Christmas Eve News Dump

When media outlets and other entities want to bury bad news, they release the bad news when people are least likely to be paying attention. Friday nights are often used. So are holiday weekends. So it should be no surprise that we've got a dandy of a news item buried right in the middle of a holiday weekend; a Congressional investigation found that the FBI and Department of Justice did an extremely poor job of investigating the Oklahoma City bombing and tracking down all the leads, including those that may have included links to foreign terrorist groups.

The subcommittee's report will conclude there is no doubt McVeigh and Nichols were the main perpetrators, and it discloses for the first time that Nichols confirmed to House investigators he participated in the robbery of an Arkansas gun dealer that provided the proceeds for the attack.

There have long been questions about that robbery because the FBI concluded McVeigh was in another state at the time it occurred.

The report also sharply criticizes the FBI for failing to be curious enough to pursue credible information that foreign or U.S. citizens may have had contact with Nichols or McVeigh and could have assisted their plot.

"We did our best with limited resources, and I think we moved the understanding of this issue forward a couple of notches even though important questions remain unanswered," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., the subcommittee chairman, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Rohrabacher's subcommittee saved its sharpest words for the Justice Department, saying officials there exhibited a mind-set of thwarting congressional oversight and did not assist the investigation fully.

The report rebukes the FBI for not fully pursuing leads suggesting other suspects may have provided support to McVeigh and Nichols before their truck bomb killed 168 people in the main federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.