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--By George Mason |
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On May 16, 2001 This was to be the day that decorated Gulf War Army veteran Timothy McVeigh, 33, was scheduled to be sedated in his cell at the federal prison in Terra Haute, Indiana. He was then to be wheeled into a room with glass walls adjoining a witness room and containing closed circuit television cameras. McVeigh was to be strapped to a table and have his vein swabbed with a cotton ball dipped in alcohol so that he wouldn’t get any infection. A needle would be inserted into his arm. It would deliver a drug that would cause his lungs to collapse and, in just a few quiet moments, he would die. Tim McVeigh had been found guilty of mass murder by a jury of his peers, sentenced by them, confessed to the crime both orally and in writing and remained unapologetic and without remorse. It would be a moment of moral justice. That’s not, however, what happened today. This is. Representative Frank Wolf, (R-VA), Chairman of the House Appropriations sub-committee, snoozed gently, his chin in his hand, as recently resigned Federal Bureau of Investigations Director Louis Freeh acknowledged the Bureau’s failure to provide either prosecution or defense lawyers with FBI evidence in the McVeigh case. Director Freeh also admitted that additional material had been found in Baltimore after the May 10th original announcement. He then said that he was informing the committee that possibly even more evidence had been found since Friday and was currently under review to see if it should be forwarded to the defendant’s attorney. It was, the FBI said, a computer glitch. At the same time, in Alexandria, Virginia, 25-year veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen was indicted on 21 counts of conspiracy and espionage, including 14 charges that carry the death penalty with them. The indictments summarize allegations that Hanssen sold U.S. secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds over a 15-year period. Prosecutors estimated that over 6,000 pages of classified documents were passed on to the KGB. Hanssen also gave the identities of three double agents to Russia who subsequently executed two of them when they returned to Moscow. His long spy career was, the FBI said, an oversight. Tonight, Timothy McVeigh is alive and likely to remain so for a considerable time. His attorneys announced in today’s press conference that all options remain open. That is to say, they have not been instructed to abandon McVeigh’s defense and allow him to claim the attention and survivalist militia martyrdom he craves by being executed on June 11th. There is, perhaps, a sound reason to support a more extended delay in the scheduled execution. It is possible that McVeigh has not yet earned the favor of death over 50 years in obscure solitary or a short life of terror in the general prison population. There is a strong and rational possibility that Tim McVeigh’s confession is false. It’s not that he wasn’t involved, it’s that he wasn’t alone. If there were, in fact, others involved in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, they deserve the same fate as McVeigh. Once McVeigh’s voice is silenced, they may never be identified and brought to trial. Stephen Jones, the estranged first attorney for McVeigh, has published an updated version of his 1998 book Others Unknown. In it, he asserts that the federal government has been making a systematic and deliberate attempt to prevent all of us from finding out exactly what happened. It is, of course, a political advantage to present a domestic terrorist as a sole perpetrator. If there is Middle Eastern involvement, the question of what the government should do about it arises. A report of the Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee, headed by former Oklahoma state representative Charles Key, is to be released within the month. The report will question the prevailing account of the number of perpetrators, the extent of government prior knowledge and the number and type of explosive devises employed. Interviewed on television within the past week, former Oklahoma City television reporter Jayna Davis revealed that in 1997 she offered the FBI her collected evidence (including more than 20 sworn witness affidavits). They refused to accept the files. Her research pointed to the possibility of a conspiracy between McVeigh and the terrorist organizations of Osama bin Laden. (It has been observed that McVeigh hadn’t worked since 1992 yet always paid in cash.) The FBI said that they refused the material because they didn’t have time to corroborate the files and didn’t want to turn the information over to the defense team. An internal memo from the San Francisco FBI field office, reported May 15th in press accounts, seems to indicate that the FBI dropped its search for other suspects within a month of the attack, mid-May of 1995. This policy seemed to have been promulgated by the Oklahoma FBI Command Post in spite of the fact that a significant collection of witnesses reported a number of unidentified men with McVeigh before and after the bombing. Retired FBI agent H. Paul Rico, showing no contrition or remorse, testified before the House Government Reform Committee on May 3rd that Boston area FBI agents, protecting their informants in local criminal organizations, allowed a man they knew to be innocent to remain in prison for 30 years on a false murder charge. A person who maintains innocence cannot qualify for parole and thus the wrongfully convicted serve longer terms than the guilty. The innocent man has just been released. Calling today for the appointment of an Inspector General from outside the Justice Department, Committee members listed a double handful of "inadvertent errors" including some of the 3,000 cases processed through the FBI Laboratories, suppressed tapes from the Birmingham Church fire, Ruby Ridge and the subsequent promotion of the agent in charge, the false accusations against Richard Jewel in Atlanta, the Wen Ho Lee investigation at Las Alamos, and the attack at Waco which used banned CS gas on innocent women and children. There comes a point, the Committee members said, when "inadvertent error" repeated ten times over becomes an advertent out-and-out failure. If the nation can fight through the fog of media hype and TV’s obscene repeating of shots of sensational violence boosting the lust for revenge for the sake of ratings, our citizens may come to another question. In the first semester of logic, we learn that the truth or falsity of a proposition cannot be determined by who says it. Isn’t it bizarre that an evil person thinks that his government is unaccountable and disdainful of its citizens when it uses CS gas banned by the Chemical Weapons Treaty and assumes that it can kill its own men, women and children with impunity? To make his point he kills innocent civilians himself. Does anyone truly believe that such a lamebrain can be the mastermind? Or that all the guilty have been accounted for?
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