Recorded Sep­tem­ber 2, 2007
MP3: 30-Minute Seg­ment
REALAUDIO
NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #608 and FTR #609 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.

Among the many 20th cen­tury crimes that have never been fully explored or adju­di­cated is the Okla­homa City bomb­ing. The avail­able evi­dence sug­gests that Tim­o­thy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were part of a larger plot that was cov­ered up by the fed­eral author­i­ties. Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance are the evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries link­ing the Okla­homa City bomb­ing with the first World Trade Cen­ter attack, the 9/11 attacks and the AMIA bomb­ing in Argentina—tributaries that have been ignored by the fed­eral author­i­ties. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR#456.) This broad­cast explores the mys­te­ri­ous [and sin­is­ter] death of Ken­ney Trentadue, believed by inves­ti­ga­tors to have been mur­dered in prison. Ruled a sui­cide, Trentadue’s death may well have resulted from his resem­blance to the mys­te­ri­ous John Doe #2, seen in the com­pany of con­victed Okla­homa City bomber Tim­o­thy McVeigh. Although Trentadue’s injuries sug­gest he was mur­dered, prison author­i­ties and other foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors have gone to great lengths to dis­sem­ble about the cause of death, a pre­tense made more effec­tive by the prison “sui­cides” of sev­eral peo­ple con­nected to the case.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The prison “sui­cide” of Alden Gillis Baker (who tes­ti­fied that Trentadue was mur­dered); the prison sui­cide of Peter Lan­gan of the Aryan Repub­li­can Army (whose asso­ci­a­tion with Tim­o­thy McVeigh is one of the inves­tiga­tive path­ways lead­ing to the death of Ken­ney Trentadue); a grisly account­ing of the nature of Ken­ney Trentadue’s injuries.

1. Among the most strik­ing aspects of Ken­ney Trentadue’s case are the foren­sic evi­dence and the behav­ior of the author­i­ties with regard to that evi­dence. Note how Ken­ney Trentadue died—keeping in mind that this was sup­pos­edly sui­cide! “ . . . Ken­ney called again that night, sound­ing chip­per, and the broth­ers strate­gized about the parole hear­ing; Ken­ney promised to call again the next day. But no call came until early the morn­ing of August 21, when the phone rang at Ken­ney and Jesse’s mother’s house. It was the prison war­den. Ken­ney, she said, had com­mit­ted sui­cide that night. She offered to have the body cre­mated at gov­ern­ment expense—a move with­out prece­dent in fed­eral prison policies—but Wilma Trentadue turned her down. Five days later, Kenney’s body arrived at a mor­tu­ary in Cal­i­for­nia. There were bruises all over it, clum­sily dis­guised with heavy makeup; slashes on his throat; lig­a­ture marks; and rup­tures on his scalp. Pho­tos of the injuries were included in a let­ter that Jesse drew up on August 30 and hand-delivered to the Bureau of Pris­ons (bop), which is part of the U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice (doj). . . .”
(“In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Okla­homa City Bomb­ing” by James Ridge­way; Mother Jones; 7/3/2007.)

2. More about this sup­posed “sui­cide”: “ . . . ‘I have enclosed as Exhibit ‘A’ a pho­to­graph of Kenneth’s body at the funeral,’ it read. ‘This is how you returned my brother to us.... My brother had been so badly beaten that I per­son­ally saw sev­eral mourn­ers leave the view­ing to vomit in the park­ing lot! Any­one see­ing my brother’s bat­tered body with his bruised and lac­er­ated fore­head, throat cut, and blue-black knuck­les would not have con­cluded that his death was either easy or a ‘sui­cide’! ‘ After describ­ing Kenney’s injuries in detail, and spec­u­lat­ing how they might have come about (bruises to his arms from being gripped, oth­ers to his legs from being knocked to the ground with batons, slashes to his throat from some­one ‘pos­si­bly left-handed,’ which Ken­ney was not), Jesse con­cluded: ‘Had my brother been less of a man, you[r] guards would have been able to kill him with­out inflict­ing so much injury to his body. Had that occurred, Kenney’s fam­ily would for­ever have been guilt-ridden... with the pain of think­ing that Ken­neth took his own life and that we had some­how failed him. By mak­ing the fight he did for his life, Ken has saved us that pain and God bless him for hav­ing done so!’ . . .” (Idem.)

3. A num­ber of Ken­ney Trentadue’s fel­low inmates pro­vided tes­ti­mony indi­cat­ing that he was mur­dered. One of them—Alden Gillis Baker—was sub­se­quently found hanged in his cell. “ . . . Other key evi­dence was sim­ply omit­ted from or buried in the offi­cial reports: FBI and state Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tions offi­cials later tes­ti­fied, in a law­suit brought by the Trentadue fam­ily, that a sec­ond person’s blood had been found in Kenney’s cell, and that there were no cut marks on the noose from which he was, accord­ing to prison offi­cials, ‘cut down.’ Accord­ing to an inter­nal FBI memo, a prison guard told his neigh­bor that Ken­ney had been killed, and then hung in his cell as a cover-up; an inmate who reported hear­ing sim­i­lar state­ments from a sec­ond guard said he was warned to keep silent and then sent to iso­la­tion. Another inmate, Alden Gillis Baker, would later give Jesse’s lawyer a note describ­ing an inci­dent dur­ing which, he said, Ken­ney got into an alter­ca­tion with a guard. Even­tu­ally, he wrote, addi­tional offi­cers entered the cell, there was ‘a lot of phys­i­cal vio­lence going on,’ he heard ‘faint moan­ing,’ and later the sound of bed­sheets being torn. (He would repeat this account in a depo­si­tion in con­nec­tion with a law­suit brought by Jesse, but a judge ruled that Baker, a con­victed rob­ber and sex offender, was not a reli­able wit­ness. In 2000, Baker was found hang­ing in his cell in a Cal­i­for­nia fed­eral prison.) . . .” (Idem.)

4. One of the hypothe­ses enter­tained by the Trentadue fam­ily and asso­ci­ated inves­ti­ga­tors involves pos­si­ble con­fu­sion between Ken­ney Trentadue and mem­bers of the Aryan Repub­li­can Army, a white-supremacist group that moved in the same cir­cles as Tim­o­thy McVeigh and com­pany. [Note the death via “prison sui­cide” of Peter Lan­gan, a key mem­ber of the ARA. Seems to be a lot of this sort of thing going on in con­nec­tion with this case.] Reports indi­cate that mem­bers of the ARA may be the mys­te­ri­ous John Doe #2, seen by wit­nesses with Tim­o­thy McVeigh. Other ana­lysts feel that John Doe #2 was Andreas Strass­meier, the son of Hel­mut Kohl’s chief of staff Gun­ther Strass­meier (the archi­tect of Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion). (Read more about Andreas Strass­meier, and the Okla­homa City bomb­ing.) “ . . . Guthrie’s name meant noth­ing to Jesse Trentadue, but in the far-right rad­i­cal scene, he had some noto­ri­ety. In 1994 and 1995, Guthrie and his gang, the Aryan Repub­li­can Army, car­ried out an impres­sive series of 22 bank rob­beries across the Mid­west, net­ting some $250,000 that they used to sup­port the white-supremacist move­ment. The ARA had a flair for the dra­matic. They rented get­away cars in the names of major FBI offi­cials. At some rob­beries they wore Clin­ton and Nixon masks; at oth­ers, they tried to look like Arabs. At a Decem­ber 1994 rob­bery they wore Santa and elf suits; the fol­low­ing April, they left behind an Easter bas­ket hold­ing a bronzed pipe bomb. In a home movie, Guthrie’s part­ner Peter Lan­gan donned a black bal­a­clava and talked about the com­ing white rev­o­lu­tion. The ARA’s phi­los­o­phy was old-fashioned nativism, but their style was a take­off on the IRA, with Latin Amer­i­can rev­o­lu­tion and rock and roll thrown in. (Mem­bers of the Philadel­phia skin­head music scene were part of the group.) Lan­gan liked to call him­self ‘Com­man­der Pedro’; out­side the gang, he cross-dressed and later, when sen­tenced to prison for the rob­beries, requested that a judge autho­rize a sex-change oper­a­tion. Cash told Jesse that some people—including some in fed­eral law enforcement—thought the ARA might have been involved in the Okla­homa City bomb­ing, and that Guthrie could have been John Doe No. 2. (Guthrie, along with other key ARA mem­bers, was finally arrested in Jan­u­ary 1996 and was reported to be coop­er­at­ing with fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors track­ing the far right. That July, shortly before he was due to tes­tify in court against Lan­gan, Guthrie was found hang­ing in his cell.) . . .” (Idem.)

5. Two video pro­duc­tions are being gen­er­ated by a cou­ple of doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ers. One is a DVD of a three-lecture series called “The First Refuge of a Scoundrel: The Rela­tion­ship Between Fas­cism and Reli­gion.” In addi­tion, there will soon be a doc­u­men­tary about Mr. Emory, titled “The Anti-Fascist.” For more about this project, visit TheAntiFascist.com.