I chose to bomb a Federal Building because such an action served more purposes than other options. Foremost, the bombing was a retaliatory strike: a counter-attack, for the cumulative raids (and subsequent violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years (including, but not limited to, Waco). From the formation of such units as the FBI's "Hostage Rescue" and other assault teams amongst federal agencies during the 80s, culminating in the Waco incident, federal actions grew increasingly militaristic and violent, to the point where at Waco, our government - like the Chinese - was deploying tanks against its own citizens.

…For all intents and purposes, federal agents had become "soldiers" (using military training, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior. Therefore, this bombing was also meant as a pre-emptive (or pro-active) strike against those forces and their command and control centers within the federal building. When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operations, it is sound military strategy to take the flight to the enemy. Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy, I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option. From this perspective what occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time, and, subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. (The bombing of the Murrah Building was not personal no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against (foreign) government installations and their personnel.)

I hope this clarification amply addresses your question.

Sincerely,
T.M.
USP Terre Haute (In.)

There were many outraged press notes and letters when I said that McVeigh suffered from "an exaggerated sense of justice." I did not really need the adjective except that I knew that few Americans seriously believe that anyone is capable of doing anything except out of personal self-interest, while anyone who deliberately risks - and gives - his life to alert his fellow citizens to an onerous government is truly crazy. But the good Dr. Smith put that one in perspective McVeigh is not deranged. He is serious.

It is June 16. It seems like five years rather than five days since the execution. The day before the execution, June 10, The New York Times discussed "The Future of American Terrorism." Apparently, terrorism has a real future: hence we must beware Nazi skinheads in the boondocks. The Times is, occasionally, right for the usual wrong reasons. For instance, their current wisdom is to dispel the illusion that "McVeigh is merely a pawn in an expansive conspiracy led by a group of John Does that may even have had government involvement. But only a small fringe will cling to this theory for long." Thank God: one had feared that rumors of a greater conspiracy would linger on and Old Glory herself would turn to fringe before our eyes. The Times, more in anger than in sorrow, feels that McVeigh blew martyrdom by first pleading not guilty and then by not using his trial to "make a political statement about Ruby Ridge and Waco." McVeigh agreed with the Times, and blamed his first lawyer, Stephen Jones, in unholy tandem with the judge, for selling him out. During his appeal. His new attorney claimed that the serious sale took place when Jones, eager for publicity, met with the Times' Pam Belluck. McVeigh's guilt was quietly conceded, thus explaining why the defense was so feeble. (Jones claims he did nothing improper.)

Actually, in the immediate wake of the bombing, the Times concedes, the militia movement skyrocketed from 220 anti-government groups in 1995 to more than 850 by the end of '96. A factor in this growth was the belief circulating among militia groups "that government agents had planted the bomb as a way to justify anti-terrorism legislation. No less than a retired Air Force general has promoted the theory that in addition to Mr. McVeigh's truck bomb, there were bombs inside the building." Although the Times likes analogies to Nazi Germany, they are curiously reluctant to draw one between, let's say, the firing of the Reichstag in 1933 (Goring later took credit for this creative crime), which then allowed Hitler to invoke an Enabling Act that provided him with all sorts of dictatorial powers "for protection of the power and the stat4e" and so on to Auschwitz.

The canny Portland Free Press editor, Ace Hayes, noted that the one absolutely necessary dog in every terrorism case has yet to bark. The point to any terrorist act is that credit must be claimed so that fear will spread throughout the land. But no one took credit until McVeigh did, after the trial, in which he was condemned to death as a result of circumstantial evidence produced by the prosecution. Ace Hayes wrote, "If the bombing was not terrorism then what was it? It was pseudo terrorism, perpetrated by compartmentalized covert operators for the purposes of state police power." Apropos Hayes's conclusion, Adam Parfrey wrote in Cult Rapture: [The bombing] is not different from the bogus Viet Cong units that were sent out to rape and murder Vietnamese to discredit the National Liberation Front. It is not different from the bogus 'finds' of Commie weapons in El Salvador. It is not different from the bogus Symbionese Liberation Army created by the CIA/FBI to discredit the real revolutionaries." Evidence of a conspiracy? Edye Smith was interviewed by Gary Tuchman, May 23, 1995, on CNN. She duly noted that the A.T.F. bureau, about 17 people on the ninth floor, suffered no casualties. Indeed they seemed not to have come to work that day. Jim Keith gives details in OKBOMB!, while Smith observed on TV, "Did the A.T.F. have a warning sign? I mean, did they think it might be a bad day to go into the office? They had an option not to go to work that day, and my kids didn't get that option." She lost two children in the bombing. A.T.F. has a number of explanations. The latest: five employees were in the offices, unhurt.

Another lead not followed up: McVeigh's sister read a letter he wrote her to the grand jury stating that he had become a member of a "Special Forces Group involved in criminal activity."

In the end, McVeigh, already condemned to death, decided to take full credit for the bombing. Was he being a good professional soldier, covering up for others? Or did he, perhaps, now see himself in a historic role with his own private Harper's Ferry, and though his ashes molder in the grave, his spirit is marching on? We may know - one day.

As for "the purposes of state police power," after the bombing, Clinton signed into law orders allowing the police to commit all sorts of crimes against the Constitution in the interest of combating terrorism. On April 20, 1996 (Hitler's birthday of golden memory, at least for the producers of The Producers), President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism Act ("for the protection of the people and the state" - the emphasis, of course, is on the second noun), while, a month earlier, the mysterious Louis Freeh had informed Congress of his plans for expanded wiretapping by his secret police. Clinton described his Anti-Terorism Act in familiar language (March 1, 1993, USA Today): "We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans." A year later (April 19, 1994, on MTV): "A lot of people say there's too much personal freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." On that plangent note he graduated cum laude from the Newt Gingrich Academy.

In essence, Clinton's Anti-Terrorism Act would set up a national police force, over the long-dead bodies of the founders. Details are supplied by H.R. 97, a chimera born of Clinton, Reno, and the mysterious Mr. Freeh. A 2,500-man Rapid Deployment Strike Force would be organized, under the attorney general, with dictatorial powers. The chief of police of Windsor, Missouri, Joe Hendricks, spoke out against this supra-Constitutional police force. Under this legislation, Hendricks said, "an agent of the F.B.I. could walk into my office and commandeer this police department. If you don't believe that, read the crime bill that Clinton signed into law in 1995. There is talk of the Feds taking over the Washington, D.C. police department. To me this sets a dangerous precedent." But after a half-century of the Russians are coming, followed by terrorists from proliferating drug-related crime, there is little respite for a people so routinely - so fiercely - disinformed. Yet there is a native suspicion that seems to be a part of the individual American psyche - as demonstrated in polls, anyway. According to a Scripps Howard News Service poll, 40 percent of Americans think it quite likely that the F.B.I. set the fires at Waco. Fifty-one percent believe federal officials killed Jack Kennedy (Oh, Oliver, what hast thou wrought!). Eighty percent believe that the military is withholding evidence that Iraq used nerve gas or something as deadly in the Gulf. Unfortunately, the other side of this coin is troubling. After Oklahoma City, 58 percent of Americans, according to the L.A. Times, were willing to surrender some of their liberties to stop terrorism - including, one wonders, the sacred right to be misinformed by government?

Shortly after McVeigh's conviction, Director Freeh soothed the Senate Judiciary Committee: "Most of the militia organizations around the country are not, in our view, threatening or dangerous." But earlier, before the Senate Appropriations Committee, he had "confessed" that his bureau was troubled by "various individuals, as well as organizations, some having an ideology which suspects government of world-order conspiracies - individuals who have organized themselves against the United States." In sum, this bureaucrat who does God's Work regards as a threat those "individuals who espouse ideologies inconsistent with principles of Federal Government." Oddly, for a former judge, Freeh seems not to recognize how chilling this last phrase is.

The C.I.A.'s former director William Colby is also made nervous by the disaffected. In a chat with Nebraska state senator John DeCamp (shortly before the Oklahoma City bombing), he mused, "I watched as the Anti-War movement rendered it impossible for this country to conduct or win the Viet Nam War…This Militia and Patriot movement…is far more significant and far more dangerous for Americans than the Anti-War movement ever was, if it is not intelligently dealt with…It is not because these people are armed that America need be concerned." Colby continues, "They are dangerous because there are so many of them. It is one thing to have a few nuts or dissidents. They can be dealt with, justly or otherwise [my emphasis] so that they do not pose a danger to the system. It is quite another situation when you have a true movement - millions of citizens believing something, particularly when the movement is made up of society's average, successful citizens." Presumably one "otherwise" way of handling such a movement is - when it elects a president by a half-million votes - to call in a like-minded Supreme Court majority to stop a state's recounts, create arbitrary deadlines, and invent delays until our ancient electoral system, by default, must give the presidency to the "system's" candidate as opposed to the one the people voted for.

Many an "expert" and many an expert believe that McVeigh neither built nor detonated the bomb that blew up a large part of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. To start backward - rather the way the F.B.I. conducted this case - if McVeigh was not guilty, why did he confess to the murderous deed? I am convinced from his correspondence and what one has learned about him in an ever lengthening row of books that, once found guilty due to what he felt was the slovenly defense of his principal lawyer, Stephen Jones, so unlike the brilliant defense of his "co-conspirator" Terry Nichol's lawyer Michael Tigar, McVeigh believed that the only alternative to death by injection was a half-century or more of life in a box. There is another aspect of our prison system (considered one of the most barbaric in the First World) which was alluded to by the British writer John Sutherland in The Guardian. He quoted California's attorney general, Bill Lockyer, on the subject of the C.E.O. of an electric utility, currently battening on California's failing energy supply. "I would love to personally escort this CEO to an 8 by 10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says - "Hi, my name is Spike, Honey."'…The senior law official in the state was confirming (what wel all suspected) that rape is penal policy. Go to prison and serving as a Hell's Angel sex slave is judged part of your sentence." A couple of decades fending off Spike is not a Henley hero's idea of a good time. Better dead than Spiked. Hence, "I bombed the Murrah building."

Evidence, however, is overwhelming that there was a plot involving militia types and government infiltrators - who knows? - as prime movers to create panic in order to get Clinton to sign that infamous Anti-Terrorism Act. But if, as it now appears, there were many interested parties involved, a sort of unified-field theory is never apt to be found, but should there be one, Joel Dyer may be its Einstein. (Einstein, of course, never got his field quite together, either.) In 1998, I discussed Dyer's Harvest of Rage in these pages. Dyer was editor of the Boulder Weekly. He writes on the crisis of rural America due to the decline of the family farm, which also coincided with the formation of various militias and religious cults, some dangerous, some merely sad. In Harvest of Rage, Dyer made the case that McVeigh and Terry Nichols could not have acted alone in the Oklahoma City bombing. Now he has, after long investigation, written an epilogue to the trials of the two co-conspirators. Herewith, some of his startling findings.

In the end, on June 2, 1997, Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on 11 counts, including conspiracy and eight murder charges pertaining to what the F.B.I. called the "OKBOMB."

The prosecution did a good job of skirting some of its case's weaker points, such as the fact that some explosive experts questioned whether a single-fertilizer bomb could account for the extensive damage done to the Murrah building, and that no fewer than 10 witnesses claimed to have seen a Ryder truck parked at Geary Lake in Kansas - the location where, the government argued, the bomb was assembled - prior to the time McVeigh actually rented the truck used in the bombing. The most damaging testimony against McVeigh came from a former army buddy and his wife, Michael and Lori Fortier. The Fortiers turned State's evidence, Michael testifying that McVeigh had planned to destroy the Murrah building because he believed that the orders to raid the Branch Davidian compound had originated there. Michael also told the jury that he had helped McVeigh case the Murrah building before the bombing. Despite the evidence to the contrary, the Fortiers claimed that they had not been involved in the bombing plot. Michael was sentenced to 12 years.

Stephen Jones continually pointed out that the Fortiers were liars and methamphetamine users, and so not reliable. But the jury was unmoved. The presentation of McVeigh's defense was scarcely a week long. Jones often left the jury more confused and bored than convinced of his client's innocence. Even when he succeeded in his attempts to demonstrate that a large conspiracy was behind the bombing, he did little to show that McVeigh was not at the center of the conspiracy. Jones's case led some reporters to speculate that McVeigh himself was limiting his own defense in order to prevent evidence that might implicate others in the bombing from entering the record.

Both Playboy and The Dallas Morning News published what they purported to be confessions by McVeigh to his defense team. In both articles, McVeigh admitted to the bombing. In many circles, the confessions have been viewed as proof that only McVeigh and Nichols were directly involved in the bombing. After, all, that's what McVeigh was reported to have claimed. But there is reason for skepticism. I believe that by confessing McVeigh was, once again, playing the soldier, attempting to protect his co-conspirators.

Did the government blow it? Terry Nichols was tried in the fall of 1997. From the beginning, the government's case against Nichols was more difficult to prove than that against McVeigh. Biggest difference: Nichols was in Kansas at the time of the bombing. Also, Nichols had a good lawyer in Michael Tigar. The jury found Nichols innocent of murder but guilty of planning to bomb the Murrah building and guilty of eight counts of involuntary manslaughter. Next, the jury deadlocked during sentencing, which ruled out the death penalty. After two days of deliberation, the forewoman, Niki Deutchman, informed Judge Richard P. Matsch that the jury was hung. On June 4, 1998, Matsch stepped in and sentenced Terry Nichols to life, but the judge's decision was not without controversy. Deutchman told the press, "Decisions were probably made very early on that McVeigh and Nichols were who they were looking for, and the same sort of resources were not used to try to find out who else might be involved…The government really dropped the ball." Some of the jurors thought that there may have been others involved who are still at large. Shortly after her news conference, Deutchman reportedly received bomb threats.

And then the government responded.

Attorney General Janet Reno blasted Deutschman's criticism. Reno assured the nation that the F.B.I. had followed every lead in its effort to find those responsible for the blast. She denied a larger conspiracy and said that McVeigh and Nichols were the sole perpetrators of the crime.

Unfortunately, Janet Reno is likely wrong. During my investigation, which included an examination of all the McVeigh discovery materials, I unearthed evidence that the F.B.I. did not follow up on solid leads, or, if they did, failed to turn those over to the defense. I uncovered information provided to the F.B.I. by Kansas law enforcement, and by very reliable eye witnesses who were apparently disregarded. More important, I found evidence that the F.B.I. may have withheld certain information from the defense teams during discovery, potentially tainting the verdicts against both McVeigh and Nichols.

Subject Nol. 1. The first time Charles Farley was shown a picture of the man he repeatedly tried to get the F.B.I. to investigate was December 10, 1997. Farley was seated on the witness stand in a federal courtroom in Denver, and the man showing him the photo did not work for the government. He worked for Terry Nichols. "Mr. Farley,…do you recognize the individual depicted in this picture?" asked Adam Thurschwell, one of Nichol's defense attorneys. "Yes, sir," answered Farley. "That was the individual that was standing at the door of the truck, the individual that gave me a dirty look," he said.

Farley was testifying for the defense about his experience a few days before the bombing. Farley, an employee of the Fort Riley Outdoor Recreation Center, near Geary Lake, had already told the F.B.I. that on April 17 or 18, 1995, he had gone to the lake to scout out the fishing potential. After inspecting the lake, Farley drove down the road that led back to the highway, but his departure was slowed by a number of vehicles parked close to the exit - a pickup, a large [?]bed truck, a brown car, and a Ryder truck - and standing near the vehicles were several men. The large truck was burdened with what he believed were bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. "It looked like it was completely weighted down," Farley told the jury. He thought the truck was stuck due to the weight of the fertilizer, and decided to offer assistance. He quickly changed his mind when one of the men - the same man, he believed, he was identifying more than two and a half years later in court - shot him a nasty glare. The man was standing practically next to Farley's car, and he had a number of distinguishing features, including a beard with no mustache. A few days later, after the bombing, Farley claims, he saw the man again. This time on TV, being interviewed about militia issues. By then it was known that the bomb had been detonated in the back of a Ryder truck that had allegedly been rented in Junction City, Kansas, close to Geary Lake. The bomb was said to have been made from ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Thinking that he may have had eyewitness information about the men who built the bomb, Farley called an F.B.I. tip line. Two weeks later an agent appeared at his workplace for an interview, but apparently that visit was as far as the government went in following this important lead, despite the fact that Farley's information seemed to confirm the government's suspicions regarding the location where the bomb was constructed. The F.B.I. apparently did not try to identify the individual Farley had seen up close. Nichol's attorneys, believing they had learned the identity of the man Farley had seen, asked the F.B.I. during the trial for all of its information on the individual. They were given a file containing nothing more than newspaper clippings. There was nothing in the file to indicate that the F.B.I. had ever attempted to contact the man or to place him in a lineup for Farley to identify. They hadn't even bothered to contact the Topeka television station to review the footage of Farley's suspect.

I found this lack of investigation curious. In mid-1997, I decided to attempt to identify the mystery man, based solely on Farley's description. Within 20 minutes of placing the first phone call to my militia contacts in Kansas, I was able to identify the man in the photo Farley had been shown in the courtroom. Subject No. 1 was hardly low-profile within the anti-government movement.

In addition to appearing on television, the man was quoted in a Kansas City newspaper article after the bombing, bragging that he was using Freemen tactics to pass of bogus liens and checks in Kansas. Several Kansas law-enforcement sources told me that, at the time these quotes were published, there was a massive federal investigation into Freemen-sponsored bank fraud in Kansas - an investigation that included Farley's man. I have confirmed the existence of this investigation through several sources. Since Subject No. 1 was under investigation, there should have been more in his file than newspaper clippings, Information, it appears, was withheld from the defense team. Why didn't the F.B.I. pursue Farley's lead? The best explanation is that it posed a serious problem to the government's cases against McVeigh and Nichols. You see, Farley saw five people, not two, with ammonium nitrate and a Ryder truck.

Subject No. 2. The day after the bombing, two police sketches were faxed to media organizations and law-enforcement offices across the country. They depicted two men who were believed to have detonated the bomb, John Doe No. 1 and Joe Doe No. 2. McVeigh, taken into custody 90 minutes after the bombing for driving without a license plate and carrying a concealed weapon, was quickly identified as John Doe No. 1. John Doe No. 2 has never been identified by the F.B.I.

Shawnee County, Kansas, sheriff's deputy Jake Mauck says he nearly fell out of his chair when, shortly after the bombing, he compared the John Doe No. 2 sketch to the photo of a known anti-government activist in his area. Shawnee County is about 50 miles east of Junction City, where the Ryder truck was rented and where McVeigh stayed overnight at the Dreamland Motel with another man, who has never been identified. Mauck says he quickly alerted the F.B.I. about his suspicions concerning Subject No. 2. For reasons that will likely never be known, the F.B.I. apparently failed to respond to Mauck's information. Nor did it heed similar tips from Suzanne James, an employee of the Shawnee County D.A.'s office. The F.B.I. told her that agents had already investigated Mauck's John Doe look-alike. So had they? Apparently not. One person who did investigate the man Mauck and James suspected is Mike Tharp, a reporter for U.S. News & World Report. Mauck talked to Tharp after his frustration with the Feds became unbearable. Tharp obtained a photo of Subject No. 2 and started showing it to people known to have seen a man other than Terry Nichols with McVeigh in the days leading up to the bombing. When he showed the photo to Barbara Whittenberg, the owner of the Santa Fe Trail Diner in Herington, who claims she saw John Doe No. 2 with McVeigh, she said, "I'd almost swear that was the guy." Others to whom Tharp showed the photo believed it was the man they had seen with McVeigh. When Tharp inquired to the F.B.I. about the individual, he was given the line that is becoming all too familiar: "We'll follow any lead." There is no evidence the F.B.I. has even bothered to follow a lead regarding Subject No. 2.

Subject No. 3. Within days of the bombing, Russell Roe, an assistant county attorney for Geary County, Kansas, sat down with F.B.I. agents and told them about a man in his area known to be involved in anti-government activities. Roe said that the individual resembled John Doe No. 2, and also that this man was said to have been exploding fertilizer bombs on his eastern-Kansas farm prior to the Murrah building explosion. Suzanne James, the woman in the Shawnee County D.A.'s office, told the Feds about the same individual. James says that the government was uninterested in her information. After placing approximately five phone calls to the F.B.I., she gave up. Pottawatomie County sheriff Tony Metcalf gave Subject No. 3's name to the F.B.I. Further, in the fall of 1997, I interviewed Cliff Hall, the owner of The Topeka Metro News. He told me that Subject No. 3 had taken out public notices in his publication. The ads were Freemen-style concoctions dealing with renouncement of citizenship and lien notices. Hall says a Secret Service agent came to his paper to obtain copies of the notices as part of their investigation into Subject No. 3.

Subject No. 3 was also named in a document pertaining to a federal bank-fraud investigation in Texas. The Texas case resulted in federal fraud charges being filed against several anti-government Republic of Texas (R.O.T.) members, including the group's leader, Richard McLaren. As part of its evidence against R.O.T., the government entered videotapes of the group preparing the fraudulent bank warrants. The videos also revealed a surprise. They clearly showed that the person teaching the R.O.T. how to create the bogus documents was none other than Subject No. 3. What McLaren's defense team couldn't understand was why their client and virtually every other person on the tape was arrested and charged in this investigation. The defense team began to suspect a sting operation. According to court documents in the McLaren case, Tom Mills, McLaren's attorney, asked the government for all of its files pertaining to Subject No. 3. The prosecutors, in a move explained only to the judge, filed a motion to keep Subject No. 3's files from the McLaren defense team. The government would turn over the files only if they would be held "in camera." In other words, the F.B.I. would make them available to the judge but not the defense.

Undaunted by the "in camera" setback, McLaren's defense team tried a new approach. If they couldn't see the files, they would subpoena the man. Mills hired an investigator, who quickly located Subject No. 3 in Oregon. Mills asked the court for money to fly the investigator to Oregon to serve the subpoena. The judge agreed, but then the government did something even more unusual than suppressing files. It arrested Subject No. 3 in the middle of the night, just five hours before the subpoena would have been served. Mills spent several hours interviewing Subject No. 3 in a Dallas jail. Afterward, Mills filed yet another motion, which stated that he was more convinced than ever that the man had cooperated with authorities on some level in the past, and therefore the attorney should be allowed to view the "in camera" files. His request was again denied. Subject No. 3 eventually took the stand while the jury was sequestered. The conventional wisdom said that if he was a government agent or informer he would have to take the Fifth. But he didn't. When asked by the judge if he was the man named in the subpoena, the subject gave a standard Freeman defense. He asked the judge to spell his name and confirm which letters were capitalized. The judge did so and the man said that the judge had spelled his name incorrectly. At that point, the government prosecutors, who had worked so hard to keep Subject No. 3 from testifying, told the judge that the man was in need of psychiatric evaluation. The judge agreed, and Subject No. 3 was never forced to explain his apparent immunity to prosecution. In April 1998, McLaren was found guilty on 27 federal counts. His defense team was never allowed access to Subject No. 3's files.

Despite the F.B.I.'s continuing denial, what we do know is that the government inexplicably failed to investigate solid leads pertaining to Subjects No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and, I suspect, still others in their organization.

It will be interesting to see if the F.B.I. is sufficiently intrigued by what Joel Dyer has written to pursue the leads that he has so generously given them.

Thus far, David Hoffman's The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror is the most thorough of a dozen or two accounts of what did and did not happen on that day in April. Hoffman begins his investigation with retired air-force brigadier general Benton K. Partin's May 17, 1995, letter delivered to each member of the Senate and House of Representatives: "When I first saw the pictures of the truck-bomb's asymmetrical damage to the Federal Building, my immediate reaction was that the pattern of damage would have been technically impossible without supplementing demolition charges at some of the reinforcing concrete column bases….For a simplistic blast truck-bomb, of the size and composition reported, to be able to reach out in the order of 60 feet and collapse a reinforced column base the size of column A-7 is beyond credulity." In separate agreement was Samuel Cohen, father of the neutron bomb and formerly of the Manhattan Project, who wrote an Oklahoma state legislator, "It would have been absolutely impossible and against the laws of nature for a truck full of fertilizer and fuel oil…no matter how much was used…to bring the building down." One would think that McVeigh's defense lawyer, restlessly looking for a Middle East connection, could certainly have called these acknowledged experts to testify, but a search of Jone's account of the case, Others Unknown, reveals neither name.

In the March 20, 1996, issue of Strategic Investment newsletter, it was reported that Pentagon analysts tended to agree with General parting. "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.'" Finally, inevitably - this is wartime, after all - "the multiple bombings have a Middle Eastern 'signature,' pointing to either Iraqi or Syrian involvement."

As it turned out, Partin's and Cohen's pro bono efforts to examine the ruins were in vain. Sixteen days after the bombing, the search for victims stopped. In another letter to Congress, Partin stated that the building should not be destroyed until an independent forensic team was brought in to investigate the damage. "It is also easy to cover up crucial evidence as apparently done in Waco…Why rush to destroy the evidence?" Trigger words: the Feds demolished the ruins six days later. They offered the same excuse they had used at Waco, "health hazards." Partin: "It's a classic cover-up."

Partin suspected a Communist plot. Well, nobody's perfect.

"So what's the take-away?" was the question often asked by TV producers in the so-called golden age of live television plays. This meant: what is the audience supposed to think when the play is over? The McVeigh story presents us with several take-aways. If McVeigh is simply a "useful idiot," a tool of what might be a very large conspiracy, involving various homegrown militias working, some think, with Middle Eastern helpers, then the F.B.I.'s refusal to follow up so many promising leads goes quite beyond its ordinary incompetence and smacks of treason. If McVeigh was the unlikely sole mover and begetter of the bombing, then his "inhumane" (the Unabomber's adjective) destruction of so many lives will have served no purpose at all unless we take it seriously as what it is, a wake-up call to a federal government deeply hated, it would seem, by millions. (Remember that the popular Ronald Reagan always ran against the federal government, though often for the wrong reasons.) Final far fetched take-away: McVeigh did not make nor deliver nor detonate the bomb but, once arrested on another charge, seized all "glory" for himself and so gave up his life. That's not a story for W.E. Henley so much as for one of his young men, Rudyard Kipling, author of The Man Who Would Be King.

Finally, the fact that the McVeigh-Nichols scenario makes no sense at all suggests that yet again, we are confronted with a "perfect" crime - thus far.

Copyright 2001 Vanity Fair

ESSAY
selections
Twelve Caesers
Doc Reuben
Two Sisters
Sex Is Politics
First Note on Lincoln
Pink Triangle, Yellow Star

complete
Monotheism and Its Discontents
The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh
The End of Liberty
The Enemy Within
We Are The Patriots

HISTORY
select passages
Burr
1876
Empire
Washington D.C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
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