Recent News of Great Interest

The U.S. Bill of Rights is being steadily eroded, with two million telephone calls tapped, 30 million workers under electronic surveillance, and, says the author, countless americans harassed by a government that wages spurious wars against drugs and terrorism. Most Americans of a certain age can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing on October 20, 1964, when word came that Herbert Hoover was dead. The heart and mind of a nation stopped. But how many recall when and how they first became aware that one or another of the Bill of Rights had expired? For me, it was sometime in 1960 at a party in Beverly Hills that I got the bad news from the constitutionally cheery actor Cary Grant. He had just flown in from New York. He had, he said, picked up his ticket at an airline counter in that magical old-world airport, Idlewild, whose very name reflected our condition. "There were these lovely girls behind the counter, and they were delighted to help me, or so they said. I signed some autographs. Then I asked one of them for my tickets. Suddenly she was very solemn. 'Do you have any identification?' she asked." (Worldly friends tell me that the "premise" of this story is now the basis of a series of TV commercials for Visa unseen by me.) I would be exaggerating if I felt the chill in the air that long-ago Beverly Hills evening. Actually, we simply laughed. But I did, for just an instant, wonder if the future had tapped a dainty foot on our mass grave.

Curiously enough, it was Grant again who bore, as lightly as ever, the news that privacy itself hangs by a gossamer thread. "A friend in London rang me this morning," he said. This was June 4, 1963. "Usually we have code names, but this time he forgot. So after he asked for me I said into the receiver, 'All right. St. Louis, off the line. You, too, Milwaukee,' and so on. The operators love listening in. Anyway, after we talked business, he said, 'So what's the latest Hollywood gossip?' And I said, 'Well, Lana Turner is still having an affair with that black baseball pitcher.' One of the operators on the line gave a terrible cry, 'Oh, no!"'

Innocent days. Today, as media and Congress thunder their anthem, "Twinkle, twinkle, little Starr, how we wonder what you are," the current president is assumed to have no right at all to privacy because, you see, it's really about sex, not truth, a permanent nonstarter in political life. Where Grant's name assured him an admiring audience of telephone operators, the rest of us were usually ignored. That was then. Today, in the all-out, never-to-be-won twin wars on Drugs and Terrorism, two million telephone conversations a year are intercepted by law-enforcement officials. As for that famous "workplace" to which so many Americans are assigned by necessity, "the daily abuse of civil liberties ... is a national disgrace," according to the American Civil Liberties Union in a 1996 report.

Among the report's findings, between 1990 and 1996, the number of workers under electronic surveillance increased from 8 million per year to more than 30 million. Simultaneously, employers eavesdrop on an estimated 400 million telephone conversations a year--something like 750 a minute. In 1990, major companies subjected 38 percent of their employees to urine tests for drugs. By 1996, more than 70 percent were thus interfered with. Recourse to law has not been encouraging. In fact, the California Supreme Court has upheld the right of public employers to drug-test not only those employees who have been entrusted with flying jet aircraft or protecting our borders from Panamanian imperialism but also those who simply mop the floors. The court also ruled that governments can screen applicants for drugs and alcohol. This was inspired by the actions of the city-state of Glendale, California, which wanted to test all employees due for promotion. Suit was brought against Glendale on the ground that it was violating the Fourth Amendment's protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Glendale's policy was upheld by the California Supreme Court, but Justice Stanley Mosk wrote a dissent: "Drug testing represents a significant additional invasion of those applicants' basic rights to privacy and dignity ... and the city has not carried its considerable burden of showing that such an invasion is justified in the case of all applicants offered employment."

In the last year or so I have had two Cary Grant-like revelations, considerably grimmer than what went on in the good old days of relative freedom from the state. A well-known acting couple and their two small children came to see me one summer. Photos were taken of their four-year-old and six-year-old cavorting bare in the sea. When the couple got home to Manhattan, the father dropped the negatives off at a drugstore to be printed. Later, a frantic call from his fortunately friendly druggist: "If I print these I've got to report you and you could get five years in the slammer for kiddie porn." The war on kiddie porn is now getting into high gear, though I was once assured by Wardell Pomeroy, Allied Kinsey's colleague in sex research, that pedophilia was barely a blip on the statistical screen, somewhere down there with farm lads and their animal friends.

It has always been a mark of American freedom that unlike countries under constant Napoleonic surveillance, we are not obliged to carry identification to show to curious officials and pushy police. But now, due to Terrorism, every one of us is stopped at airports and obliged to show an ID which must include a mug shot (something, as Allah knows, no terrorist would ever dare fake). In Chicago after an interview with Studs Terkel, I complained that since I don't have a driver's license, I must carry a passport in my own country as if I were a citizen of the old Soviet Union. Terkel has had the same trouble. "I was asked for my ID--with photo--at this southern airport, and I said I didn't have anything except the local newspaper with a big picture of me on the front page, which I showed them, but they said that that was not an ID. Finally, they got tired of me and let me on the plane."

Lately, I have been going through statistics about terrorism (usually direct responses to crimes our government has committed against foreigners- although, recently, federal crimes against our own people are increasing). Only twice in 12 years have American commercial planes been destroyed in flight by terrorists; neither originated in the United States. To prevent, however, a repetition of these two crimes, hundreds of millions of travelers must now be subjected to searches, seizures, delays. The state of the art of citizen- harassment is still in its infancy. Nevertheless, new devices, at ever greater expense, are coming onto the market--and, soon, to an airport near you-- including the dream machine of every horny schoolboy. The "Body Search" Contraband Detection System, created by American Science and Engineering, can "X-ray" through clothing to reveal the naked body, whose enlarged image can then be cast onto a screen for prurient analysis. The proud manufacturer boasts that the picture is so clear that even navels, unless packed with cocaine and taped over, can be seen winking at the voyeurs. The system also has what is called, according to an A.C.L.U. report, "a joystick-driven Zoom Option" that allows the operator to enlarge interesting portions of the image. During all this, the victim remains, as AS&E proudly notes, fully clothed. Orders for this machine should be addressed to the Reverend Pat Robertson and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, while the proud new owner of "Body Search" will be automatically included in the F.B.I.'s database of Sexual Degenerates- Class B. Meanwhile, in February 1997, the "Al" Gore Commission called for the acquisition of 54 high-tech bomb-detection machines known as the CTX 5000, a baggage scanner that is a bargain at a million dollars and will cost only $100,000 a year to service. Unfortunately, the CTX 5000 scans baggage at the rate of 250 per hour, which would mean perhaps a thousand are needed to "protect" passengers at major airports from those two putative terrorists who might--or might not--strike again in the next 12 years, as they twice did in the last 12 years. Since the present scanning system seems fairly effective, why subject passengers to hours of delay, not to mention more than $54 million worth of equipment?

Presently, somewhat confused guidelines exist so that airline personnel can recognize at a glance someone who fits the "profile" of a potential terrorist. Obviously, anyone of mildly dusky hue who is wearing a fez gets busted on the spot. For those terrorists who do not seem to fit the "profile," relevant government agencies have come up with the following behavioral tips that should quickly reveal the evildoer. A devious drug smuggler is apt to be the very first person off the plane unless, of course, he is truly devious and chooses to be the last one off. Debonair master criminals often opt for a middle position. Single blonde young women are often used, unwittingly, to carry bombs or drugs given them by Omar Sharif look-alikes in sinister Casbahs. Upon arrival in freedom's land, great drug-sniffing dogs will be turned loose on them; unfortunately, these canine detectives often mistakenly target as drug carriers women that are undergoing their menstrual period: the sort of icebreaker that often leads to merry laughter all around the customs area. Apparently one absolutely sure behavioral giveaway is undue nervousness on the part of a passenger though, again, the master criminal will sometimes appear to be too much at ease. In any case, whatever mad rule of thumb is applied, a customs official has every right to treat anyone as a criminal on no evidence at all; to seize and to search without, of course, due process of law.

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on. In 1970, I wrote in The New York Times, of all uncongenial places,

It is possible to stop most drug addiction in the United States within a very short time. Simply make all drugs available and sell them at cost. Label each drug with a precise description of what effect- good or bad--the drug will have on the taker. This will require heroic honesty. Don't say that marijuana is addictive or dangerous when it is neither, as millions of people know-- unlike "speed," which kills most unpleasantly, or heroin, which can be addictive and difficult to kick. Along with exhortation and warning, it might be good for our citizens to recall (or learn for the first time) that the United States was the creation of men who believed that each person has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbors' pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor's idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit).

I suspect that what I wrote 28 years ago is every bit as unacceptable now as it was then, with the added problem of irritable ladies who object to my sexism in putting the case solely in masculine terms, as did the sexist founders.

I also noted the failure of the prohibition of alcohol from 1919 to 1933. And the crime wave that Prohibition set in motion so like the one today since "both the Bureau of Narcotics and the Mafia want strong laws against the sale and use of drugs because if drugs are sold at cost there would be no money in them for anyone." Will anything sensible be done I wondered? "The American people are as devoted to the idea of sin and its punishment as they are to making money--and fighting drugs is nearly as big a business as pushing them. Since the combination of sin and money is irresistible (particularly to the professional politician), the situation will only grow worse." I suppose, if nothing else, I was a pretty good prophet.

The media constantly deplore the drug culture and, variously, blame foreign countries like Colombia for obeying that Iron law of supply and demand to which we have, as a notion and as a nation, sworn eternal allegiance. We also revel in military metaphors. Czars lead our armies into wars against drug dealers and drug takers. So great is this permanent emergency that we can no longer afford such frills as habeas corpus and due process of law. In 1989 the former drug czar and TV talk-show fool, William Bennett, suggested de jure as well as de facto abolition of habeas corpus in "drug" cases as well as (I am not inventing this) public beheadings of drug dealers. A year later, Ayatollah Bennett declared, "I find no merit in the [drug] legalizers' case. The simple fact is that drug use is wrong. And the moral argument, in the end, is the most compelling argument." Of course, what this dangerous comedian thinks is moral James Madison and the Virginia statesman and Rights-man George Mason would have thought dangerous nonsense, particularly when his "morality" abolishes their gift to all of us, the Bill of Rights. But Bennett is not alone in his madness. A special assistant to the president on drug abuse declared, in 1984, "You cannot let one drug come in and say, 'Well, this drug is all right.' We've drawn the line. There's no such thing as a soft drug." There goes Tylenol-3, containing codeine. Who would have thought that age-old palliatives could, so easily, replace the only national religion that the United States has ever truly had, anti-Communism?

On June 10, 1998, a few brave heretical voices were raised in The New York Times, on an inner page. Under the heading BIG NAMES SIGN LETTER CRITICIZING WAR ON DRUGS. A billionaire named "George Sores has amassed signatures of hundreds of prominent people around the world on a letter asserting that the global war on drugs is causing more harm than drug abuse itself." Apparently, the Lindesmith Center in New York, funded by Sores, had taken out an ad in the Times, thereby, expensively, catching an editor's eye. The signatories included a former secretary of state and a couple of ex-senators, but though the ad was intended to coincide with a United Nations special session on Satanic Substances, it carried no weight with one General Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton's war director, who called the letter "a 1950s perception," whatever that may mean. After all, drug use in the 50s was less than it is now after four decades of relentless warfare. Curiously, the New York Times story made the signatories seem to be few and eccentric while the Manchester Guardian in England reported that among the "international signatories are the former prime minister of the Netherlands... the former presidents of Bolivia and Colombia... three [U.S.] federal judges... senior clerics, former drugs squad officers... " But the Times always knows what's fit to print.

It is ironic-to use the limpest adjective-that a government as spontaneously tyrannous and callous as ours should, over the years, have come to care so much about our health as it endlessly tests and retests commercial drugs available in other lands while arresting those who take "hard" drugs on the parental ground that they are bad for the user's health. One is touched by their concern--touched and dubious. After all, these same compassionate guardians of our well-being have sternly, year in and year out, refused to allow us to have what every other First World country simply takes for granted, a national health service.

When Mr. and Mrs. Clinton came up to Washington, green as grass from the Arkansas hills and all pink and aglow from swift-running whitewater creeks, they tried to give the American people such a health system, a small token in exchange for all that tax money which had gone for "defense" against an enemy that had wickedly folded when our back was turned. At the first suggestion that it was time for us to join the civilized world, there began a vast conspiracy to stop any form of national health care. It was hardly just the "right wing," as Mrs. Clinton suggested. Rather, the insurance and pharmaceutical companies combined with elements of the American Medical Association to destroy forever any notion that we be a country that provides anything for its citizens in the way of health care.

One of the problems of a society as tightly controlled as ours is that we get so little information about what those of our fellow citizens whom we will never know or see are actually thinking and feeling. This seems a paradox when most politics today involves minute-by-minute poll-taking on what looks to be every conceivable subject, but, as politicians and pollsters know, it's how the question is asked that determines the response. Also, there are vast areas, like rural America, that are an unmapped ultima Thule to those who own the corporations that own the media that spend billions of dollars to take polls in order to elect their lawyers to high office. Ruby Ridge. Waco. Oklahoma City.

Three warning bells from a heartland that most of us who are urban dwellers know little or nothing about. Cause of rural dwellers' rage? In 1996 there were 1,471 mergers of American corporations in the interest of "consolidation." This was the largest number of mergers in American history, and the peak of a trend that had been growing in the world of agriculture since the late 1970s. One thing shared by the victims at Ruby Ridge and Waco, and Timothy McVeigh, who committed mass murder in their name at Oklahoma City, was the conviction that the government of the United States is their implacable enemy and that they can only save themselves by hiding out in the wilderness, or by joining a commune centered on a messianic figure, or, as revenge for the cold blooded federal murder of two members of the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, blow up the building that contained the bureau responsible for the murders.

To give the media their due, they have been uncommonly generous with us on the subject of the religious and political beliefs of rural dissidents. There is a neo-Nazi "Aryan Nations." There are Christian fundamentalists called "Christian Identity," also known as "British Israelism." All of this biblically inspired nonsense has taken deepest root in those dispossessed of their farmland in the last generation. Needless to say, Christian demagogues fan the flames of race and sectarian hatred on television and, illegally, pour church money into political campaigns.

Conspiracy theories now blossom in the wilderness like night-blooming dementia praecox, and those in thrall to them are mocked invariably by the ... by the actual conspirators. Joel Dyer, in Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City Is Only the Beginning, has discovered some very real conspiracies out there, but the conspirators are old hands at deflecting attention from themselves. Into drugs? Well, didn't you know Queen Elizabeth II is overall director of the world drug trade (if only poor Lillibet had had the foresight in these republican times!). They tell us that the Trilateral Commission is a world- Communist conspiracy headed by the Rockefellers. Actually, the commission is excellent shorthand to show how the Rockefellers draw together politicians and academics-on-the-make to serve their business interests in government and out. Whoever it was who got somebody like Lyndon LaRouche to say that this Rockefeller Cosa Nostra is really a Communist front was truly inspired.

But Dyer has unearthed a genuine ongoing conspiracy that affects everyone in the United States. Currently, a handful of agro-conglomerates are working to drive America's remaining small farmers off their land by systematically paying them less for their produce than it costs to grow, thus forcing them to get loans from the conglomerates' banks, assume mortgages, undergo foreclosures and the sale of land to corporate-controlled agribusiness. But is this really a conspiracy or just the Darwinian workings of an efficient marketplace? There is, for once, a smoking gun in the form of a blueprint describing how best to rid the nation of small farmers. Dyer writes: "In 1962, the Committee for Economic Development comprised approximately seventy-five of the nation's most powerful corporate executives. They represented not only the food industry but also oil and gas, insurance, investment and retail industries. Almost all groups that stood to gain from consolidation were represented on that committee. Their report [An Adaptive Program for Agriculture] outlined a plan to eliminate farmers and farms. It was detailed and well thought out." Simultaneously, "as early as 1964, Congressmen were being told by industry giants like Pillsbury, Swift, General Foods, and Campbell Soup that the biggest problem in agriculture was too many farmers." Good psychologists, the C.E.O.'s had noted that farm children, if sent to college, seldom return to the family farm. Or as one famous economist said to a famous senator who was complaining about jet lag on a night flight from New York to London, "Well, it sure beats farming." The committee got the government to send farm children to college. Predictably, most did not come back. Government then offered to help farmers relocate in other lines of work, allowing their land to be consolidated in ever vaster combines owned by fewer and fewer corporations.

So a conspiracy had been set in motion to replace the Jeffersonian ideal of a nation whose backbone was the independent farm family with a series of agribusiness monopolies where, Dyer writes, "only five to eight multinational companies have, for all intents and purposes, been the sole purchasers and transporters not only of the American grain supply but that of the entire world." By 1982 "these companies controlled 96% of US wheat exports, 95% of US corn exports," and so on through the busy aisles of chic Gristedes, homely Ralph's, sympathetic Piggly Wigglys.

Has consolidation been good for the customers? By and large, no. Monopolies allow for no bargains, nor do they have to fuss too much about quality because we have no alternative to what they offer. Needless to say, they are hostile to labor unions and indifferent to working conditions for the once independent farmers, now ill-paid employees. For those of us who grew up in pre-war United States there was the genuine ham sandwich. Since consolidation, ham has been so rubberized that it tastes of nothing at all while its texture is like rosy plastic. Why? In the great hogariums a hog remains in one place, on its feet, for life. Since it does not root about or even move-it builds up no natural resistance to disease. This means a great deal of drugs are pumped into the prisoner's body until its death and transfiguration as inedible ham.

By and large, the Sherman anti-trust laws are long since gone. Today three companies control 80 percent of the total beef-packing market. How does this happen? Why do dispossessed farmers have no congressional representatives to turn to? Why do consumers get stuck with mysterious pricings of products that in themselves are inferior to those of an earlier time? Dyer's answer is simple but compelling. Through their lobbyists, the corporate executives who drew up the "adaptive program" for agriculture now own or rent or simply intimidate Congresses and presidents while the courts are presided over by their former lobbyists, an endless supply of white-collar servants since two-thirds of all the lawyers on our small planet are Americans. Finally, the people at large are not represented in government while corporations are, lavishly.

What is to be done? Only one thing will work, in Dyer's view: electoral finance reform. But those who benefit from the present system will never legislate themselves out of power. So towns and villages continue to decay between the Canadian and the Mexican borders, and the dispossessed rural population despairs or rages. Hence, the apocalyptic tone of a number of recent nonreligious works of journalism and analysis that currently record, with fascinated horror, the alienation of group after group within the United States.

Since the Encyclopedia Britannica is Britannica and not America, it is not surprising that its entry for "Bill of Rights, United States" is a mere column in length, the same as its neighbor on the page "Bill of Sale," obviously a more poignant document to the island compilers. Even so, they do tell us that the roots of our Rights are in Magna Carta and that the genesis of the Bill of Rights that was added as 10 amendments to our Constitution in 1791 was largely the handiwork of James Madison, who, in turn, echoed Virginia's 1776 Declaration of Rights. At first, these 10 amendments were applicable to American citizens only as citizens of the entire United States and not as Virginians or as New Yorkers, where state laws could take precedence according to "states' rights," as acknowledged in the 10th and last of the original amendments. It was not until 1868 that the 14th Amendment forbade the states to make laws counter to the original bill. Thus every United States person, in his home state, was guaranteed freedom of "speech and press, and the right to assembly and to petition as well as freedom from a national religion." Apparently, it was Charlton Heston who brought the Second Amendment, along with handguns and child-friendly Uzis, down from Mount DeMille. Originally, the right for citizen militias to bear arms was meant to discourage a standing federal or state army and all the mischief that an armed state might cause people who wanted to live not under the shadow of a gun but peaceably on their own atop some sylvan Ruby Ridge.

Currently, the Fourth Amendment is in the process of disintegration, out of "military necessity"- the constitutional language used by Lincoln to wage civil war, suspend habeas corpus, shut down newspapers, and free southern slaves. The Fourth Amendment guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The Fourth is the people's principal defense against totalitarian government; it is a defense that is now daily breached both by deed and law.

In James Bovard's 1994 book, Lost Rights, the author has assembled a great deal of material on just what our law enforcers are up to in the never-to-be- won wars against Drugs and Terrorism, as they do daily battle with the American people in their homes and cars, on buses and planes, indeed, wherever they can get at them, by hook or by crook or by sting. Military necessity is a bit too highbrow a concept for today's federal and local officials to justify their midnight smashing in of doors, usually without warning or warrant, in order to terrorize the unlucky residents. These unlawful attacks and seizures are often justified by the possible existence of a flush toilet on the fingered premises. (If the warriors against drugs don't take drug fiends absolutely by surprise, the fiends will flush away the evidence.) This is intolerable for those eager to keep us sin-free and obedient. So in the great sign of Sir Thomas Crapper's homely invention, they suspend the Fourth, and conquer.

Nineteen ninety-two. Bridgeport, Connecticut. The Hartford Courant reported that the local Tactical Narcotics Team routinely devastated homes and businesses they "searched." Plainclothes policemen burst in on a Jamaican grocer and restaurant owner with the cheery cry "Stick up, niggers. Don't move." Shelves were swept clear. Merchandise ruined. "They never identified themselves as police," the Conrant noted. Although they found nothing but a registered gun, the owner was arrested and charged with "interfering with an arrest" and so booked. A judge later dismissed the case. Bovard reports, "In 1991, in Garland, Texas, police dressed in black and wearing black ski-masks burst into a trailer, waved guns in the air and kicked down the bedroom door where Kenneth Baulch had been sleeping next to his seventeen-month-old son. A policeman claimed that Baulch posed a deadly threat because he held an ashtray in his left hand, which explained why he shot Baulch in the back and killed him. (A police internal investigation found no wrongdoing by the officer.) In March 1992, a police SWAT team killed Robin Pratt, an Everett, Washington, mother, in a no-knock raid carrying out an arrest warrant for her husband. (Her husband was later released after the allegations upon which the arrest warrant were based turned out to be false.)" Incidentally, this K.G.B. tactic - hold someone for a crime, but let him off if he then names someone else for a bigger crime, also known as Starr justice - often leads to false, even random allegations which ought not to be acted upon so murderously without a bit of homework first. The Seattle Times describes Robin Pratt's last moments. She was with her six-year-old daughter and five-year-old niece when the police broke in. As the bravest storm trooper, named Aston, approached her, gun drawn, the other police shouted, "'Get down,' and she started to crouch onto her knees. She looked up at Aston and said, 'Please don't hurt my children....' Aston had his gun pointed at her and fired, shooting her in the neck. According to [the Pratt family attorney John] Muenster, she was alive another one to two minutes but could not speak because her throat had been destroyed by the bullet. She was handcuffed, lying face down." Doubtless Aston was fearful of a divine resurrection; and vengeance. It is no secret that American police rarely observe the laws of the land when out wilding with each other, and as any candid criminal judge will tell you, per- jury is often their native tongue in court.

The I.R.S. has been under some scrutiny lately for violations not only of the Fourth but of the Fifth Amendment. The Fifth requires a grand-jury Indictment in prosecutions for major crimes. It also provides that no person shall be compelled to testify against himself, forbids the taking of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or the taking of private property for public use without compensation.

Over the years, however, the ever secretive I.R.S. has been seizing property right and left without so much as a postcard to the nearest grand jury, while due process of law is not even a concept in their singleminded pursuit of loot. Bovard notes:

Since 1980, the number of levies-I.R.S. seizures of bank accounts and pay checks-has increased four-fold, reaching 3,253,000 in 1992. The General Accounting Office (GAG)estimated in 1990 that the I.R.S. imposes over 50,000 incorrect or unjustified levies on citizens and businesses per year. The GAO estimated that almost 6% of I.R.S. levies on business were incorrect.... The I.R.S. also imposes almost one and a half million liens each year, an increase of over 200% since 1980. Money magazine conducted a survey in 1990 of 156 taxpayers who had I.R.S. liens imposed on their property and found that 35% of the taxpayers had never received a thirty-day warning notice from the I.R.S. of an intent to impose a lien and that some first learned of the liens when the magazine contacted them.

The current Supreme Court has shown little interest in curbing so powerful and clandestine a federal agency as it routinely disobeys the 4th, 5th, and 14th Amendments. Of course, this particular court is essentially authoritarian and revels in the state's exercise of power while its livelier members show great wit when it comes to consulting Ouija boards in order to discern exactly what the founders originally had in mind, ignoring just how clearly Mason, Madison, and company spelled out such absolutes as you can't grab someone's property without first going to a grand jury and finding him guilty of a crime as law requires. In these matters, sacred original intent is so clear that the Court prefers to look elsewhere for its amusement. Lonely voices in Congress are sometimes heard on the subject. In 1993, Senator David Pryer thought it would be nice if the I.R.S. were to notify credit agencies once proof was established that the agency wrongfully attached a lien on a taxpayer's property, destroying his future credit. The I.R.S. got whiny. Such an onerous requirement would be too much work for its exhausted employees.

Since the U.S. statutes that deal with tax regulations comprise some 9,000 pages, even tax experts tend to foul up, and it is possible for any Inspector Javert at the I.R.S. to find flawed just about any conclusion as to what Family X owes. But, in the end, it is not so much a rogue bureau that is at fault as it is the system of taxation as imposed by key members of Congress in order to exempt their friends and financial donors from taxation. Certainly, the I.R.S. itself has legitimate cause for complaint against its nominal masters in Congress. The I.R.S.'s director of taxpayer services, Robert LeBaube, spoke out in 1989: "Since 1976 there have been 138 public laws modifying the Internal Revenue Code; Since the Tax Reform Act of 1986 there have been 13 public laws changing the code, and in 1988 alone there were seven public laws affecting the code." As Bovard notes but does not explain, "Tax law is simply the latest creative interpretation by government officials of the mire of tax legislation Congress has enacted. I.R.S. officials can take five, seven, or more years to write the regulations to implement a new tax law-yet Congress rontinely changes the law before new regulations are promulgated. Almost all tax law is provisional-either waiting to be revised according to the last tax bill passed, or already proposed for change in the next tax bill."

What is this great busyness and confusion all about? Well, corporations send their lawyers to Congress to make special laws that will exempt their corporate profits from unseemly taxation: this is done by ever more complex-- even impenetrable-tax laws which must always be provisional as there is always bound to be a new corporation requiring a special exemption in the form of a private bill tacked on to the Arbor Day Tribute. Senators who save corporations millions in tax money will not need to spend too much time on the telephone begging for contributions when it is time for him-or, yes, her-to run again. Unless-the impossible dream-the cost of elections is reduced by 90 percent, with no election lasting longer than eight weeks. Until national TV is provided free for national candidates and local TV for local candidates (the way civilized countries do it), there will never be tax reform. Meanwhile, the moles at the I.R.S., quite aware of the great untouchable corruption of their congressional masters, pursue helpless citizens and so demoralize the state.

It is nicely apt that the word "terrorist" (according to the O.E.D.) should have been coined during the French Revolution to Describe "an adherent or supporter of the Jacobins, who advocated and practiced methods of partisan repression and bloodshed in the propagation of the principles of democracy and equality." Although our rulers have revived the word to describe violent enemies of the United States, most of today's actual terrorists can be found within our own governments, federal, state, municipal. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (known as A.T.E), the Drug Enforcement Agency, EB.L., I.R.S., etc., are so many Jacobins at war against the lives, freedom, and property of our citizens. The F.B.I. slaughter of the innocents at Waco was a model Jacobin enterprise. A mildly crazed religious leader called David Koresh had started a commune with several hundred followers--men, women, and children. Koresh preached world's end. Variously, A.T.E and F.B.I. found him an ideal enemy to persecute. He was accused of numerous unsubstantiated crimes, including this decade's favorite, pedophilia, and was never given the benefit of due process to determine his guilt or innocence. David Kopel and Paul H. Blackman have now written the best and most detailed account of the American government's current war on its unhappy citizenry in No More Wacos: What's Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It.

They describe, first, the harassment of Koresh and his religious group, the Branch Davidians, minding the Lord's business in their commune; second, the demonizing of him in the media; third, the February 28, 1993, attack on the commune: 76 agents stormed the communal buildings that contained 127 men, women, and children. Four A.T.F. agents and six Branch Davidians died. Koresh had been accused of possessing illegal firearms even though he had previously invited law-enforcement agents into the commune to look at his weapons and their registrations. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Kopel and Blackman have now discovered that, from the beginning of what would become a siege and then a "dynamic entry" (military parlance for all-out firepower and slaughter), A.T.F. had gone secretly to the U.S. Army for advanced training in terrorist attacks even though the Posse Comitatus Law of 1878 forbids the use of federal troops for civilian law enforcement. Like so many of our laws, in the interest of the war on Drugs, this law can be suspended if the army is requested by the Drug Law Enforcement Agency to fight sin. Koresh was secretly accused by A.T.F. of producing methamphetamine that he was importing from nearby Mexico, 300 miles to the south. Mayday! The army must help out. They did, though the charges against drug-hating Koresh were untrue. The destruction of the Branch Davidians had now ceased to be a civil affair where the Constitution supposedly rules. Rather, it became a matter of grave military necessity: hence a CS-gas attack (a gas which the U.S. had just signed a treaty swearing never to use in war) 0n April 19, 1993, followed by tanks smashing holes in the buildings where 27 children were at risk; and then a splendid fire that destroyed the commune and, in the process, the as yet uncharged, untried David Koresh. Attorney General Janet Reno took credit and "blame,'' comparing herself and the president to a pair of World War II generals who could not exercise constant oversight ... the sort of statement World War II veterans recognize as covering your ass.

Anyway, Ms. Reno presided over the largest massacre of Americans by American Feds since 1890 and the fireworks at Wounded Knee. Eighty-two Branch Davidians died at Waco, including 30 women and 25 children. Will our Jacobins ever be defeated as the French ones were? Ah ... The deliberate erasure of elements of the Bill of Rights (in law as opposed to in fact when the police choose to go on the rampage, breaking laws and heads) can be found in loony decisions by lower courts that the Supreme Court prefers not to conform with the Bill of Rights. It is well known that the Drug Enforcement Agency and the I.R.S. are inveterate thieves of private property without due process of law or redress or reimbursement later for the person who has been robbed by the state but committed no crime. Currently, according to Kopel and Blackman, U.S. and some state laws go like this: whenever a police officer is permitted, with or without judicial approval, to investigate a potential crime, the officer may seize and keep as much property associated with the alleged criminal as the police officer considers appropriate. Although forfeiture is predicated on the property's being used in a crime, there shall be no requirement that the owner be convicted of a crime. It shall be irrelevant that the person was acquitted of the crime on which the seizure was based, or was never charged with any offense. Plainly, Judge Kafka was presiding in 1987 (United States v. Sandini) when this deranged formula for theft by police was made law: "The innocence of the owner is irrelevant," declared the court. "It is enough that the property was involved in a violation to which forfeiture attaches." Does this mean that someone who has committed no crime, but may yet someday, will be unable to get his property back because U.S. v. Sandini also states firmly, "The burden of proof rests on the party alleging ownership"?

This sort of situation is particularly exciting for the woof-woof brigade of police since, according to onetime attorney general Richard Thornburgh, over 90 percent of all American paper currency contains drug residue; this means that anyone carrying, let us say, a thousand dollars in cash will be found with "drug money," which must be seized and taken away to be analyzed and, somehow, never returned to its owner if the clever policeman knows his Sandini.

All across the country high-school athletes are singled out for drug testing while random searches are carried out in the classroom. On March 8, 1991, according to Bovard, at the Sandburg High School in Chicago, two teachers (their gender is not given so mental pornographers can fill in their own details) spotted a 16-year-old boy wearing sweatpants. Their four eyes glitterinly alert, they cased his crotch, which they thought "appeared to be 'too well endowed.'') He was taken to a locker room and stripped bare. No drugs were found, only a nonstandard scrotal sac. He was let go as there is as yet no law penalizing a teenager for being better hung than his teachers. The lad and his family sued. The judge was unsympathetic. The teachers, he ruled, "did all they could to ensure that the plaintiff's privacy was not eroded." Judge Kafka never sleeps.

Although drugs are immoral and must be kept from the young, thousands of schools pressure parents to give the drug Ritalin to any lively child who may, sensibly, show signs of boredom in his classroom. Ritalin renders the child docile if not comatose. Side effects? "Stunted growth, facial ties, agitation and aggression, insomnia, appetite loss, headaches, stomach pains and seizures." Marijuana would be far less harmful.

The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was not unlike Pearl Harbor, a great shock to an entire nation and, one hopes, a sort of wake-up call to the American people that all is not well with us. As usual, the media responded in the only way they know how. Overnight, one Timothy McVeigh became the personification of evil. Of motiveless malice. There was the usual speculation about confederates. Grassy knollsters. But only one other maniac was named, Terry Nichols; he was found guilty of "conspiring" with McVeigh, but he was not in on the slaughter itself.

A journalist, Richard A. Serrano, has just published One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. Like everyone else, I fear, I was sick of the subject. Nothing could justify the murder of those 168 men, women, and children, none of whom had, as far as we know, anything at all to do with the federal slaughter at Waco, the ostensible reason for McVeigh's fury. So why write such a book? Serrano hardly finds McVeigh sympathetic, but he does manage to make him credible in an ominously fascinating book.

Born in 1968, McVeigh came from a rural family that had been, more or less, dispossessed a generation earlier. Father Bill had been in the U.S. Army. Mother worked. They lived in a western New York blue-collar town called Pendleton. Bill grows vegetables; works at a local G.M. plant; belongs to the Roman Catholic Church. Of the area, he says, "When I grew up, it was all farms. When Tim grew up, it was half and half."

Tim turns out to be an uncommonly intelligent and curious boy. He does well in high school. He is, as his defense attorney points out, "a political animal." He reads history, the Constitution. He also has a lifelong passion for guns: motivation for joining the army. In Bush's Gulf War he was much decorated as an infantryman, a born soldier. But the war itself was an eye-opener, as wars tend to be for those who must fight them. Later, he wrote a journalist how "we were falsely hyped up." The ritual media demonizing of Saddam, Arabs, Iraqis had been so exaggerated that when McVeigh got to Iraq he was startled to "find out they are normal like me and you. They hype you to take these people out. They told us we were to defend Kuwait where the people had been raped and slaughtered. War woke me up."

As usual, there were stern laws against American troops fraternizing with the enemy. McVeigh writes a friend, "We've got these starving kids and sometimes adults coming up to us begging for food.... It's really 'trying' emotionally. It's like the puppy dog at the table; but much worse. The sooner we leave here the better. I can see how the guys in Vietnam were getting killed by children." Serrano notes, "At the close of the war, a very popular war, McVeigh had learned that he did not like the taste of killing innocent people. He spat into the sand at the thought of being forced to hurt others who did not hate him any more than he them."

The army and McVeigh parted once the war was done. He took odd jobs. He got interested in the far right's paranoid theories and in what Joel Dyer calls "The Religion of Conspiracy." An army buddy, Terry Nichols, acted as his guide. Together they obtained a book called Privacy, on how to vanish from the government's view, go underground, make weapons. Others had done the same, including the Weaver family, who had moved to remote Ruby Ridge in Idaho. Randy Weaver was a cranky white separatist with Christian Identity beliefs. He wanted to live with his family apart from the rest of America. This was a challenge to the F.B.I. When Weaver did not show up in court to settle a minor firearms charge, they staked him out August 21, 1992. When the Weaver dog barked, they shot him; when the Weavers' 14-year-old son fired in their direction, they shot him in the back and killed him. When Mrs. Weaver, holding a baby, came to the door F.B.I. sniper Lon Horiuchi shot her head off. The next year the Feds took out the Branch Davidians.

For Timothy McVeigh, the A.T.F. became the symbol of oppression and murder. Since he was now suffering from an exaggerated sense of justice, not a common American trait, he went to war pretty much on his own and ended up slaughtering more innocents than the Feds had at Waco. Did he know what he was doing when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City because it contained the hated bureau? McVeigh remained silent throughout his trial. Finally, as he was about to be sentenced, the court asked him if he would like to speak. He did. He rose and said, "I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, 'Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example."' Then McVeigh was sentenced to death by the government.

Those present were deeply confused by McVeigh's quotation. How could the Devil quote so saintly a justice? I suspect that he did it in the same spirit that Iago answered Othello when asked why he had done what he had done: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: from this time forth I never will speak word." Now we know, too; or as my grandfather used to say back in Oklahoma, "Every pancake has two sides."

Independent, UK

McVeigh sought martyrdom 'to aid co-conspirators'

By Andrew Gumbel and Mary Dejevsky

14 May 2001

Timothy McVeigh deliberately encouraged newspaper stories about his guilt in the Oklahoma City bombing from the earliest days of his case to deflect attention from other possible suspects, a new book by his trial lawyer shows.

According to Stephen Jones, who represented McVeigh until his sentencing in 1997 and now feels unrestrained by any lawyer-client confidentiality, his client's strategy was always to be the focus of as much public indignation as possible so the world would believe he was some kind of demon terrorist mastermind who acted alone.

"If no one else is arrested or convicted," Mr Jones quotes McVeigh as telling him, "then the revolution can continue."

As early as May 1995, less than one month after the bombing that ripped apart the federal government office building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, The New York Times reported that McVeigh had confessed his guilt to at least two people. At the time the assumption was that he had said too much to his cell mates. But the new book reveals that it was Mr Jones himself who briefed The New York Times - at the express instruction of his client. The second person cited in the article was another member of the defence team.

In the book, Mr Jones reproduces a signed statement from McVeigh written the day after the article appeared making clear that his lawyer had his authorisation to talk off the record. "I have read The New York Times story," the statement says. "It is consistent with what I authorised him to tell NY Times and it is accurate."

This revelation is the latest indication that McVeigh and his government prosecutors developed a joint interest in denying the existence of other accomplices in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation initially mounted a search for a second suspect, known as John Doe 2, but after more than a year of fruitless investigation came to insist there was no such person - almost certainly to increase its chances of securing a conviction against McVeigh.

The existence of a wider conspiracy, described in detail in The Independent last Friday, is likely to receive renewed attention following the discovery of thousands of pages of prosecution documents improperly withheld from Mr Jones's defence team during the trial.

The documents, which have been sent to McVeigh's current legal team, came to light just six days before his scheduled execution. The disclosure embarrassed the authorities and forced the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, to postpone the first federal execution since 1963 with just five days to go.

A lawyer for McVeigh said yesterday that the defence team could seek a new trial, once it had perused the thousands of pages of evidence handed over by the FBI last week. It is believed the new documents include witness statements taken immediately after the bombing that indicate sightings of John Doe 2 and possibly other suspects too.

Asked on NBC television whether McVeigh might seek a new trial, Rob Nigh - one of his two main lawyers - said: "It is certainly possible." But at this stage, he said, McVeigh was still reviewing his options.

Responding to some of the popular fury unleashed by his decision to delay the execution, Mr Ashcroft told The Oklahoman newspaper that he would not authorise any new delay. "We feel that ample time has been provided, and I have no intention of further extending this deadline," he said

Any decision about what happens next, however, rests not with Mr Ashcroft, but with McVeigh, his lawyers and the courts. Yesterday, few people - politicians, lawyers or the public - were very confident that the 11 June date would be kept. Among the most vocal was Gore Vidal, the writer and ardent opponent of the death penalty, who had been asked by McVeigh to witness his death by lethal injection and planned to write about it for Vanity Fair.

Mr Vidal said he believed that the case "would drag on for ever more". And he noted the irony of the latest turn of events. "I have a number of thoughts on this," he said, "and one is that this has a nice symmetry to his story ... McVeigh was reacting to the FBI [the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco in Texas] and now his own case is jeopardised by their actions."

Mr Jones, an experienced county lawyer from Enid, Oklahoma, who was widely criticised for botching the trial in a failed attempt to further his own conspiracy theories, first published his book, called Others Unknown, in 1998. For the new edition he has spoken freely about his client, arguing that it was McVeigh himself who broke their confidentiality agreement when he launched a wide-ranging attack on his reputation in a series of interviews with two reporters from his home town of Buffalo, New York.

McVeigh insisted throughout his dealings with Mr Jones that there was no John Doe 2. Mr Jones, who did not believe him, persuaded him to undergo a polygraph test. Every time McVeigh was asked about other suspects, he failed the test.

---------------------------------

Hunt for McVeigh gang ended within weeks

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

15 May 2001

Accomplice of McVeigh appeals over FBI blunder

The Federal Bureau of Investigation dropped its search for suspects who may have helped Timothy McVeigh bomb the Oklahoma City federal building less than a month after the attack, an internal FBI memo obtained by The Independent shows.

Despite witness sightings of accomplices with McVeigh in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing in April 1995, and despite a nationwide hunt for a man the authorities called "John Doe 2", the memo suggests that the search was quietly dropped, at least temporarily, in mid-May 1995.

The memo is a report by a field officer in San Francisco, who tells his superiors he has made unsuccessful attempts to track down the landlord of a possible John Doe 2 - known in the bureau's own investigative jargon as "Unsub (for "unidentified subject") #2".

"In view of the fact that the Oklahoma Command Post has directed all offices to hold Unsub #2 leads in abeyance, San Francisco will conduct no further investigation regarding this lead," the memo from Special Agent Thomas P Ravenelle reads. The exact day the memo was written is unknown, but it refers to an investigative lead taken up on 3 May 1995 and clearly abandoned shortly afterwards.

Why the FBI would have dropped its interest in John Doe 2 so quickly is a mystery, but the decision is in keeping with the line eventually taken by government lawyers at the 1997 trials of McVeigh and his main known accomplice, Terry Nichols - that John Doe 2 did not, in fact, exist.

The issue has returned to prominence after last week's revelation that the FBI had withheld more than 3,000 pages of evidence from the defence at the McVeigh and Nichols trials. The revelation prompted John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, to announce a 26-day delay in McVeigh's execution, which had been due tomorrow.

It is believed that the new documents contain witness statements on John Doe 2 and possibly other suspects. Defence lawyers have accused the US government of holding back evidence pointing to a wider conspiracy. Yesterday, Nichols' lawyers said they had asked the Supreme Court to reopen his case.

McVeigh's execution has been put back to June 11, but many legal experts expect a much longer delay. The Guardian, UK

Conspirators

On May 16, Timothy McVeigh is due to be executed for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing. He claims the blast was all his own work. But, Jon Ronson discovers, there were probably others, government agents even, who knew what was afoot

Jon Ronson Guardian

Saturday May 5, 2001

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is a conspiracy theorist. He believes that a shadowy elite of bankers and industrialists and politicians are plotting in secret to take over the world, disarm gun enthusiasts and implement a sinister New World Order - a world government that will destroy anyone who disobeys. McVeigh considered the Murrah building in Oklahoma City to be the local headquarters of the New World Order.

Sure, McVeigh was fully aware that innocent secretaries and receptionists would be killed as a result of the massive truck bomb he detonated on April 19, 1995. But he was a keen Star Wars fan and he compared those innocents to the "space-age clerical workers inside the Death Star. Those people weren't storm troopers. But they were vital to the operations of the Evil Empire. And when Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star, the movie audiences cheered. The bad guys were beaten. That was all that really mattered."

It is, therefore, churlish of McVeigh to scornfully dismiss - as crazy paranoid nuts - the legions of conspiracy theorists who believe that the truth of the Oklahoma City bombing has yet to be officially recognised. McVeigh is seething about this inside his death row cell. He is due to be executed on May 16. He feels the conspiracy theories are tainting his impending martyrdom. "You can't handle the truth," he has said. "And the truth is that it is pretty scary that one guy can do this all alone."

The conspiracy theories centre on a bizarre white separatist encampment on the Oklahoma/Arkansas border called Elohim City and two of its regular visitors: a flamboyant neo-Nazi called Dennis Mahon and an extraordinary German called Andy Strassmeir. McVeigh says the Elohim City conspiracy theories are nonsense, a red herring. But I didn't know what to think. They seemed pretty convincing to me. Perhaps I am becoming a conspiracy nut. Whatever, I wanted to meet the alleged co-conspirators. It would, at least, be interesting to ask them how it felt to be widely considered, by conspiracy theorists, to be the hidden hands behind the Oklahoma City bombing.

It was a Monday morning in early April. Dennis Mahon was jumpy and on the run in Arizona. "It drives you crazy," he said. "Thousands think I was involved. I've started to believe it myself. Maybe I was there. Maybe they brainwashed me and I forgot about it. Maybe I can get hypnotised and remember it. Everybody said I was there. Everybody said I drove the truck. They saw me."

This is true. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, many passers-by claimed to have seen McVeigh in Oklahoma City with unknown others. One witness drew a sketch of a John Doe who looked remarkably like how Dennis Mahon might look in dark glasses and a pencil moustache.

"Maybe there's somebody out there who looks like me," said Dennis. "I'm just about ready to turn myself in and tell them, 'Okay motherfuckers, I did it'. But I didn't." Then Dennis showed me his scar - the result, he said, of a stress-related intestinal infection.

But for all of this Dennis Mahon seemed secretly thrilled to be a central player in the alternative history of the Oklahoma bombing. Columbia Pictures is even considering making a movie of the story I am about to tell. "It'll be a hell of a good movie," he said. "I hope Tom Berenger plays me. But one guy said Danny DeVito's going to play me. That'll devastate me. I'll leave the country."

Dennis peered through the curtains of our secret rendezvous location: Room 315 of the Hampton Inn near Phoenix airport. "The Feds are on my tail!" he stammered. "The bastard sons of the FBI followed me here. See that white car?"

"Why are they following you?" I asked.

"Well, Tim McVeigh did all his training over there," he said, pointing west to Kingman, Arizona. "And he's going to be executed. And they're afraid there might be retaliation for that. And there very well might be. There very, very, very well might be."

Dennis Mahon is a veteran neo-Nazi. He was famous before the Oklahoma bombing conspiracy theories. When you see him in old Ku Klux Klan recruitment videos from the 80s , he looks striking and quick-witted. Now he is jowly, the spitting image of the actor John Goodman.

"Yeah, I'm an old guy now," says Dennis. "I'm an old comrade. I've seen changes. More lone wolfism. One man one act. These stupid Klan guys want to be circus clowns. And the Klan's targets are just little negroes. And then they get drunk in a pub and talk about it. You've got to raise your sights a little bit. If you're going to get 10 years for calling somebody a nigger, or throwing a rock through a synagogue window, you might as well go and do a McVeigh. And I think the kids are learning that."

Dennis Mahon glanced out of the window at the white car. "I don't believe they can hear us because . . ." He paused. "Did you get the room at the last minute?"

"Yes," I said.

"Well, I think we're okay," he said.

Dennis sat on the bed. "I'd never heard of a Tim McVeigh," he said. "I'd heard of a Tim Tuttle. Tim Tuttle was a real good patriot. Tim Tuttle was a highly decorated army guy from the Gulf War and he was travelling through the area and people wanted me to meet him."

"Did you meet Tim Tuttle?" I asked.

"Yes," said Dennis. "I met Tim Tuttle, but I didn't know he was alias Tim McVeigh. I met him at gun shows. He sold military stuff, knives, gun parts, camouflage uniforms. I remember he had real short hair and real intense eyes and the real long narrow nose like yours." Dennis scrutinised, and misinterpreted, my Jewish nose.

"It's a good nose," said Dennis. "Don't get me wrong. Better than mine. Mine's been broke. And we talked about Waco. And I said, 'What comes around goes around. If they keep doing this terrorism on our people, terrorism's going to happen to them.' "

"That's what you said?"

"That's what I said to him. He said, 'Probably. Probably so.' "

"Carol Howe testified that she was at your house when Tim Tuttle telephoned you shortly before the Oklahoma bomb," I said.

"Yeah, well," said Dennis, sharply. "That was another Tim. Okay? Another Tim. His name was Tim Buttle."

We talked about Carol Howe - about the strange love affair at the heart of the conspiracy theories. Carol was a Tulsa society girl and a champion horse rider. She attended private schools and won some local beauty contests. Her father Bob was an oil executive. Her mother Aubyn was a charity hostess. But Carol got in with a druggy crowd and she ended up jumping off a roof and breaking her feet. While she was convalescing from her injuries, she began to idly telephone the local "Dial-A-Racist" hotline and listen to the recorded messages: "The international corporations and Jews and banks control America, and they're out to enslave and destroy the white race." She fell in love with the voice as she lay in her sick bed. The voice belonged to Dennis Mahon. She sought him out.

"I met her in a restaurant in Tulsa," said Dennis, "and she comes on crutches. Here's a beautiful young woman who's really in bad shape - you know, physically - hobbling round on crutches trying to fight for her race. And my heart went out to her. She was strikingly beautiful and highly intelligent. Super high IQ. I think she had an IQ of 130. Way up there. She was a lot smarter than I was. She was a very rich girl, a debutante. I saw her house. Six bedrooms. Five car garage. Very wealthy."

Within minutes of meeting Carol, Dennis had formulated some big plans for her. "I was going to get her on Oprah. Most of our women are not very intelligent. All they can say is 'nigger this' and 'nigger that'. She could have been our Aryan spokeswoman."

"Did you fall in love with her?" I asked.

"I tried not to, I really did," said Dennis. "I tried to keep it on a professional level. But it was very hard. She was 23 years old. And she had a big swastika tattoo on her arm. I got a bit weak. I did fawn over her. And, yes, I had an intimate relationship with her. I finally said, 'Let's just forget about this whole thing and get married and have children.' "

"Would you have given up neo-Nazism for her?"

"Oh yes," said Dennis. "In order to raise a family you have to make pretty good money. But no. She was like a Patty Hearst. She wanted to get into the guns and the explosives." So Dennis made Carol some bombs.

"We let them off out in the woods," said Dennis. "And she was . . ." He broke off. His face flushed red. "She couldn't make love to me fast enough after that. She loved the bombs."

"She testified that you raped her," I said, "and that's why you split up."

"Well, she's a lying little snitch," said Dennis. "What really happened was that I finally got so tired. I knew that eventually she was going to make a bomb and hurt herself real bad and I'd be drawn into it. And I would have gone to jail."

Dennis said it was an amicable split. (Carol testified that he threatened to kill her.) Dennis said he wanted to see her happy. He wanted to introduce her to eligible boys. So he took her to a place called Elohim City. "It's a white separatist community," said Dennis. "They're fundamentalists, but it's really nice. Lots of good single men out there."

Elohim City is, for conspiracy theorists, the linchpin of the story. I have been told many times - by conspiracy-minded relatives of bombing victims, by local journalists and Oklahoma City councillors - that Elohim City is a terrorist training camp. It was certainly the hideout of the Aryan Republican Army, who committed a two-year spree of bank robberies using explosives. And it was home, for a year and a half, to a man called Andy Strassmeir.

"He was this tall, tough-looking guy," said Dennis. "A deep German accent. They called him Andy the German. I learned that his visa had run out and he was head of security out at Elohim City. I got to be pretty good friends with him. He told me he was very highly trained. Like our Green Berets. Or your SAS. He really knew his stuff. And he had trained a lot of good people at Elohim City. One time he had almost 30 young men, and women too, drilling them in full soldier drill. And they did just as good as any highly trained army unit in this country."

"That makes Elohim City sound like a training camp," I said.

"Well," he said, "after Waco they were very fearful they could be next."

So Dennis took Carol to Elohim City to meet boys. But there was something that he didn't know. After Dennis had threatened to kill Carol, she reported him to the police. Then the local Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - the ATF, the same government agency that raided Waco - approached Carol and asked her to become an undercover informant, and spy for them on Dennis and Elohim City. She agreed.

In the months leading up to the Oklahoma bombing, Carol filed a series of reports to the ATF. In one, she reported that Andy Strassmeir had declared, "It's time to go to war," and, "It's time to start bombing federal buildings." In another, she reported that Strassmeir had travelled to Oklahoma City to case the Murrah building as a potential target. In a third, she reported that Elohim City's patriarch, Reverend Robert Millar, preached a Holy War against the Federal Government, and suggested that April 19 might be a good day to start that war.

Immediately after the bombing, Carol Howe identified Timothy McVeigh as someone she saw walking through the Elohim City forests with Andy Strassmeir. She also testified that she overheard Dennis Mahon take a telephone call from "Tim Tuttle" - the alias McVeigh used. "Carol had a lot of boyfriends at Elohim City," said Dennis. "But she'd scare them off. You know. 'Hey! Let's make a bomb!' That kind of talk tends to scare guys away." Dennis paused. "Especially when they may actually be planning something."

"I'm sorry?" I said.

This was an extraordinary thing for Dennis to say. Dennis remains to this day a close friend of the people at Elohim City. Until now, he has always denied that the community had anything to do with the Oklahoma City bombing. Was he now implying that they may have actually been involved?

"Before that bomb went off in Oklahoma City," said Dennis, "they got rid of her. They told Carol to go back home. They said, 'We need to be by ourselves for a while.'"

"Who said that to her?" I asked.

"Her last boyfriend broke up with her and said, 'Maybe you ought to go to Tulsa. Stay away for a while.' She was away from Elohim City for almost two months before the bomb went off. Which is probably a good thing."

Dennis is a conspiracy theorist, but he said he doesn't believe the conspiracy theory that he was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. "I think Andy Strassmeir was," he said. "Or at least he knew about it. I've been trying to contact him for years. I've always defended him. And now he won't return my phone calls. And I've been banned from Germany. Why is that? So I'm taking all the heat and he's run off to Germany."

Dennis said that if Andy Strassmeir wasn't involved, perhaps a crack team of Iraqi Republican Guards were, acting under the orders of Saddam Hussein. "There's quite a few Iraqis in Oklahoma," he said. "Those guys are highly trained in improvised munitions and explosives. Whereas Tim was not. Certainly one of them could have trained Tim. There are 600 Iraqi Republican Guards in the Oklahoma City area."

The conspiracy theories were getting crazier. I wanted to get back to the facts. And this is a fact: on the morning of April 19, 1995 - just as Timothy McVeigh's yellow Ryder truck packed with three 55-gallon drums of liquid nitromethane pulled up outside the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City - a death row prisoner in Arkansas called Richard Wayne Snell asked his guard if he could watch the TV news. The guard agreed. Snell was to be executed within hours. Getting to watch CNN was just about his final request. Snell had murdered a black state trooper called Louis Bryant and a pawn shop owner called William Stumpp, whom Snell had mistakenly believed to be Jewish.

Snell had also plotted, in 1983, to blow up the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. He only abandoned the plan when the rocket-launcher he'd been practising with exploded in his hands. He took this as a sign that God didn't want him to go ahead with the plan. Snell's co-conspirator in the 1983 plot was a neo-Nazi called James Ellison, who lived at Elohim City and was, in fact, married to Reverend Millar's granddaughter.

Within the more hard-core factions of the American militia movement, Snell was a hero and a martyr: a respected preacher and political prisoner. His supporters were outraged that the Arkansas governor had chosen April 19 for the execution date. They considered it a deliberate kick in the teeth.

April 19 is holy day for anti-government activists and conspiracy theorists. On April 19, 1993, Federal agents ended the siege at Waco. David Koresh's Branch Davidian church went up in flames. On April 19, 1775, 400 British government troops attempted to disarm the citizens of Lexington, Massachusetts. A hundred colonists shot back, the first shots of the American Revolution, the "shots heard around the world". (When I visit American militias and patriots and neo-Nazis, they often ask me what I, a Brit, thinks of the Lexington uprising. I explain that I'm not au fait with the ins and outs. They are scandalised that our syllabus doesn't teach this pivotal moment in British history.) So executing Snell on April 19 was perceived to be an insult levelled at the American militia movement.

The guard on death watch duty agreed to Snell's request. He turned on CNN, just as news was breaking of the bombing of the Murrah building. Snell had already warned his prison guards that his death would be avenged. And now, the penitentiary's death watch log noted, Richard Wayne Snell watched the breaking news and he "smiled and chuckled and nodded". Shortly afterwards, he was executed by lethal injection. His good friend and spiritual advisor, the Reverend Robert Millar, transported his body to its final resting place: Elohim City.

After all I'd heard about Elohim City, I felt a little intimidated as I drove up into the Ozark mountains towards the community. I turned left at the covered bridge, the very spot where Timothy McVeigh had received a speeding ticket on October 12, 1993. McVeigh has always denied visiting Elohim City, but I couldn't imagine where else he could have been heading, out here in the middle of the dusty nothingness.

In fact, only one official record links McVeigh to Elohim City: a telephone call he made on April 5, 1995, a fortnight before the bombing. He had bought a telephone calling card from the back pages of the Spotlight, the right-wing newspaper dedicated to seeking out and exposing the Bilderberg Group, the internationalist think tank believed by conspiracy theorists, McVeigh included, to be the shadowy elite that secretly rules the world. McVeigh used the phone card to make enquiries about where he might order a Ryder truck. Then he phoned Elohim City and asked to speak to "Andy". But Andy Strassmeir wasn't there. So McVeigh put the phone down again.

My instructions were to pull up at Elohim City's entrance, stay in the car, and honk my horn until somebody came to fetch me. I did this. I honked and honked, intrusively breaking the silence. I wondered why I had to sit there and honk. Were people doing things that they didn't want a journalist to know about? Had they been told to stop doing whatever it was when the honking journalist arrived? So I felt intimidated as I sat there honking. And then the children of Elohim City suddenly appeared from nowhere and performed, for my benefit, an impressive and well rehearsed rendition of Riverdance. I clapped when it was over.

Then Elohim City's resident chiropractor, Dr Buzz, offered me a cranial massage.

"No thanks," I said.

Elohim City looked like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Brightly coloured elf type houses scattered the forest. The whole place would have resembled some new-age retreat, something like the Findhorn Foundation, if it wasn't for the fact that everyone was carrying semi-automatic rifles.

Then I was invited into the meeting hall to sit in on a travelling soap salesman's presentation. He wanted to sell Elohim City soap powder and water-refining tablets. The women of the community and Reverend Millar, who looks like Santa Claus, fired questions at the salesman.

"We don't want chlorine," said Reverend Millar. "Chlorine causes cancer."

"This isn't a game," said the salesman. "This is serious. Cleanliness is serious."

"Health is important," said Reverend Millar.

Reverend Millar is a conspiracy theorist, but he doesn't believe the conspiracy theory that he and his community were behind the Oklahoma City bombing. He thinks the bomb was planted by the government itself, a New World Order plot to turn the world against survivalists and implement gun-control legislation, much like Hitler's burning of the Reichstag.

"I think," he told me, "it was an operation by the Zionists who have infiltrated our government agencies to disparage people like us. To give us a black eye."

Carol Howe, he added, was "a poor little rich girl. We fed her and housed her. I didn't know that $400 of my tax money was going to her with each visit. She was here several times. And then she went back and told things that were so far from the truth. She said we had prepared a bomb or discussed that sort of thing. Something very violent. And, as you can see, that's hardly typical of us here."

"Could you show me your cemetery?" I asked.

"Sure," he said.

He took me down to a field at the bottom of a hill.

"How many people are buried here?" I asked him.

"All the dead ones," he said. "Ha ha! I'm sorry. Half-a-dozen." We looked at the headstones.

"This is my beloved wife," said Reverend Millar. "We had been married 55 years and nine months. She was my sweetheart from college days. And here's Richard Wayne Snell. I guess this is the one you're interested in."

Snell's headstone read, "Rev Richard Wayne Snell. Patriot. May 21st 1930 - April 19th 1995".

"It was a lethal injection," said Reverend Millar. "I was there. He said, 'I am ready to go.' He died in full confidence of his hereafter. The idea that he was all excited about a bombing in Oklahoma City never passed between us."

"Why is he buried at Elohim City?" I asked.

"He requested it," said Reverend Millar, a little sharply. "He asked me to be his spiritual adviser. I visited him regularly in the years between the trial and the execution."

"April 19," I said.

"Very significant," he said. "I had talked to the lieutenant governor of Arkansas and I suggested that it was a poor day to choose. I thought it would contribute to civic unrest." He paused, and softly added, "The government can be more interested in demonstrating their control than they are in the interests of the nation that they represent."

As we walked away from the cemetery, Reverend Millar happened to notice the Kansas licence plate of my hire car. "Ah," laughed Reverend Millar. "Just like the Ryder truck! You rented this in Kansas!"

There was a silence.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

Reverend Millar is a man who claims to know nothing about the Oklahoma City bombing, who says he needs to be reminded even of what date the explosion occurred. And now he was bringing up the most esoteric fact about McVeigh's plot - that the Ryder truck used for the bombing had been rented in Kansas. Was this a little playful clue, on his part, that there was more to Elohim City than meets the eye?

Reverend Millar giggled.

"Just kidding," he said.

There is a tiny strip club in Tulsa called Lady Godiva. It was once a salad bar, but the salads didn't take off so Floyd Ratcliffe bought the place up, painted it black, advertised for topless dancers, and now between 75 and 150 men attend each night. I sat in the back office with Floyd and his former wife Julie. "My official title," said Julie to my notepad, "is vice-president of Lady Godiva." She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and said, "I'm not bullshitting you. Really."

Behind us, a CCTV monitor screen flashed between the big bouncer doing neck exercises at the door, the bar, the stage, and the dressing room where the strippers went to change and apply make-up. A second CCTV monitor focused just on the dressing room.

"Do the women know they're being taped naked backstage?" I asked Floyd. "Why do you tape them?"

"A lot of the girls," explained Floyd, "are good girls. But it keeps down thievery. It keeps down drugs."

On the night of April 8, 1995, two strippers from Arkansas got into a fight in Lady Godiva's dressing room - a fight that was taped by Floyd's CCTV camera. "As it turns out," explained Floyd, "one of the girls was nervous and had taken some pills before she got here, which made her hyper and made her clash with everybody."

"We usually erase the tapes after two weeks," added Julie. "The reason why we kept this particular tape is because the cat fight was really quite humorous. So we kept it for entertainment."

Some weeks after the cat fight occurred, the two warring strippers applied for jobs at an erotic bar in Arkansas. Their prospective employer had heard of the taped cat fight and so he asked Floyd to send him the cassette. "He was trying to figure out whose fault the cat fight was," explained Floyd. "Was it one of the girls' fault? Was it Lady Godiva's fault?" So Floyd sent the tape to the club owner in Arkansas.

"So," said Floyd, "he's looking at the tape to try and find out what went wrong, and I think, being a little bit nosy, he wanted to see the rest of the tape. And as he's watching the rest of the tape, he suddenly realises that he's seeing something quite extraordinary."

This was true. There is a moment on the CCTV tape dated April 8, 1995, that could be seen to be incredible. Here is a transcript of that moment:

Stripper 1 (leaning into the mirror, adjusting her costume): "You know those three guys I'm sitting out there with? Well one of them says he's looking for a girl to fool around with tonight. Are you interested?"

Stripper 2: "Well, okay, I'll figure out a way to scam them."

The conversation becomes unintelligible for a while. The strippers talk about the three guys out front.

Stripper 1: (unintelligible) "... and one of them said, 'I'm a very smart man.' 'You are?' 'Yes, I am. And on April 19, 1995, you'll remember me for the rest of your life!' 'Oh really?' 'Yes, you will.' "

Stripper 1 laughs and starts to walk out of the dressing room. Then she turns back to the other and says, "Weirdo!"

"They were odd comments," said Julie. "It just seemed odd. The girls thought, maybe they're going to come out with some big invention on April 19."

"But unfortunately," said Floyd, "it turned out to be such a devastating event that they were in fact talking about." When the club owner in Arkansas realised the significance of the tape, he sent it back to Floyd and Julie. They telephoned the FBI. "Several days later," said Floyd, "a couple of agents came to the club, confiscated the tape, talked to the girls involved, and showed them pictures. The girls did identify three guys."

"McVeigh," said Julie. "They identified McVeigh and Nichols and the other gentlemen. Um. Sloshmayer..."

"Strassmeir?" I asked.

"Strassmeir," said Julie. "Right. Excuse me. They all did identify that gentleman."

"And of course," I said, "everyone's heard of McVeigh and Nichols. But not of Strassmeir."

"True," said Julie. "But the girls did identify Strassmeir in the line-ups."

"It seems like the more we find out," said Floyd, "the less we want to know. I don't know if it's a cover up. I don't know if they're trying to protect Strassmeir. There are just a lot of things I don't know. There are a lot of things that we will never know."

There was a silence.

"It's a bad deal," said Floyd. Julie nodded. "It's a bad deal all around. They were here. It's nothing to be proud of. If not here, someplace else."

"They wanted to see girls," I said.

"Sure," said Floyd. "Sure. It's a semi-nude sexual-oriented type business, so we're quite popular in this part of the country."

"What did the FBI agents say?" I asked.

"At the time, they said, 'We'll put it on the back burner and let it sit.' " Floyd paused. "Well, that's where it's been. This is five years later. And it's still on the back burner."

Something else was noticed at Lady Godiva on the night of April 8. After one of the cat-fight strippers had been thrown out of the club by Floyd, she needed to urinate. Floyd wouldn't let her back in, so she urinated in the car park. She urinated right next to a yellow Ryder truck.

In the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, President Clinton promised that no stone would be left unturned. Two thousand Federal agents were assigned to the case, 20,000 individuals were interviewed. But the people at Elohim City were never questioned. Andy Strassmeir was never questioned. Surely they could at least have questioned him.

It turns out that Andy Strassmeir's father is Gunther Strassmeir, Helmut Kohl's Secretary of State, a man known as the "architect of German reunification". Andy Strassmeir received military intelligence training at the Bundeswehr Academy in Hanover. In the light of this new knowledge, Reverend Millar now believes that Carol Howe was not the only undercover federal informant working at Elohim City.

"Strassmeir," he said, "didn't contribute to community harmony. We had a little lady here. She was 80 years old. She'd feed him. She liked Andy. She cared for him. But when she wanted some painting done, he wanted to get paid by the hour. He acted like he was without financial resources. But whenever he went to buy something, he had the credit cards to buy the best." Reverend Millar paused. "We do know," he added, "that Andy contacted an anti-terrorist agency here in the United States when he first landed." Andy Strassmeir is now back in Germany, living with his parents.

In the light of Carol Howe's undercover reports to the ATF, the American government considered launching a raid on Elohim City in the months before the Oklahoma City bombing. But they abandoned the plan. I asked FBI special agent Bob Ricks why they changed their minds. (Incidentally, Ricks was one of the special agents in charge of the siege at Waco. McVeigh had originally considered killing Ricks - or a Waco and Ruby Ridge sniper called Lon Horiuchi - instead of blowing up the Murrah building. But he decided that the Murrah would make more of an impact.) "Why did we abandon the raid on Elohim City?" said Ricks. "We didn't want another Waco."

There is a terrible irony to that decision. The American government's paranoid fear, and the reason why they originally raided Waco, was that they believed David Koresh might launch a terrorist attack on mainstream America. If you believe the Oklahoma conspiracy theories - if you believe that this story is more than just a series of coincidences - you are left with a startling conclusion. Had the raid on Elohim City not been abandoned, the Oklahoma City bombing might never have happened.

The conspiracy theories inevitably reach a chilling conclusion: something that the theorists are disinclined to state publicly, fearful that the general public might consider them paranoid lunatics. They ask themselves why every member of the ATF based at the Murrah building survived the bombing. The ATF office was one of McVeigh's chief targets. Most of the Bureau's employees didn't turn up for work that morning. The conspiracy theorists put two and two together. Perhaps Strassmeir had tipped them off about the bombing in advance, and they incompetently failed to stop it happening. Perhaps they planned a sting operation, but it somehow went awry. Perhaps they have been covering this fact up ever since.

Timothy McVeigh says he was 1,000 miles away from Lady Godiva on April 8. He says he was at the Imperial Motel in Kingman, Arizona. He says the conspiracy theorists are crazy, and he only ever met Andy Strassmeir once, at a gun show. He says he never visited Elohim City. He admits he telephoned the community on April 5, and asked to speak to Andy, but only because he thought that Elohim City might have been a suitable hideout for him after the bombing.

One wonders why, if this story is true, McVeigh is protecting Strassmeir - an undercover informant. Does he fear reprisals against his family if he spills the beans? Is he embarrassed that he was suckered by a federal employee? Does he want to be considered a lone wolf, a martyr?

McVeigh's aim, in blowing up the Murrah building, was to strike at the heart of the New World Order. And now conspiracy theorists are beginning to believe that the New World Order itself might have played a role in the conspiracy. McVeigh is seething about this in his death row cell. He will consequently be executed, on May 16, an unsatisfied man.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4180953,00.html

===========================================================================

Tuesday, May 15, 2001 Los Angeles Times

More McVeigh Files Found; FBI Orders Massive Search

By RICHARD A. SERRANO and ERIC LICHTBLAU, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON--A second batch of undisclosed records in the Oklahoma City bombing has been found in Baltimore, sources said Monday, prompting the FBI to issue a worldwide directive ordering all bureau field offices and attaches to comb their files for any more documents that may not have been turned over to Timothy J. McVeigh's lawyers. Meanwhile, new details emerged about the contents of more than 3,000 pages of documents discovered last week--witness statements and photographs relating to a mysterious person known as Robert Jacques, as well as surveillance tapes of sightings of "John Doe No. 2," an alleged McVeigh co-conspirator. Although the government later discounted the existence of either person, rumors about their alleged association with McVeigh spawned endless theories of conspiracies and government cover-ups in what became the largest investigation in FBI history. Federal officials last week discovered the 3,135 pages of new material after collecting McVeigh files from dozens of field offices across the country. After turning the documents over to McVeigh's defense team and his convicted co-conspirator, Terry L. Nichols, seven additional documents turned up late last week in the Baltimore office, sources said. The documents were expected to be delivered Monday to defense attorneys. Neither the total number of pages, nor their specific content, could be determined Monday. Like the material found in other offices, however, the Baltimore documents were discounted by government sources, who said they have no relevance to McVeigh's guilt or innocence. Baltimore was one of dozens of FBI field offices involved in interviewing witnesses and collecting evidence in the case. In issuing its sweeping order Monday, the FBI sought to ensure that no additional materials will surface that should have long ago been shared with the defense. "Everybody is checking again. The whole bureau today," said an FBI source, one of several government sources who asked not to be identified because of the ongoing investigation. "Everybody is going through everything again." A Department of Justice official said authorities are worried that if even more material is found after this latest search, it will be all the more embarrassing to federal law enforcement. "We certainly want all the information that is available," the official said. "We want all the information that's out there." The April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was the largest terrorist attack in the United States, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500 others. In the larger cache of FBI documents discovered last week, references to a Robert Jacques--whose last name sometimes was spelled "Jacquez"--crop up several times, sources said. Shortly after the bombing, a southwest Missouri real estate broker told the FBI that three men came to his office looking to buy secluded property that was "in the middle of nowhere." He said they wanted some land with caves. This was in November 1994, right before McVeigh and Nichols began stockpiling materials for the bomb.
The broker, William Maloney, said two of the men fit the descriptions of McVeigh and Nichols, and he recalled that the third man, who said his name was Robert Jacques, "did most of the talking." But the government was never able to authenticate that the men were actually McVeigh and Nichols, or that Jacques ever existed. Sources said the other newly disclosed material included photographs of people resembling descriptions of Jacques. Also in the files, the sources said, was information about the so-called John Doe No. 2. Employees at the Ryder store, where McVeigh rented the truck to carry the bomb, insisted that McVeigh was with a second man. That man was never found, but an FBI sketch of him circulated nationwide. The government later insisted that the Ryder employees were mistaken and that McVeigh had been alone, but the sightings of John Doe No. 2 persisted nonetheless. In the missing files also are surveillance tapes of John Doe No. 2 look-alikes, as well as statements from various people who claimed to have seen him, sources said. Defense lawyers are now reviewing the new material and determining how to proceed. With McVeigh's cooperation, they are likely to ask a federal judge for more time to study the documents. McVeigh was to have been executed Wednesday. But after the FBI files foul-up, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft delayed the execution for 30 days, until June 11. While defense attorneys do not think 30 days is long enough to review the newly disclosed materials, Ashcroft has said he will not grant another postponement. "The attorney general has been very generous with the time he's allowed," an Ashcroft aide said. "He thought it was a reasonable amount of time, and he's not going to delay it past the date he set. If McVeigh wants to push it, I'm sure he'll fight it in court." Lawyers for Nichols also are trying to use the new information to help him win a new trial in federal court, or at least reduce his life sentence. "In a case of this magnitude, where the defendant's life and liberty were at jeopardy . . . it is essential the defense have the opportunity to review and assess the withheld materials and then take appropriate action," they wrote in a petition filed with the Supreme Court late Friday and made public Monday. Nichols' lawyers had argued earlier this year that government lawyers withheld other key documents from the defense and that the trial court failed to fully explore this issue. The Supreme Court turned down Nichols' appeal last month. But his lawyers argue in their new filing that "the newly discovered fact that the United States withheld . . . FBI materials casts Mr. Nichols' request for a remand for further proceedings in a much more favorable light." In Oklahoma City on Monday, where state prosecutors hope to win a death sentence for Nichols on first-degree murder charges, a preliminary hearing that was to have begun next week was postponed indefinitely--a sign that the state judge there is also concerned about new materials. On Capitol Hill, where several lawmakers are urging thorough reviews of FBI operations, outgoing FBI Director Louis J. Freeh is to appear at previously scheduled hearings Wednesday and Thursday. The hearings are supposed to be about the FBI's budget needs. But, said one Senate aide, "it would surprise me if there weren't a strong line of questioning about how they managed to lose thousands of pages of documents."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/reports/mcveigh/lat_mcveigh010515.htm

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=71599 11 May 2001 12:15 GMT+1 The Independent, UK

McVeigh 'did not act alone in Oklahoma bombing'

By Andrew Gumbel in Terre Haute, Indiana

11 May 2001

The Oklahoma conspiracy. A special report by Andrew Gumbel

For six years, there have been suspicions that Timothy McVeigh did not act alone when he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Today, The Independent reveals he was part of an underground network of white-supremacist guerrillas dedicated to the overthrow of the American government, and explains how the group kept its role hidden for so long.

Known as the Aryan Republican Army, the network came to light five years ago when its leaders were arrested for 22 bank robberies committed across the Midwest from late 1993 until several months after the April 1995 bombing. They were prosecuted and imprisoned for the robberies, but their links to the Oklahoma bomb never came out in court.

Those have emerged through the efforts of a handful of reporters, academics and relatives of the bombing victims who found copies of confidential prosecution documents, saw written and video material recovered from the gang and interviewed some of the protagonists.

It is now believed the ARA financed and helped to stage the bombing, the worst peacetime atrocity on US soil, which claimed 168 lives including 19 children. There is also evidence that McVeigh, who faces death by lethal injection at a US penitentiary in Indiana next Wednesday, was part of the robbery gang and participated in at least the planning stage of some of the hold-ups.

The Independent's Review section today demolishes the theory that McVeigh was alone in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing. It shows why many of the claims made by McVeigh in a series of interviews for the recently published book American Terrorist do not stand up to scrutiny.

It also explains why the Federal Bureau of Investigation and government prosecutors gave up their efforts to find his accomplices.

It describes the extraordinary exploits of the ARA's two ringleaders, Pete Langan and Richard Guthrie, accomplished career criminals who happened to be secret cross-dressers as well as virulent exponents of racist anti-government ideology. The Independent has obtained a 300-page handwritten memoir penned by Guthrie in prison before he was found hanging from a bedsheet in his cell in July 1996. In it, he names one of the robbery gang members as a certain "Tim".

The links between the ARA and McVeigh were established in 1993 and continued regularly until the time of the bombing. All of them led frantically itinerant lifestyles, driving cross-country and staying in motels under assumed names, but on several occasions were in the same place at the same time on similar business. In January 1995, all of them abruptly left Kansas for a six-week stint in Arizona where there is evidence that a trial fertiliser bomb was exploded in the desert.

The ARA developed the notion of "leaderless resistance", a cell-based guerrilla structure in which individual members knew next to nothing about each other. Operating out of a safe-house in eastern Kansas, it also developed contacts with various far-right groups including a white supremacist religious compound in Oklahoma, Elohim City, which has long been suspected of involvement in the bombing. ---- 11 May 2001 12:18 GMT+1 Home > News > World > Americas

Next week, one man will be executed for carrying out america's worst peacetime atrocity. Timothy McVeigh claims to have acted alone. but new evidence reveals he was part of an undergound network of white supremacists

The Oklahoma conspiracy

A special report by Andrew Gumbel

10 May 2001

Internal links

McVeigh 'did not act alone in Oklahoma bombing'

Forgotten' evidence could delay McVeigh execution

Imagine this scene in Oklahoma City, in the early morning of 19 April 1995. Timothy McVeigh is driving into town in a rented removal lorry that contains a deadly fertiliser bomb: more than 6,000lbs of ammonium nitrate soaked in nitromethane fuel, supplemented by several sausage-shaped strings of commercial Tovex explosive, all of it wired up to blasting caps and shock tube.

McVeigh has driven down from Kansas, where he spent the previous day making the bomb with his old army buddy and fellow right-wing survivalist Terry Nichols. And now, the deadly plan he has worked on for so long, his gigantic, foolhardy act of revenge against his own government, is about to come to fruition. The front of his T-shirt bears the slogan shouted by John Wilkes Booth as he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, "Sic semper tyrannis". The back carries a quote from Thomas Jefferson: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Shortly before 9am, as he approaches the Alfred P Murrah federal building in improbably sunny weather, McVeigh pops in a pair of earplugs. He lights one five-minute fuse and another two-minute one. He parks in a handicapped-parking zone, right beneath the America's Kids infant daycare centre on the first floor, hops out of the truck and walks away into a series of alleys and streets, taking him safely out of his target's immediate shadow.

His getaway car, a busted-up 18-year-old Mercury Marquis, is parked several blocks away, exactly where he left it four days earlier (again, with Nichols's help). But he has covered barely 150 yards when the deafening roar of the explosion lifts him off his feet, knocks out the glass of the windows all around him, sets off hundreds of car alarms and causes the buildings, even at this distance, to shake violently, sending cascades of brick and stonework into the streets. One-third of the Murrah building has been obliterated, and 168 people - including 19 children - have been killed, in the deadliest peacetime assault on American soil.

That, at least, is Tim McVeigh's version of events. It is the story he gave to two journalists from his hometown of Buffalo, New York, in an extensive series of interviews that forms the centrepiece of the recent book American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma City Bombing. It is clearly the way he would like his act to be remembered, as he prepares for death by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary in Indiana next Wednesday. It is an account that, for all the media hullaballoo surrounding his execution, has gone largely unquestioned by the US's raucous punditocracy.

It is also, give or take a few details, the official version presented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and government lawyers at his trial in 1997. McVeigh, the argument ran, had some help from Nichols and another friend from army days, Michael Fortier, but essentially he carried out the bombing alone. No accomplices, no broader network of conspirators, nothing. Case closed, as far as the government was concerned.

Now imagine the scene all over again, this time with extra details supplied by eyewitnesses interviewed in the immediate aftermath of thebombing and by the investigative work of a handful of journalists, lawyers and academics who have spent the past six years going over every detail of the calamity to try to wheedle out its mysteries.

Suddenly, the picture is very different. McVeigh is still driving the yellow Ryder removal truck, but he is not alone. The truck contains the unmixed bomb components, minus the detonators and caps which are being transported separately, either in a brown 1970s-era Chevy pick-up or possibly another vehicle.

In the early morning, the vehicles pull up in a derelict section of Bricktown, a mile from the Murrah building, where the accomplices make the bomb at high speed, IRA-style. After filling nine of the 13 barrels in the back of the truck, they run out of nitromethane and switch to diesel fuel. McVeigh cuts open the Tovex sausages to insert the blasting caps (explaining why traces of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, are later found on his clothing).

Then, according to the accounts of at least 10 eyewitnesses, there is a flurry of activity across Oklahoma City in the hour before the bombing. Just after eight o'clock, the brown pick-up roars out of the Murrah building car park with McVeigh and another man inside. Half an hour later, the Ryder truck drives from Bricktown to the top of a hill a mile or so to the north. It is followed along part of the route by both the pick-up and the Mercury Marquis, the latter with three men inside. The truck waits at a tyre store, possibly for a radio signal giving the all-clear (hence the choice of a high altitude). McVeigh, identified once again as the Ryder driver, allays immediate suspicion by asking the store owner for directions to the Murrah building.

At about 8.45am, the Ryder pulls up across from the Regency Apartments, within sight of the target. Again, at least one person is seen with McVeigh, who goes into a convenience store on the ground floor of the building to buy two Cokes and a pack of cigarettes, even though he does not smoke.

At 8.57am, McVeigh pulls into the handicapped zone of the federal building, walks across the street and gets into the Mercury with another man. From the passenger side of the Ryder truck emerges yet another man, who jumps into the brown pick-up parked just in front and drives away. By the time the bomb explodes at 9.02am, both the Mercury and the pick-up are on the freeway heading north back up to Kansas.

Fact or fantasy? The result of confusion among traumatised eyewitnesses, or an elaborate scheme in which decoys and rapid place-shifting among vehicles are all part of the plan? And who are these supposed accomplices exactly? How many of them are there?

These are the questions that have been gnawing away at investigators and victims of the bombing from day one. The government itself spent more than a year hunting for a so-called "John Doe 2", a second bombing suspect, before giving up and switching its story to the lone-bomber theory. The original grand jury indictment named McVeigh, Nichols "and others unknown" in what it called a "conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction". When the defence team put McVeigh through a polygraph test, he passed on all questions concerning his own role; when asked whether anybody else was involved, however, he failed.

The FBI now says the supposition of a wider plot was simply wrong. Before one dismisses the alternate theory as the stuff of conspiratorial fantasy, however, it is worth examining the deep flaws in the government's side of the story and asking why its early lines of investigation into John Doe 2, the brown pick-up and the rest all came to naught. The reasons are neither as mysterious nor as murkily conspiratorial as one might think.

The government's problem is neatly summarised by Stephen Jones, who, as McVeigh's trial lawyer, had the advantage of examining every document and witness statement gathered by the prosecution. "They got very lucky very early, then their luck turned sour," he said. McVeigh was found in just 48 hours, largely thanks to the fact he had been pulled over on the freeway for a missing back licence plate and remanded in police custody for possession of an illegal concealed weapon. Nichols gave himself up in Kansas, and Fortier was a logical port of call because McVeigh had stayed extensively at his house in Arizona.

But the wider conspiracy proved maddeningly difficult to crack. The people who will be named in this article are well known to the authorities; indeed, most are by now either behind bars for other crimes or dead. At the time of the McVeigh and Nichols trials, however, their relationship to the bombing was either unknown or unsupported by sufficient evidence. Even the case against McVeigh was riddled with holes, leading several commentators at the time to speculate that he might be acquitted. The government team had to ask itself: should we dilute our case against McVeigh by admitting we can't nail his co-conspirators? Or should we simply pretend they don't exist? They plumped for the latter, and the fact that McVeigh was convicted and sentenced to death suggests it was indeed a smart strategy to bring to court. That, however, does not make it anything close to the full truth.

The government did not call a single eyewitness who saw McVeigh, either in Oklahoma City or in Junction City, Kansas, where the Ryder truck had been rented two days earlier. Why not? Because every one of them saw McVeigh with someone else. At Elliott's Body Shop, the rental agency, there are strong doubts whether McVeigh was seen at all. Although it was his alias, Robert Kling, that was used to secure the rental agreement, neither of the two men described by employees entirely fit McVeigh's profile. McVeigh had been filmed by a security camera at a nearby McDonald's 24 minutes before the time stamped on the rental agreement, wearing clothes that did not match either of the men seen at Elliott's. There is also no plausible explanation of how he travelled the mile and a quarter from McDonald's to the rental agency, carless and alone as he claims, without getting soaked in the rain. The three people interviewed agreed John Does 1 and 2 were dry.

According to Stephen Jones, who has seen the interview transcripts, it took 44 days for the FBI to convince the car rental agency owner that John Doe 1 was Timothy McVeigh. And in the end they did not dare put him on the witness stand, for fear of what might happen under cross-examination.

Jones, a man widely criticised - notably by his client - for his apparently gutless handling of the trial, could have called many of the eyewitnesses himself if he had wanted. His problem was that for all the evidence he could have presented about John Doe 2 (not to mention Does 3, 4, 5 and up), few if any of the witnesses would have proved exculpatory to McVeigh. The one person he did call, Daina Bradley, had seen a second man from inside the Murrah building; her credibility, however, was demolished under cross-examination when she admitted a history of mental problems and continuing trauma after the bombing, in which she lost two children and her mother and had to have her right leg hacked off without anaesthetic by rescue workers after it became trapped in rubble.

Jones was more successful in attacking the internal logic of the government's lone-bomber theory. It beggared belief that McVeigh would drive the Ryder truck several hundred miles with the bomb fully loaded, he argued, particularly given the history of car bombers inadvertently blowing themselves up in Northern Ireland. McVeigh himself had a close call with a car crash in Michigan in December 1994, when he was carrying detonators in his car; he swore at the time to be more careful around explosives.

And then there was the mystery of the extra leg. The rescue teams who cleaned up after the bombing had found nine severed left legs, but only eight bodies to match them with. The government's medical examiner confirmed this in court. Moreover, the state of the extra leg was consistent with someone who had been extremely close to the source of the blast. Who could it belong to? Jones is convinced it must be one of the bombers. In the course of his research he talked to the former chief state pathologist for Northern Ireland who had conducted more than 2,500 autopsies on bombing victims, and told him: "In the Western world, there is no such thing as an unclaimed innocent victim. Everyone gets claimed, sooner or later, unless there is a particular reason not to."

There are other questions for which the official account has no satisfactory answer, notably how McVeigh managed to support himself financially after he stopped regular paid work in late 1992. The bomb itself was not particularly expensive, no more than a few thousand dollars once you consider that the Tovex and blasting caps were stolen from a quarry in Kansas. But McVeigh led an extraordinarily itinerant lifestyle, particularly after November 1994, when he barely stopped moving, frantically criss-crossing the country in his car and staying in motels at almost every turn. Somehow, he paid cash for everything.

After he left the army, McVeigh actually fell heavily in debt, partly because of his habit of gambling on the Buffalo Bills football team. Terry Nichols, meanwhile, accumulated about $50,000 in credit-card bills by mid-1993. These are not problems that can be explained away by the pair's occasional selling activities at gun shows; numerous gun-show participants have testified they were usually so broke, they could not afford an exhibition table.

According to the official version of the bombing, the major source of funding was a November 1994 robbery at the Arkansas home of Roger Moore, a gun collector and self-made businessman who knew McVeigh from the gun-show circuit. Although McVeigh did not commit the robbery himself - who did is a source of some mystery - he has admitted being behind it, netting $8,700 in cash and an estimated $60,000 in silver bars, gold bullion, jewellery and firearms.

It is not clear, however, how much of this loot was put to use. Some of the weapons were later sold, but much of the rest was recovered untouched from a storage locker in Las Vegas where it had been stashed by Nichols. The Moore robbery only helps to account for one of several plane trips Nichols made to his mail-order bride's home in the Philippines, for which he paid cash every time. And it does not begin to explain how McVeigh - to take one example of many - repaid a $4,000 debt to his father in $100 bills a full year before the robbery.

From the start, there has been no lack of conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing, many of them absurd and many displaying the same government-hating bias that drove McVeigh. There was one claim that the bombing was a federal sting operation gone horribly wrong; another that there were explosive packs strapped to the internal pillars of the Murrah building, timed to go off at the same time as the fertiliser bomb. There is no credible evidence for either claim.

11 May 2001 12:19 GMT+1 Home > News > World > Americas

The Oklahoma Conspiracy - Part Two

The Aryan Republican Army could become a force to be reckoned with

10 May 2001

Internal links

McVeigh 'did not act alone in Oklahoma bombing'

The Oklahoma conspiracy. A special report by Andrew Gumbel

Forgotten' evidence could delay McVeigh execution

Much serious inquiry focused instead on Elohim City, a heavily armed religious compound in a remote part of eastern Oklahoma with strong links to a group of Aryan supremacists who had previously plotted to blow up the Murrah building in the 1980s. By macabre coincidence, one of those original conspirators, Richard Wayne Snell, was executed in Arkansas on the day of the bombing - for the murder of a state trooper and a pawnbroker whose name sounded Jewish - and his body brought to Elohim City the next day for burial.

It emerged that a secret informant for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), reporting from inside Elohim City, told her handlers in late 1994 that at least two residents, a formidable White Aryan Resistance leader called Dennis Mahon and a German ex-serviceman called Andreas Strassmeir, had talked about blowing up a government installation and mentioned the Murrah building as a possible target. She accompanied members of the commune on one of three field trips to Oklahoma City in late 1994 and early 1995. She also reported sightings of McVeigh at the compound under the pseudonym Tim Tuttle.

To many people, the link seemed irresistible, not least because one Elohim City resident, Michael Brescia, bore a striking resemblance to the composite sketch of John Doe 2, right down to the tattoo on his upper left arm. But nobody - not the few journalists who got into Elohim City and not, one presumes, the FBI - could quite join all the dots.

McVeigh admitted having met Andreas Strassmeir at a gun show in Tulsa in March 1993, and is on record as having made a brief phone call to Elohim City two weeks before the bombing, a call he now says was a part of an unsuccessful attempt to find a place to hide after 19 April. That, on its own, didn't prove much. There were reports of many other contacts and visits, but even these did not establish, without further corroboration, more than an association between like-minded people.

The ATF informant, Carol Howe, had her credibility hammered as the FBI accused her of mental instability and put her on trial for harbouring her own bomb plots. Many of the accusations against her were grossly unfair, seemingly the result of attempts ahead of the McVeigh trial to pour cold water on the whole Elohim City connection; she was acquitted of the charges against her in less than a week. Still, there are grounds for thinking she embroidered some of the reports she filed after the bombing to justify her hastily increased government pay cheque. Those who have met her in recent years have described her as "a walking crackpipe" - armed, paranoid, and living under a variety of aliases in ever-changing locations for fear of reprisals from the people she snitched on.

In short, after a burst of investigative energy in the first couple of years after the bombing, the conspiracy trail appeared to go cold. But that was before people had heard of the Aryan Republican Army.

Over a two-year period, from late 1993 until the end of 1995, a small band of robbers managed to hold up 22 banks across the American Midwest. It was an unfailingly colourful affair. The ringleader, Pete Langan, would shout "No alarms, no hostages!" as he leapfrogged over the tellers' desks and emptied their cash drawers. His main associate, Richard "Wild Bill" Guthrie, would yell phrases in Arabic, or Spanish, or Serbo-Croat, just to rattle everyone.

The team would snatch and run, making sure they were in and out in under 60 seconds. To sow confusion, they liked to leave a hoax explosive device on the scene, using real gunpowder and plenty of scary-looking wires to divert police attention. If possible, they used two getaway vehicles - the "drop car" they would abandon, plus their own Ford van they nicknamed "the Blitzenvagon". Sometimes, a fake bomb would be left in the drop car, too.

They liked to wear toyshop masks of politicians, a touch straight out of the 1991 Hollywood heist movie Point Break. They frequently donned costumes, wigs and make-up. They never failed to display a humorous sense of occasion. One Christmas, Langan dressed up as Santa and announced: "Ho ho ho, get down on the floor." One Easter, the fake explosive came in a little basket with Easter treats in it. Whenever they took off from an establishment, they would shout out: "Bank you very much!"

Before they were caught, the bankrobbers netted about $250,000 and, perhaps more remarkably, gave away almost nothing about their identities or their safe house in Pittsburg. Guthrie proved to be the weak link in the chain, first being cut out of new jobs because he was deemed too wild - he thought, for example, it was great fun to taunt law enforcement officials with announcements of the gang's exploits - and then betrayed to the police by a friend turned informer. Guthrie, in turn, squealed on the others.

When the FBI came for Langan, they opened fire on him in his truck (they thought, wrongly, that he had fired first), spraying him with more than 50 bullets but miraculously missing every time. They later discovered that he had shaved his pubic hair and painted his toenails pink. Yes, the ringleaders of the Midwest bank robbery gang were closet transvestites - and that was only the first of many secrets to be learned about them.

They were also virulent anti-government white supremacists, for whom bank robbery was merely a means to a much more ambitious end. "Make the land ungovernable - that's what we want to do," Langan, aka Commander Pedro, had said in an extraordinary recruitment video made at the height of the gang's success in early 1995.

Both Langan and Guthrie had frequented the Aryan Nations and other right-wing hate groups. They modelled themselves on the Order, the underground guerrilla movement that stole $3.8m from an armoured truck in California and killed the Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg in Denver in the early 1980s before going out in a blaze of gunfire in an FBI siege on Whidbey Island, near Seattle. They were fond of a propaganda novel called The Turner Diaries, written by the leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, in which a gang of revolutionaries blows up the FBI's Washington headquarters with a truck bomb. (The Turner Diaries was Tim McVeigh's favourite book, too.)

They had also read an influential neo-Nazi essay espousing the notion of "leaderless resistance" - developing a guerrilla-style cell structure in which nobody knew more than was strictly necessary and each element worked as independently as possible of the others.

The Aryan Republican Army (ARA) was born when Langan and Guthrie, after their first few successful robberies, went to see Mark Thomas, a Ku-Klux-Klan leader in western Pennsylvania, in search of new recruits. Thomas, in turn, put them in touch with Scott Stedeford and Kevin McCarthy, two young Philadelphia skinheads who had played together in a Nazi punk band called Cyanide. Soon, with HK-91 assault weapons packed into their old guitar cases, they formed a revolutionary cell whose aims stretched far beyond bank robbery.

"Mark... believed that if the Company [a nickname for the ARA inspired by the CIA] attacked various places like utilities, railways, communications and even government installations, [then] ARA would become a force that the government would have to reckon with," Guthrie wrote in a 300-page handwritten memoir that he completed in prison before hanging himself with a bedsheet in July 1996. Bob Mathews, the inspirational leader of the Order, had advocated something very similar a decade earlier.

The members of the ARA knew each other only by their first names, or by noms de guerre like Pedro (Langan), Pavell (Guthrie), Tuco (Stedeford) and Newt (McCarthy). They gathered at the safe house in Kansas, and later at a second one in Columbus, Ohio, discussing the coming revolution as they divided up the bank spoils between themselves and a Company fund set aside to finance other guerrilla cells.

In the recruitment video, a weird Pythonesque assemblage of goose-stepping, semi-humorous drunken rants, spoof commercial breaks and racist invective entitled "The Aryan Republican Army Presents: The Armed Struggle Underground", a masked Commander Pedro shows off his arsenal of weaponry and pulls wads of banknotes out of pickle jars on his desk, all the while declaring war on the "federal whores". "Linger on this continent at your own peril," he says. "We have endeavoured to keep collateral damage and civilian casualties to a minimum... but, as in all wars, some innocents shall suffer. So be it."

The full significance of these words did not become clear for several years. The leading academic researcher on the ARA, an Indiana State University criminologist called Mark Hamm, failed to see any meaningful link to McVeigh when he began writing about the group in 1997, even though his previous book had been about the Oklahoma City bomb and its roots in far-right political ideology.

"I thought I was done with the bombing and was now writing about a gang of bank robbers," Hamm said. But then something decidedly odd happened. In August last year, shortly before his book on the ARA was due to go to press, he sent the manuscript to Pete Langan at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he is serving life without parole. Langan, who has consistently denied all involvement in the Oklahoma bomb and denounced the killing of innocent civilians, phoned him to say the book was fine as far as it went but was missing a crucial element - the work of an Oklahoma journalist called JD Cash.

Cash is a name that anybody who looks into the Oklahoma City bombing runs into sooner or later. A former banker and property manager, he was inspired to go into journalism by a friend who was killed in the Murrah building and has devoted the last six years to a single subject, the bombing and the possible conspiracy behind it. His newspaper, the McCurtain Gazette, serves a tiny town in south-eastern Oklahoma called Idabel (pop: 6,500) and yet has somehow managed to break story after story on the bombing. ("Where the hell's Idabel?" one Justice Department official was overheard exclaiming after one spectacular leak of FBI documents in 1996.)

Despite mutterings about some kind of political agenda, Cash's information has proved unnervingly correct on numerous occasions. He got out in front of the story by forming a strategic alliance with McVeigh's defence team: he broke the ice for Stephen Jones's investigators with a number of key witnesses who were otherwise reluctant to talk to representativesof an indicted killer, and in return he got to see several confidential trial documents. He found out about McVeigh's 5 April phone call to Elohim City. He discovered Carol Howe and revealed that she had been a government informer. He was also convinced - and this is why Langan's tip was important - that the ARA was deeply involved in the bombing.

"Like many people, I had been a bit sceptical about Cash's work," Hamm explained. "But when the main character you're writing about tells you to go look somewhere, you go look." One of the first things Hamm did was to take the detailed timeline he had developed of the ARA's activities and overlay it with an equally detailed timeline on McVeigh, adding bits of Cash's research as he went. The result was akin to placing layers of the same film animation frame on top of each other - a remarkable series of concurrent and complementary events that fit so snugly together it became hard, if not impossible, to regard them as simple coincidence. Much of the activity centred on the four-state area comprising Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma, an area known historically as a hotbed of tax revolts, white supremacist Christian sects, Ku-Klux-Klan chapters and overt hostility to the federal government.

On 11-12 October 1993, McVeigh, Nichols and the ARA were all in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The ARA was there on an unsuccessful mission to rob an armoured truck in Springdale, 20 miles to the north; Guthrie wrote in his memoir that the job needed "at least one additional participant" and McVeigh had worked as an armoured truck driver. Fayetteville was close to Elohim City (McVeigh received a speeding ticket just four miles from the compound), and also to the home of the leader of the Arkansas Knights of the Ku-Klux-Klan who had met and possibly inducted both McVeigh and Guthrie a year earlier.

On 20 October, McVeigh wrote to his sister Jennifer saying he had met "a network of friends who share [my] beliefs". At the time of nine out of the ARA's first 10 bank jobs, which began around this time, McVeigh's whereabouts are unaccounted for. (The one exception was a robbery in Missouri in July 1994, when McVeigh was with his ailing grandfather in New York state.)

On Christmas Eve, 1993, McVeigh alluded to bank robberies in another letter to his sister: "The Federal Reserve and the banks are the real criminals, so where is the crime in getting even? I guess if I reflect, it's sort of a Robin Hood thing..." About a year later, according to Jennifer's testimony to the FBI, McVeigh produced a wad of $100 notes he claimed to have received as payment for helping to organise a bank robbery; he gave her three of them, asking her to exchange them for clean money. Shortly afterwards, Jennifer paid $25,000 in cash for a spanking new Jeep Cherokee.

On 12 September 1994, McVeigh checked into a hotel in Vian, Oklahoma, a 20-minute drive from Elohim City. He was later seen on the compound's gun range with Dennis Mahon, a close friend of Mark Thomas. Elohim City's residents at that time included two of the newer ARA members, Kevin McCarthy and Michael Brescia, the man later suspected of being John Doe 2, who also happened to be another Cyanide band member.

On 10-11 December 1994, McVeigh, McCarthy and Stedeford all attended the same gun show in Overland Park, a Kansas City suburb where Langan kept a residence for his cross-dressing escapades. At around this time, McVeigh wrote to his sister about "something big" that he was planning and added: "I have also been working and establishing a network of friends so that if someone does start looking for me, I will know ahead of time and be warned. If that tip ever comes (I have 'ears' all over the country) that's when I disappear or go completely underground." Langan and Guthrie, both wanted for a long catalogue of past crimes, had been successfully living beyond the reach of the law for two years.

At the beginning of February 1995, there was another startling series of coincidences. McVeigh broke off a gunshow tour of Kansas with Nichols and headed for Arizona. The ARA, who had been in Kansas at their safe house, also dropped everything and went to Arizona - the first time they had ever left the Midwest. Ostensibly, according to Guthrie's memoir, the idea was to find an armoured truck to rob in a Phoenix suburb, although no such robbery ever took place. The record of McVeigh's telephone card shows he called a few armoured truck companies in Arizona before starting his journey west. Both McVeigh and the ARA spent much of the next month and a half in Arizona.

When criminologist Mark Hamm saw the pattern, he was flabbergasted. "Are we to assume that these people came together by happenstance?" he said. "So many random coincidences have to be statistically impossible. There must have been some larger card at play."

The pattern only grew stronger once he added in the extraordinary legwork put in by the journalist JD Cash and a handful of other dogged reporters and investigators. These people had followed McVeigh's every step, quizzing anyone who might have seen him or had dealings with him, and painstakingly matched one eyewitness account against another to build up a fuller picture. Cash even passed himself off as a far-right activist for a while, accepting an invitation to speak at a neo-Nazi rally and allowing his work to appear on websites operated by militia groups. The purpose of this subterfuge was to gain access to individuals like informant Carol Howe, Dennis Mahon and the patriarch of Elohim City.

It was an investigative strategy fraught with personal risk, particularly after Cash told his extremist contacts in 1997 that he was not one of them after all. But it also paid off handsomely, netting Cash a trove of valuable new information that Hamm now considers to be at least 90 per cent reliable. For the past six months, the two men have pooled their information and found agreement on almost every key point.

The more Hamm looked at it, the involvement of the ARA was the only plausible explanation for the bombing. Looking to Elohim City for the key to the mystery had been only half-right, because these people were not based in any one place, did not communicate anything except on a strict "need-to-know" basis, and barely knew each others' names. They moved constantly across the country under a variety of aliases, operating entirely in cash.

According to the scheme laid out above, McVeigh and ARA had time to develop a history together. They had money to fund their ambitions. They also had the skills necessary to carry out the bombing - skills that McVeigh lacked on his own. Guthrie, for example, had been trained in explosives handling during his time as a Navy Seal (he was expelled for painting a swastika on a ship). Langan was a master of decoy, disguise and complex planning. McVeigh, by contrast, knew about weapons and armoured cars and trucks but little else. The notion, put forward in the book American Terrorist, that he taught himself bomb-making out of books does not pass muster with military experts.

"In criminology, there is a theory that the two elements you need to pull off a major crime are ideology and skill. I'd add to that and say you also need organisation and fanatical dedication," Hamm said.

Ideology was something shared by everyone, their anti-government rage sharpened by the deaths of more than 80 residents at the Branch Davidian religious compound near Waco, Texas, at the apocalyptic climax to a 51-day law enforcement siege that took place two years to the day before the Oklahoma bombing. The other three elements, however, were not apparent in McVeigh's official co-conspirators. Neither Nichols nor Fortier, the drug-addicted friend from Arizona whose trial testimony, following a plea bargain, proved crucial in securing McVeigh's conviction, had the necessary skills or experience. Both wavered in their commitment to the bombing several times, prompting McVeigh, according to Fortier's account, to storm off at one point in search of "some manly friends". A rich irony this: could he possibly have meant the transvestite Pete Langan?

The ARA, on the other hand, experienced no wavering, at least during the period in question. Hamm now believes the ARA financed several cells, some or all of which could have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing: McVeigh's operational cell, including Nichols and Fortier, whose key role was not so much to carry out the bombing as to take the fall for it if necessary; a security and fund-raising cell, essentially the hard core of the ARA; a training cell, led by Andreas Strassmeir, whose "platoon-sized groups" of militia trainees were noted in a May 1995 FBI report and prompted the federal authorities to think about a Waco-stye raid on Elohim City on two separate occasions; a bomb-building cell, and possibly a leadership cell, co-ordinated by people such as Mark Thomas and Dennis Mahon who had direct links to the elder statesmen of the far-right movement.

Why did none of this come out at the ARA trials? Why didn't the FBI, which had access to all the information, actively pursue the links to the Oklahoma bombing? The answer, as in the McVeigh trial, was largely to do with courtroom strategy. To be sure of convicting the surviving defendants - Langan, Stedeford, McCarthy, Brescia and Thomas - they persuaded two of them, McCarthy and Thomas, to testify against the others in exchange for reduced sentences. That, in turn, left them with a dilemma. If they introduced the idea of complicity in the bombing, they risked tainting the credibility of the two witnesses to such a degree that the prosecution might end up with no convictions for the bank robberies at all. And that, in turn, might jeopardise the prospects of pressing bomb conspiracy charges in the future. Was the risk worth it?

According to a confidential source who was involved, the FBI was initially very active in pursuing the bombing angle but then dropped all mention of it once the two witnesses entered the government protection programme. One can only speculate exactly why the feds made that decision, but embarrassment must have played some role. Embarrassment to admit they had some idea about McVeigh's possible accomplices after all. Embarrassment, too, over the fact that in 1992 the Secret Service let Langan out of prison following a Pizza Hut robbery in Georgia and paid for him to go home to Cincinnati on the understanding he would lead the authorities to Guthrie, who had been overheard threatening to assassinate President Bush. Langan strung the government along for six weeks before vanishing, with Guthrie, to begin a new underground life of anti-government subversion.

In his memoir, Guthrie dismisses Cash's early allegations of a link between McVeigh and the ARA as "flambéed gobbledygook", but he also describes the Oklahoma bombing as "the beginning of what lies [ahead]". He wrote: "Simply put, within 10 years it's my opinion that this country will resemble Sarajevo."

Here's one more intriguing titbit. In his witness statement to the FBI, Guthrie named one of the ARA bank robbery gang as an individual named "Tim". The FBI insists that "Tim" is a nickname for Brescia. (He wasn't arrested until six months after the others.) But isn't the FBI avoiding the more obvious conclusion - that "Tim" refers to McVeigh?

11 May 2001 12:20 GMT+1 Home > News > World > Americas

The Oklahoma Conspiracy - Part 3

'As in all wars, some innocents shall suffer. So be it'

10 May 2001

Internal links

McVeigh 'did not act alone in Oklahoma bombing'

The Oklahoma conspiracy. A special report by Andrew Gumbel

Forgotten' evidence could delay McVeigh execution

Nobody knows exactly what McVeigh and the ARA got up to in Arizona in February and March 1995, but something else was going on that may have been directly related to them. Two survivalists called Steve Colbern and Dennis Malzac began experimenting with detonators and small explosives in the desert outside Kingman, the town where Michael Fortier lived and McVeigh had taken up temporary residence.

McVeigh had heard about Colbern from Roger Moore, the businessman robbed in Arkansas three months previously, and had written him a recruitment letter at the end of November 1994 that was never received: a water company employee found it strapped to the leg of a transmission tower on the Arizona-California border. "I'm not looking for talkers, I'm looking for fighters," McVeigh had written. "And if you are a fed, think twice."

On 21 February, a large ammonium nitrate bomb exploded outside the home of one Rocky McPeak, just outside Kingman, apparently the work of Colbern, Malzac and a local loan shark called Clark Vollmer. McPeak later testified to an Oklahoma grand jury investigation that when he went to Vollmer's home the next day to confront him about it, he found McVeigh and another unidentified man there. Was the McPeak incident a trial run for Oklahoma City, with McVeigh taking lessons in bomb-building?

During this time, McVeigh was described by several people as agitated to the point of paranoia, leading to speculation that he was strung out on crystal meth. By his own admission, he had tried the drug before, and crystal meth does not lend itself easily to occasional use. It is noted for the short-term sense of empowerment it gives its users, and its tendency to instill paranoid delusions. On several occasions, a stream of people was seen flowing in and out of McVeigh's motel room, and in one establishment his guests made so much noise that he was thrown out. This was not the behaviour of a lone-wolf terrorist mastermind.

As 19 April approached, the number of coincidences and bizarre sightings multiplied. An unusual flag previously seen in the ARA's propaganda video, featuring a coiled snake against a white background, appeared outside Michael Fortier's Kingman home.

In February, Guthrie bought a 1970s-era Chevy pickup, the same make and era as the vehicle seen so often in Oklahoma City on the morning of the bombing. On 1 April, a pickup matching its description was seen outside Terry Nichols' house in Herington, Kansas.

Also on 1 April, Stedeford, McCarthy and Thomas went to Elohim City, ostensibly to wait for the funeral of Richard Snell following his execution in Arkansas. But they, along with Dennis Mahon, left again a few days before the funeral had taken place. Thomas went to Pennsylvania and Mahon to Illinois, possibly to establish alibis for the bombing. The whereabouts of the other two men on 19 April are unknown.

Then, as first reported in the Denver Post, there were the anomalous sightings of yellow moving trucks around Kansas and Oklahoma, well before the Ryder was rented from Elliott's on 17 April. As early as 8 April, one was seen parked outside the Lady Godiva strip club in Tulsa, at the same time as three men, later identified as McVeigh, Strassmeir and Brescia, were inside. A showgirl, captured on a dressing-room security video, told her fellow strippers that one of the three had boasted to her: "On 19 April 1995, you'll remember me for the rest of your life."

Another yellow truck, along with a Chevy pickup, turned up on 10 April at Geary Lake in Kansas, not far from Nichols's house. The truck was seen again repeatedly over the next week, both at the lake, where McVeigh claimed he mixed the bomb with Nichols, and at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, where McVeigh checked in on the 14th.

Were the witnesses imagining things, or was there a deliberate strategy to try to confuse everyone? Mark Hamm argues vigorously for the latter, pointing to the ARA's track record of switch cars, disguises and very careful staking of their territory before every crime.

If he is right, then who exactly was in Oklahoma City on 19 April? That is a tough question, and no serious researcher claims to have anything close to a definitive answer. Michael Brescia, with his strong resemblance to John Doe 2, is a leading candidate. So too is Pete Langan, whose likeness was captured with remarkable accuracy in an artist's sketch of a man seen by a loading bay worker in downtown Oklahoma City who signalled in vain to the Ryder truck to pull into his slot as it approached.

As for the others, one can only guess. Hamm describes the left leg recovered without a body as "The Phantom", a member of the bombing team whose identity has never even been hinted at. "I'm not saying I have all the answers. I don't have any smoking gun. As a criminologist I look for patterns and develop theories. I don't necessarily have hard evidence that can stand up in court."

That probably also summarises the way government investigators feel about their flawed efforts. For all the bruising disappointments and public distortions of the past six years, the FBI can at least console itself that most, if not all, of the suspected conspirators are out of harm's way - for the moment. Guthrie is dead, and Langan is in prison for life. But Brescia got only six years, and Thomas and McCarthy - who will be under government supervision as protected witnesses when they are released - were given eight and five respectively. Stedeford got 20 years, but could well be out sooner. And that's not to mention those suspects who have escaped the judicial heat altogether: Dennis Mahon, who still lives in Tulsa, and Andreas Strassmeir, who returned to Germany nine months after the bombing.

It remains to be seen how the public reacts once these findings receive a wide airing. Hamm's book - now heavily rewritten - will be published in the autumn. Will Americans accept his conclusions and, if so, will they find the justice system at fault?

The man best placed to fill in the gaps and provide some concrete answers is, of course, McVeigh himself. He has given little away in his correspondence and in media interviews, beyond what he told the two Buffalo journalists for their book. In a few days, assuming that here is no dramatic 11th-hour reversal, he will be strapped into a mounted stretcher at the US penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and become the first federal prisoner to be put to death in almost 40 years.

Nobody doubts his guilt, which he now freely confesses. Everyone agrees that he is utterly unrepentant. John Ashcroft, President Bush's ultra-conservative attorney general, would have us believe that his death, which is to be broadcast on closed-circuit television to the victims and their relatives in Oklahoma City, will enable the country to achieve "closure".

Shouldn't we worry, though, that the networks of guerrilla activism that gave rise to the bombing may be very far from closed? Aren't there a few things the world's most notorious mass murderer should tell us before he is allowed to depart this life and descend into silence for ever? Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com

Thu, 10 May 2001 Norman Solomon <mediabeat@igc.org>

EXECUTING McVEIGH: THE MEDIA RITES OF RETRIBUTION

By Norman Solomon / Creators Syndicate

For half a century, we've been watching rituals of retribution. Countless entertainment shows on TV have presented certain vengeance as dramatic justice. In time for the last commercial, the designated bad guys got what was coming to them.

These days, news coverage -- or what passes for it -- tends to edge out fictional concoctions. The surfaces of pathos, anguish and suffering are readily available without scripts, actors or set designers. Around the country, local news programs air plenty of crime sensations with yellow police tape in the background. Cable channels strive to offer the latest shootings in progress. And trials can't miss: Inside a courtroom, everyone makes a perfect cameo appearance.

A week before the scheduled execution of Timothy McVeigh, the major cable networks -- CNN, Fox and MSNBC -- could hardly tear themselves away from the spectacle of a 14-year-old boy as he testified about what happened when he shot a teacher, taking an adult's life and shattering his own. The camera work and sound quality were crystal clear.

McVeigh's crime, we're told, was the deadliest act of terrorism ever on U.S. soil. Among the 168 people he killed were 19 young children. From prison, he has insisted on describing the kids he murdered as "collateral damage." It's a phrase that disturbed some media consumers a decade ago, during the Gulf War, when it was the euphemism of choice for top Pentagon officials and many American reporters.

In a recent statement to a Fox News Channel correspondent, McVeigh said: "Collateral damage? As an American news junkie, a military man, and a Gulf War veteran, where do they think I learned that?"

Unrepentant and preferring to undergo capital punishment now rather than later, McVeigh has declined to appeal his death sentence, a move that would have delayed his execution for years. He expresses no remorse about setting off a bomb at the federal building in Oklahoma City. Explaining his motives to the authors of a new biography, McVeigh commented: "I did it for the larger good." With more diplomatic language, that's the sort of remark that U.S. officials frequently made during the Gulf War.

If McVeigh were black or brown instead of white -- and if he had grown accustomed to the idea of inflicting lethal violence as a member of a gang instead of as a member of the U.S. Army -- it's a safe bet that news media would have flooded us with feature reports, analysis and commentaries about the inner-city culture of violence and pathology that produced him. But in McVeigh's case, we're made to understand that he was a bad apple in a wholesome barrel overseen by Uncle Sam. The good apples, the ones we can all be proud of, understood that killing is laudable only when authorized.

And now, it has been authorized in Terre Haute. During the days before his execution in that Indiana city, T-shirts with his face on them have been selling briskly. A simple message is printed on those souvenir shirts: "Die, die, die."

Long ago, Bertrand Russell observed: "The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly, I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses."

The slaying of Tim McVeigh promises to be an unprecedented pageant of capital punishment. Advance stories predict that 2,000 journalists will descend on Terre Haute for the festivities.

In Newsweek's words, the execution "will be shown on closed-circuit television to several hundred victims of the Oklahoma City bombing and their families -- the biggest crowd to watch an execution since the 1930s." In theory, the audience will be limited. But some of the viewers will surely be on national TV to describe what they saw. Bootlegged videos are likely to find their way to a wider audience.

If "we," ostensibly represented by the state, are going to kill with premeditated executions, then we may as well see the grisly results. But why stop there?

A lot of babies perish due to social conditions that could be prevented by a shift in government priorities. For the first time in a quarter-century, the latest annual figures tell us, infant mortality rates have not dropped in the United States -- remaining at 7.2 infants per 1,000 births. Meanwhile, the Children's Defense Fund says, 10.8 million of the nation's children are lacking health insurance.

Unfortunately, there's no media frenzy to cover what happens when the state, in effect, routinely kills many Americans simply by inaction -- not enforcing workplace-safety rules, or not reducing air pollution that menaces people chronically short of breath, or not providing health care for the uninsured.

With the corporate-dominated state functioning as a serial killer every day, news outlets should shine a bright light on its innocent victims.

____________________________________________________

Norman Solomon's weekly syndicated column -- archived at www.fair.org/media-beat/ -- focuses on media and politics. For online audio of his recent speech about media coverage of "globalization," go to: www.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20010430.html#3

*****

McVeigh's attorneys get evidence withheld by FBI Jerry Seper

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published 5/11/01

Attorneys for convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh could ask a federal court to delay Wednesday's scheduled execution pending a hearing to determine if the FBI improperly withheld documents that should have been turned over to the defense.

FBI officials told a federal judge yesterday that the bureau had mistakenly withheld more than 3,000 documents from McVeigh's attorneys, who last night said they were considering "all options."

Federal officials said the error was discovered when FBI agents began gathering up evidence in the case to be moved to the bureau's archives.

Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said the department had notified McVeigh's attorneys that a number of FBI documents that should have been provided to them during the discovery phase of the trial had not been turned over.

"While the department is confident the documents do not in any way create any reasonable doubt about McVeigh's guilt and do not contradict his repeated confessions of guilt, the department is concerned that McVeigh's attorneys were not able to review them at the appropriate time," she said.

"The documents have been made available to McVeigh's attorneys, and the department has asked for notification if they believe any of the documents create any reasonable doubt about McVeigh's guilt," she said.

In a letter last night to the defense lawyers, Sean Connelly, special attorney to Attorney General John Ashcroft, said the documents included material generated by FBI field offices outside Oklahoma City and consisted of transcripts of sworn statements and interviews of witnesses by FBI agents and other physical evidence, including photographs, written correspondence and tapes.

The material was generated at FBI field offices in at least 30 states and in Paris, as part of a massive FBI investigation known as "OKBOMB."

Mr. Connelly wrote that FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Agent Danny Defenbaugh, who headed the Oklahoma City field office, had requested on numerous occasions that the documents be forwarded to Oklahoma City "and had received numerous assurances that all such materials had been forwarded."

"We do not believe anything produced is Brady material bearing on the federal convictions or sentences of Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols," Mr. Connelly wrote. "Similarly, we do not believe anything in the materials even makes a prima facie showing of either man's actual innocence. ... We are producing the materials so you can make your own determinations."

None of the documents is expected to be favorable to McVeigh or Nichols, according to law enforcement sources.

The FBI, which initiated an internal investigation yesterday to determine how the records were overlooked, referred inquiries in the matter last night to the Justice Department.

McVeigh's attorneys, led by Ron Nigh and Nathan Chambers, were given the documents last night and are said to be considering their next move.

The documents were flown to McVeigh's Denver defense team on an FBI plane. The papers also were delivered to attorneys for Nichols, who is serving a life sentence for helping plan the bombing.

Mr. Chambers said he had spoken personally with McVeigh about the FBI's failure to turn over the documents. He said McVeigh indicated he would consider the matter and decide on how best to proceed. Mr. Chambers did not elaborate.

"Here we are a full six years after the bombing and less than a week before Mr. McVeigh's scheduled execution and these reports mysteriously appear. So it's a cause for concern," he said.

Lawyers and others close to the case noted, however, that McVeigh may not agree to any delay. He already has boasted of his guilt, claimed sole responsibility for the bombing, expressed his willingness to die as scheduled and has refused all appeals.

U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch, who heard the McVeigh case, was not available last night for comment.

A jury in Oklahoma City found McVeigh guilty in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in which 168 persons were killed. The same jury recommended the death penalty, which Judge Matsch ordered.

McVeigh is scheduled to become the first person executed under federal law since 1963.

He is slated to die by lethal injection at 7 a.m. Wednesday at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

*****

OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBINGS---SPLIT IN FBI?
FURTHER DETAILS by Sherman H. Skolnick

5/11/01

skolnick@ameritech.net http://www.skolnicksreport.com

The following further details in this report might be helpful in understanding the situation:

1. As stated, the head of the McVeigh defense team, attorney Stephen Jones, prior to the 1997 McVeigh murder trial, filed a Petition for Mandamus, an extra-ordinary attempted remedy in the U.S. Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit, Denver. Because of perceived prejudice against a fair trial in Oklahoma, the case had been transferred to Denver U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch. Prior to the beginning of the trial, Jones was attempting to force Judge Matsch to order the release of secret records in the possession of U.S. intelligence agencies, corroborating that U.S. dissidents were secretly surrogates for an Iraqi revenge plot to carry out a major terrorist attack on an Oklahoma City federal office building. That these records, also referred to in secret court records, would show Iraqi complicity, as known in advance by U.S. intelligence agencies, as referred to in Jones' unpublicized Petition of some 185 pages.

The spy-riddled monopoly press did not bring out an important detail. Namely, that Judge Matsch was intimidated into keeping these records secret to protect the Clinton White House cover-up of the multiple bombings of the Murrah Building as well as protecting the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and others of the spy agency Establishment. How? Judge Matsch's daughter was apparently murdered. She somehow fell into a volcano in Hawaii. This apparent murder made the Judge naturally distraught. The apparent murder example also was known to and intimidated the Federal Appeals Judges in Denver who after the McVeigh murder trial, conducted without these highly revealing records, upheld the District Court's guilty verdict of McVeigh. So both the trial judge and the federal appeals Judges in Denver had been coerced into going along with a cover up by murder close to home.

Will trial Judge Matsch and/or the federal appeals judges, all apparently intimidated by the apparent murder, do something at this late date to bring out the true nature of the bombings of a federal office building in Oklahoma City?

2. The apparent split in the FBI by which some three thousand records suddenly showed up also involves the super-secret Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. Seldom accurately referred to by the pressfakers, FEMA is not authorized OR FUNDED by Congress. According to very well placed sources, FEMA secretly funds their covert operations, planning to run the U.S. FROM ABOVE THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, with huge funds garnered from the CIA's dope trafficking into the U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney has promoted the idea that FEMA should take over all anti-terrorist planning of the U.S., thus excluding the FBI, and causing a rift between the FBI and FEMA. Yes, FEMA seeks to run the U.S. from ABOVE the U.S. Constitution and yes, I recognize such a doing is itself unconstitutional.

[The martial law edict, quietly signed several years ago by President Clinton and carried over by alleged "President" or White House "resident" George W. Bush, provides---now get this---that no judge in the U.S. has jurisdiction to consider any challenge to the martial law edict. We are about the only ones publicly stating that several federal judges in the U.S. wear two hats---one as federal judge, and two, generally unknown, as FEMA official. One such judge sits in the Federal Court in Chicago. We pointed all these details out in a several hundred page documented lawsuit, in January, 1991, against FEMA, in Chicago's Federal District Court. Yes, a federal judge on behalf of FEMA dismissed our suit in secret, without any legal formality.]

3. Despite the military coup planned against Clinton as President, referred to in our story, Clinton was never concerned. Why? Because he had reason to know that his rise to and stay in power was orchestrated with the aid of blackmail and murder. We mentioned how supposed "Independent Counsel" Kenneth W. Starr was blackmailed. Clinton benefitted from an epidemic of suspicious if not sabotaged military aircraft crashes and from the strange death of those who knew too much about Clinton and about the military coup plot against him.

One of those who knew too much and was reportedly sympathetic if not supportive of the coup, was General David McCloud, head of he Alaska Military District. He died in a sabotaged plane crash. His military colleagues are aware of the terrible details but refuse to allow a reporter to publicly identify them or take their position public. His relatives tend to agree with our details.

4. Some in the monopoly press, who talk to us off the record and we agree never to identify them as sources, contend such details as in our stories, which they believe to be true but cannot go in print or on the air with them, could well topple the U.S. government. Why? Because the ruling elite, whose faces are seldom seen, are governing us from behind the scenes in contradiction of the U.S. Constitution and laws.

5. Is there a rationale by the ruling elite for the cover up of the true nature of the bombings of the Murrah Building? They fear, supposedly, a full scale war with Iraq which now has chemical and biological weapons as well as some types of nuclear bomb devices. Furthermore, any ruckus with Iraq over the Murrah Building inevitably would involve the current German government Establishment. Why? A German counter-intelligence agent, on behalf of Iraq, supervised the U.S. domestic dissidents in the limited role outside the Murrah Building while others had already planted explosive devices INSIDE the building to go off about the same moment as the ineffective truck fertilizer bomb outside. That agent,known to the American CIA, reportedly was Andreas Strasmeier, whose elders reportedly were pro-Hitler. Little understood: German industry has supplied much of the weaponry for Iraq. And, they built a 60-foot-under-the-ground bomb shelter for Saddam Hussein as well as other super-secret buildings, machines, and weaponry for Iraq. All while Germany professes to be pro-West and pro-U.S.

Also, in our stories about the murder of Clinton White House Deputy Counsel Vincent W. Foster, Jr., we mentioned that German Counter-Intelligence [also tied to Strasmeir] in Frankfurt, had advance knowledge of a foreign team set to murder Foster. [See our website stories, "Greenspan Aids and Bribes Bush", Part Four.] And study our website story about how Foster was part of a team, trying to assist the FBI, in arresting international swindler Marc Rich, at the Swiss/French border [Affidavit of former CIA operative Leo Wanta.]

In an honest world, if McVeigh is to be severely punished for his limited role in the bombings, also deserving of major punishment would be William Rockefeller Clinton and his crony, George W. Bush, as well as the Elder Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, for their cover up complicity in the 168 murders on behalf of Iraq.

6. Timothy McVeigh, a purported expert in secret code usage, cryptography, has been communicating in code with author Gore Vidal who was on an extremely short list of those McVeigh wanted to witness his supposed execution. {Study Gore Vidal's book "1876" and how it predicted the strange 2000 election. See our website series on the year 2000 alleged election.] Gore Vidal, a third level cousin of Albert Gore, Jr.,[they are on the outs with each other] reportedly has a witnessed Affidavit from Timothy McVeigh supposedly setting forth "smoking gun" details that could scandalize the American government and Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, and Bush's son, George W.

How is it that high-level types are so dedicated to destroying and discrediting the American central government? Isn't this something the British monarchy and aristocracy have been trying to do since at least the War of 1812? And British complicity in the murders of President Abraham Lincoln, President James Garfield, and President William McKinley, all who opposed the British plans to take back this continent and its peoples as subjects of a British colonial rule.

[Visit our website series, "Greenspan Aids and Bribes Bush", to which are attached secret Federal Reserve wire transfer records showing billions and billions of dollars, from worldwide illicit dope trafficking and such, to the joint account of the Bush family with the Queen of England at her private bank, owned by the Queen, Coutts Bank London, as authorized under the secret codes of Greenspan.]

More coming. Stay tuned.

*****

Monday May 7 7:57 AM ET Judge Dismisses Bombing Lawsuit

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - A federal judge has dismissed a libel lawsuit filed by a former FBI (news - web sites) official who was alleged to have had advance knowledge of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Oliver ``Buck'' Revell, a retired FBI associate deputy director, complained that a book, ``The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror,'' accused him of allowing the mass murder of the 259 people on board the flight and 11 more on the ground.

The book, by David M. Hoffman, claimed Revell had prior knowledge of the bombing and pulled his son and daughter-in-law off the plane in London.

Revell said his son was briefly booked on the flight, but had left London a week earlier. His daughter-in-law was in the United States.

Judge Robin J. Cauthron ruled Thursday that Revell had not shown that the author or his publisher knew the statements were false.

The publisher, Feral House Inc., agreed in 1999 to destroy all copies of the book because of the inaccuracies.

If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit:

http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist

Or, e-mail konformist-subscribe@egroups.com with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com

WorldNetDaily, May 19, 2001

Witnesses heard multiple explosions
Experts say Murrah Building damage not done by truck blast alone

By Jon Dougherty
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

Multiple witnesses reported hearing more than one explosion the day the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City was bombed, while other explosives experts contend that the damage done to the building could not have been caused by a single bomb placed outside in a truck.

According to excerpts of a new 500-page report authored by the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Commission, led by ex-Oklahoma state Rep. Charles Key, "the FBI concluded that the damage to the Murrah Building was caused by one ammonium nitrate truck bomb, which was concealed in a 20-foot Ryder rental truck."

However, the commission's report said, multiple witnesses "have testified to hearing a second bomb" go off shortly after 9 a.m. the morning of April 19, 1995.

Furthermore, the report said, "explosives experts contend that the extent of the damage to the building" -- of which aerial photos showed nearly one-third was destroyed -- "could not have resulted from a single truck bomb. …"

...

As the commission report showed, there were discrepancies in witness accounts, seismological accounts, and even official federal accounts about the bomb's makeup, the shock waves it caused and specific characteristics surrounding the bomb's size.

The report said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms "reported the blast as being the result of a car bomb containing 1,200 pounds of … ANFO. Then, it was reported that the bomb weighed 4,000 pounds. The story changed again immediately preceding [McVeigh's 1997 federal] trial [in Denver, Colo.] when it was asserted that the bomb was a mixture of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane (ANNM), weighing 4,800 pounds."

...

Reports of other devices
In an interview with Oklahoma City police and fire department officials in the days after the bombing, Firehouse Magazine -- a trade journal for firefighters -- quoted officials who said "four bomb scares" were eventually reported: 10 a.m., 10:22 a.m., 10:45 a.m., and 1:51 p.m., all on April 19, the day of the bombing.

Furthermore, the commission said, the "Oklahoma Final Report," which was issued in July 1996 and published by the City of Oklahoma, reported two bombs. According to this report, the commission noted, "a bomb scare occurred at 10:29 a.m. and … 1:30 p.m.," and that "both times the building was evacuated."

full article is at http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=22874

Official Website of the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee
http://www.okcbombing.org/

Order the 500-page report that exposes the lies
http://bombing.tv/

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh:
the making of a mass murderer

By David Walsh
19 April 2001

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is scheduled to die May 16 by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. On April 19, 1995, McVeigh detonated a seven-ton truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people, including 19 children, in the deadliest act of terrorism ever committed on US soil.

The impending execution has once again raised issues surrounding the bombing and the figure of McVeigh himself. Various commentaries have appeared in the media, most of them superficial in the extreme. As a rule, they go no farther than discussing McVeigh's subjective motives, and generally reach the conclusion that he is nothing more than a monstrous aberration, whose emergence is not related to broader social questions.

Approaching McVeigh in this manner is not only inadequate, it is an evasion. To grasp the Oklahoma City tragedy and the character of its perpetrator requires seriously examining and coming to grips with some ugly truths about American society.

The most striking and immediate aspect of McVeigh and the atrocity he committed is something official commentators pass over in virtual silence—the intense alienation from society and its official establishment that he exhibits. What accounts for such a level of alienation, and the anti-social form it has assumed in the figure of McVeigh? What is the socio-psychological process that transformed a working class youth into an unrepentant mass murderer?

McVeigh's cold-blooded act horrified millions in the US and around the world. But a recently published book, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by two Buffalo News reporters, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, reports that McVeigh has no regrets about his act. He openly acknowledged having set off the bomb to the authors and claims sole responsibility for the mass killing. During an appearance on ABC News's “Prime Time Thursday” March 29, Herbeck commented, “He [McVeigh] never expressed one ounce of remorse for the Oklahoma City bombing.” Michel described McVeigh's reaction to the explosion's aftermath: “Damn, I didn't knock the building down. I didn't take it down.”

According to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh claimed not to have known that a day-care center was located in the Murrah Building, and that if he had known it, in his own words, “it might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage.”

Michel and Herbeck quote McVeigh, with whom they spoke for some 75 hours, on his attitude to the victims: “To these people in Oklahoma who have lost a loved one, I'm sorry but it happens every day. You're not the first mother to lose a kid, or the first grandparent to lose a grandson or a granddaughter. It happens every day, somewhere in the world. I'm not going to go into that courtroom, curl into a fetal ball, and cry just because the victims want me to do that.”

McVeigh's lack of remorse for the deaths of 19 children, as well as secretaries, clerks, administrators and others employed by the federal government, and the dozens of people who were merely visiting the building, should serve as a warning about the character of elements promoted by the ultra-right in the US. They are brutal, cowardly and ruthless.

While American Terrorist contains some valuable material, it provides little insight into the social source of McVeigh's act. Indeed Michel and Herbeck end their work on the following note: “The same imponderable question haunts those who lost sons, daughters, spouses, friends, and other loved ones when America's long-simmering tensions over gun rights and big government exploded in Oklahoma City. Why?” This amounts to an admission of failure on the part of authors who, by all rights, should have dedicated their 388-page book to answering that very question.

One would certainly not go to the house-organ of liberal complacency, the New York Times, for an explanation of “ Why?” The Times, in a March 30 editorial, denounces McVeigh without making any effort to explain the conditions that produced him. The newspaper's editorial asserts that the Oklahoma City bomber's comments reveal “a mind warped by self-induced militancy and by a detached, phonily objective language of profit and loss.” The editorial writers of the Times imply there are no social circumstances in the US that would justify militant opposition to the status quo, from any quarter, left or right. The editorial absolves American society; McVeigh, according to the logic of the Times, in no way reflects on the social and political order as a whole.

Human beings, however, are social creatures and develop their personalities and psyches as members of a particular society under definite historical conditions. Their essence is the composite of their social relationships. Individuality lies in the specific and unique manner in which a man or woman reflects and refracts a variety of social and historical processes.

The growth of the extreme right in the US, a process that has had semi-official sponsorship over a period of decades, made it virtually inevitable that someone would carry out an atrocious act like the Oklahoma City bombing. For Timothy McVeigh to turn out to be that someone, many things in his life had to fall into place.

Economic blight

Two social processes come together in the life experience of Timothy McVeigh—economic blight and political reaction.

McVeigh was born in April 1968 in Lockport, a town of some 23,000 in western New York state, 20 miles northeast of Buffalo and 15 miles east of Niagara Falls. Lockport is cut in half by the Erie Canal, from whose locks the town gets its name.

The Buffalo area was a major business and industrial center by the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1910 Henry Harrison began making automotive radiators in a small shop in Lockport. By 1920 Harrison Radiator was a division of General Motors and remained one until 1995, when Harrison Thermal Systems was spun off to Delphi Automotive Systems. Harrison remains the largest employer in Lockport. Both Timothy McVeigh's grandfather (30 years) and father (36 years) worked at the Harrison plant.

By the late 1970s the state of western New York's economy and the automobile and steel industries that formed its backbone had begun to worsen dramatically. Harrison stopped hiring in 1979. The steel mills in the Buffalo area were decimated in the early 1980s by slump and international competition. The city and region entered into a spiral of decline.

As a 1995 Washington Post profile noted: “McVeigh's teens coincided with the most traumatic economic times since the Depression. Buffalo's experience was typical of the Rust Belt. Major blue-collar employers—auto and steel—shut down or downsized dramatically. Two major banks failed, throwing thousands of white-collar workers out of jobs and causing downturns in real estate, advertising, law and other fields.”

On the same day in early April 2001 that the Buffalo News published the third and final excerpt of Michel and Herbeck's book on McVeigh, it carried an article reporting that the Buffalo Niagara region had “lost a bigger share of its population during the 1990s than any major metropolitan area in the nation,” according to an analysis of the recently-released 2000 census figures. The decline dropped Buffalo-Niagara from the thirty-fourth to the forty-third largest metropolitan region in the US.

Political environment

Economic decay has been accompanied over the last quarter century by a growth of social inequality that has increasingly split American society into two worlds: a small, fabulously wealthy elite and the vast bulk of the population, either struggling to get by or living in outright poverty. This has been as true in the Buffalo area as everywhere else. A few suburbs have flourished, while the inner city has decayed and once relatively stable working class communities have deteriorated.

Decay and social polarization, however, cannot entirely explain Timothy McVeigh's evolution. Why did the discontent in the late 1980s and early 1990s primarily take the form of the growth of right-wing militia-type movements? Why was there not a growing movement against capitalism? Why did McVeigh's own disaffection take a right-wing direction?

McVeigh came to maturity during the years of the Reagan presidency, a period characterized by a relentless attack on the living standards and gains of the working class and an equally ferocious assault by right-wing ideologues against every current of progressive social thought. Anticommunism, directed against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union, militarism, racism, national chauvinism, religious bigotry and fanaticism, conformism and a general intellectual deadening—every form of reaction flourished. This had its consequences.

In McVeigh's case, the barrage of right-wing propaganda apparently combined with an emotional vulnerability—his parents' marriage began to break up when he was 11; he was slightly built and bullied in school—to form a particular kind of paranoid adolescent personality.

From an early age, he was obsessed with survivalism. At 14 (1983) he was stockpiling food, camping equipment and weapons “in case of a nuclear attack or the communists taking over the country,” according to a neighbor. Accounts of the tribulations endured during the gas shortage of 1973-74, plus his own experience during the great blizzard of 1977, when Buffalo was virtually shut down and large numbers of people were left without means of transportation, helped convince McVeigh that individuals had to learn to fend for themselves.

According to Michel and Herbeck, he read gun magazines voraciously and ordered books from advertisements on their pages. “One that captivated him was a volume entitled To Ride, Shoot Straight and Speak the Truth, by Jeff Cooper, a military man and a world-renowned expert on self-defense. ... The Turner Diaries was another book that hit a nerve. The novel by former American Nazi Party official William L. Pierce (under the pen name Andrew McDonald) had become a kind of bible for a loose movement of gun collectors, militia groups, and government protesters after its publication in 1978.” The book's narrative “is sympathetic to Adolf Hitler, suggests that blacks and Jews are inherently evil, and advocates killing them.”

Apocalyptic and anticommunist Hollywood films also captivated McVeigh, including The Omega Man, Logan's Run, the Planet of the Apes series and especially the 1983 Cold War screed Red Dawn (directed by right-winger John Milius)—about a group of small-town teenagers who become guerrilla fighters when “communists” invade the US—which he rented four times. He also favored militaristic fantasies like First Blood, the first of the Rambo films, and Missing in Action, in which Chuck Norris rescues American prisoners of war. McVeigh began collecting guns and firing them, going so far as to purchase a 10-acre piece of property in southwestern New York with a friend where they could fire their weapons in peace.

During the 1980s right-wing politicians and media types stirred up racism, often couched in attacks on “welfare cheats” and the like. McVeigh grew up in a lily-white community where, according to Michel and Herbeck, “brown and black faces were about as common as Martians.” After a brief stint at a two-year business college—he scored high on mathematical aptitude tests and had an early interest in computers and the Internet—McVeigh went to work for an armored car service in Buffalo. He got his first exposure “to racism during those armored-car runs through the city. On runs to check-cashing shops on the East Side of Buffalo, his white co-workers spared little sympathy for the shop's heavily minority clientele and the minorities who lived in the area.”

McVeigh's unhappy or distorted relations with women helped fuel his rage. His mother took the active role in breaking up his parents' marriage and left her son behind with her husband. McVeigh apparently developed a wider resentment. According to Michel and Herbeck, in interviews McVeigh “would also lash out—repeatedly and emotionally—at the concept of working mothers and two-income families, which he considered a major cause of problems in American society. ‘In the past thirty years, because of the women's movement, they've taken an influence out of the household,'” he told the reporters.

(It can hardly have failed to occur to McVeigh that an explosion in an office building during working hours would be likely to kill or injure mostly female employees, which, in fact, his bomb did.)

Reading about his life, one wonders if McVeigh—and his experience was hardly unique—ever encountered a single left-wing or socialist idea during his entire youth. No one is born to be a right-wing terrorist. But the social, intellectual and psychological circumstances of McVeigh's upbringing mitigated against his inchoate discontent finding a progressive channel.

The unrelenting character of the right-wing propaganda in the 1980s and early 1990s was only made possible by the advanced state of decay of American liberalism and the Democratic Party. “Reaganism” was, in fact, a bipartisan policy; the Democrats, who controlled Congress, were fully complicit in the attacks on the working class. They either openly joined in the chorus of attacks on the poor or adapted themselves to them. In cities like Buffalo, Democrats participated in cutting budgets and social services. Not wanting to be outdone by Reagan and his cohorts, Democratic Party politicians took every opportunity to promote anticommunism and militarism. Figures like Bill Clinton, a governor of a small, “right-to-work” Southern state, were promoted by the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council, which by the 1990s became the dominant force within the party.

During these years the Democratic Party abandoned the policies of social reform identified with the Great Society and the War on Poverty of the early 1960s (which themselves were of an extremely limited character), and generally repudiated any form of “income redistribution” to lessen economic inequality and improve the conditions of broad masses of people. The Democrats, basing themselves on an ever more narrow social base, turned to fiscal conservatism, catering more and more directly to big business, and to identity politics, appealing to the more privileged layers of blacks and other minorities.

It is worth noting in this context that McVeigh became even more susceptible to the propaganda of the right when, following his army service, he scored high on civil service exams for both the state and federal governments and failed to land jobs because, he believed, of affirmative action programs favoring black applicants.

One feature of Michel and Herbeck's book that jumps out at the reader is the absence of a single reference to the unions and, in particular, to the United Auto Workers. UAW Local 686 at Harrison Radiator was formed in 1943. The Washington Post depicts McVeigh's father, Bill, as “a registered Democrat and union man who on a recent afternoon sported a black nylon United Auto Workers windbreaker and baseball cap.”

It is a damning indictment of the AFL-CIO unions that right-wing militia groups emerged in industrial states where years of layoffs, carried out with the complicity of the unions, had devastated the working class.

The UAW, to which members of the McVeigh family had been paying dues for 52 years by the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, had long ceased to represent a progressive social force. Corporatism was now its official policy, and union leaders had intervened for years to help impose wage cuts and other concessions as agents of the auto companies. The UAW and United Steelworkers had been at the forefront of the chauvinist frenzy during the 1980s, with their anti-Japanese campaigns. In towns like Lockport they played a deeply reactionary social role.

Local 686, with approximately 9,700 “active and retired members,” according to a column in the UAW's Solidarity magazine, continues to promote chauvinism (although the Harrison Thermal Division makes parts for every major European, Japanese and Korean auto manufacturer), sponsoring “a Buy American weekend each year and ... staunchly promoting American- and union-made products.”

The US Army and the Gulf War

In May 1988, after six months of the armored car job and seeing no future for himself in Buffalo, McVeigh, just turned 20, joined the US Army. Along with the other recruits, he underwent a process of brutalization in the military.

Michel and Herbeck comment: “During dawn runs and their long, exhausting marches over the Georgia sand, their sound-offs revolved around killing and mutilating the enemy, or violent sex with women. ‘Blood makes the grass grow!' recruits were taught to chant. ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!' ‘I can't hear you!' barked the sergeant. ‘Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!'”

McVeigh continued to develop and promulgate his right-wing views in the army. It was here he met Terry Nichols, his fellow conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh ran into difficulty with his evident racism in the army, when he was accused, as a sergeant, of assigning blacks to the worst jobs.

His love of the army and its discipline conflicted with his views of the US government as oppressive and representative of the New World Order, stalking horse for a UN-dominated world government and so on. The experience of the Persian Gulf War, during which he operated a Bradley fighting vehicle, apparently deepened his misgivings about the role of the US military.

McVeigh, a crack shot, was gung-ho about the war when it began in February 1991. However, Michel and Herbeck write: “The American soldiers pictured their adversaries as bloodthirsty zealots, slashing throats and firing chemical weapons. Instead they found a bedraggled horde of Iraqis, poorly trained, organized, and equipped.... McVeigh felt as if he were one of the bullies, one of a type he had reviled since childhood.”

McVeigh left the army in late 1991, embittered with the military and the US government. He expected that some employer would be happy to employ a Gulf War hero. Michel-Herbeck comment: “But it didn't work out that way. Western New York, its economy still struggling as it had been when he went off to the Army, didn't have much to offer McVeigh—a realization that hit him hard. The next thirteen months back in Pendleton [where his father had moved from Lockport] would turn out to be the most disappointing time of his life, and it would drive him into a deep depression.”

McVeigh obtained a job as a security guard for Burns Security. He began writing letters to local newspapers and politicians, expressing his right-wing, populist views. Here is a typical confused passage:

“Racism on the rise? You had better believe it. Is this America's frustrations venting themselves? Is it a valid frustration? Who is to blame for the mess? At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people, democracy seems to be headed down the same road. No one is seeing the ‘big' picture.

“Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government. Remember, government-sponsored health care was a communist idea. Should only the rich be allowed to live longer? Does that say that because a person is poor he is a lesser human being and doesn't deserve to live as long, because he doesn't wear a tie to work?”

He added ominously: “Is civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system?”

The events at Ruby Ridge in August 1992, during which a FBI sniper shot and killed the wife of a white supremacist in Idaho, hardened McVeigh's resolve. The massacre of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas—the site of which McVeigh had visited earlier in the siege—on April 19, 1993 by federal law enforcement forces helped to send him over the edge. Now dividing his time between Arizona, Michigan and western New York, McVeigh began associating with militia groups and producing pamphlets of his own. In a letter to an ex-friend in July 1994 he wrote: “Blood will flow in the streets, Steve. Good vs. Evil. Free Men vs. Socialist Wannabe Slaves. Pray it is not your blood, my friend.”

By the autumn of 1994 McVeigh had apparently decided to blow up a federal building. He claims that Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, both of whom were charged in the crime, were his only accomplices. This seems dubious. McVeigh by this time had connections throughout the extreme right-wing underworld and it is known that before the bombing he called a number of fascist and racist organizations in search of a prospective hideout.

McVeigh justified his bombing, now set for the second anniversary of the Waco massacre—April 19, 1995—on military and tactical grounds. Michel and Herbeck note: “The Army had been his teacher in the horrors of war.... ‘You learn how to handle killing in the military,' he explained. ‘I face the consequences, but you learn to accept it.'

“It was the same tactic the American government used in armed international conflicts, when it wanted to send a message to tyrants and despots. It was the United States government that had ushered in this new anything-goes mentality, McVeigh believed, and he intended to show the world what it would be like to fight a war under these new rules, right in the federal government's own backyard.”

McVeigh was shaped, and warped, in a very direct way by both the internal and external sides of the deepening crisis of American capitalism—the growth of social inequality and political reaction at home, and the eruption of American militarism abroad.

McVeigh's politics

Michel and Herbeck are incapable of explaining, even defining, McVeigh's political outlook. Concerning the period following McVeigh's graduation from high school, they write: “For the first time in his life, Tim was reading widely, and really beginning to think about himself and his place in the world. He knew he loved guns, the outdoors, and heading off in his car to explore things. And it must have been around this time that he fixed upon the idea of freedom—as his guiding principle, as the value he loved most of all.”

“Freedom” is sympathetically identified here with McVeigh's extreme individualist and even misanthropic sentiments; it is divorced from the project of liberating humanity from economic and social oppression. Because of their own political blindness, Michel and Herbeck come dangerously close to offering an apology for McVeigh and his actions in this passage and others. The authors confuse their subject's social dissatisfaction with the anti-social and reactionary means he found of expressing it.

Michel and Herbeck paint a picture of McVeigh's ultra-right conceptions, but they are incapable of going beyond characterizing his politics as “anti-government,” making no distinction between right-wing and left-wing opposition to the status quo.

McVeigh opposed the federal government for its intrusions and repressions, but he largely saw it not as the representative of an exploiting elite, but as the embodiment of collective versus individual activity. And he identified the federal government as the defender of minorities, women and others who, he believed, were eating away at his perceived status as a white male.

McVeigh's act of mass terror heralded the emergence of a fascist tendency in the US. As the statement printed in the May 8, 1995 issue of the International Workers Bulletin (predecessor of the World Socialist Web Site), which we are posting today, explained: “The bombing was a conscious political act. From the standpoint of the fascists who carried it out, their present lack of popular support was all the more reason for an outrage of huge proportions. It was their way of announcing their arrival on the political scene.”

“Fascist” is not simply an epithet. The appeal of ultra-right militia movements in the US is attributable, in the first place, to the worsening of economic conditions that have thrown wide layers of the population off balance, deeply alienating many. A small minority of disoriented middle-class and working class elements have evolved an opposition to the status quo that rejects parliamentary-democratic norms and embraces what it conceives to be “revolutionary” means, i.e., terrorism.

Fascism finds its ideological sources in the filth thrown up by decaying bourgeois society: racism, anti-Semitism, the cult of guns and violence. The authors of American Terrorist flatter McVeigh when they attempt to make a coherent ideology out of the hodgepodge that he puts forth. While endowed with native intelligence, McVeigh holds political notions that are at best banal and confused—a mix of slogans about the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms), a few phrases about the dangers of “One World Government” and the “New World Order,” racist “White Power” prejudices, inchoate populist nostrums, and so on.

The confused ideology reflects the internally contradictory position of the militia and “Patriot” movements. Certain sections of the petty bourgeoisie—from the ranks of small businessmen, middle managers, civil servants, professional employees—particularly in the decaying industrial states, and disoriented, disaffected working class youth like McVeigh, deprived of a relatively secure life in the factory by economic dislocation, come together out of desperation and frustration. In the final analysis, fascism involves the whipping up of the disoriented petty bourgeoisie against the working class in the interests of big capital.

In essence, fascism is the politics of regression and despair. McVeigh came to see himself as a “soldier” in a crusade, and an inevitable martyr. He acted in revenge for the Waco massacre and other crimes of the US government, but with little real hope that his act would spark a popular uprising. He was deeply pessimistic; indeed, according to the interviews conducted with Michel and Herbeck, he contemplated suicide on a number of occasions. He suggested that he knew he would be caught and eventually executed, and referred to the bombing as “state-assisted suicide.”

Timothy McVeigh is the product of a political and social malaise, bound up with the decay of American capitalist society. As conditions for masses of people worsened in the late 1980s and early 1990s and a social chasm yawned, the political establishment was shifting sharply to the right, encouraging the growth of ultra-right forces.

The Democratic Party was repudiating its own history of social reformism and any consideration of the needs of working people. The putrefaction of the trade unions had reached an advanced stage. This coincided with the more general, international collapse of the traditional labor organizations, which found its highest expression in the demise of the Soviet Union. Triumphalist reaction encountered a working class betrayed and politically disoriented, and therefore unable to mount any serious resistance.

At the same time these processes were working away at the foundations of American bourgeois democratic institutions. The semi-fascist organizations with which McVeigh had associations were finding an increasingly sympathetic ear within the extreme right of the Republican Party. By the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, many state and federal Republican legislators had close ties to militia organizations and other fascistic and racist political outfits. There is a continuum that extends from these circles to the top echelons of the Republican Party.

It was revealed in December 1998 that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi and Congressman Bob Barr—a Clinton impeachment zealot—had addressed gatherings of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the direct organizational successor of the Citizens Councils that organized segregationist forces in the 1950s and 1960s, serving as a more respectable ally of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Democratic Party has adapted itself to this process. It proved incapable of seriously opposing either the anti-Clinton impeachment drive or the successful effort by the Bush forces to hijack the 2000 presidential election.

There is an urgent need to draw the lessons of the Oklahoma City bombing and McVeigh's evolution. There are many signs today that the acute contradictions of American society are beginning to break through the surface of political reaction. What shape this process takes will very much depend on the political education and preparation of the forces now coming into struggle.

The American working class faces the task of freeing itself from the grip of the Democratic Party and the semi-corpse of liberalism and establishing its political independence. By placing itself firmly on the basis of a socialist program and demonstrating its determination to break the stranglehold of the financial and corporate elite over society, such a workers movement will appeal to the broadest layers, including many sections of the middle class, opening the way for a new social order based on genuine democracy and equality.

Why the government's rush to execute Timothy McVeigh?

By Kate Randall
26 May 2001

The US government has been forced to delay the execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh following the revelation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation withheld more than 3,100 pages of documents from his defense team. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on May 11 that McVeigh's lethal injection, originally set for May 16 in Terre Haute, Indiana, had been rescheduled for June 11.

In the aftermath of the announcement, Ashcroft, President Bush, FBI Director Louis Freeh and other government officials have repeatedly insisted that there is nothing in the documents that could affect McVeigh's legal position. Ashcroft and Bush have stated there will be no further delays in carrying out his execution. They have maintained this position despite the fact that additional documents have been discovered since Ashcroft's initial acknowledgment of withheld material.

Only last Thursday Ashcroft announced that a final search at FBI offices had turned up an additional 898 pages of documents. But the attorney general reiterated that the government would fight any attempt by McVeigh's attorneys to seek a delay in the execution.

The government maintains that the documents were withheld from McVeigh's defense as a result of an organizational foul-up by the FBI. There was no intention to deprive the defense lawyers of the material, officials insist.

There is no reason to uncritically accept this explanation as the truth. But even if the documents were withheld inadvertently, the fact remains that federal authorities failed to provide the defense with a huge volume of evidence that bears directly on the FBI investigation into the bombing. This is a serious violation of a defendant's right to a fair trial, and the violation is compounded by the fact that it concerns a capital case. It constitutes legal grounds for contesting either McVeigh's original trial, the penalty phase, or both.

Given the mass of documents involved, and the fact that the defendant is facing the death penalty, limiting the extension to 30 days is a travesty of due process. There is no way McVeigh's lawyers can study the documents, let alone adequately investigate issues arising from them, in such a short period.

Furthermore, the repeated public statements of high government officials—echoed by the media—that there is nothing of an exculpatory nature in the material can only have the effect of prejudicing any jury that might be assembled to consider future legal proceedings, should McVeigh decide to take that path.

The question arises: why the rush to execute McVeigh?

A number of factors could be involved in the government's determination to have done with McVeigh as soon as possible. The documents may contain information that conflicts with the government's official version of the Oklahoma City bombing, which insists that only two individuals were involved: McVeigh and his former army buddy Terry Nichols.

Does the newly unearthed evidence point to a wider conspiracy? Much of it consists of interviews and leads gathered shortly after the April 1995 blast by 46 FBI field offices concerning “John Doe No. 2,” a man witnesses reported seeing at the scene of the crime.

Federal investigators subsequently dropped their search for this individual and prosecuted and convicted McVeigh and Nichols, contending the two men acted alone. While McVeigh himself has denied the existence of a “John Doe No. 2,” his former attorney Stephen Jones contends that McVeigh was among a group of conspirators. Lawyers for Terry Nichols, who have filed a motion for a new trial on the basis of the withheld documents, have always claimed there was such a man and that his existence could cast doubt on Nichols' role in the crime.

The withheld evidence might also contain information damaging to the FBI or other government agencies. There is good reason to suspect that FBI informants knew more about the bombing and the events leading up to it than has been revealed.

It is well known that the FBI has many informants in the militia movement, among gun lobbyists, the Christian right, the Ku Klux Klan and other racist and extreme-right groups. There is a long history of FBI collusion in right-wing violence.

One of the most notorious examples involves the activities of FBI informant Gary T. Rowe. In 1980 the Justice Department admitted that the FBI knew of Rowe's involvement in a series of racially motivated attacks in the South during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Rowe admitted to participating in the attack on the Freedom Riders at the Birmingham bus station in 1961, as well as being in the car with the gunman who in 1965 shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old civil rights activist from Detroit.

In the recent trial of former Ku Klux Klansman Thomas Blanton in Alabama it was revealed that the FBI for years withheld critical evidence concerning the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that resulted in the death of four young girls. State prosecutors were not informed until 1997 of the existence of FBI tape recordings implicating Blanton in the crime.

Charges had circulated for years that FBI informant Rowe had failed a lie detector test about the 1963 blast. If Rowe was not a direct participant in the church bombing, it is probable he knew of plans to carry out the atrocity, given his association with the KKK in Birmingham. The FBI may have withheld the evidence to protect Rowe and other informants, and to conceal its own complicity in KKK crimes.

There is another dimension to the Oklahoma City bombing that the political establishment has sought to conceal. At the federal, state and local level there are numerous political figures with close ties to the Christian right, militia groups and racist and anti-Semitic organizations—the very circles in which McVeigh moved prior to the bombing. The Republican Party in particular has close ties to such right-wing groups, and a number of Republican senators, congressmen and governors have actively solicited their support.

During the Republican impeachment drive against Clinton, it was revealed, for example, that Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia)—among the most ferocious anti-Clinton partisans—and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) had ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group.

Beyond these immediate questions are even more fundamental considerations. The Oklahoma City bombing raises a whole host of social and political issues that the political establishment does not want discussed. The bombing was a seminal event, revealing the profound disaffection felt by broad sections of the population with the government and the state of society in America, an alienation which in Timothy McVeigh's case took an extremely reactionary, anti-social form.

The very fact that the first large-scale terrorist action to take place on US soil was not carried out by foreign terrorists, but by an American active within right-wing extremist circles, points to the sharp divisions within American society. Elements like McVeigh—in the militia movement, the Christian right, the anti-tax movement—have been directly fostered by the political establishment, especially the Republican Party. In a political sense, establishment politicians and the media have a good measure of culpability in the Oklahoma City atrocity.

Moreover, the violence of the US government itself, both at home and abroad, is a factor in the growth of right-wing terrorist forces. There is an enormous element of hypocrisy in the sanctimonious statements of Ashcroft, Bush and others, who denounce McVeigh's act of mass murder, but support no less bloody actions by the American military and police.

According to McVeigh, two events were pivotal in convincing him that the US government was an alien and repressive force: the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the 1993 FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Volunteering as a recruit to the US Army, McVeigh was shaken by the savagery of US imperialism's one-sided onslaught against the Iraqis. Following his return from the Gulf War, the FBI attack in Waco, which resulted in the deaths of at least 85 people, including 21 children, helped push him over the edge. McVeigh chose the second anniversary of the Waco attack for the Oklahoma City bombing.

The World Socialist Web Site has examined in detail the socio-psychological processes that led McVeigh to carry out the most deadly act of domestic terrorism in American history. (See “Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh: the making of a mass murderer”).

McVeigh is a mass murderer who should be isolated from society at large. However, the WSWS opposes his execution. Capital punishment is a barbaric practice that has been outlawed in the majority of the advanced industrialized countries in the world. The American people will be no better protected by putting McVeigh to death than by locking him up for life.

But the political establishment wants to use the McVeigh execution—the first federal execution in 38 years—to rehabilitate the practice of capital punishment, which has begun to lose support among Americans in recent years, due in part to revelations of wrongful convictions of death row inmates.

Attorney General Ashcroft has organized a viewing of the execution on closed circuit television for some 300 victims' relatives and survivors, who are to watch the grisly procedure from a remote location in Oklahoma City. The media plans to assemble a horde of journalists in Terre Haute to report live on the execution.

It is ironic that the government's handling of the Oklahoma City bombing case, including the revelations of withheld evidence, has made McVeigh's execution a focus of opposition to capital punishment. International human rights organizations, foreign governments and even the Pope are calling on the Bush administration to halt the execution. It should be noted that a number of the victims' relatives have themselves come out against the execution.

The general slant of newspaper and television reports is that McVeigh's execution is a precondition for those who survived the bombing or lost loved ones to achieve “closure.” Precisely what is meant by “closure” is never explained. If it means putting an end to the pain that comes from the loss of a husband, wife, father, mother, or child—then the term has little meaning, because people can never fully put such feelings behind them.

If it means overcoming the rage and bitterness produced by an inhuman act like McVeigh's—especially when a loved one has been killed—it is legitimate to question the notion that watching the perpetrator die is the most healthy and positive form of therapy. Surely, society can and should encourage a more humane means of dealing with such a tragedy.

In any event, the government's rush to execute McVeigh has little to do with compassion for the victims and survivors. It is a continuation of the ethos of retribution that has been used by the political establishment in recent decades to brutalize society. And the authorities hope that by killing McVeigh they will preempt any further examination of the bombing and what it revealed about American society.

It is, however, only through an examination of the social roots of this terrible event that the survivors—as well as the American people as a whole—can begin to come to grips with the tragedy. What light does McVeigh's evolution shed on the class divisions in American society and the character of the political system?

Only on the basis of an understanding of the objective social roots of the Oklahoma City bombing is it possible to make sense of what otherwise seems an inexplicable event. And only on such a basis is it possible to see how society can be changed for the better to prevent such events from recurring in the future.

McVeigh interview sheds light on the social roots
of the Oklahoma City bombing

By David Walsh
30 March 2000

On March 12, CBS television's “60 Minutes” broadcast an interview with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was only the second media interview conducted with McVeigh since the 1997 trial at which he was convicted and sentenced to death. He is currently incarcerated at a federal maximum-security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Evidence at McVeigh's trial revealed how he constructed a 4,800-pound bomb in a rental truck and parked it in downtown Oklahoma City near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. The resulting explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children, and wounded 600. His actions were guided by extreme right-wing conceptions. He apparently hoped that the bombing of a federal facility would precipitate a civil war and ultimate overthrow of the government by rightist militia forces.

The bombing was a horrific crime. But neither the act nor the circumstances that conditioned McVeigh to commit it can simply be ascribed to individual malevolence. As McVeigh's “60 Minutes” interview underscored, the terrorist atrocity was ultimately the product of definite social and political conditions, which found a pathological expression in the actions of a particularly susceptible individual.

This aspect of the bombing has, not surprisingly, been all but ignored in the reams of media commentary of the past five years. To the extent that McVeigh is simply portrayed as a monster, the broader and more disturbing implications of his crime are more easily overlooked.

In his interview, McVeigh placed emphasis on his experiences as a soldier in the 1991 US-led invasion of Iraq. He said the war disillusioned him and deepened his anger against the government. He told CBS correspondent Ed Bradley, “I went over there hyped up, just like everyone else. What I experienced, though, was an entirely different ball game. And being face-to-face, close with these people in personal contact, you realize they're just people like you.”

One might argue that McVeigh's opposition to the Persian Gulf War is of recent origin, perhaps an attempt to give himself a more human face. But even were that the case, it would not alter the fact that McVeigh touches on something very real—the trauma and psychologically damage that come from being thrown into a strange country to kill and destroy, especially when one is using the most advanced weaponry in an unequal fight against an outmanned and poorly equipped foe.

As a solider who fought with McVeigh reported, their unit made ready for battle by chanting, “Blood makes the grass grow. Kill! Kill! Kill!”

American capitalism has over the past four decades subjected hundreds of thousands of young people to just such trauma, in the pursuit of its global ambitions. The psychological and moral damage is compounded by the hypocrisy of the government and media, which justify militarism and the most terrible crimes with the most lofty rhetoric.

In his conversation with Bradley, McVeigh went on to say that the killing of right-wing activist Randy Weaver's wife and son by federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and the killing—also by federal law enforcement officers—of some 80 members of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas in 1993 deepened his anger against the federal government. The Oklahoma City bombing took place two years to the day after the Waco incident.

Weaver was, to put it mildly, no friend of the working class. But that does not alter the fact that the deaths at Ruby Ridge were the unnecessary result of excessive force. The Waco massacre was an act of cold-blooded murder by the Clinton administration. It was carried out to make an object lesson of the religious cultists, whose real crime, as far as the government was concerned, was to challenge the authority of the state.

In the “60 Minutes” interview McVeigh refused to speak directly about the Oklahoma City bombing. He merely said, “Like everyone else, I thought it was a tragic event, and that's all I really want to say.” Bradley: “And the children?” McVeigh: “I thought it was terrible that there were children in the building.”

When he was asked if he would do anything differently if he could live his life over, he replied, somewhat chillingly: “I've thought about that quite a few times. And I think anybody in life says, ‘I wish I could have gone back and done this differently, done that differently.' There are moments, but no one that stands out.”

When Bradley asked if it were acceptable to use violence against the government, McVeigh replied: “If government is the teacher, violence would be an acceptable option.” He went on, referring to US missile attacks against alleged terrorists and the NATO war in Kosovo, “What did we do to Sudan? What did we do to Afghanistan? Belgrade? What are we doing with the death penalty? It appears they use violence as an option all the time.”

These are telling points. They do not excuse McVeigh's crime, but they help explain it. They provide a framework for considering how a rather ordinary youth was transformed into someone capable of carrying out mass murder.

McVeigh was born in the late 1960s to working class parents, who divorced when he was 10. He was brought up in Pendleton, New York, near the decaying industrial center of Buffalo. His father and grandfather both worked for decades in the same auto parts plant, which stopped hiring in 1979.

The youth grew to manhood in the Reagan-Bush years, with all that implies. By the age of 14 he was already a survivalist, obsessed with guns and stockpiling food against the supposed danger of a nuclear attack or a communist takeover. Hostility to affirmative action became another theme in his outlook, leading to openly racist views.

Joining the army in 1988, McVeigh took to military life. He rose to sergeant and considered making the army his career. He avidly read survivalist magazines and rented the 1983 film, Red Dawn —about Midwestern teenagers battling the Soviet army—four times. He rented a storage locker in a nearby town and stockpiled food, water and weapons. The Gulf War interrupted his plans for a military career.

After discharge from the army, McVeigh held a number of low-paying jobs, often as a security guard. He drifted between Pendleton, Decker, Michigan, home of co-conspirator Terry Nichols, and Kingman, Arizona. Coworkers remember outbursts of anger. He was apparently delusional, telling people in Decker that the army had implanted a microchip in his buttocks so they could spy on him.

In 1992 he wrote a letter to the editor of the Lockport (New York) Union-Sun, in which he bewailed rising crime, “cataclysmic” taxes, politicians serving only themselves and the disappearance of the “American Dream ... substituted with people struggling just to buy next week's groceries.... AMERICA IS IN DECLINE.”

McVeigh's visits to Michigan put him into contact with the emerging right-wing militia movement. He became involved in the gun business, at one point advertising an anti-tank missile launcher in the far-right Spotlight, an anti-Semitic and fascistic publication. It was during this period that McVeigh's political outlook gelled.

As this brief sketch of his life indicates, McVeigh grew up at a time when the ruling elite in the US was relentlessly promulgating extreme right-wing conceptions: anticommunism, religious bigotry, anti-gay prejudice, militarism and chauvinism—all of this overlaid with Social Darwinist notions about the survival of the fittest. The essential purpose of this ideological onslaught was to justify the accumulation of massive wealth in the hands of an elite at the expense of wide layers of the population.

Millions of working class youth like McVeigh were left with little hope of a fulfilling life or a decent future. Everything and everyone was to be sacrificed to the pursuit of profit. Worship of the market—equated with “freedom”—assumed a semi-religious character.

For a whole set of complex historical reasons, the frustration, resentment and sense of injustice generated by the social reaction and hypocrisy of the Reagan years did not find expression in the development of a mass, anti-capitalist movement of the working class. Indeed, the vast majority of Americans were denied access to the views of socialists, since the media exercised (and continues to exercise) a de facto ban on anti-capitalist opinion. Under these conditions, considerable numbers of distraught, disoriented people identified “anti-government” protest with the right, where demagogues—assiduously promoted by the media—promised a quick fix to America's problems.

Sections of the political elite openly cultivated the militia-type movements. The links between numerous Republican national and state politicians and extreme right-wing groups are well established.

It would oversimplify matters to describe McVeigh as the automatic result of these social and ideological conditions. His own emotional instability obviously came into play. There is something deranged about him. That his derangement took the particular form it did, however, has a broader social significance.

The same social soil that brought forward the right-wing terrorist McVeigh holds the seeds of a very different development. If the media systematically blocks socialist and left-wing ideas from reaching the general population, it is because its nervousness is well-founded. If masses of people were aware of the alternative represented by genuine socialism—with its critique of inequality, class exploitation and the waste of human and material resources in a system geared to enriching a privileged few—a socialist perspective would find an enormous response. In fact, the conditions for a movement to the left by a great number of people are rapidly maturing.

Go to: Timothy McVeigh Page II

Go to: Timothy McVeigh Page III

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh: the making of a mass murderer

By David Walsh 19 April 2001

Why the government's rush to execute Timothy McVeigh?

By Kate Randall 26 May 2001

McVeigh interview sheds light on the social roots of the Oklahoma City bombing

By David Walsh 30 March 2000

Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh:
the making of a mass murderer

By David Walsh
19 April 2001

By Kate Randall
26 May 2001

McVeigh interview sheds light on the social roots
of the Oklahoma City bombing

By David Walsh
30 March 2000