Why the government's rush to execute Timothy McVeigh?
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/may2001/mcve-m26.shtml
By Kate Randall
26 May 2001
The US government has been forced to delay the execution
of Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh following the revelation that the
Federal Bureau of
Investigation withheld more than 3,100 pages of
documents from his defense
team. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on May 11
that McVeigh's
lethal injection, originally set for May 16 in Terre
Haute, Indiana, had
been rescheduled for June 11.
In the aftermath of the announcement, Ashcroft,
President Bush, FBI
Director Louis Freeh and other government officials have
repeatedly
insisted that there is nothing in the documents that
could affect McVeigh's
legal position. Ashcroft and Bush have stated there will
be no further
delays in carrying out his execution. They have
maintained this position
despite the fact that additional documents have been
discovered since
Ashcroft's initial acknowledgment of withheld material.
Only last Thursday Ashcroft announced that a final
search at FBI offices
had turned up an additional 898 pages of documents. But
the attorney
general reiterated that the government would fight any
attempt by McVeigh's
attorneys to seek a delay in the execution.
The government maintains that the documents were
withheld from McVeigh's
defense as a result of an organizational foul-up by the
FBI. There was no
intention to deprive the defense lawyers of the
material, officials insist.
There is no reason to uncritically accept this
explanation as the truth.
But even if the documents were withheld inadvertently,
the fact remains
that federal authorities failed to provide the defense
with a huge volume
of evidence that bears directly on the FBI investigation
into the bombing.
This is a serious violation of a defendant's right to a
fair trial, and the
violation is compounded by the fact that it concerns a
capital case. It
constitutes legal grounds for contesting either
McVeigh's original trial,
the penalty phase, or both.
Given the mass of documents involved, and the fact that
the defendant is
facing the death penalty, limiting the extension to 30
days is a travesty
of due process. There is no way McVeigh's lawyers can
study the documents,
let alone adequately investigate issues arising from
them, in such a short
period.
Furthermore, the repeated public statements of high
government officials,
echoed by the media, that there is nothing of an
exculpatory nature in the
material can only have the effect of prejudicing any
jury that might be
assembled to consider future legal proceedings, should
McVeigh decide to
take that path.
The question arises: why the rush to execute McVeigh?
A number of factors could be involved in the
government's determination to
have done with McVeigh as soon as possible. The
documents may contain
information that conflicts with the government's
official version of the
Oklahoma City bombing, which insists that only two
individuals were
involved: McVeigh and his former army buddy Terry
Nichols.
Does the newly unearthed evidence point to a wider
conspiracy? Much of it
consists of interviews and leads gathered shortly after
the April 1995
blast by 46 FBI field offices concerning "John Doe No.
2," a man witnesses
reported seeing at the scene of the crime.
Federal investigators subsequently dropped their search
for this individual
and prosecuted and convicted McVeigh and Nichols,
contending the two men
acted alone. While McVeigh himself has denied the
existence of a "John Doe
No. 2," his former attorney Stephen Jones contends that
McVeigh was among a
group of conspirators. Lawyers for Terry Nichols, who
have filed a motion
for a new trial on the basis of the withheld documents,
have always claimed
there was such a man and that his existence could cast
doubt on Nichols'
role in the crime.
The withheld evidence might also contain information
damaging to the FBI or
other government agencies. There is good reason to
suspect that FBI
informants knew more about the bombing and the events
leading up to it than
has been revealed.
It is well known that the FBI has many informants in the
militia movement,
among gun lobbyists, the Christian right, the Ku Klux
Klan and other racist
and extreme-right groups. There is a long history of FBI
collusion in
right-wing violence.
One of the most notorious examples involves the
activities of FBI informant
Gary T. Rowe. In 1980 the Justice Department admitted
that the FBI knew of
Rowe's involvement in a series of racially motivated
attacks in the South
during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Rowe
admitted to
participating in the attack on the Freedom Riders at the
Birmingham bus
station in 1961, as well as being in the car with the
gunman who in 1965
shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old civil rights
activist from Detroit.
In the recent trial of former Ku Klux Klansman Thomas
Blanton in Alabama it
was revealed that the FBI for years withheld critical
evidence concerning
the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that resulted in the
death of four young
girls. State prosecutors were not informed until 1997 of
the existence of
FBI tape recordings implicating Blanton in the crime.
Charges had circulated for years that FBI informant Rowe
had failed a lie
detector test about the 1963 blast. If Rowe was not a
direct participant in
the church bombing, it is probable he knew of plans to
carry out the
atrocity, given his association with the KKK in
Birmingham. The FBI may
have withheld the evidence to protect Rowe and other
informants, and to
conceal its own complicity in KKK crimes.
There is another dimension to the Oklahoma City bombing
that the political
establishment has sought to conceal. At the federal,
state and local level
there are numerous political figures with close ties to
the Christian
right, militia groups and racist and anti-Semitic
organizations, the very
circles in which McVeigh moved prior to the bombing. The
Republican Party
in particular has close ties to such right-wing groups,
and a number of
Republican senators, congressmen and governors have
actively solicited
their support.
During the Republican impeachment drive against Clinton,
it was revealed,
for example, that Rep. Bob Barr (R-Georgia)among the
most ferocious
anti-Clinton partisans, and Senate Majority Leader Trent
Lott (R-Miss.) had
ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white
supremacist group.
Beyond these immediate questions are even more
fundamental considerations.
The Oklahoma City bombing raises a whole host of social
and political
issues that the political establishment does not want
discussed. The
bombing was a seminal event, revealing the profound
disaffection felt by
broad sections of the population with the government and
the state of
society in America, an alienation which in Timothy
McVeigh's case took an
extremely reactionary, anti-social form.
The very fact that the first large-scale terrorist
action to take place on
US soil was not carried out by foreign terrorists, but
by an American
active within right-wing extremist circles, points to
the sharp divisions
within American society. Elements like McVeigh, in the
militia movement,
the Christian right, the anti-tax movement, have been
directly fostered by
the political establishment, especially the Republican
Party. In a
political sense, establishment politicians and the media
have a good
measure of culpability in the Oklahoma City atrocity.
Moreover, the violence of the US government itself, both
at home and
abroad, is a factor in the growth of right-wing
terrorist forces. There is
an enormous element of hypocrisy in the sanctimonious
statements of
Ashcroft, Bush and others, who denounce McVeigh's act of
mass murder, but
support no less bloody actions by the American military
and police.
According to McVeigh, two events were pivotal in
convincing him that the US
government was an alien and repressive force: the
Persian Gulf War in 1991
and the 1993 FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound
in Waco, Texas.
Volunteering as a recruit to the US Army, McVeigh was
shaken by the
savagery of US imperialism's one-sided onslaught against
the Iraqis.
Following his return from the Gulf War, the FBI attack
in Waco, which
resulted in the deaths of at least 85 people, including
21 children, helped
push him over the edge. McVeigh chose the second
anniversary of the Waco
attack for the Oklahoma City bombing.
The WSWS has examined in detail the socio-psychological
processes that led
McVeigh to carry out the most deadly act of domestic
terrorism in American
history. (See "Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh: the
making of a mass
murderer").
McVeigh is a mass murderer who should be isolated from
society at
large. However, the WSWS opposes his execution. Capital
punishment is a
barbaric practice that has been outlawed in the majority
of the advanced
industrialized countries in the world. The American
people will be no
better protected by putting McVeigh to death than by
locking him up for life.
But the political establishment wants to use the McVeigh
execution, the
first federal execution in 38 years, to rehabilitate the
practice of
capital punishment, which has begun to lose support
among Americans in
recent years, due in part to revelations of wrongful
convictions of death
row inmates.
Attorney General Ashcroft has organized a viewing of the
execution on
closed circuit television for some 300 victims'
relatives and survivors,
who are to watch the grisly procedure from a remote
location in Oklahoma
City. The media plans to assemble a horde of journalists
in Terre Haute to
report live on the execution.
It is ironic that the government's handling of the
Oklahoma City bombing
case, including the revelations of withheld evidence,
has made McVeigh's
execution a focus of opposition to capital punishment.
International human
rights organizations, foreign governments and even the
Pope are calling on
the Bush administration to halt the execution. It should
be noted that a
number of the victims' relatives have themselves come
out against the
execution.
The general slant of newspaper and television reports is
that McVeigh's
execution is a precondition for those who survived the
bombing or lost
loved ones to achieve "closure." Precisely what is meant
by "closure" is
never explained. If it means putting an end to the pain
that comes from the
loss of a husband, wife, father, mother, or child, then
the term has little
meaning, because people can never fully put such
feelings behind them.
If it means overcoming the rage and bitterness produced
by an inhuman act
like McVeigh's, especially when a loved one has been
killed, it is
legitimate to question the notion that watching the
perpetrator die is the
most healthy and positive form of therapy. Surely,
society can and should
encourage a more humane means of dealing with such a
tragedy.
In any event, the government's rush to execute McVeigh
has little to do
with compassion for the victims and survivors. It is a
continuation of the
ethos of retribution that has been used by the political
establishment in
recent decades to brutalize society. And the authorities
hope that by
killing McVeigh they will preempt any further
examination of the bombing
and what it revealed about American society.
It is, however, only through an examination of the
social roots of this
terrible event that the survivors, as well as the
American people as a
whole, can begin to come to grips with the tragedy. What
light does
McVeigh's evolution shed on the class divisions in
American society and the
character of the political system?
Only on the basis of an understanding of the objective
social roots of the
Oklahoma City bombing is it possible to make sense of
what otherwise seems
an inexplicable event. And only on such a basis is it
possible to see how
society can be changed for the better to prevent such
events from recurring
in the future.