SolarGeneral Proudly Presents...
...by Dr. Robert S. Griffin
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"Of course you always will be linked with Timothy McVeigh," I said to Pierce.
"Unfortunately I have never met Tim McVeigh,” he replied, “although I must say it seems that he and Bob Mathews have a lot in common." (Bob Mathews, a National Alliance member who was inspired by The Turner Diaries, formed an Order of his own in the 1980s with bloody consequences. More on Mathews later.)
"When you first heard about it, what was your reaction to the bombing at Oklahoma City ?" I asked Pierce.
"It took a while for enough facts to become public so I could start to figure out what happened. I was watching the news one evening and there was this story about a huge bomb having destroyed a federal building in Oklahoma City. I figured that probably it was a terrorist bomb, so I was very excited. ‘What does it mean?' I asked myself. ‘Will there be more bombings?' That's what went through my mind, but I really didn't know what was going on. It took a couple of hours for the date to sink in— April 19th, the second anniversary of the Waco massacre. I thought this was maybe something one of the Christian Identity groups had done, because some of those outfits are quite militant. But it turned out to be McVeigh. [The Christian Identity doctrine holds that God's Chosen People were actually ancestors of today's Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. Christian Identity beliefs are foundational to an extremist group based in Hayden Lake, Idaho called Aryan Nations. 1 ]
"Although I have never spoken to McVeigh,” Pierce continued, “I have had contact with his lawyer, Steve Jones. That was prior to McVeigh's trial. Jones needed some expert advice, and I hope I helped him. He was concerned that the government would attempt to show that The Turner Diaries gave McVeigh the plan for the bombing. The prosecutors would say 'Here's the blueprint, in this book, and here's a man who is identified with the book— he sold the book at gun shows and told his army buddies to read it— so you can see how it all fits together.'
"I told Jones I knew he didn't have a lot of time to study The Turner Diaries, so I would point out the connections that the government was making that made no sense, and things in the book and the actual case that were clearly different. For one thing, the government is making a lot out of the fact that the bomb in Oklahoma City went off at something like 9:03 A.M. and the FBI headquarters in The Turner Diaries was bombed at 9:15. It's silly to see any connection there. You mean this guy is sitting in front of the federal building in Oklahoma City saying to himself, ‘Better not light the fuse yet, got to wait until 9:15, because it's right here in the book'? Absurd.
"I also pointed out to Jones that the bomb used at the FBI headquarters in The Turner Diaries was described in detail in the book, and it was entirely different from the one used in Oklahoma City. The bomb in the book couldn't have been used as a recipe for the Oklahoma City bomb. The one in the book was an ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil bomb. The one in Oklahoma city consisted of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane. Nitromethane is a very powerful liquid explosive. It's used as a rocket fuel and a racing fuel. It's a liquid explosive all by itself, like nitroglycerine, although it is not as sensitive. You can detonate it with a blasting cap or, as McVeigh did, with detonating cord. Nitromethane is nowhere mentioned in The Turner Diaries. Whoever made that bomb for Oklahoma City didn't get the recipe for it from my book.
"Another thing, the media— and deliberately I believe— misinterpreted my book, and then the government went along with it and linked McVeigh's actions to that misinterpretation, saying he was doing the same thing as the media incorrectly said was in The Turner Diaries. Here's how it worked: The media portrayed the bombing of the FBI building in The Turner Diaries as an attempt to create a lot of casualties, make a big impact, and send a message to the government. Anybody who has read the book with any care at all knows that is not what went on in the book. The motive of the Organization in the book was to destroy some computers in the sub-basement of the FBI building that were to be used for an internal passport system the Organization was very anxious to avoid. The people who did that bombing in the book lament the fact that so many innocent people were killed in the operation. They agonize over the innocent victims. They weren't trying to kill people or send messages.
"I told Jones that in all probability the government was going to go with the media's false account of the book and say that McVeigh took his cues from the book and had the same motives. In other words, they would argue that McVeigh was inspired by something that was never actually in the book in the first place. I figured this would happen because I honestly don't believe the government people are capable of thinking in any other way than the way they see things spelled out in the media. They are so socialized, so politicized, that they can be counted on to parrot whatever is put out for public consumption by the media. So I told Jones to watch for that and gave him references in the book to support his points. And sure enough, the government tried to bulldoze through with the ‘inspired by The Turner Diaries ' scenario in their opening arguments, and Jones was ready for them in rebuttal."
"Are you saying you seriously have doubts that McVeigh was inspired by your book?"
"I believe he was inspired by the Waco massacre. That really pissed him off. He even traveled down there. What went on in The Turner Diaries had nothing to do with what was apparently his intention, and that was to send the government the message, 'You can't do the kind of crap you did in Waco, because you are going to get hit back.'"
"But doesn't it seem very likely that your book gave McVeigh the idea for how to send that message?"
"No. As I said before, he obviously had to know more about making bombs than I wrote about in The Turner Diaries, because he had a far more sophisticated bomb."
"Yes, but just the idea of a bomb in a truck."
"That's an obvious thing. You don't have to get that from my book. If you want to destroy a large target, you need a large bomb, and the way you get it there is in a truck— you don't carry it on your back. That's the way they blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, and that's how the U.S. Embassy in Beruit was blown up. When the Jews blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem [in 1946] they had their explosives in milkcans. So probably what they did was drive up in a truck and carry the milkcans in on a pushcart or something. Tim was much into military matters, and I would imagine he had access to military manuals on how to make a bomb.”
"I understand that they found an envelope with photocopied pages from your book."
"They found a xeroxed piece of paper that had quotations from several people, and one of them was from The Turner Diaries. But there were also quotations from—"
"Samuel Adams was one of them, I think."
"Could be. Anyway, some well-known figures who made statements about tyranny and the responsibility of a free man to fight it and so forth. It was just a passage from The Turner Diaries along with other writings. Actually, I felt I was in good company."
"I think the passage was— I wrote it down— from pages sixty-one and sixty-two about how the bureaucrats and politicians are not beyond the reach of retribution for what they do.”
"That could be,” Pierce replied. “I really don't know the details of it."
"There were reports that McVeigh was in touch with your organization, the National Alliance, in the weeks before the bombing," I offered.
“There were five or six telephone calls over a two-day period from McVeigh, or somebody using his telephone credit card, to an answering machine we had in Fort Mohave, Arizona. The calls were made from the motel in Kingman, Arizona where apparently McVeigh was staying. What you get when you call that number is a four-minute recorded message and then an opportunity to leave your name and address so we can send you information and a book catalog. You are also given an address where you can write. I don't know whether an address was actually left after the message or whether the member administering the machine for us did anything.
“What I can't figure out is why anybody would call that number more than once. Why would anybody call our answering service five or six times? I suppose somebody might call the answering service a second time if he wasn't sure he got the address right the first time, but why call five or six times? What comes to me is that maybe there were three people in the motel, or four or five over a two day period, and McVeigh said 'Hey, you've got to listen to this message— call this number.' So one man would call and say ‘That's really good' and have another person call it."
"You have no record that McVeigh called here in West Virginia.”
"No. There was a story going around— and it is my suspicion that Morris Dees [of the Southern Poverty Law Center] planted it— that Tim McVeigh called my unlisted number and had a forty-five minute conversation with me two weeks before the bombing. That isn't true. The FBI has a record of the calls placed from every place they could tie McVeigh to, and none were made to this number."
"So you never talked to him, and there was no written correspondence— nothing?"
"We had no prior contact with Tim McVeigh," Pierce answered.
"Given what you know about McVeigh, what do you think of him?" I asked.
"I've never had contact with him, but I have spoken to several people who have, and they think highly of him. They say he is a young man who behaves like a soldier. He didn't try to wiggle out of this thing. I thought his statement at the end where he quoted Supreme Court Justice Brandeis fit the character of this whole affair very well. Essentially Brandeis said that the government is the teacher of the people, and that it teaches by example. If you have a government that is lawless, then you cannot blame the people if they commit lawless acts. If the government wants its people to obey the law, the government has to obey the law.
"Tim probably has a lot in common with Bob Mathews in that he is a very serious man and he took what happened in Waco very seriously. It really worried him. He probably thought, 'My government is out of control. How could they have done what they did? These people in that compound weren't bothering the government, and the government just came in and slaughtered them.'
"If they had wanted to arrest this David Koresh they could have done it easily, when he went to town to do his laundry, which he did regularly. They could have gotten his schedule from the local sheriff. But the BATF wanted a media opportunity and said to itself, 'Here's a bunch of crazy cultists who have guns they shouldn't have, and we'll make a big deal of this and get all the TV cameras in there, and this will get us all promotions and a bigger appropriation from Congress next year.' That is what is going through their minds. They think, ‘If a bunch of people get hurt, who cares. They are not like us. They are somebody else. They have a crazy religion. So screw them. We'll use them to get publicity.'
“But the whole thing backfired. Many people saw that after the fact. Certainly Tim could see it, and he figured that a government that would do a thing like that was really beyond the pale, and that something had to be done to express public outrage, and, like Bob Mathews, when Tim decided that something ought to be done he didn't leave it to someone else to do it."
"In your eyes, was McVeigh morally justified in doing what he did?"
"That is a bit complicated. If one is waging a war against the government, civilians are going to be killed. But you have to look at the bigger picture. Let's say you are trying to save our whole race, as Earl Turner was in The Turner Diaries. You know that there are necessarily going to be casualties in the process of doing that, including a lot of innocent people who didn't want to get involved on either side of the conflict. Under a circumstance like that, if it were part of a war, then a bombing of the Oklahoma City sort is morally justified.
“But if you are going to engage in a war you have to meet certain requirements. One of them is you have to have a plausible strategy, a plan that can be reasonably argued will get you what you want to achieve. If McVeigh was throwing a single punch to send a message, then its moral justification is debatable. You might well say that this was an overly expensive message in that case.”
"And if McVeigh was in fact inspired by what you wrote, and it seems to me there is a very good chance that he was, would that trouble you?"
"If that was the case, the only thing that would concern me would be the legal aspects of it. I would want to be very careful in the future to have a disclaimer on what I wrote saying this is fiction and not advocacy. I'd have a lawyer craft something and print it in very small type on the back of the title page. But the fact of the matter is that we are engaged in a war for the survival of our people. In a war, people jump the gun, it's not unusual. Often a war is preceded by border incidents, and something like Oklahoma City could be a border incident. I feel as sorry as anyone else if a little white kid gets killed in one of these things. For that matter, I feel bad if a white kid gets killed in an automobile accident. But I don't advocate that we ban automobiles because people get killed in them, including innocent people who might have grown up to be great scientists or poets. In the same way, I am not in favor of calling off a war because some border incidents or battles take innocent lives. Actually, the sooner the war to save our people takes place the better, because even more innocent lives will be lost if we wait. The sooner such a war, the cleaner it will be. It's going to be a mess later on.”Previous Chapter | Index | Next Chapter
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