Cut and paste from Tom Burghardt's anti-fascist digest at www.topica.com Michael Pugliese
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN, No. 304 By tburghardt at igc.org
THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN Reality Bites Monday, June 11, 2001 http://www.sfbg.com/reality/27.html By Martin A. Lee
Timothy McVeigh called it a "state-assisted suicide." That's how he viewed his own execution by lethal injection at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. It was the first federal execution in the United States in 38 years.
When the poison coursed through his 33-year-old veins and his heartbeat ceased, it silenced forever the one man who knew what really transpired on April 19, 1995, when a massive bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City.
The syringe that dispatched McVeigh into oblivion will not numb the pain of 168 senseless deaths. It will not deter other acts of terrorism. It will not make the United States a safer or better country. Nor will it put an end to lingering uncertainties about the Oklahoma City massacre. There are too many loose ends and unanswered questions for McVeigh's execution to qualify as the end of anything.
=46ederal officials insist that McVeigh had only one accomplice, Terry Nichols, who is facing life in prison for his ancillary role in the bomb plot. The FBI says it found no evidence of a wider conspiracy, even though the original indictment cited McVeigh, Nichols, and "others unknown."
Not that the FBI's word counts for much these days.
Last month, the bureau admitted it had neglected to share more than 4,000 pages of documents from its investigation into the bombing with McVeigh's legal team. This unexpected disclosure forced the Justice Department to postpone the execution, which was originally scheduled for May 16, so that McVeigh's lawyers would have time to scrutinize the newly released files.
Calling it "a monumental embarrassment," a spokesman for the FBI attributed the miscue to bureaucratic bungling. Others saw it as evidence of a government cover-up. Some of the missing files apparently included information about the elusive "John Doe 2," who many suspect was involved in the bombing. Terry Nichols' attorneys have petitioned for a new trial.
The government's case, as it stands, is flawed. For starters, it's highly unlikely that McVeigh could have mixed the fertilizer bomb by himself near Geary State Lake on the day before the attack, as federal prosecutors contend. Charles Farley, a car mechanic, testified at the Nichols trial that he saw five men gathered around a Ryder truck and other vehicles by the lake, loading white bags of powder that he thought was ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the same type used in the bomb. Farley, a solid witness, had provided an exact and detailed account of what he had seen to the FBI, but the bureau inexplicably did not pursue this lead.
Numerous eyewitnesses placed McVeigh in the company of other people in the days leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing. Morris John Kuper saw a person resembling McVeigh with another man (not Nichols) walking near the federal building shortly before the blast. When McVeigh was arrested two days later, Kuper immediately contacted the FBI. But his report about a possible second bomber was buried in the "misplaced" FBI files that reappeared a few weeks ago.
McVeigh claimed that he alone was responsible for the carnage in Oklahoma City, but he may have said this to protect his co-terrorists who are still at large. As he explained, he wanted to "send a message" to a tyrannical government by "borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy," which so often relies on "brute force." So he obliterated a federal building. McVeigh dismissed the 19 children who perished in the explosion as "collateral damage," a ghoulish phrase he first heard while winning medals as a soldier in the Gulf War. McVeigh said he was no more guilty than other U.S. military personnel who bombed civilian neighborhoods while attacking Baghdad or Belgrade.
"It's so fearful because he was so all-American," said Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan. "[McVeigh] was not a demented, crazy person . . . He had led an ordinary life, just an ordinary ex-G.I., come home. There was nothing about him that would stand out at a church picnic."
A big fan of macho action films like "Rambo," McVeigh had come of age in upstate New York during the Reagan-era recession of the 1980s that ravaged the industrial northeast and devastated family farms across the county. He was an above-average student with an IQ of 126 who found few job prospects after high school. So he enlisted in the army. During basic training at =46ort Benning, Georgia, he leaned to chant: "Blood makes the grass grow! Kill! Kill! Kill!"
Toward the end of his military service, McVeigh got involved with a far right crowd with extreme, antigovernment views. It was the early 1990s, and the militia scene was starting to percolate. Nourished by the odiferous compost of paranoia and hate that has long moldered on the American margins, McVeigh began making the rounds at gun shows and propagating the cause with a scowl on his geeky, college-boy face.
McVeigh immersed himself in the so-called "patriot movement," a volatile subculture where the militias overlapped with the crazed racialist fringe. He joined a Ku Klux Klan group, read the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight, and mingled with members of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, whose leader, William Pierce, had written The Turner Diaries. This notorious hate novel describes a successful paramilitary insurgency by white supremacists that blow up a federal building in Washington, DC. It was McVeigh's favorite book, and it would serve as a blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing
A paranoid style has always been part of the U.S. political scene, along with right-wing paramilitary groups such as the KKK, the Minutemen, and the Posse Comitatus. What distinguished the post-Cold-War patriot movement from its antecedents was how it reinvented fascist ideology in a uniquely American way by combining muddled arguments for anti-big-government constitutionalism with traditional isolationist appeals, reactionary conspiracy theories, and frontier myths (ala Randy Weaver) that promised national regeneration through violence. Offering scapegoats rather than solutions, the patriot subculture attracted deeply disenchanted individuals with real, down-home gripes. Shunted aside while U.S. corporations got leaner and meaner, many of these people were treading water economically and aching for someone to blame.
With so many Americans taking the paramilitary oath, wacky ideas began trickling down to millions of malcontents much faster than crumbs were falling from the tables of the wealthy. The militias were rife with wild rumors about government mind control plots, Midwest tornados caused by CIA weather modification, secret markings encoded on the backs of road-signs to assist an imminent U.N. invasion. It was the American Dream in blacklight - everything pointed toward "a conspiracy so immense," a cabal so sinister, a future so bleak that armed rebellion seemed like the only sensible response.
After the Ruby Ridge shoot-out and the Waco conflagration, McVeigh became convinced that the federal government was plotting to disarm gun owners in order to pave the way for a take-over by a shadowy elite of bankers, industrialists, and politicians who ruled the New World order. McVeigh decided to go on the offensive, hoping to spark an insurrection. It appears that he had help from the underground Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a small group of gangsters and neo-Nazi zealots who sought to overthrow the U.S. government, purge the country of blacks and Jews, and install a new legal system based entirely on their own racist interpretation of the Bible.
In the mid-1990s, the ARA robbed 22 banks in eight Midwest states. Not without a sense of humor, the ARA bandits wore whimsical disguises, such as Count Dracula and Ronald Reagan masks, while they pulled off their bank heists. Some of the stolen money may have financed McVeigh, who seemed to have an inordinate amount of cash for an unemployed drifter. During this period, McVeigh told his sister, Jennifer, that he had helped organized a bank robbery and he showed her a wad of $100 bills, which he claimed was payment for his role in the job. Richard Guthrie, an ARA bank robber who committed suicide in jail, referred in his unpublished memoirs to an accomplice named "Tim."
Indiana State University criminologist Mike Hamm and journalist J.D. Cash have discovered a compelling and unmistakable connection between McVeigh's movements in the months leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing and the shifting whereabouts of the self-styled ARA guerrillas. They traveled in the same circles and were often in the same place at the same time - a pattern that is difficult to write off as mere coincidence.
The ARA used Elohim City, a remote, white supremacist enclave in eastern Oklahoma, as a base of operations. McVeigh got a speeding ticket a few miles from Elohim City, and telephone logs indicate that he called the compound two weeks before the Oklahoma City attack. Carol Howe, a paid undercover informant for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, later testified under oath that she saw McVeigh (aka "Tim Tuttle") at Elohim City. She also claimed that she heard people at Elohim City talking about bombing government buildings, but she weakened her credibility by changing parts of her story on different occasions.
Today, all known ARA members are either dead or in prison, and their role, if any, in the Oklahoma City massacre remains a mystery. The large-scale rebellion that McVeigh envisioned never materialized, but there are those who still believe that the only way to right deep-rooted wrongs is by setting a timer or pulling a trigger. The subculture of hate that spawned McVeigh has survived his execution.
Martin A. Lee (martin at sfbg.com) is the author of Acid Dreams and The Beast Reawakens, a book on neofascism.
Copyright 2001 The San Francisco Bay Guardian.
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