As we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the worst incident of domestic terrorism in our nation’s history, we now know for certain that our government’s public account and explanation of circumstances surrounding that heinous crime was bogus. The truth lies in a suppressed version of events, one which was described by President Bill Clinton’s General Counsel Abner Mikva as “not information that should be on paper.” (Emphasis added.)
This article will for the first time present key elements of that suppressed information, on paper for the public.
For such an order to be issued by Mikva, the Oklahoma City bombing must have posed what can only be described as a mortal threat to Clinton’s political future, and to the reputation of many federal agencies involved.
During my Marine Corps career with nearly five years with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, I have seen our nuclear war-fighting plans as well as our most sensitive intelligence reports – both were “on paper.”
The account offered here is the result of 24 years of research on my part, including 11 years of working closely with the legendary McCurtain Daily Gazette reporter, J.D. Cash, and collaborating with dozens of other professional and citizen journalists committed to uncovering the full truth behind the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath.
Whatever Mikva ordered not to be put “on paper,” was seen as more threatening to his client, the president, than the compromise of any other information in the entire U.S. government. But, as is the case of any federal government cover up, information was spread far too widely among various agencies for Mikva’s edict to be completely effective.
Over the past 25 years records have been released, often in seemingly unrelated cases, which have provided key elements of this mosaic – enough for us now to piece together the core of the damaging information of such concern to the president’s senior legal adviser.
OKBOMB, as the FBI titled the case, was the result of a federal law enforcement operation that went terribly wrong for reasons still unknown.
Suppressing information about this ugly truth was Mikva’s objective when he issued his extraordinary order to go off paper. Released as a memorandum on letterhead marked, “EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT,” the date was May 25, 1995, five weeks after the bombing and after the case had supposedly been solved.
This date was exactly three weeks after this newspaper published J.D. Cash’s first story on OKBOMB. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were in jail awaiting trial. Bombing conspirator and white nationalist Michael Fortier had agreed to be the star prosecution witness against his former Army buddies.
Mikva’s order confirming the mortal threat to the Clinton presidency was released by the Clinton Presidential Library in 2016 as one of the 1500 pages characterized as pertinent to President Barack Obama’s nomination of federal judge Merrick Garland to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Garland arrived in Oklahoma City just two days after the bombing and was the senior on-site Justice Department lawyer in charge of the investigation. After four weeks, he returned to Washington where he continued to supervise both the investigation and preparing the government’s prosecution for McVeigh’s and Nichols’ federal court trials.
A memorandum between two White House attorneys recorded Mikva’s unprecedented order and was intended for Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, with this subject line: “Terrorism note for H”.
These first two sentences offer a candid disclosure of what will be referred to as the suppressed “Mikva version”:
The Justice Department has stopped working on the terrorism question. They say this is because Ab [Abner Mikva] instructed them that this is not information that should be on paper. (Emphasis added.)
Please read this historic statement again.
To put it in context, at the very time the president’s General Counsel issued his extraordinary suppression order, there was much ongoing work on “terrorism” questions that was on paper. Oklahoma City bombing documents publicly accessible at the Clinton Presidential Library show hundreds of pages of legal, policy and political questions regarding terrorism being examined by lawyers both inside and outside of the federal government.
Any question about whether Mikva’s edict dealt with OKBOMB, was answered three years later in a media interview. No longer in the White House, Mikva was interviewed about a dispute concerning congressional oversight between the Department of Justice and the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
The Chicago Tribune reporter wrote of Mikva’s admission:
Abner Mikva, a former White House counsel, federal judge, and Chicago congressman said Congress must move cautiously. [The Department of] Justice handles sensitive investigations, from terrorism to organized crime, and many techniques must remain secret, Mikva said.
“If Chairman Hyde starts asking about all the dollars they spent in Oklahoma City, that can compromise some very, very delicate information,” added Mikva, a Democrat. “How much of that does he really want to get into?” (Emphasis added.)
Mikva belatedly attempted damage control, having blurted out some sensitive words of his own about the suppressed truth, but it was too late. His claim that this matter was a budget issue is ludicrous. The Justice Department and the FBI had previously boasted about the 82 million dollars spent on OKBOMB, presenting this figure as yet another indicator, albeit a phony one, of the thoroughness of the investigation, and assurance that all perpetrators had been identified and convicted. (Mikva died in 2016 without public comment on his “not-on-paper’ order.)
Adding to the critical importance assigned this suppression effort are other White House records showing that Garland met during this period with Mikva’s Deputy General Counsel, Elena Kagan, who now serves on the U.S. Supreme Court.
This document from the Executive Office of the President confirms what had been obvious to J.D. Cash and others who observed this unprecedented suppression of evidence and obstruction of justice in a federal criminal case.
More importantly, we now know why OKBOMB federal prosecutors suppressed evidence on such a massive level: it incriminated more than a dozen additional perpetrators who either directly participated in the bombing, or provided support to the wider conspiracy that murdered 168 of our fellow citizens.
The version crafted by Garland and presented in the federal trials of McVeigh and Nichols was a bogus one whose purpose was to conceal the identity of federal informants who were members of the wider bombing conspiracy.
Despite the coronavirus outbreak and almost the complete shutdown of international travel to Israel, deceased Jews from around the world continue to be flown to Israel for burial.
“The Land of Israel is a very special place for Jewish people to be buried. The flights have been reduced heavily, but there are cargo flights. So it may take a bit longer, but we are getting people coming in,” said Rabbi Michoel Fletcher, who works with Jews abroad seeking to buy burial plots in Israel, The AP reported on Saturday.’
Fletcher said some in New York have decided to temporarily bury their dead in the United States, and then later exhume the bodies when flights to Israel resume.
Jews have sought to be buried in Israel for thousands of years and continue to be flown in by private charter planes, cargo flights and other companies. A burial plot can cost from between a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the cemetery.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said 300 bodies, some of COVID-19 victims, have arrived since February, according to the report. The process is complex and involves handling companies, local Israeli consulates, and the Israeli Health Ministry.
An unidentified Israeli aviation official told the AP that a cargo flight that arrives in Israel from Belgium five times a week brings in about 20 bodies a flight—“an exceptional amount.” Most of the bodies come from France, and there is also a weekly cargo flight from New York, the official said.
How do Poskim decide? What do they take into account? And more
***Guest Hosted by Rabbi Avrohom Kahan *** Founder, Bais Din Vaad Hadin V’horaah, Rav, Congregation Khal New City
with Rabbi Moshe Kaufman – Founder and Posek in Chicago Beis Horaah – 10:14 with Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz – Rebbe in Yeshiva Rabeinu Yitzchak Elchanan and Rabbi of Beis HaKnesses of North Woodmere – 34:08 with Rabbi Shmuel Weiner – Rav of Zichron Nosson Tzvi in Ramot Eshkol, Yerushalayim – 53:47
Social Science and Medicine, 72(6), March 2011, pp.840-854.
Publisher:
Elsevier
Meta-analyses of data from 42 studies from developed nations revealed that unemployment is associated with a significant increase in overall mortality, especially in males and those at the beginning, or middle stage, of their careers. Future studies should continue to investigate mediating, moderate and confounding factors, especially in terms of those that may be modifiable risk factors.
Extended abstract:
AuthorROELFS David J
Losing life and livelihood: a systematic review and meta-analysis of unemployment and all-cause mortality.
Journal citation/publication details
Social Science and Medicine, 72(6), March 2011, pp.840-854.
Summary
Meta-analyses of data from 42 studies from developed nations revealed that unemployment is associated with a significant increase in overall mortality, especially in males and those at the beginning, or middle stage, of their careers. Future studies should continue to investigate mediating, moderate and confounding factors, especially in terms of those that may be modifiable risk factors.
Context
The number of unemployed people worldwide has risen steadily over the last decade, prompting an increase in research on the health effects of unemployment. Most studies have found that unemployment is associated with decreased longevity, but there is no consensus on the degree to which longevity is reduced in population sub-groups, or on the most important mediating, moderating, and confounding factors involved. The aim of this study was to focus on these factors by: evaluating the impact of pre-existing health status and health behaviours on all-cause mortality; comparing the potential moderating effect in countries with and without national health care systems, and; assessing the potential moderating roles of gender, age, time, duration of follow-up, and case-control group composition on the association between unemployment and mortality.
Methods
What sources were searched? The electronic databases Medline, EMBASE, CINAHL, and Web of Science were searched in June 2005 and again in July 2008 and January 2009. Hand searches were carried out on the bibliographies of eligible publications and related articles.
What search terms/strategies were used? Searches were performed using terms for psychological stress, stress disorders, mortality, unemployment, and a wide range of social factors. Full details of the search algorithm for Medline are presented in an appendix and details of the other search strategies are available from the authors on request. The searches were performed by a research librarian.
What criteria were used to decide on which studies to include? Studies were included if all-cause mortality was the outcome variable, unemployment was measured at the individual level, and the results were compared between a study population that experienced unemployment and one that did not experience unemployment at all or experienced it to a lesser extent. Searches were carried out in English but publications found to be published in other languages were included if relevant.
Who decided on their relevance and quality? Two named authors were responsible for study selection and coding, and a third author was consulted as necessary. Study quality was assessed, using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for non-randomised trials, by the same two authors working independently; the average rating for each study was used in the analysis. The study selection process is outlined in Figure 1 and includes the number of studies included at each stage.
How many studies were included and where were they from? A total of 1,570 publications was identified from the database searches; 48 articles met the study inclusion criteria and 30 were included in the review. In all, 232 articles identified from hand search were also included. The pool of 262 publications reported on a range of psychosocial stressors; the current review used a subset of 42 articles that focused on the association between unemployment and all-cause mortality. There were eight studies from the USA, seven each from the UK and Sweden, six from Finland, two each from Denmark, Israel and Japan, and single studies from eight other countries.
How were the study findings combined? Mortality risk estimates were extracted from the 42 included studies. Odds ratios and relative risks were converted to hazard ratios. Meta-analyses and meta-regression analyses were conducted using a random effects model. Further details of statistical methods are included in the study text and appendices.
Findings of the review
In all, 235 mortality risk estimates from 42 studies, and representing more than 20 million people, were analysed. The majority were from men, and almost all were individuals of working-age at baseline.
Unemployed persons were significantly more likely to die than those in a comparator group; the hazard ratio adjusted for age and other covariates was 1.63, showing that unemployment is associated with a 63% higher risk of mortality. The average effect was higher for men than women with an increased risk of 78% compared to 37%, respectively. Unemployed people in their early or mid careers faced an increased risk of 73% and 77%, compared to 25% for those in their late careers. The risk of death was over 70% in the first ten years of follow-up but fell to 42% after that, although the trend was not significant in the final meta-regression model.
Studies that controlled for any measure of health showed no significant difference in the magnitude of risk compared to remaining studies but the hazard ratio was reduced by 24% for studies that controlled for one or more health behaviours, compared to the other studies. This suggests that health behaviour may confound the association between unemployment and mortality and also that pre-existing health behaviour and health conditions do not account for all of the relationship.
No significant difference in mortality was found between unemployed people in the USA, which has no universal health coverage, and the Scandinavian nations combined, where public health care coverage is most comprehensive, or the remaining nations. This suggests that national-level differences in policy may not affect the rate of mortality after unemployment in developed countries.
Authors’ conclusions
‘Unemployment was associated with a substantially increased risk of death among broad segments of the population. Future research should continue to focus on possible mediating, moderating, and confounding factors and on whether this risk is modifiable, either at the health system level or the individual level.’
