Botching The Big Case

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."