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

by Wendy S. Painting

fact and fantasy, reality and illusion. The acceptance of one version over another depends upon pre-existing beliefs about what is logical, plausible, implausible, palatable, or simply unimaginable.

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.

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.

According to Jones, when discussing the transfer of the case 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

Beyond McVeigh’s occasional confidential allusions and cryptic hints, the Jones Team found it all the more strange that for someone who claimed to hate the federal government, his version of events shifted in accordance with the latest theories aired publicly by the FBI and prosecutors, a circumstance Stephen Jones described as “Kafkaesque.” Jones wrote that McVeigh’s version of events and the government’s “went hand in hand” and because McVeigh had regular access to media and news reports, it became easy for him to “[adjust] his story from time to time to incorporate the governments findings” and “shore up” loose ends when he became aware of them, a practice Jones said McVeigh “finely honed” over the years.

Victims undergo additional, compounded traumatization when critical information remains unknown, a situation that prevents them from constructing a believable narrative about their pain.

Guilty verdicts in criminal trials help exorcise social demons and retroactively or pre-emptively legitimize institutional responses to it.

I want justice but there can be no justice without the truth.”

51% of Americans felt it was likely that state actors had played a direct role in JFK’s assassination. 48% believed the government was lying about chemical warfare during the Persian Gulf War and 60% thought they continued to withhold information about Agent Orange during Vietnam. One third believed that TWA Flight 800 had been shot down. An even higher number believed federal agents had intentionally set fire to the Branch Davidian compound and the majority of the population thought the CIA facilitated the sales of crack cocaine to African Americans.

Indiana State University criminologist and former Jones Team consultant Stuart Wright wrote that “the [IG] report, based on an 18 month investigation, found widespread mishandling of forensic evidence, including posed or manufactured evidence, unscientific speculation favorable to the prosecution, inappropriate techniques of analysis, use of degraded or unchecked equipment, biased and false testimony, and generally, persistent violations of standard operating procedures at the crime lab, that directly impacted the Oklahoma City bombing case”

For eight years, Whitehurst, considered the FBI’s most highly qualified bomb residue and explosives expert, had continued to tell his superiors about ongoing corruption within and mismanagement of the lab, which, he said, adversely affected the conclusions and testimony given by FBI Lab experts in over fifty-five cases, including the aforementioned. However, rather than correcting the problems, the FBI dismissed Whitehurst (described by his superiors in one performance evaluation as “the most outstanding forensic chemist in the lab’s explosive trace unit”) from his position, subjected him to various forms of harassment and ordered him not to speak to his former co-workers or attorneys about the allegations. When his superiors failed to take action, Whitehurst publicly exposed the crime lab and in doing so, instigated the IG to conduct an investigation. The Chief of the crime lab gave false testimony to Congress and FBI Director Louis Freeh concerning Whitehurst’s allegations and the events leading to his suspension.

There’s something they aren’t telling us. Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us. –David Ferrie in Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988)

tactical “strategy of tension.” A term that most often refers to state-sponsored terrorism described as “a tactic which consists in committing bombings and attributing them to others. By the term ‘tension’ one refers to emotional tension that creates a sentiment of fear. By the term ‘strategy’ one refers to what feeds the fear of the people towards one particular group”