A retired military explosives expert says the government's "fertilizer truck bomb" story is hogwash.
By Trisha Katson
The SPOTLIGHT, September 26, 1995

A 25-year expert on explosives and demolition has called for a congressional investigation to officially determine the initiators of the tragic Oklahoma City bombing which killed 168 people and injured hundreds of others.

Ben Partin, a retired brigadier general in the United States Air Force, has provided every member of Congress a detailed, comprehensive report of his analysis of the April 19, bombing.

The general contends the explosion was caused in part by demolition charges placed at critical structural points inside the building.

The official story by the Clinton administration's FBI, accepted virtuallly without question by the Establishment media, is that the bombing was caused solely by a single truck bomb consisting of 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate transported to the location in a Ryder truck which was parked outside the building.

Partin said the destruction to the building could not have possibly resulted from such a bomb alone.

To verify his analytical conclusions, Partin visited Oklahoma City during the last week of June 1995, where he had the opportunity to review hundreds of photographs taken throughout the cleanup operation.

The photos, taken before the debris was hauled off and buried at another site, provide, in Partin's view, "irrefutable evidence that at least four demolition charges were set off at four critical columns of the reinforced concrete structure at the floor level of the third floor."

Says Partin: "Based on my experience in weapons development and bomb damage analysis, and on my review of all evidence available, I can say, with a high level of confidence, that the damage pattern on the reinforced concrete superstructure could not possibly have been attained from a single truck bomb without supplementing demolition charge.

"The total incompatibility of this pattern of destruction with a single truck bomb lies in the simple, incontrovertible fact that some of the columns collapsed that should not have collapsed if the damage was caused solely by a truck bomb, and some of the columns were left standing that should have collapsed if the damage had been caused by the truck bomb."

The architect of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, Partin said, agrees with the retired general's assessment. "In my discussions with the building architect," said Partin, "he told me that the residual building was structurally sound and that the Murrah building could have been rebuilt. This is totally consistent with the collapse of columns with demolition charges because the inflicted structural damage is localized."

PRESERVE LIBERTIES

Partin has requested that action on so-called anti-terrorism legislation, which raised serious civil liberty questions, be deferred until the causes of the bombing are determined by independent investigators. That measure, introduced in Congress in February 1995, was going nowhere until the tragic bombing occurred.

Each lawmaker [member of Congress] has been provided by Partin with a packet of documentation including a letter, an 11-page report, his biography, charts and colour photographs documenting his analysis.

Partin's background includes 25 years in weapons development. He was also the first chairman of the OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) joint service Air Munitions Requirements and Development Committee.

The report concludes "the primary reinforced concrete structural failure soley attributable to the truck bomb is the stripping out of the ceilings of the first and second floors in the "pit" area behind columns B4 and B5.0.

The effort required to bomb the building, said Partin, "pales in comparison with the effort to cover it up. It is truly unfortunate that a separate and independent bomb damage assessment was not made during the cleanup, before the building was demolished on May 23, 1995, and hundreds of truck loads of debris were hauled away, smashed down and covered with dirt behind a security fence."

Whether any member of Congress, after having been presented with this evidence, will go public with the information is another matter.

"The bottom line is," an aide to a Republican congressman told The SPOTLIGHT, "is there anybody in Congress with the intestinal fortitude to challenge the powerful forces behind the orthodox version of what happened in Oklahoma City?"

Other points in Partin's report include:

- Heavily reinforced concrete beams can be destroyed effectively through detonation of explosives in contact with the reinforced concrete beams. The entire building remains in Oklahoma City were collapsed with 100-plus relatively small charges inserted into drilled holes in the columns. The total wieght of all charges was on the order of 200 pounds.

- Blast through air is a very inefficient energy coupling mechanism against heavily reinforced concrete beams and columns. Blast damage potential initially falls off more rapidly than in inverse function of the distance cubed, which is why in conventional weapons development, one seeks accuracy over yield for hard targets.

- The detonation wave pressure (500,000 to 700,000 pounds per square inch) from a contact explosive sweeps into the column as a wave of compressive deformation. Since the pressure in the wave of deformation far exceeds the yield strength of the concrete (about 3,500 pounds per square inch) by a factor of approximately 200, the concrete is turned into granular sand and dust until the wave dissipates to below the yield strength of the concrete.

- This leaves a relatively smooth but granular surface, with protruding, bare reinforcement rods - a distinctive signature of contact explosives. The effect of the contact explosive on the reinforcement rods (which are inertially confined and only see a wave of plastic deformation) can only be seen under microscopic metallurgical examination.

- When a reinforced concrete structure is damaged through air shock coupling and the pressure is below the compressive yield strength of the concrete, the failure mode is generally compressive structural fracture on one side and tensile fracture on the other - both characterized by cracks and rough fracture surfaces. Such a surface texture is very different from the smooth granular surface resulting from contact explosives.

from Spotlight newspaper at http://www.spotlight.org/Sept_26/Fbomb/fbomb.html

MURRAH FEDERAL BUILDING IMPLOSION, You Tube, May 24, 1995

People on NW 6 run away from the Murrah building (after officials discovered what was thought to be a second bomb in the wreckage). OK Bombing Investigations Committee

MURRAH BUILDING PHOTOS (Thank-you to reader Lisa Ghariani for photos she took of the Murrah bombing aftermath)

OKLAHOMA CITY: DAY ONE, by Michele Moore (excerpt from book explains how the government used the Oklahoma Bombing to pass freedom-stealing ANTI-TERRORISM legislation)

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING HOAX