Watergate: The Oval Office Tapes

Watergate Chapter 3

The History Channel (2016)

Film Review

Chapter 3 mainly concerns the discovery of the Oval Office tapes. For me the most interesting section concerns the conflict between Nixon and his legal counsel John Dean over whether to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to the tapes, in March 1973 Nixon ordered Dean to issue a statement expressing the White House’s general willingness to cooperate in any investigation. Dean never did so. Instead (according to subsequent tapes), Dean advises him not to cooperate by claiming executive immunity.

By the spring of 1973, six defendants had been sentenced in the Watergate burglaries and Watergate hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee are about to begin. Around the same time former CIA operative and Watergate burglar James McCord begins testifying to the grand jury about the White House staff who orchestrated the break-in.

By mid-1973, new scandals linking Watergate to the White House are breaking daily. John Dean hires a criminal lawyer and begins negotiations with the Senate Committee to trade testimony about White House involvement in the break-in and coverup for immunity from prosecution.

Nixon accepts the resignation of John Ehrlichman and Robert Haldeman, as their staff are heavily implicated in the cover-up. He simultaneously fires Dean, Attorney General Gordon Kleindienst and FBI Director L Patrick Gray.

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*Driven mainly by paranoia, Nixon recorded all his Oval Office conversations for most of his presidency.

**Gray was the first FBI director after Hoover’s mysterious death a month before Watergate. See http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Watergate%20Deaths.html

This film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/watergate-0

 

The Citizens Group that Blew Whistle on OKC Bombing

A Noble Lie

Directed by James Lane (2011)

Film Review

This documentary approaches the Oklahoma City bombing from a somewhat different angle, focusing on the citizens group that empaneled a grand jury to investigate Tim McVeigh’s accomplices, as well as his links to US intelligence. Oklahoma is one of the few states that allows citizens to convene their own grand jury.

The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee was made up of Oklahoma City police and sheriff’s officers, bombing victims and their families, eyewitnesses and a supportive state legislator. Their findings showed clearly that at the time of the bombing McVeigh was still in the US Army (as indicated on his death certificate) and assigned to working with the FBI and ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) group PatCon to infiltrate militant right wing groups. The committee’s goal was to force Congress to investigate the FBI cover-up of the Oklahoma City bombing. When this failed, the published their findings two weeks prior to 9-11 in a book called The Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Building.

A Noble Lie also zeroes in on the two eyewitnesses who were murdered as part of the FBI cover-up, the files the FBI and ATF removed from the Murrah federal building before they permitted search and rescue teams from entering the bomb site, and FBI memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about the involvement of McVeigh and various accomplices in PatCon. The latter was an undercover FBI operation to infiltrate right wing extremist groups.

This film also goes to great lengths to debunk the FBI claim that a truck bomb caused the Murrah Federal Building to collapse. Not only was the pattern of structural damage inconsistent with an external air blast, but a truck bomb (of the size claimed by the FBI) would have produced too much ammonia gas for rescuers to enter the building.

Independent forensic tests at an Air Force lab ascertained that the bombing had to result from explosive charges attached to one or more columns inside the building – exactly like the two bombs defused immediately after the blast. The activities of the Air Force bomb disposal squad were reported by numerous media outlets on the day.

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*An Oklahoma sheriff got a tip off from Little Rock the day of the bombing that these records likely concerned the federal investigation into CIA drug running at the Mena Airport in Arkansas. Federal records related to the Whitewater investigation, another Clinton scandal, were also stored in the Murrah building and vanished the day of the bombing.