Oklahoma City

Historic Photos of Oklahoma City
$39.95
If you're looking for a way to celebrate Oklahoma's upcoming centennial, want to get a little more familiar with Oklahoma City history, or are curious about those notorious street jogs in the downtown area, then pick up a copy of this book and feast on a collection of photographs ranging from the Land Run of 1889 through the postwar era and beyond.

The book views the birth of Oklahoma City through the lens of a camera. The result of countless hours of research, it features a collection of historic black and white photographs recording moments in time that shaped the development of the capitol city.

Some highlights:
* Two townsite companies feuded over accurately surveying the townsite, resulting in strangely aligned streets
* Treeless fields filled with tents, horses and cattle
* An early photo of a May, 1896 tornado, described as a "twisting serpent-like cloud
* Horse racing at the first state fair in 1907
* Charlton Heston participating in a civil rights march

Many people like looking at old photographs of buildings and landscapes, but my favorite shots are of people, like the one of the conductor on page 79, poised on the steps of a trolley. He's grinning from ear to ear. What was his name? How did he get to Oklahoma? Where did he live? What was his story? Such is the power of a photograph.

National Oklahoma City Memorial Reflecting Pool and Gate - Meaningful 16"x20" Photographic Print by Carol M. Highsmith
$39.95
We offer exceptional-quality 16x20 framable prints from every region and every U.S. state. Thousands of landscapes, scenic views, great monuments, city skylines, American Main Streets, landmarks, Civil War sites, highways and byways, National Parks, lighthouses, state capitals, farms and crossroads are represented. The site also presents the many moods, seasons, faces, workplace scenes, and even pets and working animals that, together, make up the fabric of American life.

Oklahoma City Bombing (Conspiracy?)
$21.99
Take a hard look at alternative theories surrounding the - at the time - largest terrosist attack on domestic soil - the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. At 9:02 a.m., on April 19, 1995, a massive explosion detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, collapsing the 9-story building and killing 168, 19 of them children, and wounding more than 700. Convicted by the federal government and executed in June 2001, Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh claimed he acted alone. Yet, multiple eyewitnesses identified McVeigh at ground zero with unknown accomplices before and after the blast. The original indictment charged McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and "others unknown" with conspiracy and murder. Was the bombing part of a greater pattern of Middle East-sponsored terrorist attacks, including the 1993 World Trade Center attack, bombing of the Khobar Towers and the USS Cole, and 9/11? Were homegrown neo-Nazi militia groups involved?

Conspiracy? - Oklahoma City Bombing (History Channel)
$24.95
Actually, the title of this DVD is a little bit misleading. In the post 9-11 world, many are automatically turned off by anything with "conspiracy" in the title. The use of the word "conspiracy" in connection with the OKC bombing might lead one to think that someone is attempting to make a case that the government was somehow responsible for the terrorist act, a la the 9-11 conspiracy theorists who maintain that Bush and Cheney had detailed information about the attacks long before they happened or were directly involved in attacking the Pentagon and Twin Towers in order to make it look as if the nation had come under terrorist attack. But this is not really what is being argued in this documentary.

There are a few key book-length sources on which the DVD seems to be based, and if you are interested in this subject, then may I recommend that you check out _The Third Terrorist_ by Jayna Davis (an investigative reporter), _Others Unknown_ by Steven Jones (Tim McVeigh's defense attorney), and _The Enemy of My Enemy_ by George Michael (a university professor of political science).

The long and short of it is this: According to the DVD and these sources, there was no "conspiracy" on the part of the federal government(during the Clinton years) to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah building. Likewise, there is no doubt that Tim McVeigh was guilty of delivering the bomb to its destination and that Terry Nichols was his key accomplice in this atrocious act of mass murder. But questions arise about other persons involved in the bombing--remember, as the title of Jones' book reminds us, the official indictment for the crime handed down by the judge was against McVeigh, Nichols, and "others unknown." So a federal judge maintains that there were others involved in the bombing, but we don't know who they are at this time. That alone should give us pause.

Well, who might these "others" have been? Well, nobody claims to know for sure, but a closer examination of some of the associations and sympathies of McVeigh and Nichols is particularly revealing. For starters, Terry Nichols spent time in the Philippines in the early 1990s--what he was doing there we don't exactly know, but there is evidence (according to the book sources) to show that he was associating with and receiving training from individuals associated with the Islamist terror group Abu Sayyaf and from Ramzi Yousef (mastermind of the first WTC bombing in 1993). And Tim McVeigh was a known sympathizer to Palestinian teror groups like Islamic Jihad and Hizballah.

This may come as a surprise to many, who might wonder what in the world extreme right-wing gun nut white supremacists could possibly have in common with Islamic terorists. Well, as George Michael shows in his excellent book, quite a lot. The main thing that they have in common, though, is absolute and total hatred of Israel and the Jews, and the fanatical belief that America is somehow controlled by Zionists and that the American people are brainwashed by the Zionist-controlled media.

Really, when you think about the similarities between the Oklahoma City bombing and the first (1993) WTC bombing (right down to the Ryder rental truck and the ammonium nitrate!) are you surprised? Or when you realize that the OKC bombing bore all the classic hallmarks of those truck bombings in Lebanon in the 1980s? (I suppose there are a lot of people who can't think that far back.)

Nobody is saying that Bill Clinton or Janet Reno or anyone esle in the Clinton administration is directly responsible for the bombing. If they are guilty of anything, it is not aggressively pursuing the identity of those "others unknown." The Enemy of My Enemy: The Alarming Convergence of Militant Islam And the Extreme RightThe Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City BombingOthers Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy