Truth and consequences

If we execute Timothy McVeigh, questions about the Oklahoma City bombing will go forever unanswered

by Dan Kennedy

IT'S MAY 16, 2026, the 25th anniversary of the day Timothy McVeigh was supposed to die for the Oklahoma City bombing. His execution was postponed when the FBI discovered that more than 3000 investigatory documents had never been turned over to his lawyers. In 2003, President George W. Bush commuted McVeigh's sentence to life in prison after a special commission chaired by Attorney General John Ashcroft found that the bombing was the work of a conspiracy of which McVeigh was only a part. Now 58 and dying of cancer, McVeigh is being interviewed in his cell by a young lawyer brought in at his request. "I'm not going to be around much longer," McVeigh says. "It's time to tell the truth about what really happened."

IN THE week following the FBI's stunning admission that it had failed to provide McVeigh's lawyers with all the documents they needed to defend their client at his 1997 trial, the FBI has been subjected to a well-deserved and long-overdue pounding by the media.

For the most part, though, the pounding has been administered on the FBI's own terms -- that is, more commentators than not have accepted the notion that the documents were withheld because of reckless incompetence rather than malice aforethought. The real danger, we have been solemnly told, is that the paranoid crazies who have never believed that McVeigh carried out the bombing alone will latch onto the revelations as proof that their delusions are real.

The conventional wisdom was well summarized by Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, who wrote that "from seemingly harmless errors and petty evasions grow conspiracy theories about monster plots. If McVeigh's wish is for publicity and martyrdom, the FBI has inadvertently added fuel to the pyre."

Yet if the media elite accept the FBI's cover story, the public does not. Newsweek's own Web site reported the results of a poll showing that 43 percent of those surveyed believed the documents had been withheld deliberately, and only 40 percent believed the government's story that it resulted from some sort of intergalactic computer glitch. What a glitch: the Los Angeles Times reported on Tuesday that still more documents had been discovered, prompting a worldwide search.

There is virtually no doubt that Timothy McVeigh is guilty of participating in the 1995 bombing, which killed 168 people, including 19 children. But there have long been doubts among some lawyers, right-wing activists, and even victims' families as to whether the conspiracy was -- as the official version would have it -- limited to McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and, to a lesser extent, Michael Fortier.

The only way out of this dilemma is to commute McVeigh's sentence to life in prison. It is inconceivable that McVeigh could be given a lethal injection next month -- or six months from now, or a year or two from now -- with questions about what really happened still unanswered. McVeigh claims he has told us what happened, repeating in a letter to the Houston Chronicle this week that there were no other conspirators. "The truth is on my side," he reportedly wrote. But for those who believe he has yet to come clean, the prospect of his maintaining his silence all the way to the grave is nearly as horrifying as the crime he committed six years ago.

And that, in turn, leads to an inescapable conclusion: we must abolish the death penalty once and for all. Even if McVeigh was part of a broader conspiracy, he is still the worst mass murderer in American history -- a remorseless, evil man who remains proud of what he did. If we can't execute him -- and we can't -- then how can we execute the poor, the black, and the mentally ill wretches who are the customary victims of capital punishment?

In an online forum on WashingtonPost.com on Friday, Kathy Graham Wilburn -- who lost her two grandchildren in the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building -- put it this way: "McVeigh deserves to die for what he did, but I am not in favor of killing him. Dead men don't talk. If McVeigh was to have a change of heart I would like for him to be able to tell us what happened."

PERHAPS THE most shocking aspect of last week's revelations was that FBI director Louis Freeh had gotten away with his act for as long as he did. Freeh's eight years at the top have been marked by a remarkable series of missteps. There was the persecution of Richard Jewell, falsely accused of the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, and of Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos scientist who was jailed for months in a spying probe that eventually fell apart. There's Robert Hanssen, the agent accused of treason, and the FBI crime lab, exposed as shoddy and incompetent. And, of course, there are the scandals that preceded Freeh, and that continue to eat away at the FBI's credibility because of his failure to address them in a public, systematic way: the agency's corrupt deal with Boston gangsters Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, the fatal standoff at Ruby Ridge, and the assault on the Branch Davidian complex in Waco. It was that last event that McVeigh claims inspired his attack in Oklahoma City.

Yet Freeh has proven himself to be a master politician. Appointed by Bill Clinton to lead the FBI, he burnished his reputation by sucking up to congressional Republicans, making it clear that he believed not nearly enough was being done to investigate the Clinton fundraising scandals -- a tack that made it impossible for Clinton to fire him. As late as last week, the New Yorker ran a long puff piece on Freeh, revealing that he had chosen to hand his resignation to Bush rather than Clinton because he believed the Clinton administration had stymied his efforts to investigate the 1996 bombing of an American military base in Saudi Arabia.

And whatever his problems in running the FBI, Freeh could always point with pride to Oklahoma City -- an $82 million investigation that reportedly involved half of the bureau's agents when it was at its peak.

But there have always been questions about the investigation. How, critics demanded, could McVeigh carry out such a deadly attack all by himself? What about his right-wing ideology, and his ties to the militia movement? What about reports that McVeigh was seen with other as-yet-unidentified people, and the FBI's own early search for a "John Doe #2"? McVeigh's trial, conviction, and subsequent confession in American Terrorist (Regan, 2001), by journalists Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, seemingly put those questions to rest, at least in mainstream circles. Yet the FBI's own actions have now dredged them up once again.

How credible are these questions? It's impossible to say. There are, as we all know, people who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill John F. Kennedy, that James Earl Ray did not kill Martin Luther King Jr., that Sirhan Sirhan did not kill Robert Kennedy, that John Wilkes Booth did not kill Abraham Lincoln, that Franklin Roosevelt conspired with the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor, and that the earth is flat. In the case of Oklahoma City, it is almost certainly safe to discard theories that McVeigh was some sort of unwitting government agent who blew up the Murrah building in a twisted, Washington-directed plot.

Not so easy to dismiss, though, is a lengthy report published last week -- on the same day the FBI's discovery was announced -- in the London Independent by that paper's American correspondent, Andrew Gumbel. According to what appears to be careful, well-documented reporting, Gumbel found that McVeigh had, for several years, been a member of a group of white-supremacist bank robbers called the Aryan Republican Army; that the organization was heavily involved in the bombing; that a missing leg found in the rubble, never claimed or identified, almost certainly belonged to one of the bombers; and that, in addition to the bomb-laden Ryder truck outside the building, there were several bombs that exploded inside.

According to Gumbel, the government never presented this story for reasons of pragmatism. Prosecutors, fearful of putting a diffuse, complicated narrative before the jury, concentrated on McVeigh, against whom they had the strongest case; in any event, most of the other conspirators were either dead or in prison by the time of McVeigh's trial. McVeigh, who'd decided to take the fall, was happy to play along. And his lawyer, Stephen Jones, couldn't make the case for a broader conspiracy because it would have harmed his client.

Less likely theories continue to get an airing as well. On May 4, the right-wing Web site WorldNetDaily.com reported that a citizens committee headed by Charles Key, a former Oklahoma state representative, had just completed a 500-page report on the bombing that found "over 70 witnesses" had seen McVeigh with "one or more `John Does.' " The committee also presented evidence that the bombing may have had some connection with the international terrorist network financed by Osama bin Laden -- a theory that has been pursued by former Oklahoma City television reporter Jayna Davis, who recently appeared on the Fox News Channel's The O'Reilly Factor to discuss her views.

It's also worth noting that a 1997 book by the notorious British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Secret Life of Bill Clinton (Regnery), made many of these same allegations, including an accusation that federal agents knew beforehand that the Murrah building was a likely terrorist target. Few American journalists take Evans-Pritchard seriously, and maybe they shouldn't. Yet among Evans-Pritchard's allegations is that the FBI illegally withheld so-called 302s -- investigative documents -- from the defense team. And now we know that is precisely what the agency did.

For the most part, the mainstream media have been content to sneer at the conspiracy theorists. The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Salon have all used the FBI revelations to check in on the right-wing militia movement, many of whose members believe that "the government" was behind the bombing. The subtext: still crazy after all these years. (And kudos to U.S. News & World Report and the Boston Herald for treating the more-credible theories with the seriousness they deserve.)

Whether any of the conspiracy theories are true, or whether substantial numbers of people merely think they're true, what's needed is more investigation, not condescension.

THIS PAST Sunday, 60 Minutes showed a year-old interview it had conducted with McVeigh to a group of eight Oklahoma City survivors. It was a moving program, ending with correspondent Ed Bradley touring a memorial and museum that have been erected on the former site of the Murrah building. It marks, as Bradley noted, the aftermath of "one man's act of terror."

And so the official version of what happened on that April day six years ago has now been memorialized in glass and concrete. A dead child's sneaker, pulled from the wreckage and plunked down inside a display case, stands as a silent rebuke to anyone who would question that version.

One month from now, Timothy McVeigh is scheduled to be strapped down on a gurney and killed. Even if it doesn't happen that day, it will probably happen someday, sooner rather than later. And we will see the death penalty at its most pernicious. McVeigh will take the truth with him to the grave. That truth may well be exactly what he has said it is: that he carried out the bombing all by himself, that there was no fellow conspirator other than Terry Nichols.

But how can we execute the only person who knows what really happened that day? How can we know what he might tell us 10, 20, or 30 years from now?

George Bush and John Ashcroft have talked insipidly about "closure," as if McVeigh's death will bring peace to the victims' families. Yet there can be no closure without justice. And if we bury the truth along with McVeigh, there will be no justice.

The death penalty is a barbaric act unworthy of a civilized society. To be sure, McVeigh deserves to die. But we don't deserve the consequences of his death.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.