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Their construction involves a complex and dynamic process of collaboration and competition between multiple individuals and institutions with various motives, agendas and intents (stated or implied), all of whom assert different facts based on different evaluative criteria. Authors of the stories include journalists, victims and survivors, eyewitnesses, the FBI, federal prosecutors, politicians, experts, analysts, pundits, defense attorneys and notably, McVeigh himself. Within each narrative, the material facts and chronology of events as well as the roles and identities of the villains
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University of Texas, Austin and the American Terrorist Collection, located at St. Bonaventure University.
I use these sources to show how Timothy McVeigh authored all the competing stories about himself, not only those of the “Lone Wolf” variety.
Compared against each other and to newer information introduced in this book, these stories illustrate the shifting nature of history itself and the ways that the Oklahoma City bombing acts as an example of how institutional secrecy can subjugate and silence information and knowledge and relegate it to the outskirts of officially sanctioned regimes of truth.
experimental COHORT Unit,
December 11, 1991: McVeigh ends active duty service with U.S. Army, is transferred to the New York Army National Guard, where he is obliged to serve until April 11, 1995, and returns home to New York where he works as a security guard.
September 13, 1994: According to Grand Jury indictment against Terry Nichols, Timothy McVeigh, and Others Unknown, the conspiracy to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City begins. On the same day, the Federal Assault Weapons ban is signed into law.
The Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 is introduced into the Senate by Sen. Joe Biden on behalf of the Clinton Administration.
9 pm: Richard Wayne Snell, an associate of residents at Elohim City who had previously plotted to bomb the Murrah building in OKC, is executed in the state of Arkansas.
November 1995: Survivors, victims’ family members and citizens led by OK State Representitive Charles Key petition to form a State Grand Jury investigation to uncover new information about the bombing plot and, if possible, identify other conspirators.
December 1, 1995: The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals replaces Oklahoma District Judge Wayne Alley with Denver District Judge Richard Matsch and the trials are moved to Denver, Colorado.
January 27, 1996: Four FBI workers who evaluated evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case are transferred out of the crime lab after a f...
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April 24, 1996: The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) is signed into law by Congress and President Bill Clinton.
June 30, 1997: Oklahoma Supreme Court unanimously rules in favor of the formation of the Grand Jury to investigate the Oklahoma City bombing.
December 2006: California Representative Dana Rohrabacher completes a two-year investigation to determine if others besides Nichols and McVeigh were involved in the Oklahoma City bombing plot.
April 30, 2015: Federal Judge Clark Waddoups files an order appointing Magistrate Judge Dustin B. Pead as Special Master to determine if the FBI tampered with a witness who was going to testify about participation in an undercover FBI operation called PATCON. In November 2015, Judge Waddoups issues an order barring participants in the Special Master’s investigation from discussing the process or the particulars of their participation.
Oklahoma State Rep. and former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Dave McCurdy announced on CBS News that there was “very clear evidence of the involvement of fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups.”
On trial, the very same day that the Oklahoma City bombing occurred, was Ramsi Yousef, “mastermind” of the 1993 WTC plot (also involving a Ryder truck bomb).
film studies scholar, Stephen Prince, termed “The Theater of Mass Destruction.”
existence of known bomb threats to the Murrah up to two weeks before April 19, one of which had resulted in the evacuation of the building on April 18.
they observed members of the OKC Sherriff and ATF bomb squad trucks and a canine search unit near the Murrah. These reports led to the construction of a story about the government’s foreknowledge of the attack.
The OKCPD horse patrol was gearing up that morning; all loaded and dressed up. We were told they were being sent out for crowd control. They were en-route to downtown when the bomb went off. Why? Why crowd control? There was nothing going on in downtown. The arts fest had not started. They only ever got called out for an event. They don’t just do willy nilly crowd control. There was nothing to indicate that the horse patrol was needed. There was something not quite kosher with all this. Later I was told by a secretary in the ATF office that the building had been searched for bombs late the
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The media made immediate and ongoing comparisons between McVeigh and Lee Harvey Oswald. After being appointed to act as McVeigh’s lead defense attorney in early May 1995, Stephen Jones also publicly compared McVeigh’s “Perry Perp Walk” to that of Oswald’s. Jones commented that the repeated airing of these images had created a sense of national “déjà vous” and said “those old enough to remember ‘saw’ in [McVeigh] the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald.”9 Jones later pointed out that it would have been much easier (and safer) to whisk McVeigh quickly and quietly out of the back of the Perry courthouse
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“Patriot Movement,” consisted of loosely-affiliated, but often ideologically similar, groups and individuals who included, among others, Second Amendment advocates, paramilitary citizen militias, white supremacist separatists, pro-lifers, tax protestors, survivalists, and proponents of a range of conspiracy theories.
espoused an updated variant of much older anti-Semitic beliefs about collusion between elements within the U.S. government and the world’s elite (the Illuminati) in a secret plot to establish a world government (the New World Order) and total surveillance society.
The same day, April 23, the FBI received a call from Linda Thompson, an Indianapolis attorney, militia spokesperson and producer of an underground documentary, Waco: The Big Lie, which advanced a theory that the government had deliberately set the fire that killed the Branch Davidans.
Prior to the bombing, Congress refused to pass a controversial anti-terrorism bill proposed by the Clinton administration, but two days after, on April 25, the first draft of it passed in the Senate and a year later, passed in its final form with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Janet Reno reminded viewers that although authorities had McVeigh and Nichols in custody, the case remained open and stressed that JD2 remained at large and was considered armed and dangerous.
been recruited to work undercover as part of a domestic security operation.
McVeigh expressed his shock that the Ryder could have caused as much damage as it did and wondered out loud if someone may have switched the truck at the last minute without his knowledge.
Otto cryptically warned Jones that “when you know everything I know, and you will soon enough, you will never think of the United States of America in the same way.”14
believed the federal government’s actions at Waco posed a threat to himself and the citizenry, as well as the constitutional foundations of the United States. Therefore, McVeigh, believing he must intervene, conceived of, planned and executed the bombing alone, as an act of self-defense in the face of an encroaching threat to his life and the lives of others.
went on to name him as a runner-up for their 1995 Man of the Year award,
him by spreading propaganda, the same tactic they used against the Branch Davidians at Waco. The FBI, he said, had prevented the public from seeing images of “the charred remains of children’s bodies” at Waco and therefore nobody cared “when these families died a slow, torturous death as they were gassed and burned alive at the hands of the FBI [or] when boastful FBI agents posed for the camera as people’s lives were consumed in flames.” McVeigh said “the truth” about his own case and the events at Waco “lies deeper,” but in order to get it to the public, he argued, people needed to “question
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these concerned his links to Elohim City, a white separatist community on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border known as a “safe haven” for fugitives within the White Power Movement. Shortly before the bombing, McVeigh received two speeding tickets within miles of Elohim City, and nearby motel registration records and statements made by residents there strongly suggested that McVeigh had not only called Elohim City but had visited on more than one occasion.
the state of Arkansas executed Richard Wayne Snell, a main participant in the failed 1983 plot. On the morning of April 19, 1995, Snell’s final words, addressed to Arkansas Gov. Jim Tucker,
Such reports (and the many supporting video surveillance tapes that also turned up missing after the FBI took possession of them) presented grave problems for a legal defense team, whose client refused to acknowledge that any of these reports could be accurate.
They were painting him to be a general of some sort, but you only had to sit down with him to know he was a frightened kid.
as his trial had historical value and therefore, certain details about it must remain secret.
At least one Grand Juror, Hoppy Heidelberg, found the proceedings so disturbing that he defied his oath of secrecy and spoke publicly about it, thereby making public some of the information presented. Heidelberg came to feel, during the hearings, that prosecutors had prevented jurors from hearing crucial evidence and stymied their inquiries and attempts to subpoena it. None of the witnesses who saw the John Does were called to testify and despite the Grand Jury’s requests, jurors were not permitted to view the surveillance tapes from in and around the Murrah building that captured the critical
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“Before this investigation is over with, the government will have Tim McVeigh standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald.”
Meanwhile, members of the press as well as the Jones Team engaged in a monumental struggle with the government concerning their withholding of substantial information about the case from defense attorneys, an effort that closely paralleled McVeigh’s own obfuscations and Heidelberg’s account of government stonewalling during the Grand Jury.
USA Today remarked that while the bombing “was the most public of crimes … the man accused of committing it is getting the most secret of trials,” despite the advantage this afforded to the government, “who can’t always be trusted to do what’s right.”
the government’s “delays and omissions were always most pronounced on the issue of possible conspirators.”
Nevertheless, Judge Matsch ruled that an order forcing the government to produce the missing surveillance tapes would not only interfere with the operations of law enforcement agencies, but that public release of the tapes could hamper the ongoing criminal proceedings.
Secret Service memo written immediately after the bombing come to the surface. The memo stated “security video tapes from the area [around the Murrah] show the truck detonation three minutes and six seconds after the suspects exited the truck.” All while the FBI and federal prosecutors for years continued to deny the existence of any such footage, a memo, which was permitted entry as evidence during Terry Nichols’ 2004 state trial, was described by Nichols’ defense team as “direct evidence of the involvement of others in the bombing conspiracy.”
and threatened to plead guilty if the defense team did not stop their investigation.
“I haven’t been brainwashed … I did this for the movement.”
Prosecutors and officials publicly accused the Dissidents of engaging in paranoid delusions and “pandering to the worst kind of paranoid conspiracy theories.”
those most deeply impacted by the bombing, an act committed by a ‘crazed conspiracy theorist,’ were now themselves labeled as conspiracy theorists.
