Sunday, June 30, 2002 12:21 a.m. EDT

A congressional task force investigating the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had information suggesting that Islamic plotters recruited two "lily whites" - non-Middle Easterners with no connection to prior terrorist activity - to carry out the attack ultimately perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, according to a report broadcast late Saturday.

Terrorism expert Yossef Bodansky discussed the previously secret evidence obtained by Congress during an interview with Fox News Channel's Rita Cosby.

COSBY: I'm going to read some information that we obtained here at Fox News - something else you wrote that, more importantly, that the congressional task force learned: That two "lily whites" - these are people sort of considered non-Middle Easterners - had been recruited to carry out the bombing of an American federal building.

BODANSKY: "Lily whites" are people that have no - nothing to do with ethnic background, that's not true. "Lily whites" is the term used for people who have no past known encounter with security authorities anywhere in the U.S. or anywhere in the world. And therefore, there's no way they will raise an alarm bell with the security authorities once they're involved in something.

COSBY: So these are people who would sort of be out of the scope?

BODANSKY: It can be somebody from the heart of Africa, somebody from the middle of Australia or anywhere else. (End of Excerpt)

Couple Bodansky comments with a report on Judicial Watch Radio last week, where Judicial Watch co-counsel Mike Johnson detailed a very specific warning that came just hours before the OKC bombing from Washington, D.C.'s then-top terrorism expert.

"Vincent Cannistraro, who is the former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for the CIA, called Special [FBI] Agent Kevin L. Foust, and informed him that one of his best sources from Saudi Arabia intelligence specifically advised him that there was a squad of people currently in the United States, very possibly Iraqi, and I'm quoting, 'who have been tasked with carrying out terrorist acts against the United States,'" said Johnson.

"The Saudi informant, who's part of the Saudi Counter-Terrorism Service, told him that he had seen the list and that 'first on the list was the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.'"

Johnson said other targets on the Saudi informant's list included Immigration and Naturalization Service offices in Houston and what was then the FBI's counterterrorism headquarters in Los Angeles.