Anonymous wrote:
On Mon, Jun 02, 1997 at 05:34:55PM -0500, bennett_t1@popmail.firn.edu wrote:
Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on all counts today. I am not surprised. People will believe anything the govt. says, and besides, the governments lawyers were obviously more expensive than McVeigh's. This is a sad day for all anti-government haters.
Yes, poor Tim Mcveigh. If he's innocent then he is one more victim of the OKC bomber.
I'm surprised at the concern. After all I've not noticed militia supporters and appologists speaking out against the death penalty. If one is driving away from the scene of the biggest single terrorist incident on US soil one is probably well advised to both have license plates on the car and not be carrying unlicensed firearms. If one is arrested its probably not advisable to counter interrogation by refusing to give more than name rank and serial number, a request to see a lawyer is probably a more sensible choice. The one problem I have with the trial is the leaking of the defense notes. I suspect that they are genuine and that McVeigh really did confess. In the UK publication would be barred for the duration of the trial and heavy jail sentences imposed since the right to a fair trial is considered a reasonable justification for a temporary bar on the right to free speech. However I would not argue that the trial be halted as a result since one possible explanation is that the defense saw that there was no chance of aquital and gambled on gaining a mistrial. $10 million for 5 days of defense evidence tends to suggest that there was not much evidence to show. Appologists for McVeigh should consider that his actions did not advance the militia cause an iota, it destroyed it and along with it much of the right wing fringe. It forced Rush Limbaugh off television and many right wing hosts off radio. The sympathy shown for the bomber's motives made the country aware that it did not share the anti-government sentiment. Clinton's poll recovery dates precisely from the moment of the Oaklahoma bomb. If you read the propaganda being generated durning the budget impasse its pretty ovbvious that Clinton was successful in portraying Newt as a legislative version of McVeigh, Newt had of course alligned himself with the most extreme of the talk show hosts Liddy and Limbaugh when he became speaker. McVeigh ripped the heart out of the militia movement, he demonstrated what it was really about. Ironically the Oaklahoma bombing may have had precisely the effect McVeigh desired but in a very different sense. It was a wake up call to defend the country from fascism but the fascist threat was McVeigh and the millitia movement. The millitia movement have only two possible scripts at this point and one might well be denied them. They can either admit the nature of their cause and claim McVeigh as a martyr, this probably guarantees them extinction but then again Hitler recovered from the beer hall putsch. Alternatively they can loudly claim that McVeigh was "framed" in the same way that other neo-NAZIs on the net claim the holocaust a fake, i.e. so that nobody really believes it. I suspect that this script will be denied them because it would require McVeigh to go to the execution chamber proclaiming his innocence and this is something he has curiously failed to do so far. I'm not a trained psychologist but my experience in this area suggests that a claim of responsibility and publication of some document that serves as a political manifesto is very likely. It an ego thing... Phill