Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

whose policies he railed against; agencies connected to both PATCON and NORTHSTAR operations. The first was with the Niagara Falls based Border Patrol, yet after passing the screening test, they informed him that no positions were available. Weeks after his arrest, the FBI attempted to locate and interview certain “close associates” of McVeigh’s working in the Buffalo area Border Patrol. Next, McVeigh took the exam required for employment with the United States Marshalls Service, receiving one of the highest recorded scores. He did not get the job, however, and later blamed it on reverse discrimination due to affirmative action.

McVeigh inevitably began railing about secret conspiracies involving “factions of the government who wanted to gain world domination” as well as the government’s plans to set up “concentration camps” for U.S. citizens.

criminal activities to further the AN cause. One of the people he met was Randy Weaver who, while not a card-carrying member of AN, held similar views, lived off the grid in nearby Ruby Ridge, Idaho with his wife and four children, and he was an occasional visitor there.

The date listed on the summons, however, was March 20, 1991 instead of the actual court date, February 19.

What happened at Ruby Ridge only confirmed growing suspicions of many on both the left and right, that the U.S. was becoming a police state.

and from the Army, who called the house frequently.

1984

Lebron then made the fortuitous decision to surreptitiously record their bizarre conversations. Describing his reasons for doing so, Lebron said:

Lebron may have underestimated the importance of the tape. The resumé of a former New Jersey police officer says he initiated and maintained his office’s liaison with NORTHSTAR, which he explained was “a DOD program that enabled the transfer of surplus military equipment to law enforcement agencies. Through this program, I obtained numerous items, at no cost, for official use by the office such as Kevlar helmets and office equipment.”

vehement anti-Semitic rants, musings on the illegitimacy of the Federal Reserve System and advice to Lebron that he should withdraw all his money from the bank and convert it to gold so that “when the monetary system collapses” he might survive.

According to the newly released FBI documents and a 2011 article in Newsweek, in the aftermath of Ruby Ridge, PATCON assets and operatives were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their “willing[ness] to commit violence,” and “advocate [the] violent overthrow of the U.S. government.” Informants found steady employment for years, traveling the country attending KKK and Aryan Nation meetings, gun shows and paramilitary training compounds, selling illegal weapons and “sitting in church pews with would-be abortion clinic bombers.”

Similar to the violent right-wing rhetoric and dissent it ostensibly sought to quell, PATCON spiraled out of control.

Like in the FBI’s COINTELPRO days, operatives started their own organizations and sometimes engaged in unjustified criminal acts.

PATCON did not result in any criminal charges against its targets. The program did manage to forge a more symbiotic relationship between the targets and those who targeted them and in doing so, arguably only exacerbated the problem it intended to neutralize.

More than one federal informant has come forward to say that his handlers knew about McVeigh’s (and friends’) terroristic escapades prior to the bombing. Certainly, in a way that can only be described as uncanny, his geographic meanderings line up, from Texas to Tennessee to Utah to New Jersey to Arizona and so on; as do his actions and the specific relationships he sought.

The question is begged: Was McVeigh the Forrest Gump of right-wing domestic terrorism, always in the right place at the right time, or was he working for

somebody? If he wasn’t, he probably sho...

Soon after the bombing, questions arose about whether McVeigh’s military training or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) had contributed to his act of violence and if those same factors contributed to violent acts committed by other Gulf War Veterans, an increasingly reported phenomenon.

Trauma theorists posit that the experience of trauma, isolated or ongoing, results in a radical disruption of associative pathways, linear time, and the ability to form meaning about an event.

neurological changes in the hippocampus

number of those who shared their stories with Jones Team investigators remarked that the Gulf War was the beginning of their own troubles and revealed that they too continued to suffer from a host of symptoms commonly associated with PTSD,

Since the Global War on Terror began, PTSD diagnosis in U.S. soldiers, sometimes deployed to current theatres of war up to six times, have reached epidemic levels, as have corresponding suicide rates; 22 per day according to some estimates. As soldiers of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to “come home to roost,” so to speak, PTSD, its relationship to military service and anti-social and violent acts committed by combat veterans remain highly relevant.

veterans who said they were experiencing a physical illness often described as a persistent flu; dubbed “Gulf War Syndrome” [GWS].

Included were chemical and biological warfare vaccines and treatments,

medical attention on more than seventy occasions for a number of symptoms commonly associated with GWS.

“medical programs are one of the most effective means of control available to a government.

The control of medicine and drugs is mandatory” and enclosed several articles about vaccines along with the letter.

He refused to let the dentist take an x-ray though, claiming he could not afford it.

Thus, GWS became just another conspiracy theory in a decade ripe with them.

Reason magazine article entitled “Gulf Lore Syndrome,” that invited readers to step into “a world [where] science is replaced by rumor.” In this world, veterans, “convinced they are the victims of a conspiracy deeper and broader than anything on “The X-Files,” claimed to have “skin blistering semen and glowing vomit.”

Showalter went so far as to compare GWS to other conspiracy theories such as alien abductions and satanic cults which, while pervasive, remained beyond the boundaries of rational discourse (or at least as she defined it).

Despite the supportive approach taken by more sympathetic commentators like Knight, more often than not, Gulf War veterans seeking information about and help for their symptoms were dismissed and told they were psychosomatic in nature, evidence of their malingering, or that they’d succumbed to ill-informed hysterical conspiracy theories.

“Desert Storm Syndrome physical” but in 1993, VA doctors told him that PTSD was responsible for his symptoms and referred him to the mental health division. James Lane said he had gone to the doctor at least five times in order to determine the cause of his symptoms but said rather than answers, all the doctors gave him was Prednisone, which helped but did not stop his rashes from coming back. Lane said when he asked his doctors if something during the war might have caused his rashes and sleep problems, they said they did not have the answers to that question and as his inquiries to the VA only resulted in him getting “the run-around,” he eventually gave up trying to obtain answers altogether. Blackcloud said he, too, brought up his symptoms to the VA but had not heard back from them “in a long time” and after 1995, “didn’t even mess with the VA anymore.”

It is often said that conspiracy theories tend to equate the absence of evidence to proof of a conspiracy. Certainly, the fact that pertinent government records detailing occurrences and circumstances related to possible causes of GWS (e.g., chemical warfare logs and military medical records) continued to go missing, failed to inspire confidence in official denials about the reality of GWS. Later revelations only served to bolster conspiracy theories about GWS and intensify the already contentious debate. Throughout the

1990s and 2000s, from various congressional investigations, scientific studies and government admissions, a number of commonly suspected causes of GWS became more credible. Among those suspected causes that were initially dismissed but incrementally became more plausible were a number of chemical warfare agents such as sarin gas, depleted uranium, oil well fires as well as various ingredients in the experimental vaccines and pills administered to soldiers (some of which are discussed in previous chapters of this book). The U.S. government seemed to recognize potential harmful exposures only after they became undeniable, often through investigative journalism. Official acknowledgement followed in June 1993 when officials in the Clinton administration and Walter Reed Medical Center publicly announced that the DU used on U.S. tanks and artillery shells may have contributed to GWS. Among the thousands of U.S. troops exposed to DU was McVeigh’s division.

In July 2000, Lou Johnson, the only COHORT to acknowledge McVeigh’s deteriorating health, wrote to McVeigh, at that time on death row awaiting execution. In his letter, Johnson discussed his ongoing struggles with the Veterans Administration and said he planned to go to law school because, “I’m sick of seeing vets get fucked by the VA and the government. If not law, then teaching. Maybe I can change some of these college kid’s idiot thinking.” He said after seven years of fighting with “the bastards at the V...

Only after McVeigh’s execution when, in 2008, the number of Gulf War veterans reportedly suffering from ailments linked to GWS reached over 700,000, did the Department Of Defense recognize it as a legitimate service-related illness and, while money continued to be allotted for studies of its causes and treatments, to this day, no consensus exists. In 2010, the VA announced it was reviewing the 300,000 compensation claims filed by Gulf War vets, acknowledging that some of them had been wrongfully denied.

Archives of Neurology

nervous system damage resulting from exposure to neurotoxins including the nerve agent sarin and widely dist...

cause Parkinson’s disease.

When the Jones Team interviewed Steve Hodge’s mother, she said that after McVeigh returned home from the Army he developed a strange obsession with the AIDS virus.

In a letter McVeigh wrote to Steve after leaving the Buffalo area in late 1992, he included clippings of news articles about a recent CIA drug running scandal and wrote, “The U.S. government waged biological warfare against its citizens as a means of population control.”

Steve said that in previous conversations McVeigh “insisted” that the government “engineered the AIDS virus and introduced it into the public,” first in Africa through a smallpox vaccine, and fl...

Earlier, in March 1991, doctors from Walter Reed Army Medical Center warned that Middle East infectious diseases could manifest several years after their contraction and banned Gulf War veterans from donating blood after 27 of them contracted a parasitic disease. By November 1994, newspapers warned of a newer threat faced by U.S. troops described as “more insidious than Iraqi tanks or Haitian machetes.”

and the vets she spoke to make explicit links between HIV and AIDS and GWS.

More than a few studies reported that patients treated for GWS responded positively when treated in the same manner as those treated for auto-immune deficiencies, including repeated rounds of strong antibiotics. Rather than being an illness rooted in a patient’s mind, these studies further emphasize that anxiety itself weakens the immune system and exacerbates these types of chronic illness.

A scientist whose research was described as something that might be seen on The X-Files, had been commissioned by the VA to study the role of mycoplasma in GWS, believed that, as it appeared in the blood of Gulf War vets, it seemed “genetically engineered” and resembled “a gene from HIV.”

Eventually, after years of previous denials, the Pentagon incrementally acknowledged that the experimental anthrax vaccine given to U.S. soldiers during the Gulf War contained the adjuvant squalene.

In fact, by February 1996, GWS had come to act as a “powerful metaphor for disease” for a generation of Americans who suspected that GWS itself had been “created by the hubris of modern science … one of our terrible Frankenstein monsters.” Conspiracy theories about the government’s responsibility for the creation of GWS were similar to those about AIDS. McVeigh’s belief that the U.S. government created and released AIDS into the population was one shared with a large number of Americans, particularly African-Americans.

Cultural commentator Jodi Dean wrote that the growing popularity of the AIDS conspiracy coincided with speculations during this same period that the CIA introduced crack cocaine into the black community. Both conspiracy theories, said Dean, had roots in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, other “unethical medical practices” and genocidal practices historically and systematically employed by the U.S. government to oppress black Americans. In 2005, journalist Margaret Cook reported on a study conducted by the University of Oregon, which found that over half of the African-American population believed that HIV was man-made and had been intentionally spread within their community by the government as a form of genocide. According to this lore, HIV was created in chimpanzees by the CIA in the 1950s and first introduced to the public via polio vaccines and later, within the gay population, through experimental Hepatitis vaccines.