Oklahoma City, 9/11, and the Face of Terror

[Parts 1 and 2.]

Part 3: The Murrah Mystery

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Oklahoma City bombing is how quickly it seems to have receded to the shadows of our national memory, even before the events of Sept. 11.

Compared to the national focus that has (appropriately enough) been directed toward 9/11, it sometimes seems as though we couldn't brush April 19, 1995 into the dustbin of history soon enough -- even though both, in fact, represent two facets of the most serious threat facing America in the coming century: Namely, terrorism on American soil.

Perhaps that's because of the difference in perpetrators. In the popular mind, 9/11 was committed by The Other: Brown-skinned Muslims, fanatics from the uncivilized hellhole of the Middle East. Oklahoma City, in contrast, was committed by one of us. By a boy next door who was one of those same war veterans to whom we pay lip service now.

However, we did our damnedest to make even Timothy McVeigh, eventually, into another kind of The Other. The mythology about McVeigh that emerged in the months and years after Oklahoma City became something of a comforting story: He was a freak, a lone wolf. The Murrah Bombing was an "isolated event."

That mythology has camouflaged the underlying reality: April 19, in fact, heralded the arrival of a new kind of threat to American security and, ultimately, its democratic institutions. This is asymmetric terrorism committed by highly corpuscular and extremely motivated actors unattached to any nation/state and who cannot be dealt with through military might.

Robert Wright, in his Slate thinkpiece "A Real War on Terrorism," explained it this way:

For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people. They won't have to claim that they speak on behalf of a whole religion. They'll just have to be reasonably intelligent, modestly well-funded, and really pissed off. It may be hard to imagine a few radical environmentalists, or Montana militiamen, or French anti-globalization activists, or Basque separatists, or Unabomber-style Luddites, killing 100,000 people. Yet what makes this plausible is exactly what makes radical Islam such a formidable long-term threat: two enduring aspects of the evolution of technology.

These two aspects, as Wright describes, are "the growing accessibility of massively lethal munitions" and "the diverse threat posed by information technology."

... [T]he point isn't to minimize radical Islam, which is probably the biggest single threat to American security of the next decade, if not longer. But as we address that threat on its own terms, we should be building a policy framework that will apply to the larger, more generic threat as well. This is especially true in light of the fact that the current phase of rapid change -- info revolution, globalization, etc. --is hardly over, and periods of rapid change tend to spawn intensely aggrieved groups.

It should be clear, in fact, that the Oklahoma City bombing was significant not merely because it represented the first serious terrorist attack on American soil, but because it heralded this deeper and far more threatening trend.

Unfortunately, there has hardly ever been any recognition of it in this light, certainly not in the mainstream media. Instead, the common understanding of Oklahoma City derives largely from the Justice Department's version of events that won in court for them in convicting Timothy McVeigh: that the bombing was committed by a tiny claque of conspirators comprising McVeigh and Terry Nichols and their lesser cohorts, Michael and Lori Fortier, and that there were no broader organizational ties or social significance. This made it easy to forget -- yet another "isolated event."

There's just one problem with that picture: The same version of events, offered by the Justice Department at Terry Nichols' trial, failed to convince the jury -- or for that matter, the judge (the same judge who oversaw McVeigh's trial).

Indeed, the very reason that Nichols is now on trial again in Oklahoma is that the federal jury found compelling reason to believe that, just as Nichols' defense attorneys suggested, he was not alone in aiding Tim McVeigh.

In other words, the mystery of who committed the Oklahoma City bombing has never been fully resolved. The evidence, in fact, strongly supports the possibility that there are other co-conspirators who have gone uncaught.

I examined this problem in depth three years ago in a Salon piece titled "The mystery of John Doe 2". One of the main weaknesses in the government's case, as I described then, was the wealth of witness sightings of other men in McVeigh's company during the days before the bombing, especially as the bomb was being assembled. Most of these sightings, however, lacked physical evidence, and were perhaps dismissed because of the frequently flimsy nature of eyewitness accounts.

There were similar tantalizing clues, including the leg that wouldn't match up:

The weaknesses in the government's theory about how the bombing occurred go well beyond mere witness accounts. The FBI has never adequately explained, for instance, the bombing's rarely acknowledged 169th victim.

When sifting through the debris of the Murrah Building, workers encountered numerous body parts disattached from the bodies of their owners, including nine severed legs. But only eight of those legs were eventually matched up with the bodies to which they belonged.

The body belonging to the ninth leg -- apparently a dark-skinned person, according to the medical examiner's testimony in the McVeigh trial -- has never been found, leading investigators to conclude that whoever owned it was very near to the blast when it occurred. There is the possibility that it belonged to a random person walking by, but there are no missing persons on record associated with the Oklahoma blast, even after extensive searches of homeless service agencies in the area.

However, like most such clues, the extra leg was something of a red herring without anything further to accompany it. And the accompanying questions tended to obscure the most significant fact to emerge from the trial: The clear message from Nichols' defense team that there were other co-conspirators -- to be named, perhaps, later.

As Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, who worked as a consultant and investigator for Nichols' defense team, explained to me in an interview:

The blast zone for quite a ways out was just tremendous. ... The pillar that was closest to the truck, and it was less than 16 feet away, just shattered. I mean, it didn't even break, it just basically turned into powder. So it's very possible that somebody standing within 15 to 20 feet away from the truck would essentially be atomized and through some fluke of physics and randomness, that a leg was just flung someplace.

OK, I accept that, I accept that there probably is a 169th person, or 168 if you leave out the rescue worker who was killed.

The problem here is -- to me, the leg is not the most compelling evidence there were more people involved. The most compelling evidence is that Nichols has said there were more people involved.

... So let's set aside the leg, which I think gets people off on a wild goose chase. Let's look at the fact that there are a number of witnesses who said there were other people involved. There were a whole lot of witnesses who say that. I do think that's pretty compelling, and when you add to that -- although Nichols has never said it publicly for quoting, it's pretty clear from the representation of [defense attorney] Michael Tigar in front of the judge in the Nichols trial that Nichols is willing to name more names, if they don't put him on trial for his life.

I described this in more detail in the Salon piece:

Even more problematic is McVeigh's account of how the bomb was constructed. He claims in American Terrorist that he and Nichols alone managed to load several tons of liquid jet fuel and ammonium nitrate into the Ryder truck and mix it into lethal explosive all in the span of three hours. Considering the difficulty of such work -- particularly that of mixing the chemicals -- McVeigh's account stretches the limits of credulity well beyond breaking.

A more reasonable explanation for the construction of the bomb can be found in the testimony at Terry Nichols' trial. Charles Farley, a local sporting-goods rental shop worker, told the courtroom that he passed by Geary Lake at the time the bomb was being built, and saw not only the Ryder truck, a two-ton farm truck loaded with white bags of fertilizer and a car similar to McVeigh's getaway car, but at least five men working around the scene.

"Initially, when I got to the gate, there was one individual standing at the back of the farm truck, at the back left corner of the farm truck," Farley testified. "I seen three individuals standing down between the Ryder truck and the brown car, one of them standing in the -- in the road just a little bit, one of them leaning against the front of the Ryder truck and the other one just kind of standing between them."

Farley said he made to drive out of the area, pulling just beyond a gate nearby. "As soon as I was out, I seen an individual walking alongside of the farm truck. He was probably at the cab when I first seen him. And I was really going slow. I mean, I was just creeping. And I was going to roll the window down and ask him if he needed some help. And -- give me kind of a dirty look and I decided, well, if you're going to be that way, me too, and I'm just going to leave; so I just drove away."

Farley said he couldn't identify any of the other men, but he got a clear view of the man who shot him a look. Nichols' defense attorneys handed him a photo of a gray-bearded man and asked if that was him, and Farley said it was. The Rocky Mountain News later tracked down the identity of the man in the photo and found it was a sixtyish member of a local Kansas citizens' militia group named Morris Wilson.

Strangely, prosecutors did not attempt to rebut Farley's testimony, which came on the last full day of defense testimony. It was a crucial error in judgment. The jury convicted Nichols, but only of the lesser crime of taking part in the conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter, eschewing the murder and bombing charges that would have brought him the death penalty. Several of the jurors later said that Farley's testimony had convinced them that there was a wider conspiracy.

The jurors were not alone. In the sentencing phase of the trial, Judge Matsch himself indicated he was not convinced that everyone involved in the bombing had been brought to justice when he offered to lighten Nichols' life sentence in exchange for information about other participants. He said many questions about the case remained unanswered, adding: "If the defendant in this case, Mr. Nichols, comes forward with answers or information leading to answers to some of these questions, it would be something that the court can consider in imposing final sentence," Matsch said.

Tigar demurred in this offer because he was aware that Oklahoma officials intended to try Nichols if the federal courts failed to deliver a capital conviction and death sentence. Which is why Terry Nichols is currently standing trial in Oklahoma City and is again fighting the death penalty.

Berlet believes that federal prosecutors indeed blew the case -- but did so well before Nichols even went on trial:

The other thing, of course, is that the Fortiers are liars. All you have to do is look at the record of their various testimonies to see that they don't add up. Their story was constantly changing.

I think the Fortiers were much closer to the plot than Nichols was. I think Nichols got browbeaten into it.

Why would the government not want to know? It's because you know Timmy did it, and Nichols turned himself in. And the Fortiers you gave immunity. Well, where do you go? If you open it up beyond that, you have to admit that you shouldn't have given the Fortiers immunity. You should have given Nichols immunity -- he would have rolled over on McVeigh, the Fortiers and the other people. So it was a tremendous error of judgment to give the Fortiers immunity.

To me that is the simplest explanation. There's no giant conspiracy here -- there's an embarrassment that they rushed to give the Fortiers immunity when they shouldn't have. They should have just sat on their hands for a couple of days and see what percolated up. And it would have turned out that Nichols would have been the better government witness. But they screwed that -- you can't take back an immunity offer.

Of course, the outcome of Nichols' trial was largely treated as something of a "glitch" -- an anomalous failure on the part of federal prosecutors. Hardly anyone in the media seemed to recognize that in fact a huge hole had been blown in the popular script about Oklahoma City -- the one portraying it as the maniacal act of a handful of lone-wolf types, hardly suggestive of a larger problem. On the contrary, there may indeed have been not just a John Doe No. 2, but also Nos. 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Berlet expressed these thoughts as well:

I think that there's a very strong possibility that there was a very clandestine and limited but larger network of people than four who were involved in helping each other remain underground and plan different anti-government activities.

I think what you have here is substantial evidence that the government in fact did not do a good case of investigation. You can't dispute that it was a broad net that was thrown, but there were big holes in the net. So the argument says there were all of these interviews and all of these, you know, we tracked down every lead, but they didn't analyze it. Or if they did analyze it, they decided at some point to stop with the four they had.

The story is that, for whatever reason, whether it was because they had too much evidence to collate -- which can happen in a case, to make sense of it -- that somewhere along the line, somebody made the political decision to stop at four. And from that decision forward, and even if that was an unstated decision.

Even Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose view of the case is from a broader perspective, believes the evidence is far from conclusive that McVeigh and Nichols acted alone:

"I think it's not a closed case ... I think that certainly there's the possibility that there are two or three or perhaps more people out there still. I absolutely don't think that's certain. That said, I think there's no question there are unanswered questions."

What makes this especially the case are the reports that Nichols, through his lawyers, tried to get the current Oklahoma charges dropped in exchange for information about other conspirators. The Oklahoma prosecutors, however, declined the offer and proceeded full steam ahead.

The truth, in any event, may finally emerge from the Oklahoma courts later this spring or summer, when the verdict comes in on Terry Nichols' state trial. Regardless of whether he is convicted of a capital offense, whatever information he may have on other participants in the bombing is likely to come into play during the sentencing phase, when it is almost certain to be used as a bargaining chip.

If that occurs, then it will be irrevocably clear that much of what is popularly believed about the Oklahoma City bombing -- especially the notion that everyone involved has been brought to face justice -- is a phantasm.

This goes beyond simply the question of who and how many were involved. Indeed, the core of the popular mythology, that Oklahoma City was an "isolated event," is similarly hollow.

Americans -- because they have wrapped Oklahoma City into a tidy and readily disposed package separate from the mass death of Sept. 11 -- have never really faced up to the fact that the terrorist threat they now confront does not only come wrapped in the traditional mask of the foreign enemy, the readily demonized Other. It comes in many forms, among them the extremists in their own midst who, even after conspiring to build a bomb that wipes out a federal building and 169 lives, blend back into the populace at large with relatively little effort.

These are terrorists who in fact share an identical agenda with Al Qaeda and the dozens of other potential terrorist threats, including such cult-based radicals as Aum Shinrikyo. Their beliefs are uniformly apocalyptic: that Western Civilization is hopelessly corrupt and must be brought down by any means necessary in order for a "new age" fitting their own particular vision to blossom in its place. Superfortress America, they believe, can be shaken at its foundations by attacks that cause mass deaths and undermine its core values and institutions, most of all the belief that a democratic society can be a secure one.

Of course, one of the chief reasons the public has not faced either Oklahoma City or its larger significance is because the simpler American worldview -- the one in which every threat can be confronted with our military might -- is somehow more comforting, probably because of its familiarity and seeming certainty, and we cling to it with all our might ... even as, every day, the unfolding disaster in Iraq brings fresh evidence that this too is a lie.

We are abetted in this belief by a complacent media content to regurgitate conventional wisdom and preferred scripts, trumpeting threats from abroad while blithely relegating domestic terrorism to the memory hole.

Some recent attempts to explain Oklahoma City that have gained media circulation, in fact, have contributed significantly to muddying our understanding of what happened April 19. But, as we will see, these too are only more recent permutations of the same irrational conspiracism that inspired the bombing in the first place.

Next: New Conspiracy Theories

[Cross-posted at The American Street.]