Manila Enveloped in Oklahoma Bombing Case
Ice Melts; Controversy Boils
There’s No Safe Sex in Muslim Nigeria
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Manila Enveloped in Oklahoma Bombing Case
Terry Nichols’s Filipino Connection
Fourteen survivors and victims of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 filed suit against Iraq in federal district court in Washington, D.C., last week, claiming that Iraqi officials gave money and training to Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols. McVeigh was executed last April. Nichols, convicted of manslaughter and given a life sentence in federal court, is awaiting trial in Oklahoma state court, where survivors are determined that he get a death sentence.
Nearly a year after McVeigh’s execution, the case remains controversial. Families of victims have accused the federal government of shoddy detective work, and some even have claimed that government dicks knew from the git-go about the bombing but did nothing to prevent it and then tried to cover their asses by hiding information after the blast.
A recent report by the FBI’s inspector general found that two FBI supervisors knew that nine field offices had either lost or destroyed documents that should have been provided to McVeigh’s defense team as early as two months before the execution. The FBI claims that the documents wouldn’t have made any difference, but says it is instituting reforms and disciplining agents.
Immediately after the bombing, federal lawmen focused on possible Middle Eastern terrorists, and Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s trial attorney, said in his book Others Unknown that his client was a patsy of Middle East interests. Others have long insisted that the mysterious “John Doe No. 2” came from somewhere in the Middle East and that two accomplices seen with McVeigh before the blast looked dark and could have been Arabs. An unaccounted-for leg that turned up in the rubble was dark and might have belonged to an Arab, according to one theory.
Jones even speculated on the possibility that Nichols was involved at some level with Osama bin Laden. Jones’s theory goes like this: Nichols first went to the Philippines in the 1990s, after his divorce from Lana Padilla, to find a new wife through a mail-order bride service. He came upon Marife Torres, the daughter of a traffic cop in Cebu City, and in a short time they married and she joined him in the U.S. Over the next few years Nichols made several trips to the Philippines, once for as long as six months. Nichols always said he spent the time trying to turn up “business opportunities.” But Jones thought this was a fishy excuse because Nichols at one point stayed at a boarding house where young Muslim extremists lived.
In the Philippines, Jones met with an official of an intelligence service who was known only as “the Director,” who coyly put him on to a guy in jail. There Jones found Edwin Angeles, a supposed cohort of Ramzi Yousef, being held in protective custody by the Filipino police. At first, Angeles wouldn’t talk, but he eventually told police in a filmed interview that he had been at a meeting in the early 1990s in Davao, on Mindanao, where he met an American who called himself “the Farmer.” Angeles produced a sketch that resembled Nichols. Also at this meeting were Ramzi Yousef, Yousef’s friend Abdul Hakim Muradand, and a man called Wali Khan Amin Shah. Angeles said in a statement that the group had discussed bombing activities, providing firearms and ammunition and training in making and handling bombs. All three were subsequently convicted of a plot to blow up 12 U.S. jetliners.
The mystery deepened. Before he went to the Philippines, Nichols left his first wife a strange package containing a letter that said if he didn’t return in 60 days, Lana should open the letter and follow instructions. But Lana didn’t wait 60 days and instead followed the elaborate instructions to a Las Vegas storage locker, which contained a stash of $20,000, which she gratefully seized. Maybe Nichols thought he would be rubbed out by his Middle Eastern cohorts in the Philippines.
Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, the feds investigated Nichols’s activities in the Philippines, but his ties to the Middle East were never proven, and the feds eventually left that trail in favor of the homegrown conspiracy. Judge Richard Matsch didn’t allow Jones to introduce his Middle Eastern foray into evidence, and there the matter rested until September 11 got everybody thinking again.
Ice Melts; Controversy Boils
New Poles Hint of Doom
The huge block of ice that split off from Antarctica last week is just another sign that the poles are melting at an unexpectedly rapid rate—so fast that the famed Northwest Passage will be open to commercial shipping within a decade, creating new problems for the U.S. military.
When this happens, there will not only be a boom in shipping, because the passage cuts by one-third the distance from Europe to East Asia, but commercial fishing boats will be able to get at vast schools of fish hitherto unreachable because of the ice. The world’s stock of fish has long been predicted to decline due to overharvesting.
At the same time, it will open yet another wild frontier in the far far north, with nations fighting each other over fishing boundaries—not to mention environmentalists trying to save the poles from marine pollution, and pirates skulking behind ice floes to prey on unarmed passing ships. Both Russia and Canada consider their northern sea routes as national territory, but the U.S. views them as international waterways.
The U.S. Navy is worried that it can’t police this new Arctic route. A study by the Office of Naval Research points out that policing the area will be difficult because there are no good communications satellites in orbit that cover the North Pole.
The area of the Arctic pack ice is diminishing at the rate of 3 to 4 percent every 10 years, according to Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University. Submarine data show that the Arctic ice thickness in the central Arctic and Eurasian Basin in summer has diminished by a staggering 40 percent in the past 30 years, and some scientists expect that winter ice will be gone from the Barents Sea by 2030 to 2050 and summer ice from the entire Arctic by the 2080s.
There’s No Safe Sex in Muslim Nigeria
Hanging Judges
A regional tribal government in northern Nigeria has grudgingly relented, in the face of enormous public protests, and spared the life of a 35-year-old divorced woman who had been sentenced to death by stoning under strict Muslim law. Her crime was having sex with a man. In the eyes of the religious court, she committed adultery even though she was divorced. At the same time, another court of Muslim clerics in the same area doomed Amina Lawal, another divorced woman who had a baby. She was sentenced to being buried up to the shoulders and then stoned to death. And that sentence stands.
Religious courts are superseding civil sectarian justice in several African nations, as Muslim orthodoxy creeps in from Asia. Of course, the Taliban notoriously treated women harshly. And just recently there was an outcry at the shocking beheading of three men who a Saudi Arabian court said violated religious law simply by having gay sex.
Across North Africa, holy men are busy lopping off hands and arms for minor offenses, and are hanging men and stoning women to death. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in northern Nigeria, where fundamentalist Muslims are having a field day straightening out straying parishioners.
The Muslim court that sentenced Safiyatu Husaini to be stoned did show mercy by allowing her to wean her eight-month-old girl and stay home with her family before the sentence is exacted.
Residents in her village of Tungan Tudu, in the state of Sokoto, first reported the case to the police when they discovered that Husaini was pregnant. The man in the case, 60-year-old Yahaya Abubakar, a cousin of Husaini, got off; he was acquitted by Judge Alhaji Muhammad Bello Sanyinlawal. Three local cops testified that the cousins had sex three times, but the judge threw out their testimony because under religious law, there have to be four witnesses, the BBC reports. During the trial, the court was packed to overflowing, while Husaini sat in the dock, nursing her squalling baby.
Sokoto is one of more than a dozen states in predominantly Islamic northern Nigeria that have adopted Shariah, the Muslim code, in the past two years. A teenage mother received 80 lashes for committing adultery, and an elderly man was sentenced to be stoned to death because he sodomized a minor. Two people convicted of stealing had their hands cut off. Hundreds have been killed in fighting between Christians and Muslims in the area.
The Husaini case has shocked Europe—in Spain alone, 650,000 signatures have been collected against killing her. The Nigerian government, which oversaw installation of the Muslim code, now says it is unconstitutional.
In yet another case involving a woman, Bariya Ibrahim Magazu was found guilty of having sex outside marriage and bringing false charges against the men she allegedly had sex with. The merciful court reduced the sentence to 100 lashes, which she suffered this past January.
It could have been worse. In another recent case in the Sudan, two hapless defendants were sentenced to amputation of their right hands, followed by death by hanging.
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An “innovation which nobody has managed to achieve during the past century.” —Iraqi press review of The Fortified Castle,
a new novel by Saddam Hussein Source: BBC
Additional reporting: Gabrielle Jackson, Meritxell Mir, and Michael Ridley