Botching The Big Case
Missing documents surface,
McVeigh's execution is delayed, and the FBI is left scrambling
to explain its latest fiasco
By
NANCY GIBBS
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.
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May 21, 2001 | No. 20
COVER
STORIES
Justice
Delayed
Does the hitch in Timothy McVeigh's execution point to deeper fbi problems?
The confessed bomber may get what he is due in the end, but he may also
have met one of his goals: making Americans doubt the way their government
pursues justice
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOUTH
PACIFIC
NEW ZEALAND: Loved to Death...
A top tourist spot's popularity has become a threat to its beauty
Defense: The focus shifts from force
to service
THE
ARTS
ART: Kathleen Petyarre's Utopia Dreamings
BOOKS: A Harry Potter wannabe cries foul
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