Timothy McVeigh - Motivations For The Bombing

Motivations For The Bombing

“	"Why? McVeigh told us at eloquent length, but our rulers and their media preferred to depict him as a sadistic, crazed monster ... who had done it for the kicks".	”
—Gore Vidal, 2002

McVeigh claimed that the bombing was revenge for "what the U.S. government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge." McVeigh visited Waco during the standoff. While there, he was interviewed by student reporter Michelle Rauch, a senior journalism major at SMU who was writing for the school paper. McVeigh expressed his objections over what was happening there.

McVeigh frequently quoted and alluded to the novel The Turner Diaries; while rejecting the book's racism, he claimed to appreciate its interest in firearms. Photocopies of pages sixty-one and sixty-two of The Turner Diaries were found in an envelope inside McVeigh's car. These pages depicted a fictitious mortar attack upon the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

In a 1,200-word essay dated March 1998, from the federal maximum-security prison at Florence, Colo., McVeigh claimed that the terrorist bombing was “morally equivalent” to U.S. military actions against Iraq and other foreign lands.

The administration has said that Iraq has no right to stockpile chemical or biological weapons (“weapons of mass destruction”) — mainly because they have used them in the past.

Well, if that’s the standard by which these matters are decided, then the U.S. is the nation that set the precedent. The U.S. has stockpiled these same weapons (and more) for over 40 years. The U.S. claims this was done for deterrent purposes during its “Cold War” with the Soviet Union. Why, then, it is invalid for Iraq to claim the same reason (deterrence) with respect to Iraq’s (real) war with, and the continued threat of, its neighbor Iran?

The administration claims that Iraq has used these weapons in the past. We’ve all seen the pictures that show a Kurdish woman and child frozen in death from the use of chemical weapons. But, have you ever seen those pictures juxtaposed next to pictures from Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

I suggest that one study the histories of World War I, World War II and other “regional conflicts” that the U.S. has been involved in to familiarize themselves with the use of “weapons of mass destruction.”

Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones — Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the U.S. killed at least 150,000 non-combatants — mostly women and children — in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks or months to die).

If Saddam is such a demon, and people are calling for war crimes charges and trials against him and his nation, why do we not hear the same cry for blood directed at those responsible for even greater amounts of “mass destruction” — like those responsible and involved in dropping bombs on the cities mentioned above?

The truth is, the U.S. has set the standard when it comes to the stockpiling and use of weapons of mass destruction.

The handwritten essay, submitted to and published by the alternative national news magazine Media Bypass, was distributed worldwide by The Associated Press on May 29, 1998. Ironically, it made global headlines alongside reports that Pakistan, following the suit of its neighbor and bitter rival India, had just detonated a nuclear device.

The essay, which marked the first time that McVeigh publicly discussed the Oklahoma City bombing, continued:

Hypocrisy when it comes to the death of children? In Oklahoma City, it was family convenience that explained the presence of a day-care center placed between street level and the law enforcement agencies which occupied the upper floors of the building. Yet, when discussion shifts to Iraq, any day-care center in a government building instantly becomes “a shield.” Think about it.

(Actually, there is a difference here. The administration has admitted to knowledge of the presence of children in or near Iraqi government buildings, yet they still proceed with their plans to bomb —saying that they cannot be held responsible if children die. There is no such proof, however, that knowledge of the presence of children existed in relation to the Oklahoma City bombing.)

When considering morality and “mens rea”, in light of these facts, I ask: Who are the true barbarians? ...

I find it ironic, to say the least, that one of the aircraft used to drop such a bomb on Iraq is dubbed “The Spirit of Oklahoma.” This leads me to a final, and unspoken, moral hypocrisy regarding the use of weapons of mass destruction.

When a U.S. plane or cruise missile is used to bring destruction to a foreign people, this nation rewards the bombers with applause and praise. What a convenient way to absolve these killers of any responsibility for the destruction they leave in their wake.

Unfortunately, the morality of killing is not so superficial. The truth is, the use of a truck, a plane or a missile for the delivery of a weapon of mass destruction does not alter the nature of the act itself.

These are weapons of mass destruction — and the method of delivery matters little to those on the receiving end of such weapons.

Whether you wish to admit it or not, when you approve, morally, of the bombing of foreign targets by the U.S. military, you are approving of acts morally equivalent to the bombing in Oklahoma City ...

McVeigh included photocopies of a famous Vietnam War-era picture showing terrified children fleeing napalm bombs, and of nuclear devastation in Japan. He said in a preface that the essay was intended to “provoke thought — and was not written with malevolent intent.”

In interviews before his execution, documented in American Terrorist, McVeigh stated he decapitated an Iraqi soldier with cannon fire on his first day in the war and celebrated. But he said he later was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners and to see carnage on the road leaving Kuwait City after U.S. troops routed the Iraqi army. In interviews following the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh said he began harboring anti-government feelings during the Gulf War.

On April 26, 2001, he wrote a letter to Fox News, I Explain Herein Why I Bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which explicitly laid out his reasons for the attack. McVeigh read Unintended Consequences and noted that if it had come out a few years earlier, he would have given serious consideration to using sniper attacks in a war of attrition against the government instead of bombing a federal building: