Botching The Big Case
CHUCK ROBINSON/AP
The death chamber at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. |
 |
Related Articles
Even war criminals usually go to the trouble of claiming some moral justification for their crimes, some moral equivalence with their enemies. Timothy McVeigh argued that the arrogance of the Federal Government, the government that wanted to take his guns and cramp his rights, was so vast and so dangerous that he needed to blow up a building, start a revolution. "I did it for the larger good," he claimed, and if innocent people had to die, well, that's what happens in war. He called the 19 dead children "collateral damage," and bragged that even if he is executed, he still wins: the final score will be 168 to 1.
|
|
 |
And so the last thing that anyone in the government, anyone in law enforcement and above all any of McVeigh's surviving victims could abide was anything that might give him satisfaction or lend his theories of moral equivalence a veneer of legitimacy. They wanted to take away his platform. Most were ready for him to die, and the execution had the makings of an awful circus: 1,600 reporters were booking rooms in Terre Haute, Ind., for next Wednesday. "Good morning, America, it's time to kill a killer, but first, this is Today." All those cameras, all those talking heads and the countdown clocks would guarantee the insane intimacy of this might-as-well-be-public execution.
Then the FBI revealed that it had suddenly found 3,135 documents about the Oklahoma City bombing investigation that McVeigh's defense lawyers had never seen, and Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped the clock. The problem was not that there were doubts about McVeigh's guilt; he has admitted that. This was not the discovery of some sinister plot, Justice officials insisted--just human error, maybe a computer glitch. But it was another bomb exploding nonetheless. Ashcroft looked drained and solemn as he announced that McVeigh's execution would be postponed for a month so his defense lawyers could review the documents. "I believe the Attorney General has a more important duty than the prosecution of any single case, as painful as that may be to our nation," Ashcroft said. "If any questions or doubts remain about this case, it would cast a permanent cloud over justice, diminishing its value and questioning its integrity."
President Bush had a message for McVeigh, and for anyone else who would try to make him a martyr to those questions and doubts. He said McVeigh is "lucky to be in America. That this is a country who will bend over backwards to make sure that his constitutional rights are guaranteed." But that was small consolation to the victims' families, the parents and children and spouses whom McVeigh derides as the "woe is me" crowd, to whom he has never shown the least regret, other than that there were not more of them killed, that he did not bring down the entire Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They imagine him sitting in prison, rubbing his hands together, feeling as if it were Christmas. "This is playing right into his hand," says Paul Howell, who lost his 27-year-old daughter Karen. "He can go in there and say, 'Guys, I told you the Federal Government is all screwed up.' This could hurt a lot of people, and it will hurt the FBI."
That, of course, was McVeigh's goal all along, the one he and his fellows in arms were never going to achieve on the battlefields that stretched from Ruby Ridge to Waco to Oklahoma City: the crusade to turn citizens against a tyrannous government. Through mistakes, misjudgment and misconduct, the feds have, over time, done damage to themselves worse than any McVeigh could have inflicted in his poisonous revolutionary dreams. "This clearly nudges [the FBI] off its pedestal," says Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating.
The McVeigh fiasco comes just as the FBI is having to defend itself against charges that it is capable of brutal indifference to individual rights if it feels justified by some larger goal. It's hard even to say which was the worst of the recent crop of federal offenses, though the McVeigh blunder probably doesn't make the top five. Two weeks ago, officials from the Boston FBI field office were hauled before the House Committee on Government Reform to explain why they had allowed Joseph Salvati to spend 30 years in prison for a murder they knew he didn't commit, just to protect one of their informants. "The Federal Government determined that Joe Salvati's life was expendable," said his lawyer Victor Garo. Asked if he felt any remorse for what they had done to Salvati and his family, retired Boston agent H. Paul Rico said: "What do you want, tears?"
That same week, prosecutors in Alabama finally convicted the Klansman who bombed the black church in Birmingham back in 1963, killing four little girls. We could have done this years ago, they said, if the FBI had just handed over their secret tapes that proved his guilt. That conviction came after months of criticism that the FBI had dismissed warnings of a mole in its ranks right up until they tripped over Russian spy Robert Hanssen, an agent for 25 years. Last month the bureau announced a mediation agreement with African-American agents in a long-running class action charging bias in promotions. Last year there was the relentless pursuit of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who spent nine months in jail after an immense FBI mole hunt, only to be released by a judge who said his imprisonment had "embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it." To say nothing of Richard Jewell.
After the Cyclone: Fear and Disease
Robert Rauschenberg's TIME covers
Why U.S. Infants Die Too Often
Me and My Bipolar Disorder
Surrendering to Hizballah
The 10 Best Moms Ever
Cartoons of the Week
Nicaragua's Great Leap Forward
The New James Frey: A Review