The OKC Bombing thread: Surveillance Camera Footage

[Richard Booth]

The writeup about O'Neill following his death, in the NY Times, says this: O'Neill "coordinated information in the Oklahoma City bombing that led to the arrest of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols"

Coordinated information. Hmm. Makes me wonder if he might have been involved in the ZyIndex program. This was a special piece of software that the OKBOMB task force used. People uploaded disks of 302s to ZyIndex and it basically stored every word of every 302, so you could do a full text retrieval of a document and search by any keyword and get search hits on the exact 302s you're looking for.

Danny Coulson speaks of this without using the name ZyIndex in the C-SPAN 2 BookTV presentation he did. He says "we had full text retrieval" -- at the time ZyIndex was used solely in the OKBOMB case and was new.

I learned a lot about ZyIndex from two places:

(1) The DOJ/OIG report on OKBOMB documents withheld from the Defense team
(2) Documents relating to Jesse Trentadue's 2008 FOIA suit vs. the FBI (he had many victories in court vs. FBI in that case)

This makes me wonder then if John O'Neill was actually transferred from the Atlanta office to work at the OKC OKBOMB task force where the ZyIndex uploads were done, or if he had access to ZyIndex from the Atlanta office and was one of the agents performing cross-checks.

John Hersley, when he testified before the 1997/1998 grand jury, he testified at length about how Nichols and McVeigh were caught, what they did to get the evidence. So he talks a lot about finding the ANFO purchases, finding the storage lockers under assumed names ('Mike Havens') that were also used when Nichols checked into hotels, he'd use the same phoney name and the FBI would cross-reference the purchases with hotel check-in registers using ZyIndex. They did lots of cross-checking to find the records necessary to put Nichols in a certain city when an ANFO purchase was made, or put McVeigh on the phone with Nichols at a certain time.

Since O'Neill is deceased it might be a worthy task to perform a FOIA request for all documents relating to O'Neill and OKBOMB. I'd also add in there the 'BOMBROB' case because it had some crossover w/ OKBOMB.

I had no luck whatsoever with FOIA requests, filed about 50, I received responses on about 7 of them. All of those responses were denials due to the person I was requesting info on still being alive.