Гор Видал - Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace

Those present were deeply confused by McVeigh's quotation. How could the Devil quote so saintly a justice? I suspect that he did it in the same spirit that Iago answered Othello when asked why he had done what he had done: "Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: from this time forth I will never speak word." Now we know, too: or as my grandfather used to say back in Oklahoma, "Every pancake has two sides."

The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh

Toward the end of the last century but one, Richard Wagner made a visit to the southern Italian town of Ravello, where he was shown the gardens of the thousand-year-old Villa Rufolo. "Maestro," asked the head gardener, "do not these fantastic gardens 'neath yonder azure sky that blends in such perfect harmony with yonder azure sea closely resemble those fabled gardens of Klingsor where you have set so much of your latest interminable opera, Parsifal ? Is not this vision of loveliness your inspiration for Klingsor?" Wagner muttered something in German. "He says," said a nearby translator, "'How about that?'"

How about that indeed, I thought, as I made my way toward a corner of those fabled gardens, where ABC-TV's Good Morning America and CBS's Early Show had set up their cameras so that I could appear "live" to viewers back home in God's country.

This was last May. In a week's time "the Oklahoma City Bomber," a decorated hero of the Gulf War, one of Nature's Eagle Scouts, Timothy McVeigh, was due to be executed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, for being, as he himself insisted, the sole maker and detonator of a bomb that blew up a federal building in which died 168 men, women, and children. This was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians, as the cultists called themselves, were a peaceful group of men, women, and children living and praying together in anticipation of the end of the world, which started to come their way on February 28, 1993. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, exercising its mandate to "regulate" firearms, refused all invitations from cult leader David Koresh to inspect his licensed firearms. The ATF instead opted for fun. More than one hundred ATF agents, without proper warrants, attacked the church's compound while, overhead, at least one ATF helicopter fired at the roof of the main building. Six Branch Davidians were killed that day. Four ATF agents were shot dead, by friendly fire, it was thought.

There was a standoff. Followed by a fifty-one-day siege in which loud music was played twenty-four hours a day outside the compound. Then electricity was turned off. Food was denied the children. Meanwhile, the media were briefed regularly on the evils of David Koresh. Apparently, he was making and selling crystal meth; he was also — what else in these sick times? — not a Man of God but a Pedophile. The new attorney general, Janet Reno, then got tough. On April 19 she ordered the FBI to finish up what the ATF had begun. In defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act (a basic bulwark of our fragile liberties that forbids the use of the military against civilians), tanks of the Texas National Guard and the army's Joint Task Force Six attacked the compound with a gas deadly to children and not too healthy for adults while ramming holes in the building. Some Davidians escaped. Others were shot by FBI snipers. In an investigation six years later, the FBI denied ever shooting off anything much more than a pyrotechnic tear-gas canister. Finally, during a six hour assault, the building was set fire to and then bulldozed by Bradley armored vehicles. God saw to it that no FBI man was hurt while more than eighty cult members were killed, of whom twenty-seven were children. It was a great victory for Uncle Sam, as intended by the FBI, whose code name for the assault was Show Time.

It wasn't until May 14,1995, that Janet Reno, on 60 Minutes , confessed to second thoughts. "I saw what happened, and knowing what happened, I would not do it again." Plainly, a learning experience for the Florida daughter of a champion lady alligator rassler.

The April 19,1993, show at Waco proved to be the largest massacre of Americans by their own government since 1890, when a number of Native Americans were slaughtered at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Thus the ante keeps upping.

Although McVeigh was soon to indicate that he had acted in retaliation for what had happened at Waco (he had even picked the second anniversary of the slaughter, April 19, for his act of retribution), our government's secret police, together with its allies in the media, put, as it were, a heavy fist upon the scales. There was to be only one story: one man of incredible innate evil wanted to destroy innocent lives for no reason other than a spontaneous joy in evildoing. From the beginning, it was ordained that McVeigh was to have no coherent motive for what he had done other than a Shakespearean motiveless malignity, Iago is now back in town, with a bomb, not a handkerchief. More to the point, he and the prosecution agreed that he had no serious accomplices.

I sat on an uncomfortable chair, facing a camera. Generators hummed amid the delphiniums. Good Morning America was first. I had been told that Diane Sawyer would be questioning me from New York, but ABC has a McVeigh "expert," one Charles Gibson, and he would do the honors. Our interview would be something like four minutes. Yes, I was to be interviewed In Depth. This means that only every other question starts with "Now, tell us, briefly. " Dutifully, I told, briefly, how it was that McVeigh, whom I had never met, happened to invite me to be one of the five chosen witnesses to his execution.

Briefly, it all began in the November 1998 issue of Vanity Fair . I had written a piece about "the shredding of our Bill of Rights." I cited examples of IRS seizures of property without due process of law, warrantless raids and murders committed against innocent people by various drug-enforcement groups, government collusion with agribusiness's successful attempts to drive small farmers out of business, and so on. Then, as a coda, I discussed the illegal but unpunished murders at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (by the FBI) then, the next year, Waco.

When McVeigh, on appeal in a Colorado prison, read what I had written he wrote me a letter and.

But I've left you behind in the Ravello garden of Klingsor, where, live on television, I mentioned the unmentionable word why , followed by the atomic trigger word Waco . Charles Gibson, thirty-five hundred miles away, began to hyperventilate. "Now, wait a minute. " he interrupted. But I talked through him. Suddenly I heard him say, "We're having trouble with the audio." Then he pulled the plug that linked ABC and me. The soundman beside me shook his head. "Audio was working perfectly. He just cut you off." So, in addition to the governmental shredding of Amendments 4, 5, 6, 8, and 14, Mr. Gibson switched off the journalists' sacred First.

Why? Like so many of his interchangeable TV colleagues, he is in place to tell the viewers that former senator John Danforth had just concluded a fourteen-month investigation of the FBI that cleared the bureau of any wrongdoing at Waco. Danforth did admit that "it was like pulling teeth to get all this paper from the FBI."

In March 1993, McVeigh drove from Arizona to Waco, Texas, in order to observe firsthand the federal siege. Along with other protesters, he was duly photographed by the FBI. During the siege the cultists were entertained with twenty-four-hour ear-shattering tapes (Nancy Sinatra: "These boots are made for walkin' / And that's just what they'll do, / One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you") as well as the recorded shrieks of dying rabbits, reminiscent of the first George Bush's undeclared war on Panama, which after several similar concerts outside the Vatican embassy yielded up the master drug criminal (and former CIA agent) Noriega, who had taken refuge there. Like the TV networks, once our government has a hit it will be repeated over and over again. Oswald? Conspiracy? Studio laughter.