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In McVeigh’s “Face of Terror” is also reflected “The Ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald” and like Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Sirhan Sirhan and a number of other American “Lone Gunmen,” before and after McVeigh, all of whom inspired multiple competing, highly conflicting and continually evolving narratives and debates about just how alone these lone wolves really were.
The [ATF, FBI and] different agencies weren’t cooperating. In fact, they were working against each other. You even had a situation where one branch of the FBI was investigating and not sharing with another branch…The ATF had something going on with McVeigh. They were watching him-of course they were…McVeigh knew he was delivering a bomb, but he had no idea what was in that truck. He just wanted to shake things up a little; you know, make a gesture…the bomb was never meant to explode. They were going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand,
you will be executed and put to death, not with honor, but because you will be perceived as a mass murderer, a man who committed a crime greater than Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, or Ted Bundy. Not only will you die, but many of the principles you believe in will, at least temporarily, be rejected by the American people and you will be seen as a fanatical, mal-adjusted misfit who brought untold suffering to thousands of innocent people in your misguided attempt to right an imaginary wrong by resorting to revolutionary terror. You will be equated in the public’s mind not with Patrick
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“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.” Then the jury sentenced Timothy McVeigh to death by lethal injection.
Somewhat similar to the previously discussed concept of snapping, and shedding additional light upon newer Lone Gunmen, are cultural theories about postmodern hyper-reality; a condition that results from an increasingly virtual “lived” experience in which “every means of consumption is a simulated setting, or has simulated elements, or simulated people, or simulated products.
Narcissism refers to, among other traits, a pathological preoccupation with the survival of the self;
America’s future Face of Terror, also came of age during the advent of mass-mediated “Terrorism Spectacles.” These began in earnest in late 1979 during the Iran hostage crisis, at which time Americans learned that the United States does not negotiate with terrorists.
[You need to] keep in mind a ‘fundamental’ – it will be important later: ‘survivalists’ are, by their nature, defensive in posture...so in a real sense, a survivalist ‘goal’ is an incremental effort at attaining personal freedom
The effects of this trend on children became a subject of debate and study. Generation X, the first to live fully within the themes of postmodernism, inhabited an unpredictable, “rapidly mutating” and “crisis ridden” world and faced an extremely uncertain future in which “previous boundaries” dissolved.
Chapter Two The Following Records Do Not Exist
In Hamm’s opinion, “there would have been no conspiracy” without the COHORT program, for it was in Basic Training that Timothy McVeigh met Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, who would become Tim’s closest friends and, later, his co-conspirators.
McVeigh later told his biographers that, while at the German installation “they learned to fight their way through houses and barns, ducking into alleys and climbing up chimneys … to ‘clear’ a house by tossing in a grenade and then spraying the place with automatic weapon fire.”12
On September 18, 1990, McVeigh graduated from PLDC and re-enlisted the same day. On October 4, 1990, he was found to be “Qualified for Special Forces Qualification Course” and on December 27, 1990, granted Secret Clearance.
Desert Shield began on August 7, 1990, when, without Congressional authorization, the Department of Defense dispatched an additional 40,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, along with 100,000 body bags.
For Pentagon officials it was important to win the “hearts and minds” of the American people and prevent unmanaged media coverage of public dissent from spreading and morphing into Vietnam Syndrome.
