FC: Timothy McVeigh, muzzled by U.S. government, speaks via the Net

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue May 8 20:56:25 PDT 2001


On Tue, 8 May 2001, Maureen Anderson wrote:


> >Are we sure this is really McVeigh's writing? It seems terribly,
> >uncharacteristically lucid compared to the stuff I have actually heard or
> >read.
>
> That was my impression,too (re lucidity), though I had nothing to
> compare it to. Maybe Gore Vidal proofread it for him :-)

I dunno. His letter to Soldier of Fortune Magazine excerpted in today's Washington Post seems to be written in the exact same voice, and it doesn't seem like most of the literati would have been interested in helping him with that. I wonder if reporters haven't been reporting his speech all along as a verbatim transcript without cleaning it up, which makes anyone look like an idiot who isn't pompous. (The NYT did it to Reagan once early in his term, and it set off a subterreanean firestorm that the Times was crossing the line of dirty trickery.) After all, they expect to see a madman, so perhaps they see one and the trascript looks perfect as is. They might even be prevented by a feeling of treason from cleaning up his speech in the normal way to make it look better. At any rate, if reporters haven't misled us about his ability to reason and use multisyllabic words, they certainly seems to have misled us about him being taciturn.

Here's the SOF letter. It's in the Washington Post feature "The Magazine Reader."

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60858-2001May7.html

Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City,

has entered the wonderful world of magazine criticism.

The June issue of Soldier of Fortune -- the magazine for macho

mercenaries and their fans -- contains a long letter from McVeigh,

attacking SOF and its editor, Robert K. Brown.

"In this post-Cold War era, SOF has periodically struggled to find

relevant content for its pages," McVeigh writes. "To fill this void,

Bob Brown has of late adopted the subtle promotion of militarized

civilian law enforcement as his bread and butter. The nation has seen

this police-state mentality come to fruition before, at places like

Ruby Ridge and Waco, and it is disturbing to see your magazine once

again drifting in this direction.

"A sometimes overlooked or underestimated danger of a standing army is

the 'filter-down' effect: the unabated outpouring of military

personnel into civilian law enforcement jobs. This, in turn, has the

effect of slowly (but predictably) devolving the concept of 'protect

and serve' into one of 'assault and conquer' . . . While law

enforcement recruitment efforts pitch military adventure as a way to

lure applicants, these efforts ultimately leave recruits believing

that it is their job to be militaristic. While it may be gung-ho macho

to strap on an assault rig and kick in a door, is this really the

America you want to live in? Should SOF be encouraging this 'war at

home' mentality?"

Michael

__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com



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