- Justice lawyers recommend delay in 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- That, at least, is Tim McVeigh's version of events. It
is the story he gave to two journalists from his hometown of Buffalo, New
York, in an extensive series of interviews that forms the centrepiece of
the recent book American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & the Oklahoma
City Bombing. It is clearly the way he would like his act to be remembered,
as he prepares for death by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary
in Indiana next Wednesday. It is an account that, for all the media hullaballoo
surrounding his execution, has gone largely unquestioned by the US's raucous
punditocracy.
-
- It is also, give or take a few details, the official
version presented by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and government
lawyers at his trial in 1997. McVeigh, the argument ran, had some help
from Nichols and another friend from army days, Michael Fortier, but essentially
he carried out the bombing alone. No accomplices, no broader network of
conspirators, nothing. Case closed, as far as the government was concerned.
-
- Now imagine the scene all over again, this time with
extra details supplied by eyewitnesses interviewed in the immediate aftermath
of thebombing and by the investigative work of a handful of journalists,
lawyers and academics who have spent the past six years going over every
detail of the calamity to try to wheedle out its mysteries.
-
- Suddenly, the picture is very different. McVeigh is still
driving the yellow Ryder removal truck, but he is not alone. The truck
contains the unmixed bomb components, minus the detonators and caps which
are being transported separately, either in a brown 1970s-era Chevy pick-up
or possibly another vehicle.
-
- In the early morning, the vehicles pull up in a derelict
section of Bricktown, a mile from the Murrah building, where the accomplices
make the bomb at high speed, IRA-style. After filling nine of the 13 barrels
in the back of the truck, they run out of nitromethane and switch to diesel
fuel. McVeigh cuts open the Tovex sausages to insert the blasting caps
(explaining why traces of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, are later
found on his clothing).
-
- Then, according to the accounts of at least 10 eyewitnesses,
there is a flurry of activity across Oklahoma City in the hour before the
bombing. Just after eight o'clock, the brown pick-up roars out of the Murrah
building car park with McVeigh and another man inside. Half an hour later,
the Ryder truck drives from Bricktown to the top of a hill a mile or so
to the north. It is followed along part of the route by both the pick-up
and the Mercury Marquis, the latter with three men inside. The truck waits
at a tyre store, possibly for a radio signal giving the all-clear (hence
the choice of a high altitude). McVeigh, identified once again as the Ryder
driver, allays immediate suspicion by asking the store owner for directions
to the Murrah building.
-
- At about 8.45am, the Ryder pulls up across from the Regency
Apartments, within sight of the target. Again, at least one person is seen
with McVeigh, who goes into a convenience store on the ground floor of
the building to buy two Cokes and a pack of cigarettes, even though he
does not smoke.
-
- At 8.57am, McVeigh pulls into the handicapped zone of
the federal building, walks across the street and gets into the Mercury
with another man. From the passenger side of the Ryder truck emerges yet
another man, who jumps into the brown pick-up parked just in front and
drives away. By the time the bomb explodes at 9.02am, both the Mercury
and the pick-up are on the freeway heading north back up to Kansas.
-
- Fact or fantasy? The result of confusion among traumatised
eyewitnesses, or an elaborate scheme in which decoys and rapid place-shifting
among vehicles are all part of the plan? And who are these supposed accomplices
exactly? How many of them are there?
-
- These are the questions that have been gnawing away at
investigators and victims of the bombing from day one. The government itself
spent more than a year hunting for a so-called "John Doe 2",
a second bombing suspect, before giving up and switching its story to the
lone-bomber theory. The original grand jury indictment named McVeigh, Nichols
"and others unknown" in what it called a "conspiracy to
use a weapon of mass destruction". When the defence team put McVeigh
through a polygraph test, he passed on all questions concerning his own
role; when asked whether anybody else was involved, however, he failed.
-
- The FBI now says the supposition of a wider plot was
simply wrong. Before one dismisses the alternate theory as the stuff of
conspiratorial fantasy, however, it is worth examining the deep flaws in
the government's side of the story and asking why its early lines of investigation
into John Doe 2, the brown pick-up and the rest all came to naught. The
reasons are neither as mysterious nor as murkily conspiratorial as one
might think.
-
- The government's problem is neatly summarised by Stephen
Jones, who, as McVeigh's trial lawyer, had the advantage of examining every
document and witness statement gathered by the prosecution. "They
got very lucky very early, then their luck turned sour," he said.
McVeigh was found in just 48 hours, largely thanks to the fact he had been
pulled over on the freeway for a missing back licence plate and remanded
in police custody for possession of an illegal concealed weapon. Nichols
gave himself up in Kansas, and Fortier was a logical port of call because
McVeigh had stayed extensively at his house in Arizona.
-
- But the wider conspiracy proved maddeningly difficult
to crack. The people who will be named in this article are well known to
the authorities; indeed, most are by now either behind bars for other crimes
or dead. At the time of the McVeigh and Nichols trials, however, their
relationship to the bombing was either unknown or unsupported by sufficient
evidence. Even the case against McVeigh was riddled with holes, leading
several commentators at the time to speculate that he might be acquitted.
The government team had to ask itself: should we dilute our case against
McVeigh by admitting we can't nail his co-conspirators? Or should we simply
pretend they don't exist? They plumped for the latter, and the fact that
McVeigh was convicted and sentenced to death suggests it was indeed a smart
strategy to bring to court. That, however, does not make it anything close
to the full truth.
-
- The government did not call a single eyewitness who saw
McVeigh, either in Oklahoma City or in Junction City, Kansas, where the
Ryder truck had been rented two days earlier. Why not? Because every one
of them saw McVeigh with someone else. At Elliott's Body Shop, the rental
agency, there are strong doubts whether McVeigh was seen at all. Although
it was his alias, Robert Kling, that was used to secure the rental agreement,
neither of the two men described by employees entirely fit McVeigh's profile.
McVeigh had been filmed by a security camera at a nearby McDonald's 24
minutes before the time stamped on the rental agreement, wearing clothes
that did not match either of the men seen at Elliott's. There is also no
plausible explanation of how he travelled the mile and a quarter from McDonald's
to the rental agency, carless and alone as he claims, without getting soaked
in the rain. The three people interviewed agreed John Does 1 and 2 were
dry.
-
- According to Stephen Jones, who has seen the interview
transcripts, it took 44 days for the FBI to convince the car rental agency
owner that John Doe 1 was Timothy McVeigh. And in the end they did not
dare put him on the witness stand, for fear of what might happen under
cross-examination.
-
- Jones, a man widely criticised - notably by his client
- for his apparently gutless handling of the trial, could have called many
of the eyewitnesses himself if he had wanted. His problem was that for
all the evidence he could have presented about John Doe 2 (not to mention
Does 3, 4, 5 and up), few if any of the witnesses would have proved exculpatory
to McVeigh. The one person he did call, Daina Bradley, had seen a second
man from inside the Murrah building; her credibility, however, was demolished
under cross-examination when she admitted a history of mental problems
and continuing trauma after the bombing, in which she lost two children
and her mother and had to have her right leg hacked off without anaesthetic
by rescue workers after it became trapped in rubble.
-
- Jones was more successful in attacking the internal logic
of the government's lone-bomber theory. It beggared belief that McVeigh
would drive the Ryder truck several hundred miles with the bomb fully loaded,
he argued, particularly given the history of car bombers inadvertently
blowing themselves up in Northern Ireland. McVeigh himself had a close
call with a car crash in Michigan in December 1994, when he was carrying
detonators in his car; he swore at the time to be more careful around explosives.
-
- And then there was the mystery of the extra leg. The
rescue teams who cleaned up after the bombing had found nine severed left
legs, but only eight bodies to match them with. The government's medical
examiner confirmed this in court. Moreover, the state of the extra leg
was consistent with someone who had been extremely close to the source
of the blast. Who could it belong to? Jones is convinced it must be one
of the bombers. In the course of his research he talked to the former chief
state pathologist for Northern Ireland who had conducted more than 2,500
autopsies on bombing victims, and told him: "In the Western world,
there is no such thing as an unclaimed innocent victim. Everyone gets claimed,
sooner or later, unless there is a particular reason not to."
-
- There are other questions for which the official account
has no satisfactory answer, notably how McVeigh managed to support himself
financially after he stopped regular paid work in late 1992. The bomb itself
was not particularly expensive, no more than a few thousand dollars once
you consider that the Tovex and blasting caps were stolen from a quarry
in Kansas. But McVeigh led an extraordinarily itinerant lifestyle, particularly
after November 1994, when he barely stopped moving, frantically criss-crossing
the country in his car and staying in motels at almost every turn. Somehow,
he paid cash for everything.
-
- After he left the army, McVeigh actually fell heavily
in debt, partly because of his habit of gambling on the Buffalo Bills football
team. Terry Nichols, meanwhile, accumulated about $50,000 in credit-card
bills by mid-1993. These are not problems that can be explained away by
the pair's occasional selling activities at gun shows; numerous gun-show
participants have testified they were usually so broke, they could not
afford an exhibition table.
-
- According to the official version of the bombing, the
major source of funding was a November 1994 robbery at the Arkansas home
of Roger Moore, a gun collector and self-made businessman who knew McVeigh
from the gun-show circuit. Although McVeigh did not commit the robbery
himself - who did is a source of some mystery - he has admitted being behind
it, netting $8,700 in cash and an estimated $60,000 in silver bars, gold
bullion, jewellery and firearms.
-
- It is not clear, however, how much of this loot was put
to use. Some of the weapons were later sold, but much of the rest was recovered
untouched from a storage locker in Las Vegas where it had been stashed
by Nichols. The Moore robbery only helps to account for one of several
plane trips Nichols made to his mail-order bride's home in the Philippines,
for which he paid cash every time. And it does not begin to explain how
McVeigh - to take one example of many - repaid a $4,000 debt to his father
in $100 bills a full year before the robbery.
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- From the start, there has been no lack of conspiracy
theories about the Oklahoma City bombing, many of them absurd and many
displaying the same government-hating bias that drove McVeigh. There was
one claim that the bombing was a federal sting operation gone horribly
wrong; another that there were explosive packs strapped to the internal
pillars of the Murrah building, timed to go off at the same time as the
fertiliser bomb. There is no credible evidence for either claim.
- Comment
-
- From Oceania Investigations
shannapat@worldnet.att.net
5-13-1
-
-
- Dear Jeff,
-
- Gumbel's article is a good synopsis of the "untold
story." However, he has a few errors in fact.
-
- 1. -- "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)."
-
- The falsified report from the FBI the following week
released the incriminating statement that traces of PETN were found on
Tim's clothing. However, a year later, Dr. Fred Whitehurst, the whistle-blowing
agent, came forward to say that he was the one in charge of that lab exam
and the tests were negative. NO traces of any explosive materials were
found on Tim's clothes. It was another government lie!
-
- 2.-- "Although McVeigh did not commit the robbery
himself - who did is a source of some mystery - he has admitted being behind
it, netting $8,700 in cash and an estimated $60,000 in silver bars, gold
bullion, jewellery and firearms."
-
- Tim "admitted" in the new book EVERYTHING the
government would want him to say. Let us remember that he has been under
their control for six years, and his drug-induced posture today is textbook
MK-Ultra. (See my attached "Musings" column from the current
issue of Media Bypass magazine.)
-
- 3.-- "From the start, there has been no lack of
conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing, many of them absurd
and many displaying the same government-hating bias that drove McVeigh.
There was one claim that the bombing was a federal sting operation gone
horribly wrong; another that there were explosive packs strapped to the
internal pillars of the Murrah building, timed to go off at the same time
as the fertiliser bomb. There is no credible evidence for either claim."
-
- Oh, yes, there is and there has been since May of '95
when USAF demolition expert Gen. Ben Partin showed the four columns that
were blown from the inside. He also proved the absolute absurdity of the
theory that ANFO could wreak this kind of havoc. Columns close to the truck's
alleged location were still standing while several farther away were blown
out.
-
- I leave you with this: If a few hundred freelance reporters
and a few million unbiased citizens can see through the absolute nonsense
of the official scenario, then so can the FBI. And if they, the agency
in charge of the investigation does not say what really happened and aids
in the coercion of witnesses to change their stories, that is no mistake.
That is willful.
-
- And you can bet the ranch that the "oversight"
of forgetting to forward 3.140 documents to the defense was no accident
either.
-
- You are welcome to forward this to Mr. Gumbel.
-
- Sincerely,
Pat Shannan
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