The reason message boards exist is to exchange ideas. If I'm wrong about stuff, feel free to correct me. I'm quite willing to conceed that I'm wrong, and I'm not %100 confident in this information anyway. I haven't got a good technical edukashun so please be patient with me.

I am not trying to be antogonistic. I just want to figure out what's up.

The term 'High Explosive' is really just an overused laymans term.

I was actually trying to be specific when I wrote "high explosive". Here are some definitions:

- Low Explosives burn through deflagration rather than a detonation wave, are usually a mixture, are initiated by heat and require confinement to create an explosion; and
- High Explosives explode in supersonic reactions and without confinement, are compounds, are initiated by shock or heat and have high brisance (the shattering effect of an explosion).

Wikipedia defines ANFO as a low explosive.

There is the volume of Gas produced, the rate/speed at which gas is produced, efficiency, heat and several other factors are used when evaluating/comparing the productivity of a blasting ordinance. ANFO produces a huge volume of gas with a comparatively low propagation speed. Its very efficient and its very useful for knocking down buildings, and destroying solid slabs of rock over-burden in coal stripmines, or crushing solid rock faces in rock quarries. These are the real world uses that it is used for.

Yes, that is consistent with the definitions provided above, and the small amount that I know.

In a word: bullshit. In five words: Stinking Mass of anomalist Bullshit.

Any explosive can knock down steel-reinforced concrete, its just an issue of volume of explosive used, confinement and placement and context in which it is used.

This is where my questions begin: volume, confinement and placement. Let us return to one of the real-world uses of ANFO you mentioned above, destroying rock over-burden in coal stripmines:

"To break the rock, explosives are used to blast a certain amount of rock in a careful and controlled manner. The explosives are placed in holes that have been carefully and accurately drilled down into the bench."

The explosived are placed in holes drilled into the rock being broken up. It is not placed on top, though I'm sure that would have some effect. At the Murrah Federal Building, the truck was 20 feet from the building - not even in contact with the building, let alone one of the columns. This is an unconfined explosion, as opposed to a confined explosion when ANFO is used in professional demolition work.

McVeigh did what any idiot would do who knew he was an idiot. He made as much explosive as he possibly could- filled a ryder truck with tones of the stuff. In fact, the slow propagation of ANFO blast waves worked in his favor, allowing a substantial percentage of the ordinance to be consumed before the blast wave dispersed it.

Windows were broken 10 miles away by the blast. It was sufficient to knock down a building.

I trust you have seen Partin's analysis? What do you make of it?

The 'x second later' second blast reported was the rebound of the shockwave off of the mantle. It was that large. Don't even bother with that line of argument.

I wasn't going to broach that topic here. However, I believe the USGS explaination was that the second spike on the seismograph was caused by the collapse of the building. "Scientists Debate Meaning of Bombing Seismograms", The Daily Oklahoman, 11/21/95.

Okay, so you believe in a small conspiracy. That doesn't make what you are pushing for any more founded or believable.

No, it doesn't make it more founded. It does, though, make it more believable. The smaller the number of people in the know, the less likely it is to leak.

If they are fringe, why do you drag them in and use them?

They are fringe in two ways: 1. Not widely beleived 2. Draw (in my opinon) outlandish conclusions. I tried to explain why I still use these sources in my post, let me try again - I don't believe that people are fabricating - lying - about these things. I beleive that some people have picked up these pieces of information and incorrectly assembled them, coming up with something like 'the CIA bombed the Murrah building.'

If I say "2 + 2 = 5" the conclusion is wrong. But the mistaken conclusion, '5', doesn't invalidate the '2's.

Whats your point?

I went off on a tangent here, trying to explain why I thought there weren't hundreds, or thousands of government agents all in cahoots to supress information. Or rather, that they were surpressing it, but some groups for different reasons than others. My point was that I believe the bombers used McViegh to feed the government disinformation.

There are reports of alien abductions as well. Post your sources. And even granted, we ARE talking about a FEDERAL BUILDING here, with an ATF office.

" and the others kicked us in the ass. "

Oh boy. Here we go again. Post your sources or retact your claim

If you deign to read my post, I have already provided a link to Intel Wire, which has a number of articles up concerning who the "others" might be. Please read every article there concerning Oklahoma City.

"Except it didn't go away"

Funny that, neither does alien abduction. So either something is there, or some people won't allow it to drop no matter how many debunkings are produced.

The "it" was referring to terrorism.

And I haven't seen much in the way of debunking a possible meeting between Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef. Richard Clarke will only go so far as to say that they couldn't disprove it. And I haven't seen much in the way of debunking the eyewitness reports of people not McViegh scurrying away from the Murrah building shortly before and after the blast.

From Why America Slept by Gerald Posner:

"Early reports that filtered in from the FBI's field investigation also bolstered the theory of a Middle Eastern connection...Some of the events from those early hours are revealed here for the first time, through a review of still-classified FBI reports. By the time the FBI had issued their evening communique to field offices warning of an Islamic link, crime scene investigators had uncovered a mangled license plate that they initially-- and incorrectly -- thorugh might belong to the vehicle that delivered the bomb. They traced it to a National car rental counter in Dallas. The Bureau then dispatched agents who interviewed a security officer in the Dallas office where National as located The guard heightened their suspicions when he told the agents that he had noticed "a strange-looking group of men" congregating on the pavement outside the building the previous Friday night.

"They were dark-haired with beards," he continued, "and I am almost certain they were Arabs, or at least of Middle Eastern origin. There were three of four of them." ...

Meanwhile, two Middle Eastern men were spotted driving from Oklahoma City to Dallas within hours of the bombing. The men stopped to ask directions from an Oklahoma highway patrolman. When the officer ran their plate, he discovered that it didn't match the vehicle. The plate bbelonged to a rented blue Cheby Cavalier, the very description of a car that at least two witnesses were then telling FBI agents in Oklahoma Ciity that they had seen near the Murrah Building that morning. Asad R. Siddiqy, a cabdriver from Queens, along with the other two men, Anis Siddiqy and Mohammed Chafi, were taken into custody.....

... Texas authorities contacted the FBI's Dallas office to report tthey were searching for "two men of Middle Eastern appearance driving a Cavalier or Chevrolet Blazer towards the Mexican border."

For 36 hours, the FBI continued finding witnesses who pointed to an Arab connection. One of those interviewed shortly after the blast was an injured woman who had been riding the elevator in the Murrah Building. She told two agents that she spotted a young Arab man wearing a backpack hurriedly pushing the buttons as if trying to get off. She had follwoed him outside, not suspecting anything was amiss. Moments later, she was sent sprawling to the sidewalk by the explosion.

Gary Lewis, a pressman for the Oklahoma City Journal Record, told the FBI agents that he had stepped outside to smoke his pipe when he remembered he had left something in his car. As he walkied down an adjacent alley, a yellow Mercury peeled away from its spot near the Murrah building, jumped a concrete barricade, swerved to avoid hitting a dumpster, then bore down on him, forcing him up onto the curb (when McVeigh was arrested, he was driving a light yellow Mercury Marquis). Several minutes later, back in his office, Lewis was thrown to the floor as the building rocked from the blast's impact. As he and his fellow workers rushed outside, he noticed a peculiar sight: an Arab man standing nearby, staring at the smoldering federal building, grinning from ear to ear.

Another witness told crime scene investigatiors that he saw two men running from the area of the Murrah Building toward a brown Chvy pickup truck just prior to the blast. He described the two men, both with beards, as "possibly [of] Middle-Eastern descent, approximately six feet tall, with athletic builds.

A few blocks away from ground zero, Debra Burdick and her daughter had been on their way to the doctor's office. As she stopped for a light at 10th and Robinson, her attention was diverted by three vehicles. One was a blue Chevy Cavalier, the type of car invesigators thought might be connected to the three Arabs detained while driving to Dallas.

"I looked across," Burdick told agents, "and there was that light blue car, it had a white interior, and there were three men in it. They were dark, but they were not black....I would say they were Middle Easterners....Now, I noticed the three men in the car, that guy sitting in the middle was kind of staring out....I said, 'Huh. I wonder what they're looking at?' and as I turned around, I said, 'There's nothing there but buildings'"

The other vehicles Burdick identified were a yellow Mercury, the same type of car that Gary Lewis, the Journal Record news worker, said had almost run him down a few minutes before the explosion. The third vehicle was a brown pickup. Burdick was now the second witness to describe that pickup, with Middle Eastern men inside, as having been in the immediate vicinity of the Murrah Building just before the blast.

More confirmation came froma witness identified in FBI documents only as Mary H. She had raced out of her office, five blocks from the Murrah building, just after the explosion. As she stepped onto the meridian she was nearly run over by a brown pickup that came screeching around the corner. She told the agents that there were three men inside and she made eye contact with the driver.

"He looked like he was in his twenties -- late twenties. [He] had an angry look on his face. I'll never forget the look on his face. It just was full of hate and anger. It really struck me, because everyone else -- people were coming out and looked scared and confused, and he just looked full of anger." She said that two of the three people in the truck were Middle Easterners. (Later, when shown photos, she picked out an Iraqi, with ties to terrorist groups, as the driver.)

That stuff is from pages 85-87.

I've got more, but it's going to have to wait.