New Revelations in Wisconsin Killings; Shooter Showed Up in Fla. Terror Probe

I was on CNN Tuesday and Wednesday to discuss new developments in the Wade Page investigation.












Page was a member of the Hammerskins skinhead group. He traveled around the country playing white power music as founder of the band End Apathy and a member of Definite Hate. In March 2011, those bands played to a crowd in central Florida that included a law enforcement source working for the Orange County sheriff's department. The informant recorded the band's presence in a heavily redacted document.

Two FBI undercover agents and an Orange County Sheriff undercover agent were also involved in the investigation and may have been present at the event.

The source had been investigating a skinhead group called the American Front, which culminated in 13 arrests in May 2012 on charges mostly related to paramilitary operations in support of the group's dream of a race war. The informant was attempting to penetrate the Hammerskins as well, and frequented an Internet forum also used by Page, according to redacted court documents.

The Hammerskins and American Front had a close relationship, and Page posted on an in memoriam page to American Front's founder, David Lynch, who was murdered in March 2011, just days before Page's band played in central Florida. Lynch's slaying was a topic of conversation at the event, according to the informant's report.

Click here for story and full documents on American Front

Check out J.M. Berger's new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, on sale everywhere.

Labels: FBI, Hammerskins, Infiltration, Informants, Wade-Page, white-supremacists

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

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New America Foundation: Surveillance and Infiltration

I will be appearing at this event to discuss PATCON and to mark the release of a new and much more detailed report on the undercover operation and its implications for U.S. law enforcement policy. Please come! I will post a link to the extended report once it become available.

The New York City Police Department's surveillance of Muslim communities in New York has been widely debated since being publicly revealed in a Pulitzer Prize winning series of Associated Press reports. Defenders argue such techniques are crucial tools in an era of homegrown terrorism. Critics allege that the NYPD's techniques amount to blanket surveillance and alienate the very communities that government needs to work with against extremists. Please join us for a discussion about these techniques with two of the Pulitzer Prize winning reporters that broke the NYPD surveillance story and the author of a New America Foundation report revealing the FBI's efforts to infiltrate anti-government extremist networks in the early 1990s.

Sign up for the event On an unrelated note, if you haven't taken the "One Year After Bin Laden" survey sponsored by Selected Wisdom, please take a few minutes to do so. It's an important snapshot of our current view of Al Qaeda. Clint Watts also has an interesting post today on the fact that Al Qaeda, like most Western stakeholders in the war on terrorism, may not really know what it means to be in Al Qaeda. Check out J.M. Berger's new book, Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam, on sale everywhere.

Labels: FBI, Infiltration, Informants, Oklahoma-City-Bombing, PATCON, Patriot-Movement, Surveillance, Timothy-McVeigh, Undercover

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

Oklahoma City Bombing: FBI Informants Reported on ABC News, McVeigh Defense Team

FBI informants reporting on the Oklahoma City bombing provided the bureau with leads taken from ABC News and Timothy McVeigh's defense team, according to documents filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.


A confidential informant in the St. Louis, Missiouri, area "learned of the following information as a result of interviews and contacts made by the ABC News team covering OKBOMB," the FBI's code name for the investigation, according to an FBI FD-302 record dated April 3, 1996.

The informant said government documents including "telephone records and grand jury information" had been "leaked" to attorneys for both Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols.

The informant said the information was "being used to fuel belief that a government conspiracy exists to 'cover up' government mistakes," the document states, including information indicating that the goverment was warned of the April 19, 1995 attack ten days in advance. The material was being used to bolster claims that "the government had a confidential informant next to McVeigh."

The informant also provided information on reporting by the late J.D. Cash regarding the bombing and the possibility of additional conspirators.

According to the document, the informant also provided information on gun dealer Roger Moore and German neo-Nazi Andreas Strassmeier, both of whom have been the subject of scrutiny for their relationships to McVeigh and possible roles in the bombing plot. According to the informant, "some right-wing group supporters believe [Strassmeier] is an FBI informant."

A second document from the same informant again provided information learned "as a result of interviews and contacts made by the ABC News Team covering OKBOMB" related to Elohim City, a white supremacist compound in rural Oklahoma where Strassmeier lived and worked as security director.

A third document identifies a numbered informant in Oklahoma who claimed to be alerting the FBI to a planned ABC expose concerning the bombing. This informant was relaying information from "a confidential source who works for a news agency."

A fourth document from April 16, 1996, was previously released and identifies a numbered FBI informant based in New York who was "a senior official employed by ABC News for over fifteen years." This informant was pressured into revealing the name of a ABC News source -- Vincent Cannistraro -- who had provided information pointing to overseas involvement in the attack. This informant was later allegedly identified as Christopher Isham, who denied providing information to the FBI.

The complete set of new Oklahoma City bombing documents were filed as support for a sweeping motion that details the FBI's noncompliance with previous court orders regarding disclosure of documents related to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue sued the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act for documents related to the Oklahoma City bombing after his brother, Kenneth, was found dead in a federal prison cell soon after the bombing. Trentadue won a wrongful death suit against the Bureau of Prisons for covering up key details of his brother's death, which the Bureau claimed was a suicide.

Documents previously disclosed as part of the lawsuit can be found here, here and here.

Labels: Andreas-Strassmeir, Informants, Jesse-Trentadue, OKBOMB, Oklahoma-City-Bombing, Roger-Moore, Terry-Nichols, Timothy-McVeigh

Views expressed on INTELWIRE are those of the author alone.

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink