- LOS ANGELES (Reuters)
- Author Gore Vidal, who maintained a three-year correspondence with executed
Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, says he is convinced that McVeigh
acted as part of a conspiracy.
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- In an article in the new issue of Vanity Fair magazine
published on Tuesday, Vidal asks of McVeigh's insistence that he acted
alone: ``Was (he) being a good soldier covering up for others? Or did he,
perhaps now, see himself in a historic role (as abolitionist John Brown)
with his own Harper's ferry, and though his ashes molder in the grave,
his spirit is marching on?''
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- Citing material provided to him by investigative reporter
Joel Dyer, Vidal concludes that there is overwhelming evidence of a plot
involving militia groups and government infiltrators to blow up the Alfred
P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. The April 20, 1995 bombing
claimed 168 lives in the worst act of terrorism ever committed on American
soil.
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- Vidal also quotes a letter to him from McVeigh, who was
executed in June for the bombing, in which the Gulf War veteran explained
why he bombed the Murrah building:
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- ``I chose to bomb a federal building because such an
action served more purposes than other options. Foremost the bombing was
a retaliatory strike, a counterattack, for the cumulative raids (and subsequent
violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in the previous
year (including but not limited to Waco) ... Our government, like the Chinese,
was deploying tanks against its own people.'
-
- In the materials given to Vidal, Dyer said that credible
experts believed that McVeigh neither built nor detonated the bomb that
blew up the Murrah building and that some experts believe that a single
fertilizer bomb could not have caused that amount of damage.
-
- Dyer also said that there were new findings that 10 witnesses
saw a group of men in or near the Ryder truck that was believed used in
the explosion shortly before it was taken to Oklahoma City and that at
least one of the men was a known militia figure.
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