Jim Crogan has an extensive piece in the latest LA Weekly (a lefty publication, for what it's worth) on the connections between the OKC bombing and the Middle East.

It seems to remain difficult to get anyone in the mainstream media to touch this story.

A quick Lexis/Nexis search reveals that the Wall Street Journal's Jay Krall wrote about the online interest in a Jose Padilla - John Doe #2 connection on June 17th (Page B1).

Krall also commented on the fact that Terry Nichols first wife had the surname "Padilla," something I didn't remember and found interesting in the LA Weekly piece. Krall makes light of the similarity by comparing it to the historical coincidence that John F. Kennedy had a secretary named Evelyn Lincoln.

He also includes quotes from Lana Padilla saying that she's never met Jose Padilla and isn't related to him. She says that she first heard about the supposed connection when she was called by a local TV talk show and asked about her name, but now that she's looked at the similarity between Jose Padilla and the John Doe #2 sketch she thinks the issue ought to be investigated. Nichols, she says, was afraid of "something or somebody" when he wrote to her prior to one of his trips to the Phillipines in 1994, and she suspects a wider conspiracy.

Krall's story was syndicated and ran in other major newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times (6/18/2002, p. 14), and the Houston Chronicle (7/7/2002, p. A2). It also inspired an article by Stephanie Schorow in the Boston Herald (6/25/2002, p. 39), which mentions the JunkYard Blog piece that Instapundit linked to: http://junkyardblog.blogspot.com/2002_06_09_junkyardblog_archive.html#77607189

But the mainstream press apparently isn't very interested in the story, since it smacks of wacko conspiracy theory and was Not Invented Here.

The Phillipines was evidently a hotbed of terrorism once upon a time, since the 1993 WTC bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef was active with an Al Queda cell in the Phillipines led by his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed during 1994-95. Mohammed is on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list: http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/terrorists/terkmohammed.htm

A lot of this has been covered by Bryan Preston at JunkYard Blog, http://junkyardblog.blogspot.com/.

Most of the relevant posts are in archives by now, but if you know Padilla was arrested June 10 they shouldn't be hard to start finding.

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