Somewhere between ten and fifteen explosives experts and professional engineers have written strongly worded opinions that the Murrah building had to have been destroyed by interior bombs and that the ANFO truck could not have done the damage. These experts included a NASA scientist and demolition experts who have worked in the field for thirty years. What is most eye-opening is that even a government report concluded that the ANFO truck bomb couldn't have possibly destroyed the Murrah building. In early 1997, Wright Laboratory at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida constructed a concrete, steel-reinforced structure that was similar to the Murrah Building, and then did a series of explosions to test bomb effects. The Air Force structure was not nearly as structurally as sound as the Murrah Building, and the bombs used against it were more powerful than a 4,800 pound ANFO bomb. Minimal damage was done to the structure. Afterwards, the Air Force released a 56-page report that was entitled Case Study Relating Blast Effects to the Events of April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The report, which included an extensive technical analysis that the Air Force commissioned from construction and demolition expert John Culberston, concluded that ". . . it is impossible to ascribe the damage that occurred on April 19, 1995 to a single truck bomb containing 4,800 lbs. of ANFO . . . It must be concluded that the damage at the Murrah Building is not the result of the truck bomb itself, but rather due to other factors such as locally placed charges within the building itself . . . The procedures used to cause the damage to the Murrah Building are therefore more involved and complex than simply parking a truck and leaving . . ." Six explosives experts strongly agreed with the report's findings.
Apparently, Elgin Air Force Base isn't the only government group that came to these conclusions. In his Vanity Fair article, Gore Vidal pointed out that Strategic Investment newsletter (20 March 1996) wrote: "A classified report prepared by two independent Pentagon experts has concluded that the destruction of the Federal building in Oklahoma City last April was caused by five separate bombs . . . Sources close to the study say Timothy McVeigh did play a role in the bombing but 'peripherally,' as a 'useful idiot.'"
Brigadier General (ret.) Partin has been the most vocal of the critics of the government's one-bomb, one-man scenario. During his thirty-one year Air Force career, General Partin's expertise was explosives. During that time, he designed warheads, "had a lot of experience in combat damage evaluation", was trained in all the pertinent military laboratories, and was one of the government's foremost--if not the foremost--experts on explosives. "When I first looked at the reports coming out of Oklahoma I knew that the truth was not coming out. The media was pretty much confused, or passing out disinformation, and I think some of the officials down there were passing out disinformation, and what was going on down there was totally at odds with what I had twenty-five years experience of knowing," General Partin has said. To Partin, the contention that the ANFO truck bomb did the damage to the Murrah Building is "absurd". Within a month of April 19, 1995, the General had prepared a technical analysis of the bombing. In the report, Partin made it clear that by the time the blast wave from the ANFO truck bomb had hit the building it would not have had anywhere near enough psi (pounds of pressure per square inch) to collapse the steel-reinforced concrete columns. (By the time the ANFO blast wave hit the columns it would have been yielding 25-375 psi; the yield strength of concrete is 3,500-5,000 psi.) The report also made it clear that larger, thicker columns further away from the truck bomb came down, while smaller columns much closer to the truck were undamaged. "You don't have to go any further than that to know that you had demolition charges on those larger columns. There's no other explanation for it . . . Unless you believe in magic," Partin said. General Partin examined hundreds of photos of the destroyed building, and his in depth report listed the many other reasons why he can see �clearly, clearly�with a very high probability . . . with a high level of confidence" exactly where interior bombs were placed. Partin eventually delivered his analysis to all 535 senators and congressmen. In his cover letter to the politicians, he pleaded that the "Congress take steps to assure that evidence in Oklahoma City be evaluated by a collection of demolition experts from the private sector before the building is demolished." If experts had been able to examine the building closely, they could have reported definitively how the building was bombed. On 23 May 1995, though, just 34 days after the bombing, the Murrah Building was destroyed, and the rubble was buried in a landfill that is surrounded by a chain link fence and guarded by security personnel. "This is a classic cover-up of immense proportions," the General said.