By Andrew W. Griffin

Red Dirt Report, editor

Posted: November 28, 2011

reddirtreporter@gmail.com

OKLAHOMA CITY – Ten years after 9/11 and 16 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, it appears the federal government continues to view some Americans who embrace their First Amendment rights – press and speech, primarily – as a danger to the State, and as a result they are listing certain investigative websites as extremist and a terroristic threat to the “homeland.”

One, labeled as “extremist” and therefore a threat to the U.S. Government, includes a well-known site, once operated by a truth-seeking Oklahoma state legislator, working to expose anomalies related to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing – OKCbombing.net. A link to the document can be seen here.

This shocking designation is indeed troubling, particularly to the local documentary film production company Free Mind Films, which is also releasing an explosive documentary about the Oklahoma City bombing, A Noble Lie.

OKCbombing.net was formerly operated by State Rep. Charles Key (R-Oklahoma City), as a site to inform the public about reams of information discovered by the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, much of it originally ignored by the same federal agencies who now list the site as a threat to the homeland. As for Rep. Key, he concluded his role in the OBIC in approximately 2002 and  Free Mind Films is now paying for access and domain rights to the site.

So, how was this designation discovered? It was via the investigative work of John Bush and Catherine Bleish of Operation Defuse, an Austin, Texas-based group whose ongoing efforts are to expose the growing police state and the growing influence of the national network of “Fusion Centers” across the country.

And Operation Defuse has plenty of fans due to their hard work. In fact the activists appeared in a controversial “police state” episode of Jesse Ventura’s Conspiracy Theory program on TruTV last year as an extension of their tireless work in “unmasking the new American police state.”

And part of that police state apparatus are Fusion Centers, Bush told Red Dirt Report. These centers are described by the government as “terrorism prevention and response centers” and were established by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice in the mid-2000’s. Specifically, they were designed to share and analyze information which can be shared between local, state and federal agencies. Civil libertarians and constitutionalists are very concerned about the overreach these centers have, and the impact they will have on freedom in this country.

“Our interest in Fusion Centers is in exposing the threat that Fusion Centers pose to our civil liberties and Constitutional rights,” Bush told Red Dirt Report this week.

So, while attending the 2010 National Fusion Center Conference in New Orleans, La. in February of that year that Operation Defuse’s Bush and Bleish, journalists with the “Austin Free Press,” came across a compact disc that was made available by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance.  The CD laid out anti-terrorism resources for Fusion Center directors and senior leadership, Homeland Security directors, local, state, tribal and federal law enforcement and intelligence officers and analysts.

Under the heading “Domestic Terrorism,” the DOJ/BJA reference document has a subhead titled “Miscellaneous Extremism." It is there, amidst well-known websites like Antiwar.com and lesser known sites one calling for an “end to corporate governance,” that The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee’s OKCbombing.net website is listed as an extremist and domestic terrorist website by the federal government.

In describing the site for law enforcement, OKCbombing.net is noted as being a “web site for the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, a group convinced that a large Oklahoma City bomb conspiracy exists.”

But upon reading the “about us” portion of the scholarly investigative site, their mission statement goal is to “find the whole truth about the fatal attack on the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Through extensive eyewitness interviews and research, the Committee is working to bring all those responsible to justice.”

The site offers visitors information on “articles of interest” related to the bombing and Timothy McVeigh and offers copies of the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee’s thorough, 500-plus page independent book, Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, released in 2001. Since Key handed over the control of OKCbombing.net to Free Mind Films, a link to that group’s website is on the site and it notes that they will be releasing a documentary film about the bombing and anomalies related to it called A Noble Lie.

As the site notes: “Evidence presented at this web site is documented, compiled from more than four years of investigation.”

James Lane, who created Free Mind Films and directed the new Oklahoma City bombing film A Noble Lie, said he is not surprised the government has designated OKCbombing.net a terrorist site.

“This document shows the lengths that the US government will go to demonize people that have the audacity to expose corruption and cover-ups,” Lane told Red Dirt Report. “These institution’s primary goal is self-preservation above all else.”

As for Key, he told Red Dirt Report that he has not been involved in any sort of Oklahoma City bombing for over a decade and that the site is now operated by others.

“I’m not involved in it,” Key said. “I don’t know why they (the DOJ) would make this kind of claim. I think it’s ridiculous, extreme and reactionary in its own right.”

Bush, meanwhile, said Operation Defuse saw the the fed’s targeting of the OKCbombing.net website was “another example of the federal government training officials to believe that exposing these things is ‘extremist.’” He went on to add that the feds, via “Fusion Centers” and connected groups can further “marginalize anti-establishment organizations and groups.”

It was nearly three years ago that Missouri’s “Fusion Center” – the Missouri Information Analysis Center, or “MIAC” -- had a report that was leaked to the Alex Jones Show.  The leak revealed MIAC’s “Modern Militia Movement” document was labeling supporters of presidential candidates like Ron Paul or Chuck Baldwin as “militia”-influenced terrorists.  The document also singled out people opposed to the “New World Order” and the creation of a “North American Union,” among others. After the MIAC report was exposed, outrage over the government demonizing political speech and constitutional freedoms led to its eventual denunciation by state officials.

But it was clear that a year later – in 2010, while at the New Orleans Fusion Center conference – that federal officials and those within the Justice Department were still obsessed with labeling investigative groups like the long-defunct Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee and its accompanying website as an extremist and terroristic organization.

Red Dirt Report contacted the DOJ's Bureau of Justice Assistance seeking more information about what critera OBIC and OKCbombing.net met in order to be designated as an extremist, terroristic threat. If we do receive a reply, we will be sure to update this important story.

Operation Defuse's John Bush, meanwhile, said that for the government to include a site like OKCbombing.net as an extremist site only gives local agencies an excuse to crack down on people seeking the truth.

“So, when you question the official line about the Oklahoma City bombing you are labeled a domestic terrorist?” Bush asked rhetorically.

Concluded Bush: “It’s unfortunate that the anti-terrorism apparatus is being turned inward” against the American people.”

For more information go to www.operationdefuse.com or www.freemindfilms.com.

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