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.

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