March 29, 2001: Convicted Oklahoma City Bomber Admits to Carrying Out Bombing, Shows No Regret for Carnage

The people who died in the Oklahoma City bombing (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995), even the children and babies, were merely “collateral damage,” according to Timothy McVeigh, who is awaiting execution for his role in the bombing (see June 2, 1997 and June 11-13, 1997). McVeigh admitted to his participation in the bombing to two Buffalo News reporters, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, who wrote the book American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing. The book is due to be published within days. “I understand what they felt in Oklahoma City,” McVeigh told the authors. “I have no sympathy for them.” The authors quote McVeigh as saying: “I recognized beforehand that someone might be bringing their kid to work. However, if I had known there was an entire day care center, it might have given me pause to switch targets. That’s a large amount of collateral damage.” CNN reported that according to Danny Defenbaugh, the FBI’s lead investigator in the case, there was no doubt that McVeigh knew there would be children among his victims (see March 28, 2001). In an ABC News interview, the authors say that McVeigh “never expressed one ounce of remorse” for his victims in their interviews with him, though they witnessed him become emotional over his remembrance of killing a gopher. According to the authors, McVeigh regrets only that the deaths of the children detracted from his message about the Ruby Ridge (see August 31, 1992 and August 21-31, 1992) and Waco (see August 31, 1992 and August 21-31, 1992) debacles. McVeigh told the authors, using a reference to the song “Dirty for Dirty” by Bad Company: “What the US government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge was dirty. I gave dirty back to them at Oklahoma City.” The authors note that McVeigh said the triggering event for him was the government’s ban on some types of assault weapons (see September 13, 1994): when that happened, McVeigh told them, “I snapped.” Dr. John Smith, a psychiatrist who evaluated McVeigh, asked McVeigh why he continued with the bombing even though he knew children were in the building. “[H]e said, ‘One, the date was too important to put off,’” Smith says, noting that the date of the bombing, April 19, was the two-year anniversary of the Branch Davidian debacle, “and he went into a tirade about all the children killed at Waco.” According to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh told them he alone planned the bombing, and when his accomplice Terry Nichols (see December 23, 1997 and June 4, 1998) began to show reluctance in continuing (see March 1995 and March 31 - April 12, 1995), he forced him to keep working with him by threatening his family (legal sources dispute that claim, noting that Nichols never raised the idea of coercion in his defense). McVeigh denied that anyone else took part in the bombing, quoting a line from the movie A Few Good Men: “You can’t handle the truth.” McVeigh continued, “Because the truth is, I blew up the Murrah Building, and isn’t it kind of scary that one man could wreak this kind of hell?” He also told the authors that he was disappointed the building did not come down entirely, saying: “Damn, I didn’t knock the building down. I didn’t take it down.” McVeigh told the authors he knew he would get caught and even anticipated execution as a form of “state-assisted suicide.” Yet he worried initially about snipers as he was being charged. “He was ready to die but not at that moment—he wanted to make sure that his full message got out first,” Herbeck says. [New York Times, 3/29/2001; Associated Press, 3/29/2001; Oklahoma City Journal Record, 3/29/2001; Washington Post, 3/30/2001]