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October 31 - November 4, 2023
The plausibility of the theatrics seen or the degree to which they accurately reflected real world events were of little concern to eager viewers of the new terrorist action movie genre. Rather, commanding their attention were the violent aesthetics of the films; the glorious explosion and the myriad ways of depicting death and destruction; all providing a window to observe and, by proxy, engage in what film studies scholar, Stephen Prince, termed “The Theater of Mass Destruction.”4
In addition, a number of people said that in the early hours of April 19, 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.
Davis insisted that, if he had to say which JD sketch the man who answered the door and paid for the order resembled, it would be JD2, but stressed that, in actuality, the man he encountered resembled neither sketch nor the man later identified as “Timothy McVeigh.”6
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 and accused the FBI of tipping off reporters to the scheduled perp walk during which they paraded McVeigh in front of the cameras, thereby scripting and orchestrating a major media event.
Thompson told agents that a certain “Dr. Jolly West,” a CIA operative who conducted mind control experiments had implanted microchips in McVeigh and other U.S. soldiers.
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.
He told Coyle and Otto that, while in the Army, he had 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.
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.”
During his first meeting with Jones, McVeigh “calmly,” “proudly” and “dispassionately” confessed that, although he had not meant to kill children, he had bombed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and had gotten caught on purpose, hoping to use his trial to demonstrate that the government’s actions at Waco, Texas, on April 19, 1993, had been abusive and illegal.
When Jones asked about JD2, McVeigh denied that any such person existed and, ironically, accused those who insisted otherwise of being conspiracy theorists. He further informed his attorneys that he intended to “embarrass the government” during his trial and hoped that “after all the evidence is heard, the case remains a mystery” as, McVeigh explained, it had historical value and certain details about it must remain secret.
Reyna informed Jones that based on his investigation and McVeigh’s many proven connections to the far right, “It is very likely that Mr. McVeigh could have been tricked or entrapped by members of the ‘movement’ to carry out a specific deed which in the end, leaves Mr. McVeigh with the appearance of total responsibility.”
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
the Associated Press reported that, according to federal law enforcement officials, while the footage showed “a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the passenger seat [of the Ryder]” because the quality of the image was poor, investigators were unable to determine the identity of the passenger. Referring to John Doe 2, one article opined, “It’s like he walked into the wall and vanished.”43
For many, including the Jones Team and Stephen Jones particularly, that other yet unidentified suspects existed was the only way to make sense, not just of the eyewitness’s accounts, but also the many unexplained calls McVeigh had made to suspicious groups and people prior to the bombing and critical gaps of unexplained time in his (and the FBI’s) timeline of the plot.
Eventually, mental health experts hired by the Jones Team to evaluate and treat McVeigh concluded that he was “not likely the person who came up with the idea for the bombing, but that he could very well have been the person who took responsibility for carrying it out. His strength is in carrying out orders…”
Thus, the Dissidents were equated, symbolically, with Timothy McVeigh himself. In an ironic twist, foreshadowing many more to come, those most deeply impacted by the bombing, an act committed by a ‘crazed conspiracy theorist,’ were now themselves labeled as conspiracy theorists.52
In 1997, while denying his involvement in the bombing, he told Evans-Pritchard that the bombing was a sting operation permeated by undercover agents and informants that “acquired a momentum of its own.” Strassmeir elaborated: 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
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When asked if he thought the agents and informants would reveal themselves, Strassmeir responded: How can he? What happens if it was a sting operation from the very beginning? What happens if it comes out that the plant was a provocateur? What if he talked and manipulated the others into it? What then? The country couldn’t handle it. The relatives of the victims are going to go crazy, and he’s going to be responsible for the murder of 168 people? Of course, the informant can’t come forward. He’s scared shitless right now.56
Carol Howe, a paid informant for the ATF and the FBI, who from June 1994 until March 1995 had infiltrated EC, the ARA and other groups in an ATF investigation deemed investigation “SIGNIFICANT/SENSITIVE,” meaning it had potential national security implications. Howe, who became deeply embedded within the community of extremists, filed over 70 reports with her ATF handlers and, on numerous occasions, warned them about an impending attack on April 19, the anniversary of the fire at Waco, and named Andreas Strassmeir and some of the ARA bank robbers (among others) as conspirators.59
Included were lead FBI agents Scott Mendeloff and Jon Hersley’s “extensive efforts” to “neutralize” Elliot’s employees, “convince [them] that John Doe 2 was a phantom” and thereby, prevent the spectral conspirator from appearing at the trials. In fact, “Hersley was the prosecution’s go-to person to resolve many of the holes in the case.”
Jones chided McVeigh, “If by Code of Honor you mean we are to protect other murdering bastards, that is not something that we have any obligation to do…Certainly no one is protecting you. You have been thrown to the wolves”:
Guilty verdicts in criminal trials help exorcise social demons and retroactively or pre-emptively legitimize institutional responses to it. The bombing had unleashed an abundance of previously dormant or clandestine threats including racists, militia, gun-nuts and conspiracy theorists who posed a danger to peace-loving Americans and who had quickly come to represent an emergent ‘homegrown domestic terrorist’ specter.
Although there were up to twenty-five surveillance cameras positioned in and around the Murrah Building on April 19, the FBI never produced them during discovery nor did they enter them as evidence at the criminal trials. The whereabouts of footage from all of the twenty-five known surveillance cameras remained unknown and Matsch did not compel the FBI to produce them.
since the surveillance tapes from the Murrah never surfaced, and while nobody argued otherwise, prosecutors never even established McVeigh’s presence in OKC on the morning of the 19th.76
the IG had ever encountered and that the FBI crime lab had “repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without scientific basis.”78
The FBI had an incentive system for the scientists there. If they testified in a case that resulted in a conviction, they got bonuses, which in our view, was highly unethical. They had no scientific protocols to speak of. It was just pathetic. This was supposed to be the world’s premier lab!
Judge Brandeis in a 1928 illegal wiretapping court case: “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.86
One such trauma, called ‘Information Stress,’ resulted from “obsessive absorption” with computers, television or other modern-day hobbies, noting that recent generations “have been molded, not by rich real-life experiences [but] information imparted electronically via television, film, computers and other advances in communication technologies” that convey “narrow, shallow and violent” images and messages, lead to crises of identity (at best) and actual violence (at worst) and render people mere “holograms of the society they inhabit.” While the most common IDs led to “ongoing altered states
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Average, everyday people were being “pushed to the breaking point and beyond” and becoming “anxious … confused … overwhelmed … overloaded … vulnerable to manipulation and ultimately less capable of thinking and acting as fully human beings.”
The authors concluded that “the profusion of engineered images, experiences and environments” had not only undermined traditional institutions” (ex., nuclear family, education, work, government, religion) but “made information stress a fact of life” and ominously (but accurately) warned readers that “the phenomenon [of increased snapping] seems to be accelerating as a tumultuous millennium approaches.”11
“when we’re sold a fantasy that is so well made, that seems to tap so deeply into our very real sense of imminent catastrophe, and that seems so self-aware about the fantasy itself, certain people respond to it as if it’s the Truth.”33
Perhaps more understandably, it sometimes seemed as if McVeigh had lost large portions of his memory, especially about the two years leading to the bombing.
DID’s are more severe and long lasting-expressions of dissociated states which manifest at times of acute stress. What makes them pathological or maladaptive is, in part, the episodic amnesia often accompanying them.
“My Lai’s killer zombies come home, dripping blood and lunacy…a metaphor for madness itself.” These films aimed to resolve lingering conflicts surrounding the country’s recent humiliating and shameful war by telling fictionalized versions of historically uncomfortable tales, thereby conquering the collective nightmare of the Vietnam War through the construction of shared national fantasies and newer mythologies about it.
“The chains that bind us are formed slowly, one link at a time, so we never notice the additional weight of one additional link, but eventually, it forms a chain.”
Whatever his reasons for joining, while he claimed to be so at the time of his death, upon enlisting, Timothy James McVeigh was no longer fully the Captain of his Soul, nor Master of his Fate. Rather, he became the property of the United States Army, and the chains that would bind him proved strong ones indeed. Timothy McVeigh had just joined an experiment in progress, one from which, psychologically, there would never be an exit strategy.
In regard to Timothy McVeigh’s life in the army prior to the Gulf War, four major themes consistently emerge within existing biographical accounts: his love of guns, interest in survivalism, an inclination towards racist literature, and his outstanding performance as an infantry soldier. Archival sources reveal the existence of another pattern in his letters, however– a continued tendency to link sex with weapons, violence and possible catastrophe, a quality which, while not a conventional “Army Value,” was one perhaps possessed by only the best soldiers in the U.S. Army.
The relationship between Iraq and Kuwait became terminally hostile when, after the war ended, Kuwait sold its oil for prices lower than OPEC standards and increased its production at rates exceeding OPEC regulations, drilling in disputed border territory with Iraq. To Saddam, the U.S.’s alignment with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait constituted acts of theft, aggression and economic warfare that, he said, violated and deprived Iraqis of their basic human rights and standard of living. UN sanctions had effectively deprived Iraq of 70% of their food supply and, in turn, the Iraqi
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Some Experimental Wolf accounts depict Calspan, a defense establishment research facility where McVeigh briefly worked after leaving the Army, as instrumental in the bombing story. In such stories, Calspan becomes a staging ground for darker and more sinister tales wherein McVeigh acts as an unwitting puppet controlled by mysterious and faceless handlers, (often Jolly West), sanctioned and funded by government black budgets. In addition, while so-called credible mainstream commentators briefly note McVeigh’s assignment at Calspan, they view it as inconsequential to both the bombing and the
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The following year, in Alex Constantine’s book entitled Timothy McVeigh’s Rise From ‘Robotic’ Soldier to Mad Bomber, one chapter speculates about McVeigh’s possible experiences as a security guard at the Buffalo-based defense contractor. Constantine, like Keith, found it both conceivable and “technically feasible that McVeigh was implanted with a telemetry chip … drawn into an experimental black project” at Calspan and, in combination with more traditional behavioral modification techniques, remotely controlled and transformed into a robotic super soldier. In this story and stories like it,
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According to Culver, McVeigh was probably guilty of, at the least, driving the Ryder truck. But behind the scenes and throughout “the entire operation,” he had been under the influence of brainwashing by puppeteers working at the behest of still other, invisible conspirators, whose motives included the demonization and targeting of militias and the passage of counter-terrorism legislation.
While the Jones Team’s quest for McVeigh’s records or the anomalous (but overlooked) information in the portions obtained were unknown to Devvy Kidd, she was so convinced that McVeigh “wasn’t himself,” “had a look-alike, [and] a biochip in his rear end, courtesy of the U.S. Army,” that, in 2002, she filed a FOIA request for his military records. She sought his separation from the Army, deployment, and medical records, detailing “the insertion of a micro-chip, a bio-chip or any other object foreign to the human body,” the surgical or other methods used to implant this device and those “that
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To Otto and Coyle, his original public defenders, as well as allegedly to Hammer, McVeigh claimed that when he was recruited into an undercover mission during the SFAS at Ft. Bragg, he received orders to report to the NYNG. He told the Jones Team that he joined to keep his rank of sergeant and his retirement benefits. To his biographers, he said the primary reason was to supplement his low-paying job at Burns.
His successes and ability to lead seemed to depend upon his having practiced, rehearsed, memorized and perfected with precision tasks required of him, but when unexpectedly asked to articulate what he knew or act spontaneously he had great difficulty, became impatient and got upset if things did not go by the book. Tim McVeigh’s real strength, they said, was in following orders; not necessarily giving or getting others to follow them, a trait that comes to bear on the bombing, his particular role in it and later construction of non-Lone Wolf theories and narratives about it.
The Low Intensity Conflict goal was further outlined and advanced in the 1989 Defense Authorization Act (DAA), which defined the post-Cold War role of the military as one increasingly blended with civilian policing, justified by claims that the transport of illegal drugs over the border posed a “direct threat to the sovereignty and security of the country.”30
In 1989, under the authorization of the DAA, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney initiated Operation Alliance, a Department of Defense-led effort based in Texas that, in coordination with federal, state, and local agencies, ostensibly attempted to facilitate a rapid response to the threat of illegal drugs, firearms and other contraband from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. Operation Alliance was an “unprecedented program of police-military-security forces” using Advanced Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUNT), the very tactic the Army had trained McVeigh in during his trip to Germany and
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Like Alliance, NORTHSTAR utilized the equipment, personnel and intelligence of, and coordinated with, several federal agencies, including the DOD, FBI, DEA, Border Patrol, Customs, U.S. Coast Guard, and New York National Guard.33 While NORTHSTAR began as part of the counter-offensive in the War On Drugs, it came to take on national security and counter-terrorism functions as well.
The primary group responsible for conducting Alliance/NORTHSTAR operations was Joint Task Force 6 (JTF-6). JTF-6 operatives received training at the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, NC., and were subsequently deployed in the domestic field. Of the over 4,000 soldiers involved in JTF-6 in 1992, only a small portion were active-duty, including at least 50 members of the Special Forces, while the majority were culled from National Guard units.
