Oklahoma City Bombing, Torture stateside & the FBI

CNN recently reported that “the Justice Department is re-examining its investigation into the 1995 death of a federal prisoner that the victim’s family alleges was murder at the hands of the government.”

The victim was Kenneth Michael Trentadue. At 7 AM on August 21, 1995, officials from the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center for the body of a man recently picked up for parole violation who allegedly was a suicide by hanging. The astonished state officials saw a body with scalp split to the skull in three places, throat slashed, and a body completely covered in blood, bruises and burns.

[...]

Dr. Fred B. Jordan, the Chief Medical Examiner of the state of Oklahoma, was stunned at the destruction of evidence by federal authorities and at the way federal officials blocked his office from carrying out required duties. In a memo to the file dated December 20, 1995, Dr. Jordan described his frustration over being stonewalled by top Department of Justice officials in Washington. He recorded that he confided to the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Oklahoma City that “I felt Mr. Trentadue had been abused and tortured.”

Two years later Dr. Jordan said on a Fox News Interview (July 3, 1997):

“I think it’s very likely he [Kenneth Trentadue] was murdered. I’m not able to prove it. I have temporarily classified the death as undetermined. You see a body covered with blood, removed from the room as Mr. Trentadue was, soaked in blood, covered with bruises, and you try to gain access to the scene and the government of the United States says no, you can’t.

“They [the federal government] continued to prohibit us from having access to the scene of his death, which is unheard of, until about five months later. When we went in [the cell] and luminoled, it lit up like a candle because blood was still present on the walls of the room after four or five months. But at that point we have no crime scene, so there are still questions about the death of Kenneth Trentadue that will never be answered because of the actions of the U.S. government.”

Dr. Jordan’s effort to do his job brought him under great pressure and harassment from federal authorities. Realizing his peril, on August 25, 1997, Dr. Jordan wrote to IRS Commissioner Margaret Richardson:

“The requirements of my job as chief Medical Examiner for the State of Oklahoma are currently bringing me into an uncomfortable juxtaposition with the United States Department of Justice. In order to protect myself from retribution, I would like information as to how to request a protective audit from your agency. By this, I simply mean a standard audit in order to avoid having your agency used to harass me as I proceed with my inquiries into a death that directly relates to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City.”

[...]

It has always been a puzzle why a man picked up on a parole violation would be murdered in his cell by federal agents. Recently an explanation has turned up.

Kenneth Trentadue might have been a victim of mistaken identity. Misidentified as the missing John Doe, Tim McVeigh’s alleged accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing, he might have been beaten and tortured in an effort to obtain a confession. The autopsy report shows Trentadue with a highly elevated caffeine level, amounts certainly not available to a person held in isolation.

High doses of caffeine are used to increase pain under torture.

[...]

A believer in the system, Jesse Trentadue [attorney and brother of the victim] has not given up. He has brought a Freedom of Information Act suit against the DOJ. Trentadue’s suit, rather than a rediscovery of integrity by the DOJ, probably explains the recent CNN report that the DOJ is reopening the case. By reopening a criminal investigation, the DOJ does not have to release the documents demanded by Trentadue’s civil suit.

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More Trentadue case information

By late 1997, when Jesse Trentadue’s efforts to win a Justice Department investigation had still gone nowhere, he sued the federal government for intentional infliction of emotional distress. At first, Trentadue figured his brother had mouthed off to a prison guard and had been beaten to death. He believed FTC officials were simply covering for their guards. Later events made him suspect a deeper conspiracy.

Alden Gillis Baker, a fellow inmate, was a chief witness in the case. He swore in a deposition that he heard Trentadue scuffling with guards, then heard “a lot of beating going on” followed by moans. “I heard, like, sheets being ripped,” Baker added. But in August 2000, before he could appear in court, Baker himself was found hanging from the ceiling of his prison cell at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary.
  Orange County Weekly article

Kenneth Trentadue with "self-inflicted wounds"

Ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing—years that have included crumbling towers and color-coded terror alerts—U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) says he wants to reopen the case of what was, at the time, the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

Four years after the execution of “lone-bomber” Timothy McVeigh, Rohrachacher wants to use his House Committee on International Relations to reopen the government’s long-closed investigation. He’s hinted that his suspicions involve formerly classified FBI files that suggest that the government knows more about the bombing than it has so far acknowledged, and that the FBI may be covering up the fact that the tragedy might have resulted from an FBI sting operation that got out of control.

“There’s a lot of questions that need to be answered,” Rohrabacher declared in a May 7 interview with Fox News. “And what bothers me is that the authorities just seem to be just so dedicated to keeping the book closed.”

Rohrabacher failed to respond to interview requests for this story, and his staff refused to comment—“Why don’t you get a real job,” said a Rohrabacher aide.

But Jesse Trentadue, a Utah lawyer who grew up in Westminster, claims Rohrabacher not only believes in a wider conspiracy but believes the FBI played a role in the bombing. Furthermore, he said, Rohrabacher’s suspicions involve the mysterious McVeigh accomplice, John Doe 2—a sketch of whom was released and then withdrawn by the FBI shortly after the bombing—and Trentadue’s brother, who died mysteriously inside his cell at the Federal Transfer Center (FTC) in Oklahoma City 10 years ago.

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Trentadue says full release of the bureau’s files will prove the FBI knew about the Oklahoma City bombing in advance—and could have done something to stop it.

“This was a sting operation run amok; it went too far,” he says. “Those teletypes are smoking guns.”

On Jan. 28, Trentadue was visiting his mother in Westminster and took copies of the teletypes to Rohrabacher’s district headquarters. Just weeks later, Rohrabacher made the stunning announcement that he was reopening the Oklahoma City bombing investigation.

“Rohrabacher was alarmed,” Trentadue says. “He said, ‘If these things are real, they implicate the FBI and the government of the United States in the greatest act of terrorism in the 20th century.”
  Orange County Weekly article