Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 01:11:39 -0400
Subject: [Fwd: Gore Vidal on Timothy McVeigh]
From: John Judge

     To the few who might be able to see beyond the headlines and think
     outside the paradigm, Gore Vidal is approaching the truth here.
     His Vanity Fair, article this month is critical reading I think.
     Vidal understands that we are already living fascism, and is one
     of the few people who ever uses this word (the real "F" word) on
     television. McVeigh was a patsy, but not a hero I think. He is one
     of their special forces, trained and debriefed. I kept asking
     myself why is he confessing to the crime, or willing to die. Vidal
     thinks he is just indifferent to death, I think, strangely enough,
     he may have been promised he would not. Do we really know if he
     died there?

     JJ

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               Vidal Praises Oklahoma Bomber for Heroic Aims
                   by Fiachra Gibbons, Arts correspondent
                             Guardian of London
                              August 17, 2001

     The writer Gore Vidal yesterday compared the executed Oklahoma
     bomber Timothy McVeigh to Paul Revere, the hero of American
     independence.

     In a withering address at the Edinburgh book festival, the liberal
     novelist and elder statesman of the Gore political dynasty said
     the former soldier decorated for bravery in the Gulf war wanted to
     send out a warning that the government had been bought by
     corporate America and "its secret police, the FBI, were out of
     control. What McVeigh was saying was, `The Feds are coming, the
     Feds are coming'."

     In his strongest identification yet with the man who confessed to
     blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing
     168 people in retaliation for the FBI's "slaughter at Waco", Vidal
     described him as a "Kipling hero" with an "overdeveloped sense of
     justice" who did what he did because he was inflamed by the
     massacre, the FBI's subsequent cover-up, and the way it "had
     shredded the bill of rights and the constitution. He was the man
     who would be king."

     Vidal, whom McVeigh asked to witness his execution in June after
     the pair corresponded for three years, insisted McVeigh did not
     actually carry out the bombing, and hinted he was now close to
     revealing the names of those who did.

     "I am about to drop another shoe. I have been working with a
     researcher who knows at least five of the people involved in the
     making of the bomb and its detonation. It may well be that McVeigh
     did not do it. In fact, I am sure he didn't do it. But when he
     found out he was going to be the patsy, he did something
     psychologically very strange. He decided to grab all credit for it
     himself, because he had no fear of death."

     Vidal maintained this was because "McVeigh saw himself as John
     Brown of Kansas", the anti-slavery campaigner who was executed
     after leading a raid into the south which sparked the American
     civil war.

     Vidal alleged that the FBI not only knew about the plot, it was
     involved in it. Having infiltrated the rightwing militia group
     that planned it, it did nothing because it wanted to pressure
     President Clinton into pushing through draconian anti-terrorist
     legislation he was refusing to sign. "Within a week of the
     bombing, Clinton signed it for `the protection of the state and of
     persons', using the exact language that Adolf Hitler used after
     the Reichstag fire of 1933."

     America was in the grip of what he called "a revolutionary
     situation" because wealth had become concentrated in the hands of
     only 1% of the population. "The truth is that 80% are not doing
     well, and many of those are farmers out in the mid-west who have
     been driven off their land by big business. They are the backbone
     of the militia movement. Many of them are as crazed as you can
     find. But they number over 4m, 300,000 of which are active."

     Vidal revealed that having had his last meal of mint ice-cream
     with chocolate sauce, McVeigh spent his last hours watching the
     Coen Brothers' film Fargo on a black and white TV. "It's a great
     film but bloody, a body is shredded and suchlike, and not quite
     what he wanted to see, poor fellow."

     He saved his greatest venom for Janet Reno, the attorney general
     during the 52-day Waco siege, for "persecuting a perfectly
     harmless bunch of religious nuts" and for presiding over the "lies
     and cover-up" that followed it. "Her mother was a very famous
     alligator wrestler in Florida, a family profession she herself
     should have pursued."

     © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001