Well, This is Fucked Up

I'm not big on conspiracy theories, except for the one that says Obama is a secret dragon, but this is really something. A dude has been tenaciously investigating the Oklahoma City bombing because...well...he has a good reason.

In the July/August 2007 issue of Mother Jones, I wrote about a strange twist in the investigation: the case of a laborer called Kenney Trentadue. His brother Jesse, a Salt Lake City attorney, has accused federal agents of wrongly suspecting Kenney of being John Doe No. 2. When Kenney did not confess to aiding the bombing, Jesse Trentadue alleges, the agents beat him to death in a prison outside Oklahoma City and tried to cover it up by claiming he had killed himself. Kenney's death was indeed ruled as a suicide, but Jesse said his body bore numerous injuries that could not have been entirely self-inflicted. (The government later awarded the Trentadue family a $1.1 million settlement for its handling of the death.)

Um. What? I love that this received no coverage in our great country.

So, dude is clearly motivated to get to the bottom of whatever happened and the security tapes from that day are released and...

Now his search has at last borne some fruit. As the AP reported Sunday, the government has released a set of surveillance tapes filmed moments before the bomb went off—tapes which have, until now, been withheld from the public. When Trentadue looked at footage from the various cameras around the site, he said the tapes had a blank spot in the minutes before the blast—eliminating imagery of the truck carrying the bomb and people in the vehicle. Trentadue concludes that key parts of the tapes have been edited out—an accusation certain to fuel suspicions that the government may have withheld relevant evidence in the case.

I really, really need the second bomber to be Tyler Perry. Oh, Madea! What you do now?