Philadelphia ? Earlier this month, as the U.S. Senate debated whether to allow the president to wage war on Iraq, an unusual spectacle unfolded in the office of Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

While colleagues spoke on the Senate floor, Specter sat in his office listening to a former television reporter who alleges that contrary to the findings of the largest federal investigation in history, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was orchestrated by a secret terrorist cell of former Iraqi soldiers working for either Saddam Hussein or Islamic extremists, or both.

The briefing was broadcast live on a radio show led by Specter’s friend, attorney Michael Smerconish. Smerconish says he received so many phone calls and e-mails that the station, WHPT-AM, rebroadcast the show a few days later.

There is little Americans love more than a whiff of conspiracy.

Nobody knows that better than Specter, who four decades ago advanced the oft-ridiculed single-bullet theory, which was designed to show how a lone gunman could have assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

“My sense is that it would take an extraordinary degree of inertia and incompetence for the FBI to overlook something this serious,” he said after the radio show. “But stranger things have happened.”

He said he had asked for, and expected to receive, a briefing from the FBI about why the agency discounts a Middle Eastern link to the bombing.

Specter is not the only one showing interest in the allegations of former television reporter Jayna Davis, which were first made public seven weeks after the Murrah Federal Building was destroyed. While the Oklahoma City media have criticized Davis, the Fox News Channel broadcast an interview with her recently, and the Wall Street Journal published a lengthy article about her allegations on Sept. 5 on its op-ed page.

Acting alone

The FBI, having reviewed 30,000 witness statements and one billion documents, concluded that convicted bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols acted alone in the April 19, 1995, attack. So did an Oklahoma County grand jury.

McVeigh was executed last year, and Nichols is serving a federal life sentence as he awaits trial on state murder charges.

Before he was executed, McVeigh told two journalists that he and Nichols had acted by themselves.

“How do they get around that?” asked Weldon Kennedy, the former FBI deputy director who led the investigation, in a telephone interview. “It’s just like the Kennedy assassination. These conspiracy theories are going to go on long after you and I are gone.”

That may be because the case has a number of loose ends. The indictment of McVeigh and Nichols said they had help from “others unknown to the grand jury.” Jurors in their federal trials said they believed others had to have been involved.

The biggest discrepancies surround the identity of “John Doe 2,” the famous sketch of a dark-complexioned man wearing a baseball cap and said to have a tattoo on his left arm released by the FBI the day after the bombing.

The government says the sketch was the product of a confused witness. But alternative theories have abounded.

Davis, who covered the bombing for KFOR-TV, has been gathering information ever since, even though she left the station in 1997.

She says she has 2,000 pages of evidence “which present a persuasive argument that 4-19 was the precursor for 9-11.” She says she is not sure whether the bombing was orchestrated by Saddam, as some of her supporters believe, or Islamic fundamentalists, as others do.

Seven weeks after the attack, Davis broadcast a report identifying John Doe 2 as an Iraqi refugee who had been a laborer in Oklahoma City. She has gathered sworn affidavits from seven people who say they saw this man who has a tattoo on his left arm and bears an uncanny resemblance to the John Doe 2 sketch with McVeigh.

The report noted that, after the bombing, the FBI put out an all-points bulletin seeking a brown pickup truck and indicating that two Middle Eastern men were believed to be in the truck. She says witnesses later placed the truck at the Iraqi man’s place of employment, where he worked with other former Iraqi soldiers.

Her broadcast did not identify the man, Hussein al-Husseini, by name. But he later approached competing stations complaining that he had been wronged. He sued Davis and her station for defamation.

In November 1999, the suit was dismissed by a federal judge who ruled that al-Husseini’s attorneys had not met their burden of proof.

Connect the dots

Some of what Davis cites as evidence is regarded by critics as the kind of coincidences and dot-connecting that animate conspiracy theories the world over.

For example, she makes much of the fact that after leaving Oklahoma, al-Husseini went to work at Logan International Airport in Boston, which was a boarding site for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers. And she points out that Nichols was in the Philippines in 1994, at the same time as Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. (An alleged Philippine terrorist, while in police custody, gave a statement saying Yousef and Nichols had met. Kennedy says the FBI checked and concluded that they had not.)

In interviews, Davis went beyond her presentation to Specter. She alleged, for example, that government officials are hiding a surveillance tape that shows al-Husseini getting out of the yellow Ryder truck outside the Murrah building on April 19, 1995.

Official reaction

Kennedy, who retired in 1997 as deputy FBI director, calls talk like that ludicrous and insulting. He said investigators repeatedly had been able to disprove the accounts of those who say they saw another man with McVeigh in the hours before the bombing. (Nichols was in Kansas.) Some were lying, Kennedy said, and others were simply mistaken.

Even one of Nichols’ attorneys, Michael Tigar who does believe there is a chance others were involved said in an interview that he saw no hint of a Mideast connection.

“That dog wouldn’t hunt,” he said, noting that “there was a great deal of evidence that McVeigh was a stone racist.”