Wrestling with the morality of a terrorist

By Bill Steigerwald

By now, Timothy McVeigh, America’s perfect excuse for keeping the death penalty alive, would have been put to sleep by the state.

By now, if the FBI hadn’t fumbled away a sure touchdown on the two-yard line, America could be carrying on its national debate over capital punishment without McVeigh’s especially deserving case clouding up the usual pros and cons. We’d also be looking forward to a future where we no longer have to look at his remorseless face on the cover of Time.

But the American terrorist lives another 30 days. And, irony of irony, it’s due to the bumbling of the very police agency he hates the most — the FBI. The same outfit whose actions drove McVeigh to conclude that the mass murder of 168 innocents was a morally justifiable means of attaining his goal — starting a revolution to stop the federal government from abusing its citizens’ inalienable rights.

You can read the details of McVeigh’s one-man crime against humanity in the June Reader’s Digest, which includes an adaptation of the book “American Terrorist.” It’s easy to understand why some bookstores in Oklahoma City have refused to sell it: It’s too dispassionate, too straightforward, too uncritically interested in its evil subject.

Time’s cover package on the botched execution wastes little time on McVeigh or his twisted morality. It mostly beats up on the poor FBI — the infamously arrogant bureaucracy that also has trouble keeping its ends and means straight.

As Time’s Nancy Gibbs shows by citing such egregious examples as Waco, Ruby Ridge and the casual reading of our e-mail by the FBI in the name of fighting organized crime, the FBI “is capable of brutal indifference to individual rights if it feels justified by some larger goal.” Latest example: The FBI knowingly kept an innocent man in prison for 30 years to protect an informant.

Gibbs is right on when she says that “through mistakes, misjudgment and misconduct the feds have, over time, done damage to themselves worse than any McVeigh could have inflicted in his poisonous revolutionary dreams.”

Meanwhile, postponing McVeigh’s inevitable rendezvous with eternity also means we’ll have a longer wait for Gore Vidal’s eyewitness report on the execution for Vanity Fair. The often ideologically-unpredictable author had been invited to watch McVeigh’s state-assisted suicide after McVeigh read a November 1998 piece Vidal wrote in Vanity Fair called “The War at Home.”

Vidal’s main point was to decry the erosion of constitutionally protected freedoms in America, mainly through what he called the government’s “spurious” wars against drugs and terrorism. But the great liberal got into trouble with lots of less intelligent folks of all ideological persuasions by not simply writing-off McVeigh as “the personification of evil” who acted mindlessly.

Vidal, of course, did not say he approved in any way what McVeigh did. But he said he could understand why McVeigh “went to war pretty much on his own” against his own government. “The guy’s got a case — you don’t send the FBI to kill women and children,” Vidal said, referring to Ruby Ridge-Waco and throwing gasoline on a fire that already included the politically incorrect sentence, “The boy’s got a sense of justice.”

Whether the old provocateur meant it or not, it earned him an invitation to the big execution — if it ever comes.

Bill Steigerwald

Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and writer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. He has written a weekly column about magazines for the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Trib since 1987. Read more of Bill Steigerwald's articles here.