Pat Shannan's MUSINGS
FINAL CLOSURE ONE MORE TIME
"Never tolerate injustice or corruption. Always fight demagogues of all parties. Never belong to any party. Always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers. Never lack sympathy with the poor. Always remain devoted to the public welfare. Never be satisfied with merely printing news. Always be drastically independent. Never be afraid to attack wrong whether it be predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." Joseph Pulitzer 4/10/07
A century ago, America still had a free press. The founders had insisted upon it as an absolute necessity to liberty. Yet today even the famed Pulitzer Prize, originally and still purported to be awarded for honest, indefatigable, and outstanding reporting of what would otherwise often be a suppressed story, sometimes seems to be as corrupted as the Nobel Prize allegedly awarded for "peace." David Cay Johnston of The New York Times has surfaced as the current frontrunner for this year's reverse Pulitzer Prize, with a couple of deluded wannabes from The Buffalo News running a close second . We need a name for our new upside-down award to be given by this column each year to the nation's leader in the spreading of government fertilizer. The trophy will be a dried cow chip, and I promise you we will send it to the winner each year with an appropriate inscription attached. We welcome your suggestions and will award an autographed book to the person submitting our favorite choice of titles. You may write to me at this magazine with your entries or e-mail through my website: www.patshannan.bizland.com.
McVeigh's Execution Appears Imminent
Americans will be reading about the execution of Tim McVeigh in Terre Haute, Indiana this month. We have it from one of the locals that all of the motel rooms there and in the surrounding towns have been booked for weeks to accommodate news people from all over the world coming in for the blood sacrifice.
Once again, we will be subjected to the whimpering of the babbling idiots, as they rejoice to their own private tunes of "Final Closure." We first heard the strains of this cacophonic medley only 34 days after the OKC tragedy - the morning of May 23, 1995 - that dark day in history when the federal government destroyed the crime scene in order to get rid of the evidence. They told us that the empty shell just represented too many bad memories for the survivors of the (multiple) blast(s) and that this would bring "closure" to the emotionally distraught. (Did anyone really swallow that pathetic excuse?)
Then in June of 1997, Tim McVeigh was convicted and the throng cheered again, yelping with excitement for the oncoming "closure." This sadistic folly was repeated only a few days later when he was sentenced to the penalty of death by lethal injection. "Yippee!" The following December this same warped crowd moaned with disappointment when the federal court missed with the death shot at Terry Nichols. However, their emotional butterflies continue to flutter with bloodthirsty anticipation while the State of Oklahoma prepares to take aim at Terry one more time.
On May 16th, we will watch and hear it all again. This time they will call it "Final Closure." Yet the only ones who should be cheering are the real perpetrators - those invisible Lon Horiuchi-like assassins who get away with legalized murder and almost always remain nameless. They got away with it in Dallas in 1963. They got away with it outside of Selma, Alabama in 1965. They got away with it in Memphis and Los Angeles in 1968. And in Laurel, Maryland in 1972, they got away with it, too, even though their target did not die. In 1983, they missed in North Dakota but finished the job in Arkansas four months later and got away with both attacks. It was at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 that they got away with it again and at the New York Trade Center and Waco, Texas only six months later.
On April 19, 1995, somebody - almost certainly a group of somebodies - planted multiple charges inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City and destroyed the edifice from the inside out. Two other somebodies, one of whom may have been Tim McVeigh, parked a rented Ryder truck, which may have contained some ammonium nitrate, in front of that building as a diversionary tactic shortly before the detonation. An enormous explosion of mini-nuclear proportions occurred minutes later. 169 people died - 168 of whom were identified - and some 500 more suffered from a range of minor injuries to a lifetime maiming. The incident was logged in the books as the largest mass murder in American history, and the weasels got away with it.
The Real Faces of Evil
Their cover-up is now being aided by Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck of The Buffalo News, who have written the latest fairy tale demonizing Tim McVeigh into a remorseless, bloodthirsty ogre. According to them, Tim "purposely waited until the building was filled at 9:00 a.m. in order to raise the body count." They say Tim also referred to the 19 dead children as "collateral damage" which undermined his effort to fuel anti-government sentiment and that Tim acknowledges he was "the architect of the bombing." If the hearts and minds of the victims' families could possibly have been inflamed any more, this certainly did it.
Their new book being so perfectly timed, coming out only weeks before the celebrated execution, reminds us of an earlier and similar government ploy. In 1997, only days before the start of the McVeigh trial in Denver, notes from the files of defense attorney Stephen Jones were mysteriously leaked to the Dallas Morning News. These were from private conversations between attorney and client and amounted to no less than a semi-confession from McVeigh being emblazoned across the newspapers of America. No one was ever implicated, and Stephen Jones, the chief suspect, denied any culpability.
And one more thing. Did anyone notice how cleanly Tim put the noose around Terry's neck with the subtle insertion by the authors that McVeigh said, "Terry Nichols helped me build the bomb and load it on the truck." Tim will not get to sit in the witness chair and be cross-examined at Terry's state trial in Oklahoma, but this by-then-posthumous statement will go further towards convicting Nichols than any of the evidence yet presented.
Author Bob Papovich, who knows Tim better than any other truth-teller, doesn't buy it. For one thing, McVeigh is confessing to the impossible. But is it really his fantasy or a drug induced and/or post-hypnotic suggestion he recites on cue? And did he really make these outrageous statements at all, or are (some of) these the figments of the imaginations of two creative writers who studied the trial transcripts and are parroting the prosecutors? Once Tim is dead, there will be no one to refute it, and the story will become another part of twisted history.
"I don't believe we will ever know," says Papovich. "But I do know one thing for sure. They've got Tim saying everything the government would want him to say."
Indeed they do. Even the part that originally came out of the mouths of the FBI spokesmen and the Justice Department way back in April of '95, long before Tim had uttered anything. Now, according to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh is claiming he did the dirty deed to avenge the fatal raid by federal authorities at the "Waco compound of religious extremists" two years earlier. Sound familiar? The federales never cease to amaze us. They were already reading Tim's mind six years ago. Man, dem guys is smart!
But this time the programmers, assuming that the authors interviewed a mind-controlled zombie reciting previously fed information, may have outsmarted themselves. At trial time in 1997, Michael Fortier testified that he and Tim did a recon mission at the Murrah Building and talked to the director of the Day Care Center. But Michel and Herbeck write that Tim says that he did not know about the center until he watched the news on television from the jailhouse. "I recognized beforehand that someone might be bringing their kid to work," McVeigh said (on ABC "PrimeTime"). "However, if I had known there was an entire day care center, it might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage." Was Tim overdosed with new information before the interview?
Now they've even got Tim confiding that the load was much more than the oft-publicized figure of 4,800 pounds of ANFO. They quoted him as saying it was over 7,000. Hmmm. Could that be because even the government's own experts realized that the 4,800 just wouldn't measure up to the damage? "Our" expert, Brig. Gen. (ret.) Ben Partin, says that not even the 7,000 would have been nearly enough to wreak the kind of havoc seen on NW 5th Street that morning and create the dimensions of the alleged hole in the asphalt.
Partin says that Dan Herbeck called him just a few days before the book was scheduled to come out on April 1st but doesn't know why. There was nothing that could be added at that late date. Maybe the authors wanted to be able to say that they talked with Gen. Partin, if asked. Herbeck did say that he had never talked with McVeigh but Michel did the alleged 75 hours of interviews. On April 3rd on CNN, Herbeck refuted his own statement to Partin, saying that he had interviewed McVeigh for some 30 hours by telephone. Anyone who has ever been in federal prison will be quick to assert that it would take a special dispensation from the Pope to get half that much time on the telephone. It must be the first time in history for one on death row. But whatever the truth is about the length of the interviews and whether or not they even took place, the book is a hoax.
There are certain irrefutable facts that make a liars out of Tim and the authors: . There are 30+ extremely credible witnesses who put Tim McVeigh in the company of one or more individuals. · At least 8 of those see him and at least one other pull the Ryder truck in front of the Murrah and/or get out of the truck after parking it and leave the scene. · At least 2 of those 30+ see him AND another John Doe immediately after the explosions.
This is physical evidence that disproves what he said or what the authors say he said.
Former Oklahoma State Representative Charles Key, who had his job torpedoed because of his relentless stand for truth, says, "The evidence is very clear that the fed's went to great lengths to fabricate and then cover-up the bomb, bombs, crater, damage to Murrah, and other related subjects. . . If Tim McVeigh (or someone) lies about the involvement of other people and tries to claim that he did this alone (give me a break about threatening Terry Nichols and his family to get a little help loading the truck at Geary Lake) then how can anyone believe anything he says?"
The alleged statement above that McVeigh claimed that Nichols helped him build and load the bomb reminds us of the news leak only days after the arrests, that the FBI lab had discovered ANFO residue on Tim's shirt. However, Dr. Fred Whitehurst, supervisor of that research lab who became a whistleblower, said it was a contrived lie obviously designed to draw the blanket of guilt over the head of McVeigh. In fact, Dr. Whitehurst had personally performed that residue test and the opposite was true. There was no bomb material residue found on McVeigh's clothes or in Nichols' closet.
And the world public is suckered again - this time into believing that a coupla' disgruntled soldiers, trained to be demolition experts (which they were not), had a few beers one night, decided they hated the government, and had a thundering brainstorm. Then one of them, single-handedly, achieved the equivalent of shooting down an Atlas Missile with a BB gun.
Sanctioned Terrorism Praised
Yet Timothy McVeigh is a Great American and a Hero to many pro-American patriots.
Wes Cross, in the newsletter of South Carolina's "United Militias," has described McVeigh and his army buddies as "Great Americans" and "Heroes to all patriotic Americans" for their role in the bombing-murders of innocent men, women and children.
Former President George Bush spoke up on national television to congratulate Timothy McVeigh and his accomplices, describing the bombing as "just and necessary." McVeigh and his peers were also characterized as "America's finest" by retired General Colin Powell.
Even the Liberal Media has fallen into line with these sentiments. News anchorman Dan Rather offered "congratulations on a job well done" to the bombers, while his competition Ted Koppel praised the "efficiency" of the killings. Koppel even stated on his news program that "the good news [of the bombing] led to a rather unique feeling of euphoria throughout the nation."
Some public opinion polls corroborated this, claiming as many as 80% of Americans professed "support" for Timothy McVeigh and "the troops" in the bombing attack against even civilian government buildings, not unlike the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Destroyed in the bombing were electrical power plants, water pumping stations, dams, municipal water and sewage facilities, oil tankers, oil refineries, oil pipelines, cement plants, textile factories, car plants, a rubber factory, TV stations, radio stations, phone exchanges, offices, cafes, hotels, markets and night clubs. Two fully operating nuclear reactors were also bombed, adding nuclear terrorism to the list of war crimes committed by McVeigh and his unnamed accomplices.
Also among the bombed were civilian hospitals, including a mental hospital and a maternity hospital; schools, mosques, civilian homes, grain silos, wheat fields, farm buildings, a vegetable oil factory, a sugar factory, frozen meat storage, food warehouses, a tractor assembly plant, pesticide storage, a baby milk-powder factory, a major fertilizer plant and busy highway traffic,
A Pepsi-Cola plant and several Christian churches - as well as the Baghdad City Hall, Iraqi Supreme Court, and the central post office were also hit in the bombing perpetrated by this well-armed group of right-wing nuts calling itself "The Allied Forces." They were discovered to have an unlimited stash of automatic weapons and ammunition, in addition to the bombs and hand grenades.
An estimated 25,000 civilians were killed in the bombing, according to former U. S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Another 25,000 civilians were killed indirectly by the bombing. At least 100,000 more civilians have died since the end of the bombing, due to lack of food, medicine, clean water; and a mysterious, lingering, debilitating malady known only as "Gulf War Disease."
Oh! We neglected to tell you that all this politically correct terrorism happened in 1991. Four years later, McVeigh took the rap for one other, much smaller criminal act. Most of the gang escaped. M
See all of Pat Shannan's past Musings columns at www.patshannan.bizland.com Hear "Pat Shannan's Investigative Reports" each Sunday on www.gcnlive.com at 8:00pm Eastern, 5:00 Pacific