he delivered to the United Nations [Security Council] on February 5, 2003, was a turning point in my thinking on Iraq. . . . Powell drew on his enormous credibility in the world community as he painstakingly made the case that preemption was needed to rid the world of another Osama bin Laden in the making. The meticulous way in which he outlined the case for war before the world body convinced me that we were doing the right thing.
In hindsight, we all now know the decision to invade Iraq was a mistake, but I don’t believe that the president or the secretary of state set out to intentionally deceive U.S. citizens about the presence of WMDs in Iraq.
Still, I wish I’d stuck to my initial skepticism.
TWO GOOD REASONS
TO OPPOSE TORT REFORM
Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, January 23, 2003
LINDA McDOUGAL’S MISSING BREASTS are two reasons the president’s proposed limitation on so-called noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases is shortsighted and potentially cruel.
McDougal was told in May that she had breast cancer and had to have both breasts removed. She underwent a double mastectomy, thinking she needed the radical surgery to save her life. Forty-eight hours later, she heard some devastating news. She did not have cancer and the surgery was unnecessary.
United Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, told McDougal that a “tragic mistake” occurred when her biopsy slides and paperwork were mixed up with another patient’s sitting in the same tray.
It’s a clear case of malpractice. So what’s it worth?
According to the president, $250,000. Under the plan he touted during his Scranton swing last week, McDougal’s damages would be capped at that level for this egregious case of malpractice. That’s outrageously insufficient. In the year 2003, is the value of a 46-year-old woman’s breasts 125G each? But that’s all she’d get.
Yes, her medic
al bills would be a compensable item, but in all probability they would be paid by an insurer which would garnishee that portion of her recovery.
And unless she is an exotic dancer who relies on her breasts for income, she would have no wage claim. Total payout: 250G.
Like the trashing of trial lawyers, caps make for good sound bites. But a limit on pain and suffering awards is terribly unfair to non-wage-earners, mainly the elderly and the poor. And the disfigured, like McDougal, completely get the shaft.
Which is not to say that there isn’t a need for change. Insurance for physicians is skyrocketing. But blaming the trial lawyers and capping pain and suffering isn’t going to solve the problem. It may help W. beat Senator John Edwards if he wins the Democratic nomination, but it won’t fix the flaws in our system.
Here’s what will:
First, the core cause, missing from Bush’s discussion: physician error. Harvard’s Institute of Medicine reported in 1999 that 44,000 to 98,000 people (think a full house at last week’s Eagles-Bucs game) die every year due to medical errors. That needs to be reduced.
Second, accountability. The only way a member of the public learns of physician error is if they are the injured party. The usual malpractice settlement contains a confidentiality provision. Only jury verdicts hit the news—and usually, only the aberrant case involving millions makes headlines.
Left unsaid is that doctors win the majority of malpractice cases—even in Philadelphia. Mistakes must be acknowledged by the wrongdoer, as was done with McDougal, and the public should be able to access a data bank that keeps track of the information.
Third, rid the medical community of bad actors. The bulk of malpractice payouts are made for a handful of physicians. Just as there are bad plumbers, deficient carpenters, incompetent housewives, and, yes, lousy lawyers, there are bad doctors.
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 5