Phill writes:
McVeigh is the racist extreemist who has committed mass murder in this case, not the government. While I would welcome it if you joined me in condeming US sponsored terorism during the cold war I don't think you are willing to do so.
No government can afford to behave in a way that outrages large numbers of citizen-units, and provokes action on the part of the less mentally stable ones. Janet Reno sealed the fate of the federal building on the day that she took action which resulted in numerous children being incinerated, just so she could win a dicksizing contest with a religious extremist.
But this threat does not come from the state, it comes from those like McVeigh who will murder children to further their agenda.
I worry a lot more about the behavior of the United States, the nation that never apologizes, the arms merchant to the world, five percent of the population of the world that thinks it has the Manifest Destiny to dictate to the other ninety five percent, than I worry about whether such behavior inspired little Timmy McVeigh and others of his ilk to set off a truck bomb. I think the odds are about 50/50 between McVeigh being the bomber, and McVeigh being the first anti-government extremist sap the Feds tripped over after their precious building blew up. It's not as if we have the ability to make that distinction given coerced testimony from friends, planned leaks, and invented testimony from the FBI crime lab, all of which could have been easily manufactured for an arbitrary suspect. Maybe McVeigh blew up the building, and maybe he didn't. Like the Kennedy assassination, the official version of the facts is now all that exists.
It is surprising to find that you are so willing to be an open appologist for McVeigh's crime but in answer to your point: No children are going to grow up in a better world because of McVeigh or any of his followers, many will not grow up at all because he murdered them.
Along with many Vietnamese children, Granadian children, Panamanian children, and Quadaffi's baby. At least in Oklahoma city, we didn't have marines bulldozing the bodies of dead civilians into trenches to make everything neat and tidy before the press arrived. Yes, Oklahoma city was unfortunate. It was not remarkable or unexpected. If the government deliberately kills Tim Mcveigh, it will not bring back a single dead person. It will just demonstrate that we have a government that deliberately kills people. But then, we knew that already, didn't we? -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $