Aquarian Weekly 5/23/01 REALITY CHECK
THE FBI & TIMOTHY McVEIGH
Raise your hand if you believe anything about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s non-disclosure of documents, misrepresentation of the illustrious John Doe No. 2, the bleeding-heart cross-that-T-and-dot-that-I speeches of new attorney general, John Ashcroft or the mia culpa congressional confessional of FBI director Louis Freeh.
Put your fucking hand down.
The FBI screwed this Timothy McVeigh case up. That is their history. You know what friends to lend money too, and whom to avoid. The trust of the American people in the FBI went by the boards many eons ago, the examples of which I will not waste space citing, but there is much more pepper in this particular sauce.
McVeigh, in between media performances and patriotic ramblings, waits to die. He is certainly a horrible blight on any society. Most civilizations would have eradicated this disease long ago, but we’ve been trying to improve on that.
Nobody really wants to execute anyone in this country, except, of course, those who’ve suffered losses by the hands of the accused. If we actually craved it, there would be hundreds of these things weekly, the appeal system wouldn’t be so convoluted and people with the most cash wouldn’t walk, and, the least, fry.
Politicians talk a good game, and we’re all so tough and intellectual about capitol punishment, but when it comes down to it there is an awful glut of Pontius Pilates in our midst. This is why many activists against the death penalty want to broadcast these things into your living rooms, so you can vicariously take part in your murder.
“What? I know I voted for the death penalty, but I don’t want to see the results of it! I’m a 21st Century American, filled with empathy and wit, and I surely don’t expect anything that I decide to result in injecting someone with poisons!”
This is why any talk about Pro-Choice activists actually wanting to abort fetuses is ludicrous. Sure it makes sense on a surface level to prevent unwanted births and to cleanse society of killers, but there is serious doubt anyone wants to see, participate or take responsibility for any of it.
Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people. Should he die? Should those 168 innocent people, many of them children, have died?
We discuss.
McVeigh sits and waits for his demise.
But now it doesn’t look like there will be any demise, at least not a forced on him by the state.
The FBI takes the current fall for this. Why? More importantly, why now?
Mere days before McVeigh takes the long walk there is suddenly years of hidden files, 700 of them, turning up all over the joint. Hiding that many files in the FBI for that length of time is tantamount to hiding an elephant in a crowded subway train. Since nobody in law enforcement wants to see a record-setting mass murder laugh in the face of justice, there can be only one explanation for this coincidental revelation: someone in the FBI feels guilty. And whoever it may be cannot be trembling with guilt over the systematic snuffing of a single mutant, but perhaps the premeditating killing of hundreds of people would do it.
Think about it for just a second. Why did McVeigh finally decide to take his medicore nothing of a life and strive for warped notoriety? According to the source himself, when McVeigh saw the Branch Davidian compound in Waco raided, and eventually torched by the FBI in 1994, something significant snapped in his brain. One year to the day later he took his revenge on the United States government by hitting one of its buildings.
Misguided? Horrific? Why, of course it is. But none-the-less, the terrifying result of what McVeigh, and frighteningly enough a great number of people slinking in the shadows of subculture have called a war, came to a head in April of 1995.
Janet Reno, then attorney general, did not understand this war. But the FBI knew damn well what a potential powder keg they were lighting when they started that land mission against a religious cult turned militia.
Militia was a popular word in 1994. Scores of angry mid-western white guys were throwing out hints that the shit would soon come down. And the FBI had these fuckers bugged and under constant surveillance. But they made the fatal mistake of ignoring one of the bureau’s key credos: Take everything dead serious. They did not. And those people in Oklahoma City paid with their lives.
Why didn’t the investigation, dubious and corrupt as it may have been, weed the guilty out? No one has any satisfying answers on that. Reno, who should have been jailed for the Waco fiasco long ago, walked. Nobody said anything, and nobody will.
But someone inside the FBI cracked last week, and ironically, McVeigh, the man who perpetuated a reactionary heinous act of pure evil will benefit. But that’s fine, because there really isn’t any sane reason for killing someone who has killed. You hear the victim’s family members say they will rest easy when McVeigh is dead. But isn’t there something strangely wrong with that? As if the murder of another can somehow quell the pain of a loss. That somehow someone’s little girl will rise from the grave the second McVeigh’s heart stops.
It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to execute someone in this country. Lawyers, appeals and political debates drain the coffers dry. Maybe it costs more to feed and provide cable television and cigarettes for murders, but who really knows? It’s all a great debate to keep us from silly things like the truth. But the pertinent aspect of this latest public farce, conducted in front of yet another innocuous House of Appropriations Committee, is that the FBI had a confessed mass murder on the way off the planet and slipped up big time. It is always easiest to ask how when the real question worth a damn is why?
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