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A Coverup That Won’t Stay Covered
CNN recently reported that "the Justice Department is re-examining its investigation into the 1995 death of a federal prisoner that the victim’s family alleges was murder at the hands of the government."

The victim was Kenneth Michael Trentadue.

At 7 AM on August 21, 1995, officials from the Oklahoma Medical Examiner’s office arrived at the new Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center for the body of a man recently picked up for parole violation who allegedly was a suicide by hanging. The astonished state officials saw a body with scalp split to the skull in three places, throat slashed, and a body completely covered in blood, bruises and burns.

As law requires, the officials asked to see the cell in which the alleged suicide occurred. Federal officials pulled rank and refused on the grounds that a federal investigation was underway.

A federal investigation was not underway.

The state officials told the prison officials that the body’s condition required FBI notice and protection of the cell as an undisturbed crime scene. Associate Warden Max Flowers, however, ordered the cell to be cleaned before any investigation could be done. Flowers claimed that medical staff informed him that Trentadue was HIV-positive and that it was urgent to remove the infectious blood.

Trentadue was not HIV-positive....

...It has always been a puzzle why a man picked up on a parole violation would be murdered in his cell by federal agents. Recently an explanation has turned up. Kenneth Trentadue might have been a victim of mistaken identity. Misidentified as the missing John Doe, Tim McVeigh’s alleged accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing, he might have been beaten and tortured in an effort to obtain a confession. The autopsy report shows Trentadue with a highly elevated caffeine level, amounts certainly not available to a person held in isolation.

High doses of caffeine are used to increase pain under torture. ...