http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/2242
Just like the subsequent 9/11 conspiracy theories, the Oklahoma "second bomb" champions applied intense focus to the initial news reports right after the explosions (ignoring reports published later, by which time VARIOUS discrepancies were cleared up), during which time numerous reports surfaced indicating that second and third explosive devices had been found, and that secondary explosions had been heard. And just like the 9/11 Truthers, the Oklahoma conspiracists quoted TV anchormen and women who opined offhandedly that the bombings seemed to be the work of sophisticated demolitions experts. Remember the Dan Rather clip used in Loose Change in which the anchorman says the collapse of WTC-7 is "reminiscent" of a controlled demolition? Here's how that worked in OKC:
"This is the work of a sophisticated group, this is a very sophisticated device," says one Oklahoma newscaster, in a much-circulated video of early Oklahoma news broadcasts, "and it has to have been done by an explosives expert."
Remember, this is just newspeople Guessing on live TV; they're not reporting. But in both conspiracy theories, these comments were presented as though they're evidence of something. But what is a collapsing building supposed to remind an anchorman of -- an Aboriginal dance ceremony? An auction of polo ponies?
In 9/11 lore we are often told that the fact that people could be seen standing in the craters caused by the planes proved that the fires could not have been hot enough to compromise the steel structure. In Oklahoma City, conspiracists claimed that the fact that the YMCA building across the street from the Murrah building was unaffected proved that the truck bomb could not have caused the damage. "Window washers weren't even knocked off their scaffolding!" screamed one site.
Conspiracy theories are always full of this kind of "it's just common sense" rhetoric, i.e. you can't throw an ice cube through the side door of a Buick, so clearly the Titanic was not sunk by an iceberg... Similar appeals can be found throughout 9/11 literature. One of my favorites comes from David Ray Griffin, who in his book The New Pearl Harbor posited that if the falling top-section of the second tower had paused just a half-section each time it collapsed a floor beneath it, it would have taken 40 to 47 seconds to fall, and not the "near-freefall" 11 seconds or so that it actually took.
Which is true. It's also true that if the top-section had paused for three seconds on each floor, it would have taken, not 11 seconds, but three minutes to fall! And if it had paused five minutes on each floor, you could have watched the whole first half of Ghost Dad on the fifteenth floor before you died! And so on. Griffin never explains why he thinks the building should have paused a half-second on each floor, but that's why he teaches theology, not engineering.
Murrah conspiracists also used the inevitable scientific mumbo-jumbo genus of argument. Here's a typical entry by J. Orlin Grabbe, a ubiquitous conspiracy barnacle who can be found sticking to the cyber-hull of almost every right-wing conspiracy theory from the last two decades, from Vince Foster to Whitewater:
The concrete in the columns had a compressible yield strength of at least (and probably higher than) 3,500 pounds per square inch. Since this value is almost ten times the strength of the blast wave hitting the columns from the truck bomb, the blast wave is insufficient to produce a wave of deformation in the concrete (and thus to turn it back into its sand, gravel, and clay components).
In these accounts structures like the Murrah building and the World Trade Center suddenly become architectural Bismarcks, unsinkable engineering wonders seemingly impervious to damage. Just as writers like Griffin went out of their way to quote engineers who said "nowadays, they just don't build them as tough as the World Trade Center," Oklahoma conspiracists focused intently on the remarkably tough core of the federal building. Here's an excerpt from a post-Murrah report by William F. Jasper, who not surprisingly would surface years later as a leading voice of the relatively small right-wing contingent of 9/11 conspiracy theorists:
Critics have argued compellingly that the blast wave from the ANFO truck bomb was totally inadequate to cause the collapse of the massive, steel-reinforced concrete columns of the federal building in Oklahoma City...
One need hardly mention that "steel-reinforced" would a few years later become one of the most-widely circulated phrases on the internet (third place, after "rock hard penis" and "buy vicodin online"), in connection with both the Pentagon and the WTC, which were variously supposed to be impenetrable or unshakeable. "For that hole to have been caused by Flight 77," barks Loose Change about the Pentagon crash, "the Boeing would have had to smash through nine feet of steel-reinforced concrete, traveling 310 feet." Says wanttoknow.info of WTC: "First Steel-Reinforced Skyscraper To Ever Collapse in Fire!"
"Steel-reinforced" made great waves with the Murrah revisionists, but the likes of Jasper and Grabbe were not quite reputable enough. For the conspiracy theory to really take off, a true authority was needed to put his stamp on the case. So along came Ted Gunderson, who carried the impressive title of a former Special Agent in Charge of the FBI. Gunderson's analysis of Oklahoma City was a staple of conspiracy websites. Here's what he wrote of the Murrah blast:
"A very high tech and top secret barometric bomb was the cause ... could not have been built ... without the knowledge of research classified at the very highest level of top secret by the U.S. government."
The Murrah conspiracy sites that referred to Gunderson's conclusions generally failed to point out that Gunderson had devoted much of his post-FBI career to the exposure of a plot called "The Finders," which he alleged was a vast CIA enterprise to kidnap thousands of American children for sex slavery in Satanic cults. Not surprisingly, Gunderson would resurface after 9/11 with a DVD called 9/11 Failure: The True Colors of the New F.B.I., which argued that the F.B.I. had foreknowledge of the attacks.
As if that weren't enough, Oklahoma City conspiracy theorists also pointed to seismic evidence proving the existence of secondary explosions. Raise your hands, kids, if you've seen anything like this graph before. It's a chart put together by the Oklahoma Geological Survey purportedly "proving" that there was more than one explosion in Oklahoma City that day:
Compare that to the seismic graph from the Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.J., frequently cited as "proof" that there were secondary explosions in the Towers.
In both cases the seismologists who actually compiled the data rejected conspiracy explanations, but the non-scientists peddling the conspiracy theories overrode them, apparently knowing better how to interpret their data.
Both Oklahoma City conspiracy theorists and 9/11 revisionists circulated "eyewitness accounts" of strange men in suits confiscating evidence -- the last link in the coverup. Regarding the Oklahoma City bombing, here's an account from
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED | The History The US Government HOPES You Never Learn!