Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Judge denies stay of McVeigh execution

By Kate Randall
7 June 2001

From the World Socialist Web Site, June 7, 2001

Federal District Court Judge Richard Matsch denied a stay of execution Wednesday to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The man convicted of setting off a truck bomb that killed 168 people in April of 1995 is scheduled to die by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana next Monday, June 11. His attorneys are appealing Judge Matsch's decision to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The appeals court is expected to rule quickly on McVeigh's appeal of Matsch's decision. Should it uphold the ruling of the trial judge, the matter will go to the US Supreme Court prior to the June 11 execution date.

In seeking the stay, McVeigh's attorneys argued that the federal government perpetrated a “fraud upon the court” by withholding more than 4,000 pages of documents from the defense prior to McVeigh's 1997 trial. McVeigh's lawyers also requested that Judge Matsch conduct an evidentiary hearing to determine why the documents were not turned over and to insure that other evidence is not still being withheld.

In the fall of 2000, McVeigh had instructed his attorneys to waive any further appeals on his behalf. However, based on the government's failure to disclose all evidence to the defense as directed by the judge at trial, McVeigh instructed his defense to request Judge Matsch to allow him to reopen his appeal.

In denying the stay, Matsch said there was nothing in the documents that showed McVeigh was not guilty. The judge had commented earlier that he found it “shocking” that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had withheld the evidence, but stated at Wednesday's hearing, “I am not going to try the FBI.”

Arguing for the stay, McVeigh's defense team charged that the government withheld evidence that pointed to the involvement of other people besides McVeigh and his army buddy Terry Nichols in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. “Specifically, counsel believes that the government—at least some FBI agents—knew ... that other people in addition to Mr. McVeigh and Mr. Nichols were responsible for the bombing,” they stated.

McVeigh's lawyers also alleged that federal law enforcement officers were told by informants about the bombing before it occurred. In a filing prior to Wednesday's hearing they wrote: “The defense believes that the government had a significant volume of such information, yet chose not to disclose critical portions of it to the defense, and chose not to present it at trial for fear of diminishing the responsibility that would be assigned to Mr. McVeigh during his trial, or for fear of shifting some of the responsibility to itself by revealing that federal informants had advised federal law enforcement officers of the bombing several days or weeks before it occurred.”

On May 11, just five days before McVeigh's original May 16 execution date, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced he was delaying the execution until June 11 due to the discovery of the new evidence. The government maintains that the withholding of the evidence was an “oversight.” But at Wednesday's hearing, McVeigh's attorneys stated that the prosecution knew of the existence of the documents six months before they were turned over to the defense.

New evidence has emerged that suggests the government's withholding of material may not be as innocent as it claims. Included in the evidence that was not provided to the defense—which now amounts to 4,449 pages of documents and 11 CDs—are leads concerning “John Doe No. 2,” an unidentified man who reportedly accompanied McVeigh at the site of the bombing and was sought by the FBI early in the investigation as a possible accomplice. Within a few days of the bombing, however, the government declared there was no John Doe No. 2, and has maintained since that McVeigh detonated the truck bomb by himself, with the prior collaboration of Terry Nichols. Evidence pointing to the existence of John Doe No. 2 could potentially contradict the government's version of events.

In recent days federal agents involved in the bombing investigation have made public statements criticizing the government's handling of evidence. On May 29, one current and three former FBI agents appeared on the CBS News program 60 Minutes II. One of these men, former Special Agent Rick Ojeda, said that evidence he developed in the Oklahoma City bombing case that might have helped the defense was ignored or not documented by FBI officials.

Ojeda told CBS News: “I talked to a couple of agents that worked the case and asked them about leads that I had done, whether they were ever brought up. And I even asked them to check to see if some of the 302s [reports] that I had mentioned had ever been turned over. And they couldn't find them. And so I started to wonder if the stuff had been withheld.”

In March 2000, Ojeda wrote a letter to Senator Charles Grassley (Republican of Iowa) in which he said he was aware of instances, including the Oklahoma City bombing case, where evidence that would have helped the defense was ignored or not documented, including exculpatory information he gathered from leads assigned him in the bombing case. Ojeda told 60 Minutes II: “I thought they were leads that should have been investigated.”

Special Agent Dan Vogel, a career FBI agent assigned to the Oklahoma City field office, told CBS News that he felt the FBI's handling of the evidence in the case amounted to obstruction of justice. “It would be something that needs to be presented to a federal grand jury as a criminal case,” Vogel commented.

Jim Volz, an FBI agent for 27 years, also appeared on the 60 Minutes II program. Volz, who worked on the Oklahoma City bombing case, reviewing thousands of FBI investigation sheets, said, “It's extremely surprising to me that these documents all of a sudden show up.” Volz was eventually forced into retirement after intervening to defend Jeff Jenkins, a black FBI agent who charged his superior with making racist statements. Volz says that Danny Defenbaugh, the FBI agent who oversaw the Oklahoma City bombing case, threatened him with retirement if he didn't back off from defending Jenkins.

The appearance of these government agents on national television—and their allegations of misconduct on the part of the FBI—reveals a state of internal discord within the agency charged with investigating the Oklahoma City bombing. Their statements raise as a plausible scenario the possibility that the Justice Department only acknowledged the existence of the documents out of fear that these agents, or other whistle-blowers, might come forward with damaging information on the eve of McVeigh's execution.

The government has maintained that the withheld evidence is of no interest to the defense. But McVeigh attorney Rob Nigh told reporters that one of the newly released documents included information on a potential witness who was unknown to the defense.

The New York Times reported on May 27 that one of the documents pertains to Morris John Kuper, Jr., who was called as a witness in the trial of bombing suspect Terry Nichols. Kuper was one of a number of witnesses called by Nichols' defense in an effort to show that someone other than Nichols worked with McVeigh to carry out the bombing.

At Nichols' trial, Kuper testified that he saw a man resembling McVeigh walking with another man along the sidewalk of the federal building at 8:02 a.m. the morning of the bombing. He said he saw the two men get into a car similar to the vehicle in which McVeigh was arrested later that morning. Kuper described the second man as muscular and dark-haired, a depiction similar to that of a number of other witnesses who described the unidentified suspect referred to as John Doe No. 2 in the initial stage of the FBI investigation.

Under cross-examination, government prosecutors sought to discredit Kuper's testimony by asserting that he had waited more than six months to come forward with the information. But according to a newly revealed document, Kuper called the FBI on April 21, 1995, two days after the bombing, to recommend that they check cameras that might have surveyed a parking lot a block away from the Alfred P. Murrah federal building an hour before the bombing. He suggested the cameras might have captured suspicious activity pertinent to the investigation.

Kuper told the Times that the FBI “took my name and phone number and never contacted me again.” October 24, 1995 Kuper again provided his description of the two men in response to a request by his employer, the Kerr-McGee Corporation, for information that might impact the bombing investigation. Because Nichols' defense team had never been given the report documenting Kuper's initial phone call, it was unable to challenge the prosecution's effort to discredit Kuper's testimony on the grounds that he had waited so long to come forward.

Reprinted  From the World Socialist Web Site, June 7, 2001

The McVeigh ruling--a travesty of justice

By Barry Grey
8 June 2001

The ruling handed down Wednesday by Federal Judge Richard Matsch denying Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's request for a stay of execution is a flagrant attack on the constitutional principle of due process with ominous implications for basic democratic rights.

Matsch's ruling was upheld Thursday by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in a rapid-fire decision that reeked of contempt for the constitutional issues raised by McVeigh's lawyers. “McVeigh has utterly failed to demonstrate substantial grounds upon which relief might be granted,” the court declared. Echoing Matsch, the appeals court judges dismissed out of hand McVeigh's complaint that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had prejudiced his trial and sentencing by illegally withholding thousands of pages of evidence from his attorneys.

Following Thursday's appeals court ruling, McVeigh instructed his attorneys to forego a final appeal to the US Supreme Court, making all but certain his execution by lethal injection on Monday, June 11 at 8 AM Eastern Daylight Time.

These rulings are a travesty of justice. They stink to high hell.

The enormity of the crime for which McVeigh was convicted does not give federal authorities license to withhold thousands of pages of evidence from his defense lawyers, and then rush him to the death chamber before his legal team can properly study the suppressed documents. Such a procedure makes a mockery of democratic rights.

The operating principle behind these rulings is the motto: “Dead men tell no tales.” Behind all of the official talk of “closure” and the manipulation of the families affected by the horrible crime in which McVeigh participated is an effort by the government and the courts, aided and abetted by the media, to conceal evidence of criminality by federal agencies that might point to their own complicity in the Oklahoma City bombing.

There is reason to believe that Matsch is far more aware of the forces that were at work in the bombing that killed 168 people in April of 1995 than McVeigh himself. The only plausible explanation for the unseemly rush on the part of the federal government and the courts to put McVeigh to death, riding roughshod over the legal rights of criminal defendants in the process, is their fear that a further delay in his execution and the reopening of an investigation will expose the government's connections to ultra-right forces and its own culpability.

Matsch handed down his ruling less than a month after Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had withheld more than 3,000 pages of evidence from McVeigh's lawyers. Ashcroft made this announcement only days before McVeigh's original execution date, which Ashcroft then put off to June 11. Since then, the Justice Department has turned up nearly 1,000 additional pages of suppressed evidence, most of which McVeigh's defense team received less than two weeks before Matsch's ruling.

Matsch's decision stunned even government prosecutors, who argued against a stay of execution but were all but reconciled to the likelihood that the execution would be delayed, given the scale of the violation of McVeigh's rights and the obvious fact that McVeigh's lawyers had not had adequate time to study the evidence and pursue further investigations.

McVeigh's lawyers argued that their preliminary reading of the documents had uncovered evidence pointing to the existence of a wider conspiracy in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. Some of the withheld evidence, they alleged, pointed to the involvement of FBI or Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms informants, and suggested that federal authorities had been given advance warning of the bombing.

They maintained that the suppression of this information had damaged McVeigh's defense. While not contesting the guilty verdict against their client, they asserted that the suppressed evidence could warrant a new hearing on McVeigh's sentence, potentially reducing it from death to life imprisonment.

The defense lawyers asked Matsch to delay the execution so that they could pursue a charge of fraud by federal authorities against the court and reopen McVeigh's appeal proceedings.

Without making any reference to specific evidentiary facts raised by the defense, the judge dismissed their arguments on the absurd grounds that even if their allegations of a wider conspiracy and the complicity of federal agencies could be substantiated, such revelations would have no impact on either the verdict or the sentence against McVeigh.

“The argument of defendant's counsel that the jury may not have found the death penalty was justified if the defense had been able to implicate additional perpetrators is just not tenable,” Matsch declared.

To back up this claim, Matsch noted that McVeigh had declined to reveal the names of other co-conspirators during the sentencing phase of his trial. “The defendant,” said Matsch, “must have knowledge of this fact: whether others were involved with him.”

But, as the defense lawyers pointed out in their brief to the appeals court, McVeigh might very well be unaware that certain individuals played a role in the bombing, and he would certainly be unaware of the participation of government agents or informants.

It is absurd on its face to claim that information concerning government complicity in the bombing, at whatever level or degree, could have no impact on the decision of a jury to send McVeigh to his death.

Moreover, as McVeigh's lawyers argued in their brief to the appeals court, existing law and precedent clearly hold that a defendant facing the death penalty has a right to present before the jury a wide scope of extenuating circumstances, including the involvement of others in the crime. McVeigh's ability to do so was clearly damaged by his ignorance of important facts that were known to the FBI.

During Wednesday's hearing, Matsch said he was outraged when he learned last month that thousands of pages of documents had been withheld by the FBI. “It is a good thing I was in quiet chambers because my judicial temperament escaped me,” he declared, adding, “It was shocking.”

Yet this statement, tantamount to an admission that the legal process had been seriously prejudiced, was in no way reflected in the decision he handed down. On the contrary, Matsch made the preposterous claim that even if the integrity of the FBI was undermined by its withholding of evidence, that in no way impacted the integrity of McVeigh's trial:

“It has been argued forcefully here by [defense attorney] Mr. Nigh that this calls into question the integrity of the process and that this court has a responsibility to protect that integrity. But I think there has to be drawn a distinction between the integrity of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the integrity of the adjudicative process leading to these verdicts and recommendation. They are quite different things.”

The judge then proceeded to echo uncritically the government's contention that the suppression of evidence was inadvertent—“...there is a great deal of difference between an undisciplined organization or organization that is not adequately controlled or that can't keep track of its information...”—and concluded by declaring an amnesty for federal investigators: “We're not here for the purpose of trying the FBI.”

With this statement, Matsch jettisoned any pretense of judicial evenhandedness. Given the illegal actions of the FBI, any attempt by McVeigh to avoid the death penalty could only take the form of an indictment of the agency. What is the defense argument that the FBI's actions constitute a fraud upon the court if not an effort to “try the FBI?”

The rulings by Matsch and the appeals court—and virtually all of the commentary in the media—are premised on the contention that a defendant facing execution is obliged to show in advance that evidence illegally withheld by the state would be sufficient to prove his innocence. In fact, thousands of convictions have been thrown out and guilty people set free or given new trials because their constitutional rights were violated by the police, the prosecution or the courts. It has been an established principle of American jurisprudence that convictions obtained through forced confessions, illegal searches, denial of legal counsel, etc. are not valid.

This democratic principle has come under increasing attack, but never as openly as in the rulings handed down this week against McVeigh.

In this case, moreover, the defendant was not even suing for a new trial. He was merely asking that his execution be delayed. It is not uncommon even today, with defendants burdened by reactionary court rulings and laws, such as the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, for a decade or more to transpire between the date of a death sentence and the actual execution.

Notwithstanding Matsch's attempt at eloquence—“The United States government is not some abstraction... It is the American people...”—his ruling reeks of cover-up and conspiracy. Its significance goes far beyond the fate of McVeigh. It is symptomatic of a political establishment that is shedding any adherence to democratic rights. The federal judiciary in particular is increasingly dominated by right-wing ideologues.

The blatant violation of the rights of criminal defendants and the promotion of the death penalty are of a piece with the general assault on democratic rights that culminated in the 2000 presidential election. It was the US Supreme Court, it should be recalled, that intervened to block the counting of votes in Florida and hand the election to George W. Bush.

On the same day as Matsch's ruling, Attorney General Ashcroft released a Justice Department report claiming there was no racial or ethnic bias in the administration of capital punishment in federal cases. This sets the stage for the execution on June 19 of Juan Raul Garza, who is to become the second person, after McVeigh, to be put to death by the federal government since 1963.

Subj:    The Loop : Roger Bunn on McVeigh
Date:   6/7/01 12:51:36 AM Mountain Daylight Time
From:   policy.office<@>mihra.org (mihra)
To: MsDarkstarOne@a...

McVeigh : Still the Wrong Questions?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's Oklahoma City expose

New book claims sweeping cover-up in Oklahoma City blast

Chicago Sun-Times (for more about this) - October 20, 1997

 

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

As Terry Nichols is tried for the Oklahoma City bombing, grave and disturbing questions are being raised in a new book by British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He describes a cover-up that protects alleged collaborators of Nichols and Timothy McVeigh in America's worst terrorist act ever.

Evans-Pritchard presents documentation, including an April 21, 1995, memo that he calls "the smoking gun of the Oklahoma bombing." Written two days after the tragedy, it reports an FBI debriefing of Carol Howe, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms volunteer undercover agent at Elohim City--a neo-Nazi paramilitary base in eastern Oklahoma. She told the FBI of conversations with two activists there who were closely associated with McVeigh: Andreas Strassmeier, a former West German army lieutenant illegally in the United States, and Dennis Mahon, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Reporting the interview with Howe, the memo says Strassmeier "frequently talks about direct action against the U.S. federal government." The information about Mahon is even more precise: He "has talked with Carol about targeting federal installations for destruction through bombings, such as the IRS building, the Tulsa federal building and the Oklahoma City building." The same document reports three pre-bombing visits to Oklahoma City by Strassmeier and Mahon (accompanied by Howe on one occasion).

This information was supplied by Howe before the disaster to her ATF contact, agent Angela Finley (who on Nov. 29, 1994, warned of "bombings" after a debriefing of the undercover operative). Whether or not this meant the government was alerted to the horror to come, what is unfathomable is that the Elohim City extremists were ignored after April 19, 1995.

The FBI conducted more than 20,000 Oklahoma City interviews, most inconsequential. But it never talked to Mahon, who unlike his associate McVeigh is an expert on ammonium nitrate explosives. Strassmeier was interrogated by phone a full year later and then only for the purpose of clearing him of accusations. Federal prosecutors successfully blocked Howe from testifying in the McVeigh trial and brought a terrorist case against her (which resulted in acquittal Aug. 1), though she then was still a federal informant.

Why this reticence? Why insistence that there were no more accomplices, though Evans-Pritchard provides abundant evidence that at least four other men were involved?

Evans-Pritchard is certain that Strassmeier and Mahon are under federal protection, though he is unsure what agency they worked for. He says the ATF was ready to arrest Strassmeier in February, 1995, as an illegal alien violating weapons statutes, based on Howe's secret reports, when the U.S. attorney's office intervened.

The jacket blurb of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories claims that Evans-Pritchard "exposes" the bombing "as a government sting that flew out of control." In fact, he has not pinned that down, though he quotes Strassmeier musing about a sting to entrap McVeigh.

Glenn Wilburn, grandfather of two children killed in the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and a tireless battler for the truth until his death from cancer this summer, is reported to have believed this was "a sting operation that went disastrously wrong."

Wilburn, joined by 170 Oklahoma families with relatives killed in the blast, in April barely beat the two-year statute of limitations in filing a tort claim against the federal government. That lawsuit could yield truths, writes Evans-Pritchard, that "may ultimately sweep away much of the political landscape of fin de siecle America."

That apocalyptic appraisal reflects the conclusion reached by Evans-Pritchard, as Washington correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph, that America the last five years shows "how a country loses its democracy." His investigative reporting of President Clinton runs from Vince Foster to Paula Jones, but the 108 pages on Oklahoma City beginning the book are only indirectly connected with the president.

Evans-Pritchard is no conspiracy-theory lunatic. Now back in London, he was known in Washington for accuracy, industry and courage. He has offered leads to discovering a pattern of lies and deception after Oklahoma City that, if verified, would approach Vietnam and Watergate in undermining American citizens' confidence in their government.

Robert Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist of the Sun-Times.

What Really Happened in the Oklahoma City Bombing? Many Victims' Families Believe FBI Knew Bombing Was Being Planned;

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

As printed in Human Events, October 31, 1997, pp. 12,13,18.

In his new book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, just published by Regnery, renowned investigative reported Ambrose Evans-Pritchard alleges massive corruption and cover-ups in the Clinton Administration in connection with many incidents, including the death of Vincent Foster, drug dealing in Arkansas, and the Paula Jones case.

He also raises, as the Terry Nichols trial begins, some very serious questions about the tragic 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. There is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was guilty, says Evans-Pritchard, but he believes that nothing like the full story has ever come out. Why? Because the government, although it interviewed over 20,000 people, failed to call many knowledgeable witnesses during the trial, witnesses who could discuss collaborators with McVeigh and Nichols. He makes a strong case that the reason the government covered up--and continues to cover up--is that bumbling FBI agents knew in advance that the bombing plot was afoot but failed to stop it.

He discloses what he calls "the smoking gun of the Oklahoma bombing," a memo written only two days after the bombing. The memo discusses the FBI's debriefing of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms undercover agent who infiltrated a neo-Nazi paramilitary group where men close to McVeigh talked about using violence against the U.S. government.

The charges in this book are sure to stir emotional reactions, but, writing about the book last week, national syndicated columnist Robert Novak said that Evans-Pritchard "is no conspiracy theory lunatic [and] is known for accuracy, industry, and courage." Evans-Pritchard has reported from the United States for both the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph, for which he was Washington bureau chief.. He has recently returned to England and is now serving as the Daily Telegraph's roving European correspondent. In the following excerpts from the first two chapters of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Evans-Pritchard explains why so many families of bombing victims are suspicious of the official story of what happened that day and why hundreds have now filed suit against the government.

---

The searing destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, was the most traumatic event in the United States since the assassination of President Kennedy. . .

Clinton seized the moment. He castigated talk radio for broadcasting "a relentless clamor of hatred and division." The Right, he said, was sowing distrust of government institutions and creating a climate that fostered recourse to violence.

He did not name the Republicans as co-conspirators; he did not have to. The media clerisy made the connection for him. They all but said that Tim McVeigh was the military expression of the Gingrich agenda. Republicans had failed to understand that rhetoric has consequences, opined the commentators, and now look what had happened.

The Republicans were dumbstruck. A few dared to reply that it was the deployment of tanks by a militarized FBI against women and children in Waco that had set off the deadly spiral. But most were too intimidated, or horrified, to articulate a defense.

President Clinton traveled to Oklahoma and handled the ceremony of grief with consummate skill. . .

The polls noted that four-fifths of Americans admired his human touch. Overall, Clinton's job rating jumped from 42% to 51 %. Clinton had come back to life, and the Justice Department was riding high.

Valuable Witnesses Never Called to Trial

But what if the Clinton Administration has not told the full truth about the Oklahoma bombing, as many of the families now suspect? What if some of the perpetrators are still at large, freely walking the streets and giving remarkably candid interviews to this author, because it is not in the political interests of the White House or the FBI to bring them to justice? I think that would give a different complexion to the matter. I hope that the following chapter will make it clear that these are not idle questions.

I do not wish to revisit the Denver trial of Tim McVeigh. I am convinced that McVeigh was guilty, and his own lawyer admitted as much during the sentencing hearings. But the trial did not bring out the full story. Indeed, it was skillfully managed to ensure that collateral revelations were kept to a minimum.

This was a terrible mistake. The Oklahoma bombing was the most deadly act of terrorism ever committed on U.S. soil. It was no time for a sloppy investigation or a trial that could be considered expedited, abridged, or rigged in any way.

Jurists concurred that it was imperative that the Justice Department conduct itself beyond reproach if this tragedy was to attain closure. Retribution was important, of course, but it was even more important to sustain confidence in the American democratic system for decades to come. The President professed agreement. The attorney general promised to make this an exhibit of American excellence.

It did not happen. In violation of its "Brady" responsibilities, the prosecution withheld material from the defense that was exculpatory or impeached the credibility of government witnesses.

It delayed a year in handing over FD-302 witness statements that were critical to the defense. It stonewalled, obstructed, and dragged its feet at every turn. It also told a series of demonstrable lies that will be enumerated in this book.

As for the FBI, the proven malfeasance of the crime labs in the handling of scientific evidence from the crime scene makes it clear that the "OKBOMB" investigation was rotten from the foundations up. The report of the Justice Department's Inspector General lists the Oklahoma bombing case as one of the worst examples of de facto evidence tampering by the crime labs.

It is worth dwelling on this point because the FBI has been patting itself on the back for "solving" the Oklahoma bombing, as if it had cause for self-congratulation. In the first place, the FBI had no scientific basis for concluding that the Murrah Building was blown up by an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb. The FBI did not know in 1995, and does not know to this day, what actually caused the explosion. The Justice Department report concluded that the explosives unit simply guessed that the bomb was made of 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate after "the recovery of receipts showing that defendant Nichols purchased 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate."

The labs guessed that the explosive charge was placed in 50-gallon white plastic barrels, without conducting the requisite tests, after the discovery of 50-gallon plastic containers at the house of Terry Nichols. They said that the detonator appeared to be a Primadet Delay system, but no trace of this was found at the crime scene. Primadet was, however, found at the house of Terry Nichols.... You get the picture.

The FBI crime labs sculpted a theory of the bombing that would help the prosecution secure convictions against Tim Mcveigh and Terry Nichols--and science be damned. Once it is understood that the FBI behaved this way in handling empirical evidence-- where malfeasance is susceptible to exposure--it becomes easier to discern the attitudes that informed the rest of the OKBOMB investigation.

It is my contention that the crime labs were no worse than other divisions of the FBI. The only difference is that the technicians were caught red-handed, while certain corrupt field agents and their superiors have yet to be exposed.

In summing up, the inspector General's report found that the FBI crime labs had "repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without a scientific basis" in the Oklahoma bombing case.

Was Crime Shaped To Fit the Suspect?

I find this quite staggering. In Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, shared by Britain and America, it is not acceptable to shape the crime to fit the suspect. It is a practice we condemn as "framing." I do not understand why the current director of the FBI is still drawing a paycheck from the U.S. taxpayer after a scandal of this magnitude, especially since he permitted the retaliatory harassment of Dr. Frederick Whitehurst, the chief whistle-blower.

It was the duty of Judge Richard Matsch to prevent the executive branch from conducting a politicized trial that obscured the facts. Instead he went with the flow, acceding to the prosecution's request that the Inspector General's report be barred as evidence. It was never made clear to the jury that the FBI did not know what kind of bomb initially caused the blast, nor that the FBI had forfeited its magisterial authority.

But most serious of all the judge refused to allow the testimony of an ATF informant with very relevant information indicating that the Oklahoma bombing was a broad conspiracy involving several members of the neo-Nazi movement in Oklahoma, an assertion that the U.S. government had gone to great lengths to suppress.

Whether or not Judge Richard Matsch was acting in tacit concert with the Justice Department is a matter that will demand hard scrutiny by historians. Doubtless Judge Matsch is sure that he can justify his decision on technical grounds. No judge likes to commit reversible error.

But even if he can do so, I still believe that he betrayed his mission as a U.S. federal judge. There was more riding on the trial than the guilt or innocence of Tim McVeigh. The greater cause of justice was obstructed.

Needless to say. the Mcveigh trial was described in this way by the American media. The outcome was seen as a triumph. Judge Matsch was lionized, praised for restoring confidence in the criminal justice system. The reaction of the press disturbed me deeply. I never imagined that the machinery of cover-up could be so oppressively efficient.

McVeigh's mercurial counsel, Stephen Jones, allowed himself a moment of angry passion when he returned home to Oklahoma. If anybody thinks that the full story came out in the trial, he said, he could guarantee them that it most assuredly did not. Jones was bound to silence by the rules of attorney-client confidentiality, while McVeigh was "hanging tough" out of loyalty to his sworn brothers in the Aryan order.

Indebted to the Oklahoma families who have refused to accept the half-truths of the U.S. Justice Department, I offer a fragment of the story that these two men cannot or will not reveal.

Federal Law Agents Shunned Murrah Day Care

The boys were the heart and soul of the house. They lived with their mother and grandparents three generations together in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. Chase was three; Colton was two.

On weekdays they would be dropped off at "America's Kids" on the second floor of the Alfred P Murrah Building. Their mother, Edye Smith, worked as a secretary for the IRS, four blocks away. So did their grandmother, Kathy Wilburn, a training instructor.

The day-care center was an extra perk the two women enjoyed as federal employees. They did not know at the time that none of the law enforcement agents put their own children in the creche as a matter of policy. Nor did they know that the ATF, the Secret Service, and U.S. Customs had offices in the building.

Glenn Wilburn doubled as father and grandfather. A courteous, gentle, well-fed fellow, aged 44, he had a successful practice as a certified public accountant. In the evenings after work he would take his grandsons down to the park. On weekends he would take them to a movie. They watched The Lion King three times....

On Tuesday, April 18, 1995, Edye was sick with strep throat and stayed at home with the boys. The next day, Patriot's Day, she was still feeling ill, but her colleagues had made her a birthday cake, so she made the extra effort and struggled in to work.

It was the usual morning ritual. The boys were in Edye's bed, one snuggled up on each side. Glenn and Kathy burst in singing "good morning to you;" and the scramble began.

"Glenn was helping with Colton. He had him sitting up on the bar in the kitchen, putting on his little blue sandals," said Kathy. "When he finished, Glenn kissed him on the forehead and said, 'You're a good boy. Papa loves you.'"

No ATF Field Agents Were Hurt

The bomb went off at 9:02 a.m.

Edye was about to blow out the candles on her birthday cake when the shock waves rocked the IRS building.

I grabbed her and we rushed out into the street;" recounted Kathy. "I could see smoke over towards the Murrah Building, and I screamed, 'Edye, the babies, the babies,' and we took off running."

Then we saw it--the total devastation-- and Edye crumbled to her knees. I put my arms around her and told her, 'It'll be all right.' But I knew it wasn't true. I knew already that our babies were gone.

Both boys were killed. A rescue worker had found Colton still breathing in the ruins, but he would not live long. His stomach had been ripped out. Kathy's grownup son Daniel had spotted the tiny two-year-old body laid out on a bench.

Glenn had already heard the news. When the women found him in the mayhem outside the Murrah Building, he was leaning over the hood of a pickup truck crying his heart out.

That was when it all fell apart for Glenn," said Kathy. "It wasn't pancreatic cancer that killed him in the end. He really died of a broken heart."

That night they huddled together at home, silently watching the TV news. The camera picked out a solitary shoe on the edges of the smoking rubble. It was the blue sandal that Glenn had slipped onto Chase's tiny foot that morning.

Within days of the bombing the rumors began to circulate. People talked of seeing bomb squads in downtown Oklahoma in the early hours of the morning before the blast. It was said that the ATF did not come to work that morning at the Murrah Building. The families noticed that none of the ATF agents were on the casualty list.

One hundred and sixty-eight people had been killed. It was the most deadly act of terrorism in the history of the United States. If there was a bomb squad on alert that morning, the full story would come out soon enough.

But Edye Smith began to sense that the Justice Department was dissembling. There was a hint of arrogance in the responses of U.S. Attorney Pat Ryan. The man was pleasant enough, but he did not make a serious effort to answer the questions of the families. When Edye asked where the ATF agents were on April 19, he brushed her off with a glib comment that they were playing in a golf tournament at Shawnee. He was mistaken. Some of the DEA were playing golf, but not the ATF.

She contacted the ATF directly, only to hear a babel of improvised spin. There were two ATF agents in their offices on the ninth floor that day, said one message on her answering machine. No, there were four, said another message, left by another official the same day.

Edye was being trifled with. Her grief turned to anger. On May 23, 1995, the day the ruined Murrah Building was brought down with demolition charges, she erupted in a live interview on CNN.

Where the hell was the ATF, I want to know?" she thundered, red hair flying in the breeze. 'All 15 or 17 of their employees survived, and they were on the ninth floor. They were the target of this explosion, and where were they? Did they have a warning sign? Did they think it might be a bad day to go into the office?

They bad an option not to go to work that day, and my kids didn't. They didn't get that option. Nobody else in the building got that option. And we're just asking questions We're not making accusations. We just want to know. And they're telling us: 'Keep your mouth shut, don't talk about it.'"

Deluged with calls from the media, the ATF issued a press release. "I strongly suspect that these malicious rumors are fueled by the same sources as the negative rhetoric that has been recently circulating about law enforcement officers," said Lester D. Martz, the Special agent in charge of the Dallas regional office. "The facts are that the ATF's employees in Oklahoma City were carrying out their assigned duties as they would any workday, and several of them were injured in the explosion."

ATF Peddled Phony Elevator Story

In fact, the only people in the office to suffer injuries were two clerical workers. None of the ATF's field agents were hurt.

If Lester Martz had stopped there the matter might have subsided. But he over-reached, the instinctive reflex of an agency accustomed to operating without accountability. "We were there, and we were heros," he said.

The ATF claimed that Alex McCauley, the resident agent in charge, was in an elevator when the bomb went off. He survived a free fall from the eighth to the third floor. McCauley escaped by breaking through the thick metal doors, and went on to rescue survivors in the stairwell.

If the ATF thought they could get away with this farrago, they had underestimated the 23-year-old redhead and her affable stepfather. Curiosity piqued, the Wilburns tried their hand as amateur sleuths. With the help of a freelance reporter, John (J.D.) Cash, Glenn contacted the Midwestern Elevator Co., the firm that had actually searched the elevators for survivors.

The first thing we did was split up and check, then double check, each elevator for occupants," explained Duane James, one of the engineers. "We found that five of the six elevators were frozen between floors, and a sixth had stopped near floor level.... We had to go in through the ceilings of the elevators to check for people.... All were empty."

Agent Alex McCauley could not possibly have broken out before the team arrived, said James, "not unless he had a blowtorch with him.... The doors were all frozen shut.... It took several of our men over 12 hours just to get the one elevator [opened]."

None of the elevators had been in a free fall. 'That's pure fantasy. Modern elevators have counterbalances and can't free fall unless you cut the cables, and none were. There are a series of backup safety switches that will lock an elevator in place if it increases in speed more than 10%."

The Midwestern Elevator Co. took extensive photographs to document the inspection. These records were later reviewed by ABC's "20-20" program. The pictures confirmed that all the safety cables were intact.

As the details emerged, the ATF began to back away from its claims, suggesting that the blast created the sensation of a falling elevator. "Well, maybe Agent McCauley just imagined he free fell," said Lester Martz in a taped telephone interview with J.D. Cash.

Agent McCauley was transferred to Kansas City and quietly demoted. The Justice Department, however, clung resolutely to the story of his accomplishments. Joseph Hartzler, the chief prosecutor in the case against McVeigh, repeated the tale in a court filing on Nov. 7, 1996, dismissing any doubts about the mailer as "outrageous.

At the time, Hartzler already had the FD-302 witness statements given to the FBI by the elevator engineers, all concurring that the story was fabricated. But Hartzler has never been held to account for deliberately misinforming the court.

The Wilburns had walked through the looking glass. They now knew for a fact that the head of the ATF's office in Oklahoma City was a shameless liar. And they were learning that some of the others were just as bad. On May 24, 1995, the day after Edye's outburst on CNN, Glenn was visited by two ATF agents. It was a contentious meeting. Glenn pressed them hard. "Didn't April 19 have any significance to your people? You know, Patriot's Day, the Waco raid?"

"No, there was no alert, or any concern on our part about the significance of that day," replied Luke Franey, an undercover agent who sported long hair and a ring in one ear.

Two hours later Glenn was watching the news. It was a live interview with John Magaw, the director of the ATF, explaining that the agency had taken special precautions on April 19. "I was very concerned about that day and issued memos to all our field offices. They were put on alert," said Magaw.

It was the lies that offended Glenn more than anything else. One lie, after another, after another....

The kidney-shaped table in the kitchen of Glenn and Kathy had become the nerve center of the Oklahoma dissident movement. Their closest friend and ally was J.D. Cash from the McCurtain Daily Gazette.... [He had proved] himself to be a reporter of extraordinary skill--a loose cannon, perhaps, a wild man, a transgressor of every rule in the Columbia School codex--but still one of the best investigative journalists of modern times.

Among his friends was Richard Reyna, the court-appointed investigator for Timothy McVeigh. It was a relationship that would lead to an unholy alliance between the Wilburns and the defense lawyers of the man who murdered their grandchildren.

Documents have a habit of leaking when friendships are formed across a broad front, and it was not long before the Wilburns acquired the raw material of the OKBOMB investigation--FBI 302 witness statements, Tim McVeigh's phone logs, surveillance reports, the unfiltered facts. They were no longer competing at a total disadvantage against the U.S. Justice Department.

The alliance made sense. The Wilburns and the McVeigh defense team both wanted to know whether the U.S. government was telling the truth.

It caused consternation in Oklahoma City. Glenn and Kathy were denounced by the state media as "conspiracy theorists" and tools of the far right. For a year they endured bitter recriminations from many of the families.

But that would change.

When the Wilburns filed a federal tort claim against the U.S. government in April 1997, just in time for the two-year statutory deadline, they were joined by 170 of the Oklahoma family members.

The claim alleges that the U.S. federal government "knew or should have known" that the Murrah Building was a likely target of attack. Their chief counsel Connecticut lawyer Richard Bieder, brought in three other law firms with specialist expertise in a legal alliance that had very deep pockets and a track record of confronting the government.

Another group of five families signed up shortly afterward with the Los Angeles firm Baum, Hedland, Aristie, Guilford, and Downey. Finally, more than 300 family members joined a third suit with John Merritt in Oklahoma State jurisdiction against the FBI, the ATF and other agencies of the U.S. government. The Merritt lawsuit alleged outright that the disaster was a failed "sting operation."

The claim stated that the U.S. authorities had "detailed prior knowledge of the planned bombing of the Murrah Building yet failed to prevent the bombing from taking place." It alleged that ATF agents were "alerted not go to work on April 19, 1995."

Civil lawsuits are the great purgative instrument of the American system. They are the safeguard against abuse. The rules of civil litigation are very different from criminal trials. The power to subpoena documents and witnesses under legal discovery is much broader, while the power of tame judges to exclude evidence is much narrower. The truth has a way of forcing itself to the surface.

The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard $24.95, free shipping, payable by credit card Regnery Publishing, Inc (SEC-HE) PO Box 39 Federalsburg, MD 21632-0039 1-888-219-4747

Evans-Pritchard's relentless investigative reporting began shortly after Bill Clinton was inaugerated as president in 1993 and was a constant thorn in the side of the Clinton Administration His factual reports became so upsetting to the White House that he was singled out by the Clintons' as a problem journalist in a 300 page White House report. He was also condemned by the establishment U.S. media (such as the Washington Post) for revealing facts about the government which the "mandarin class" have decreed are not to be reported.

Here is his farewell address to the American people at the end of April, 1997:

Rouse and Guard your Liberty! by Ambrose-Evans Pritchard

Let me state for the record that I was not sent to Washington as part of a British government plot to destabilize the Clinton Administration in revenge for US meddling in Ulster. Or at least, I don't think I was. Contrary to assertions made in a Congressional hearing, I have never worked for British military intelligence, or MI5, or MI6, or for that matter MI7.5 - the fabled Welsh branch!

No, I found my own way into a spitting match with President Clinton. It was the last thing I expected upon arriving in Washington, for I had succumbed to the Clinton charm years before at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council. As for Hillary, I was rather taken by her image of flinty altruism.

Disappointment was swift, however. I was stunned when the new President - barely installed in the White House - repudiated his campaign promise for a tax cut. It was downhill from there.

The Clintons look good from a distance. As Yale Law School graduates they have mastered the language and style of the mandarin class. It is only when you walk through the looking glass into the Arkansas underworld they came from that you begin to realise something is horribly wrong.

You learn that Bill Clinton grew up in the Dixie mafia stronghold of Hot Springs, and that his brother, Roger, was a convicted drug dealer who was once taped during under-cover surveillance saying "got to get some for my brother, he's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner". You learn about sworn testimony that links Clinton to cocaine smuggling in the early 1980s. You learn that Clinton's chief of security in Little Rock was gunned down in 1993 by assassins who seem to be enjoying immunity.

Let us not forget the allegation that Bill and Hillary helped empty a bank called Madison Guaranty - but I will leave that to the special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr.

Bill Clinton is not the first president with the skeletons of the mob in his closet. Harry Truman, for instance, was a protege of the Pendergast crime machine in Kansas City. All you have to know about Bill Clinton is that he chose Patsy Thomasson - top lieutenant of convicted cocaine dealer Dan Lasater - to be his White House chief of personnel.

Once that has sunk in, you can start to understand how seriously this president has been compromised, and how much of a threat he could pose to the democratic system if allowed to get away with incremental abuse at a national level.

The Clintons wasted little time taking charge of the US Justice Department. All US Attorneys were asked to hand in their resignations. It was a move of breath-taking audacity, one that gave the Clintons control over the prosecutorial machinery of the federal government in every judicial district in the country.

They then set about eliminating the Director of the FBI, William Sessions, who was known for his refusal to countenance White House interference in the affairs of the Bureau. The post of FBI Director is supposed to be a 10-year appointment that puts it above politics. But Sessions was toppled in a Washington putsch, without a murmur of protest from America's press, and replaced by the hapless errand boy Louis Freeh. And I almost forgot, the Clintons installed their friend Webster Hubbell as "shadow" Attorney General- until Hubbell was jailed for Arkansas crimes.

When you are living through events day by day it is hard to know whether you are witnessing a historic turning point, or just mistaking the usual noise of politics for something meaningful. But there is no doubt that strange things have been going on in America.

The Clinton era has spawned an armed militia movement involving tens of thousands of people. The last time anything like this occurred was in the 1850s with the emergence of the southern gun clubs. It is easy to dismiss the militia as Right-wing nuts: it is much harder to read the complex sociology of civic revolt. At the very least the militias reveal the hatred building up against the irksome yuppies who run the country.

It is under this president that domestic terrorism has become a feature of life in America, culminating in the destruction of the Oklahama federal building on April 19, 1995. What set the deadly spiral in motion was the Waco assault two years before, and the cover-up that followed.

No official has ever lost a day's pay for precipitating the incineration of 80 people, most of them women and children, in the worst abuse of power since Wounded Knee a century ago. Instead of shame and accountability, the Clinton administration accused the victims of setting fire to themselves and their children, a posthumous smear that does not bear serious scrutiny. It then compounded the injustice by pushing for a malicious prosecution of the survivors.

Nothing does more to sap the life of a democracy than the abuse of power. Public trust is dangerously low. According to polls, barely a quarter of the American people now feel that they can count on the federal government to do the right thing.

A majority refuse to accept that Vincent Foster committed suicide, and they have good reason for their doubts. The paramedics and crime scene witnesses in Fort Marcy Park on July 20, 1993, tell a story that flatly contradicts the official findings. A police Polaroid shows a .22 calibre bullet wound in Foster's neck that the autopsy somehow failed to note. Are Americans to believe that Hillary Clinton's closest friend shot himself twice, with two different guns?

The Washington press corps has chosen not to report on this sort of thing, of course, because it always gives more weight to the utterings of an "official" source, with a title, than it does to the testimony of a common citizen. It has the matter backwards, in my opinion, because the "official" usually has the greater interest in lying.

Even so, the truth is getting out. Unauthorised stories are reaching the public through the samizdat links of the Internet and talk radio. From there it disseminates by word of mouth, spreading a thick layer of cynicism across the country.

Of all the bad things that Clinton has done to America, the worst is turning the FBI into a federal replica of the Arkansas State Police. Whether it is the persecution of dissident investigators in the air disasters of Pan Am 103 and TWA 800, or allowing the White House to peruse the secret files of political opponents, or the alledged intimidation of key witnesses in the Foster case, the FBI is starting to look like the enforcement arm of a police state.

The latest shocker is the decision to punish Frederic Whitehurst, the whistle-blower who first came forward with tales of corruption at the FBI crime labs. An internal inquiry has conceded that the lab tilted evidence "to incriminate the defendants" and cooked up the theory that a fertiliser bomb blew up the Oklahoma federal building after it found fertiliser at the house of a suspect, Terry Nichols. But the Justice Department seems more interested in denigrating Whitehurst, the lone hero of this sorry tale, than flagellating itself.

Look at the treatment of Carol Howe, the undercover informant who tracked the early stages of what appears to be the Oklahoma bombing conspiracy. The moment she surfaced as a threat to the "lone bomber" case against Timothy McVeigh, this January, she was indicted on criminal charges.

The FBI claims that she was dropped as an informant months before the bombing, but debriefing reports show the Bureau continued to receive her intelligence weeks after the blast. They also show that she named members of a neo-Nazi terrorist cell who had cased the Oklahoma federal building in December 1994 with the intention of bombing it. Yet the FBI did not follow up her reports. It conducted 26,000 witness interviews, most of them irrelevant, but could not find time to pursue the suspects who were specifically named by a paid informant.

This leaves the nasty suspicion that the FBI is shielding this neo-Nazi group in order to cover its own tracks. If it turns out that the bombing was a bungled sting operation by the FBI, as some of the victims are now alleging, the only fit response is to send bulldozers down Pennsylvania Avenue to flatten the Hoover Building once and for all.

A monument should be raised on the rubble of the FBI headquarters that reads Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (Who Shall Guard the Guards?) as a warning to free-born Americans of the next millennium.

Is Bill Clinton to blame? Of course he is. Degradation spreads from the top down... Perhaps it is impolite for a London newspaper to say such things about a president of the United States. Many people think so...Critics tell me that I have invested too much emotion in my quarrel with the Clintons. To that I plead guilty. It comes from befriending so many of their victims. I am content to be blacklisted as the "mad scribbler" - as the Washington Post called me this week - for I am confident that one day historians are going to view Clinton as a the last great cad of the 20th century, or worse.

To the American people I bid a fond farewell. Guard your liberties. It is he trust of each generation to pass a free republic to the next. And if I know you right, you will rouse yourself from slumber to ensure exactly that.

Buffalo News
Buffalo, New York
10 June 2001

McVeigh hints at some regrets

Please send as far and wide as possible.

Thanks,

Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

Robalini's Note: Why has this letter never been displayed to the
public?  Just as the 35 hours of tapes of him confessing to the same
reporter, all the evidence of his supposed admittance of guilt has
never been released to the public: instead, the claims of these
reporters must be taken on faith.


http://www.buffalonews.com/
 

McVeigh hints at some regrets 

Timothy J. McVeigh:"I am sorry these people had to lose their lives. But that's the nature of the beast." In a letter from prison to Buffalo News reporter Lou Michel

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. - The words "I am sorry" do not come easily for Timothy J. McVeigh. Nor do they come without conditions. When he speaks those three words about his victims in the Oklahoma City bombing, he attaches a strong statement of defiance.

"I am sorry these people had to lose their lives," McVeigh said in a recent letter to The Buffalo News.

"But that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be."

The bombing, he wrote, was "a legit tactic" in his war against what he considers an out-of-control federal government.

In a series of letters written from his death row prison cell before and after the postponement of his original execution date, the condemned mass murderer declared that his terrorist act was in defense of Americans' rights to personal freedom and a reaction to government atrocities at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

Though he recognizes that millions of Americans despise him, the decorated Persian Gulf War veteran said he hopes his countrymen eventually will come to view him as a "freedom fighter" who died for his cause. He compares his bombing to the actions of John Brown, who protested slavery in the mid-1800s by leading raids that killed men, women and children.

Joseph Hartzler believes McVeigh will be remembered as something else: a heartless villain and traitor who wore earplugs and fled the scene after igniting a bomb that killed innocent people.

"I think he'll be remembered as an evil person who murdered 168 innocent people," said Hartzler, the chief government prosecutor in the trial that put McVeigh on death row.

In Hartzler's view, McVeigh will be remembered as anything but a hero or a freedom fighter.

In fact, the prosecutor believes McVeigh's actions give a bad name to people who speak out against big government.

"People who oppose the federal government don't typically support violence," Hartzler said. "The country is richer when we have people who are comfortable criticizing policies and practices they don't like. Otherwise, we won't improve as a nation."

Oklahoma City bombing victim Patti Hall, a former government employee who has endured 16 surgeries for the injuries she suffered in McVeigh's blast, believes the Pendleton native will go down as one of the most hated villains in American history.

"He says he is proud of what he did. He says he isn't afraid to be executed. But to me, it all seems like false bravado," Hall said. "I think he's a scared little kid inside."

Though courtrooms have been abuzz from the highly publicized controversy over missing FBI documents from the bombing investigation, McVeigh's last weeks on death row have been quiet. He recently told The News that he is "shutting down operations" - cutting off communications with all but a few people.

But before he cut off communications, McVeigh contradicted his lawyers' contention of a wider conspiracy theory in their last-ditch efforts to delay his execution.

McVeigh's recent letters to The News definitively restated that he, Terry Nichols, Michael Fortier and his wife, Lori, were the only people aware of the bombing before it occurred.

"The three people who knew something were Mike, Lori and Terry," McVeigh said. "They all knew most details. . . . No one knew them all but me.

"For those die-hard conspiracy theorists who will refuse to believe this, I turn the tables and say: Show me where I needed anyone else. Financing? Logistics? Specialized tech skills? Brainpower? Strategy? . . . Show me where I needed a dark, mysterious "Mr. X'!"

Those few who remain close to McVeigh say that his last days are being spent in managing what will happen after his death.

"He's been taking care of a lot of last-minute details, like trying to figure out where all his papers and letters will be archived," said Cate McCauley, a Rhode Island woman who is one of McVeigh's few confidants. "I last heard from him a week ago, and he was very businesslike."

McVeigh continues to maintain he did the right thing when he bombed the Murrah Building, said McCauley, who spent years investigating the bombing as the executive director of a citizens committee in Oklahoma City.

"I don't think he has any regrets," McCauley said. "He sees himself as a soldier. He committed himself to this course of action. Sometimes he wishes he didn't have to do it, but he felt he had no other choice."

McVeigh has told McCauley and Buffalo News reporters that he might have chosen another tactic for expressing his hatred of the federal government. McVeigh said he sometimes wishes that, instead of a bombing, he had used his gunnery skills for a series of assassinations against police and government officials who crack down on the rights of gun owners.

If the anti-government novel "Unintended Consequences," by John Ross, had come out before the bombing, McVeigh said he might not have bombed the Murrah Building. Ross' book, published in 1996, tells the story of a man who protests gun laws by murdering law enforcement and government officials.

"He has told me that, in hindsight, he might have done things differently if "Unintended Consequences' had come out first," McCauley said. "But I don't think he regrets the bombing."

McVeigh has turned down hundreds of reporters' requests for interviews in recent weeks. He said he also turned down a request from the FBI for a "final debriefing." Agents wanted to conduct a "progressive interview," meeting McVeigh in federal prison and asking about the political views that led to his crime.

McVeigh said he was concerned that the FBI agents would somehow use whatever information he gave them to hurt people who stood up against the government.

"I will not be doing a progressive (aka repressive) interview with the FBI," McVeigh wrote. "I would hate for my insights to be used to kill more people, when they eventually abuse their power."

Among the other issues touched on by McVeigh in recent letters and phone interviews:

• He plans to have his body cremated and the ashes turned over to his attorney Robert Nigh. Ultimately, the ashes will be scattered in a place that McVeigh wants to be kept secret.

"I don't want to create a draw for people who hate me, or for people who love me," McVeigh said.

During one moment of anger toward some of his critics in Oklahoma City, McVeigh briefly considered having his ashes dropped at the memorial where the Murrah Building once stood.

"That would be too vengeful, too raw, cold. It's not in me," he said.

McVeigh has also considered the possibility of having his ashes flown into space, or dropped in Waco or in the Erie Canal, one of the favorite places of his childhood.

• McVeigh said he has had a number of requests for organ transplants. He said he would be willing to provide organs, but prison regulations prohibit that.

"I respond personally to every organ request, explaining that I looked into this years ago, and it is not allowed," McVeigh said.

• McVeigh continues to get letters in prison from people who admire his political stance, though most do not condone the bombing. Some of the letters are bizarre.

"Timmy even got a letter from a woman who said she would have his baby if he could somehow get his sperm smuggled out of prison," said his father, Bill McVeigh. "She even said her boyfriend told her it was OK."

• As McVeigh looks back on his life, he said the deadly 1993 siege at Waco - more than anything else - propelled him to action in Oklahoma City.

"If there would not have been a Waco, I would have put down roots somewhere and not been so unsettled with the fact that my government . . . was a threat to me," McVeigh wrote. "Everything that Waco implies was on the forefront of my thoughts. That sort of guided my path for the next couple of years.

"Waco made me decide that you can't lay down roots because you're not even safe in your own room anymore."

McVeigh said his violence was a "last resort" after he spent more than a year writing protest letters to the federal government and handing out pamphlets criticizing the government. Though he said he is sorry that people died, he blames the government, not himself.

• McVeigh contends that he used threats and threatening behavior to stop Nichols from abandoning him in the final days before the bombing. He said Nichols was getting "cold feet," and at one point seemed as though he wanted to back out.

Nichols had reason to fear him. At one point in 1994, McVeigh said, he surprised Nichols by spraying pepper spray into his face. He said he did this to show Nichols the effects of the spray.

McVeigh added that he is convinced that an Oklahoma jury will eventually convict Nichols of state murder charges and sentence him to death.

Defiant and unrepentant to the last, McVeigh continues to insist he has no fear of his execution.

An agnostic, he said he will "improvise, adapt and overcome" if it turns out that there is an afterlife, and he winds up in heaven or hell.

"If I am going to hell," he said, "I'm gonna have a lot of company."

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

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

The popular conception was spun by the press corps like a clay urn: McVeigh, the volatile minute man, was so bitter after failing to make the Army's "elite" Special Forces, so stuffed full of the froth of the Turner Diaries, that he vented his rage on the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

But Captain Terry Guild, McVeigh's' former platoon leader, told reporters that the failure to become a Green Beret left the Iraq War veteran "upset. Not angry. Just very, very disappointed." In the Army, he demonstrated a willingness to carry out orders, any orders. He trained on his own time while other soldiers languished in their bunks or caroused at the PX. As a civilian, Timothy McVeigh continued to dwell on the military. In 1992 he took a job with Burns International Security Services in Buffalo and was assigned to the security detail at Calspan, a Pentagon contractor that conducts classified research in advanced aerospace rocketry and electronic warfare. Al Salandra, a spokesman for Calspan, told reporters that McVeigh was "a model employee."

"He was real different," Todd Regier, a plumber, told the Boston Globe. "Kind of cold. He was almost like a robot."