Truth and consequences

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

BY DAN KENNEDY

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.