Did Timothy McVeigh Have The Right Idea?

by Liz Michael

LizMichael.com, www.lizmichael.com
Released May 29, 2001 for immediate release

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“How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive?” — Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” – – Barry Goldwater

Okay. There. I said it. I asked the unthinkable question no one dare ask. Much akin to the question of whether Tom Alciere was right when he opined we should shoot police officers when they overstep their authority and oppress the people through the pursuit of victimless crime.

Killing innocents is a bad thing. Killing children in a day care center is also a bad thing, no question. Certainly, the Oklahoma CIty Bombing was not well executed from a public relations standpoint. Killing the citizens of a city is not the way to get the people to rally to your side. Perhaps McVeigh should be executed for the wanton murder of innocents. But when he is executed, that’s not what he will be executed for. He will, ironically, be executed for having killed government agents. And if you divorce that single concept from the rest of the massacre at the Murrah Building, that brings up the question: if the government is your enemy, then is killing the agents of the government morally wrong?

To really give anything other than the kneejerk answer to what McVeigh did, we have to establish what the ground rules are now. The ground rules, not of a peaceful democratic society, which we are not, despite our insistence to the contrary: but the ground rules of a resistance to a despotic government.

War has rules. Yes, war, as Rush Limbaugh commonly states, is about “killing people and breaking things”. But even the most agressive war has rules: rules about whom you kill, whom you target, what you do with innocents and noncombatants, what you do with prisoners of war. And the rules of any war are greatly shaped by the moral code of the combatants, and by their purpose for prosecuting such a war. It is not just “carte blanche” and anything goes.

Patriots Have A Moral Code We Must Abide By

Patriots almost to a man and woman feel that both Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian Massacre were despotic acts of a government run amok, and acts which deserve punishment of the most severe nature. Most of these patriots have one of the following moral codes, if not both. We have the libertarian wing of the patriot movement. This wing believes that the initiation of force, not the use of it, mind you, but the initiation of it, is wrong, regardless of who does it. We also have the Christian wing of the patriot movement, and generally speaking, they have a moral code written in the Holy Scriptures for them: that moral code is a lot more complicated to discern, because we as a society have been subject to the watered down, feelgood version of Christianity. We tend to forget everything written in the Old Testament, where Yahweh often commanded the Israelites to engage in some pretty brutal massacres themselves.

Another question also must be submitted: and that is… who is our enemy? It is important to discern this. Why? It is important to know whom to attack, whom to kill, and whose stuff to break.

No, I do not believe McVeigh acted alone, even if he is claiming he did. I could get into a long discourse about that, but that’s another column. But let’s play “what if”: if trios of patriots could, acting in unison, and having no outside help from government operatives, take down a series of key government buildings, with key government employees in them, using a truck bomb or some other like device, never having to set foot inside the buildings, should they? If lone patriots can track, lie in wait, and assassinate agents of the government, often not even revealing the true motive for the crime, deflecting the evidence to make it appear as a random criminal act, should they?

The only way to legitimately answer that question is to understand how we patriots think, and to understand our moral code.

The Rules of War

When a people is engaged in a war, the rules change, the Geneva Convention notwithstanding. What in peacetime would be considered acts of cowardice and violence can be acts of patriotism and heroism in wartime. What in peacetime is mass murder in wartime is simply “taking out Charlie”. And if we have a government that is truly at war with we the people, then one of us “we the people” taking out one of their buildings and some of their people is no longer an act of cowardice or an act of terrorism but an act of patriotism.

Of course, such acts should be taken carefully, strategically, and with careful forethought. For another rule of war is that resources are always scarce, and operatives are too valuable to place at risk for a target that doesn’t merit it. If we are, for instance, plotting to blow up a Social Security office or assassinate employees of the Small Business Administration, just because we hate the government, or just because a worker was impolite to us, then we are acting emotionally, in an immature manner. And soldiers cannot afford to do that.

Targeting Our Enemy

Two of the things we should, as patriots, clarify is precisely who our enemy is, and precisely who among our enemy we should be targeting. Because there are not enough of us to go around and target every single individual or group which could be construed as the enemy. Now, situations always change, another rule of war. But if I were a patriot planning to go to war against the government, there would be certain organizations, and certain people, which would be priority targets. Mind you now, I am speaking in the hypothetical: I am not “issuing any orders” to any patriots to do these things. I am merely, as a reporter and an observer, stating what a good patriot war strategy would entail.

There would be six key targets of a good patriot strategy to take back our nation:

1. Police and sheriffs’ deputies and their facilities, local, state and federal

Rule of War #1: Attack and intimidate the enemy’s troops.

The Army and the National Guard all have guns and all work for the government. So do the Marines. But the Army, the Marines, and the National Guards have not been the primary agents of our oppression, except perhaps for a slight mistake in Ohio at Kent State. Yet we patriots don’t have ire against them. Our ire at police is not because they are convenient and there. Our ire at them is because they are the prime enforcers of unconstitutional law, the prime agents in denying second amendment rights to the people, and the prime agents of tyranny.  And when I say “the police”, I mean, any law enforcement agency, such as the FBI or the BATF, which chiefly acts as an oppressor of the people.

Moreover, the police are the local shock troops. They are the chief local agent of government oppression. They are the modern day equivalent of the redcoats. They are not the “protectors of the Constitution”. I understand there might be cops “sympathetic” to the cause. I realize that the cops, by and large, are not evil people with horns growing out of their heads. But they ARE the opposition, most of the time. They are not only the opposition, but they are the primary opposition. They are the primary agents of oppression in our society. They always harass “us” demanding payment of licenses and tickets and registration of weapons and other such sundry stuff. But when was the last time a cop arrested another cop for violating the civil rights of someone to keep and bear arms?

Frankly, if the primary agents of our oppression, which are the police, can be eliminated or neutralized, by whatever means necessary, the bulk of the oppression will cease.

We do not have to hate an enemy to oppose an enemy. We do not have to hate an enemy to kill an enemy. Many of us have a code which tells us to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us”. Many troops on an opposing side of a war can be respected, spoken to and about civilly, even admired. Notwithstanding this: they are still the enemy, and the enemy must be vanquished.

2. Taxing agencies

Rule of War #2: Attack and scatter the ability of the enemy to raise revenue, to feed and supply his troops.

Everyone hates the IRS. And of course, the IRS targets individuals for political purposes. Retribution alone would merit that in any continued offensive against the government, that destruction of the IRS out of vengeance is a right and noble goal.

But I submit to you that the evilness of the IRS is not the reason it should be a target for destruction. The real reason, the strategic reason, the IRS should be targeted is that it is the primary revenue raiser for our oppression. And not the IRS alone. ANY federal, state or local revenue raiser, should be a prime target. For without a means to raise revenue, no government agency could operate, and no government thug could oppress.

3. Propoganda organs

Rule of War #3: Tyrannical powers always have their mouthpieces and apologists. They always have their press organs. Sometimes they own them. Sometimes they don’t have to. Without their propoganda, the oppressors cannot rally people to their side, and they cannot deceive the masses. Nazi Germany could never have become fact had it not been for the shrewd propogandists the National Socialists had at their disposal.

Tyrannical powers also have their educators. The Hitler Youth was a strategic means of subduing the people, as is the education establishment today, especially public education.

4. The politicians

The other chief tool of our oppression is the politician. For the most part, the politician, with extrmemely rare exception any more, is the enemy. They craft the laws the police use to engage our oppression. I include with politicians the people behind them, the real powers pulling the strings. They are as guilty as the officeholders if not moreso.

5. The courts

Without the courts, the police in this country would have very little permanent power to do much of anything, and a tyrannical government would find it difficult to operate if they did not have a court system to enforce their tyrannical law.

6. Child Protective Services Agencies

These agencies often are able to act without judicial authority or police authority, by fiat, to interfere, search a family’s home, and snatch a family’s children, often with no grounds whatsoever, and they do it more and more every day. We would be remiss if we did not redress this chief oppressor of our FAMILIES. Because, after all, for most of us, the family is what this revolution is all about.

Tactics

Boycott

The boycott is a tried and true method used by people of all politics. The effect is to deny income to a company or a merchant who is your enemy, supports your enemy, or has aligned with the enemy. Boycotts almost always have an effect, even if the only effect is that you do not multiply your enemy’s strength, and thereby increase his ability to move against you: even if that is all you manage to accomplish, it is a positive.

The best example of a boycott against government is to refuse to pay its taxes, or to willfully arrange your affairs to pay as few taxes as possible.

Financial Bleeding

Another method of attacking an enemy is multiplying his cost of doing business, or depriving him of financial resources. In the private sector, this can manifest itself in both legal activities, such as abusing a company’s 800 number or postage paid envelopes, to illegal sabotage operations. Anything to make their cost of doing this business more expensive. The best legal example of this is prolifers who protest before abortion clinics: the chief effect of such protests is to heighten the costs of such clinics to do business. The best illegal example of this is union and mob inspired sabotage against businesses to compel compliance. Hacking government computers is also an excellent means of causing financial expense to a government agency: often governments are much less savvy than corporations on prevention of hacking.

There are a few of us, and I am one, who instead of leaving government programs alone, openly advocate applying for as much money out of the government as one possibly can. This has several effects. One, it bleeds the government dry. Two, it is a form of returning of tax money which some of us believe was stolen from us in the first place… this is, I suppose, the Robin Hood theory concerning government grants.

Failure to cooperate

Often, failure to cooperate with the system is a way of preserving freedom and combatting slavery. Rigging drug tests is an example of this, as is jury nullification. Most tax protestors who are successful simply ignore the tax man instead of provoking a confrontation with him. Where the police are oppressive, it is commonplace for the citizenry to not cooperate with them on any criminal investigation. Home schooling your children is a good means of non-cooperation with the education establishment, in addition to almost being a necessity today.

Meeting propoganda with truth

We have to become master propogandists who understand how to educate the masses to throw off their shackles. I won’t personally come after the police, for instance. I will rather encourage the masses that they ought to go after the police. This is why the system always tries to kill the leader, be he a Martin Luther King, Jr., a Malcolm X, a John F. Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan, a Lawrence MacDonald, or even a George Corley Wallace. The people without the leaders usually tend to be less of a threat. The leaders and the teachers tend to frighten the system.

Destruction of their facilities

Most of the time, this is what I would call “extra-legal”. But if you can actually end an oppression by ending the facilities source of that oppression, it is a morally correct thing to do. I hesitate to counsel anyone to resort to symbolic violence against property. Violence should be reserved for strategic reasons, not wasted on the symbolic. Hacking is also a form of this, not destruction of the actual building, but of their information and data structure. Just think about how difficult the IRS’ work could be if their databases were destroyed, altered, and infected with viruses.

Assassination of their operatives

Remember, we are talking about war and we are talking about oppressors. It is always moral to slay the tyrant. Sometimes it is not wise, but it is always moral. And when dealing with a bureaucracy, every agent of that bureaucracy, from its leader to the lowly secretaries, are critical to its operation. Assassination of any of them is just, moral and proper. Think back to Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s statement: tyrants must be made to fear the people. Tyrants should be made mortally afraid to carry out their tyranny. Those tyrants who are not removed directly will be intimidated into being less tyrannical, or perhaps intimidated into retirement.

Do you think the IRS would be as oppressive as they are if an agent, every time he had to meet a taxpayer, didn’t know whether he would return home to his wife and kids, or didn’t know whether his wife and kids were safe. Do you think politicians would be so eager to pass oppressive laws if there was an impending death sentence hanging over their heads for doing so. Would you, if given the chance, have assassinated Adolf Hitler in 1932? Or Josef Stalin? Or Mao Zedong?

Remember that they are not afraid to assassinate us, whether we are the President of the United States (John F. Kennedy) or merely a citizen owning a piece of coveted property they want (Donald Scott). We should also not be afraid to assassinate them. For if we do, there will be fewer of them, and they will be more afraid to commit tyranny.

Diversion

Of course, the tried and true means of the enemy is diverting our attention from the real agenda with an attention-getting diversion. It is a tactic which we should copy to its fullest degree. If you are going to draw attention to yourself, it should be for doing something OTHER than what your real agenda is. Often, the most effective diversions are diversions that have NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the actual mission objective.

What would I advise people who work for the government?

The answer to the question is not as clear cut as it may seem at first glance. The answer to the question really depends upon the conduct of the agency itself. So I give the following advice to so-called “servants of the people”. You have three options, and only three options.

1. Abide by the letter of the Constitution, and enforce it. You may say, “oh, but of course, I do that”. Do you? Do you realize, for instance, that the right to keep and bear arms is constitutionally unlimited? Do you also realize that it is against federal law for a police officer to violate the civil rights of an individual? Accordingly, what you should do about that? Simple. An officer should never disarm a citizen of their weapon unless they commit a crime with it. And if you see any other official attempting to disarm an honest citizen, you should arrest that officer. In fact, you should arrest any government agent, officer, or worker that violates any citizen’s civil rights and constitutional rights.

2. If you can’t do #1, quit, or…

3. Be prepared that you will be targets of assassination. If you’re a cop, never ride around in a cruiser alone. Give up the activity that makes you most vulnerable to assassination, namely, traffic stops. Always look over your shoulder. Always distrust that last client you just saw, or perhaps the next one who comes into your office. Be suspect of absolutely any situation in which may be a potential setup. You have a family? Even worry that they may be targeted if you happen to be difficult to get to.

Because if you’re going to decide to be the chief enforcers of our tyranny, you are going to be targeted for removal from that role. The easiest way to remove you from that role is not through the courts, the legislature, or any “civilian review board”. The easiest way to remove you from that role is to shoot enough of you to intimidate you from and distract you out of the role of the chief enforcers of our tyranny.

Is that a personal threat from me? No. It is an observation of history, an observation of what happens when the time comes for the people to remove the tyrants. When the time comes, you will be judged by the people you claim to serve as to whether you are the tyrants. And when you are adjudged the tyrants by enough of the people, you will begin to be removed, one by one, on duty and off, not really by a group or by a conspiracy, but by a bevy of individuals belonging to all the sundry groups you have offended. From the left. From the right. From whites and from minorities. From the criminals you arrested to the people whose vehicle you unjustly impounded: remember, in Texas they used to hang horse thieves… don’t be one. From the person you audited yesterday, to the person who you intend to subpoena tomorrow.

Whether it is right I really cannot say. Right or wrong, it is a logical consequence of your actions.

The Lessons of Ronald Reagan and Adolf Hitler

So you may be asking yourself this question: do we really have to, as the esteemed Claire Wolfe once opined, “shoot the bastards”?

Ask any criminologist. The criminal mind, and this is how the criminal thinks, bets his activity on your reluctance to put warm lead via cold steel through his eyeballs. World War II. This is exactly what Hitler did. Now what was more traumatic? To have been the nation of Britain, Neville Chamberlain waving a piece of paper in hand saying they had achieved “peace in our time”, and then sudden destruction coming upon them…. (read your Bible). And having to endure what they endured for as long as they endured it? Or France, actually having their country conquered and having to fight to get it back while in slavery?

The bottom line is, the more reluctant you show yourself to be to use force, the more likely you are to be a target. If the cold war with the Soviet Union, and the difference between the Reagan and Carter eras shows you anything, it should show you that. If you can’t learn from a master of these things like Reagan, I don’t know what to say.

“When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”
–Thomas Jefferson

Applying that situation to this. Yes, you should say that you are ready to shoot the bastards. I would also go so far to say that you should actually prepare to shoot the bastards. Hoping against hope that you never have to. Telling government thugs that you will never use violence against them only increases, not decreases, the likelihood that you will have to use violence against them. As we did with Hitler. As we did not ultimately have to do with the Soviets, because we scared the living crap out of them.

Heed the words and deeds of the greatest American President to have ever lived, Thomas Jefferson, on whether the Second Amendment applies here. The Second Amendment was designed to enable the people to remove tyrants from power by force. You ask me that a thousand times, and I will answer you the same a thousand times. Maybe you don’t REALLY want to shoot the bastards. But you’d damn well better be prepared to do it sooner or later.

Remember the Soviets. The United States stood up to the Communist superpower and they collapsed. If the people of the United States would stand up and stare down their oppressive government, and do what it takes to bring down that government, the oppressive United States government will also collapse. As one of the greatest men to have ever lived once said, “If your faith is great, you will be able to go to this mountain, and say ‘be moved, and be cast into the sea’ and it shall happen.”

So was McVeigh right?

If we are to believe the recently released biography, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing,  and by the way, I probably don’t… by the standard I have set on the table, Timothy McVeigh probably would have been right to plan and execute the assassinations of several of the people he deigned to have actually executed the massacres at Waco and Ruby Ridge. This would have been just vengeance. Had Timothy McVeigh assassinated the agents connected to these massacres, or had specifically destroyed THEIR offices, this would have been justice.

I would moreover say this. Had the Murrah Building been the locale of a strategic plan by the government to oppress the people: if the patriot movement itself was placed at direct risk by specific operations within the Murrah Building, and if therefore the destruction of the building would have hindered the operations, I would be willing to say that the “collateral damage”, as McVeigh allegedly termed it, of 168 lives, many children, and the countless injuries to others, would have been justified. The American military has destroyed lives over much less. Bill Clinton destroyed lives in the Sudan because he couldn’t keep his affair with an intern off the front pages.

However, no such operation has come to light. No evidence exists that the Murrah Building was being used in that manner. There was no stategic value in blowing it up. No strategic value in the massive loss of life.

What about the symbolic value of blowing up the Murrah Building? With all due respect, if one wants to make a symbolic statement, there are much more appropriate symbols to attack. One can start with the buildings and agents of the Internal Revenue Service and continue from there. (For example only.)

In short, the actions of Timothy McVeigh seem to represent not a carefully calculated operation initiated by a soldier, but a childlike temper tantrum with devastating results. And we know from the rash of school shootings what violence some temper tantrums can wreak. And this is only if we believe the government theory of the event. Which I really don’t: but that’s another column.

We in the patriot movement cannot afford to act like that. We have to be more righteous than that, more discriminating, more rational, more…. adult…in our thinking. We have to be REAL soldiers. We have to consider not just a narrow emotional good feeling of “sticking it to The Man”, but consider the complete ramifications, military, political, strategic, and most importantly, moral, of every action we may take. We do not blow up the Social Security Administration just because we hate the government. We do not obsess over a given date to execute our plan, as it is alleged McVeigh did: this is superstition, and we must avoid such triviality in our thinking.

So McVeigh was wrong. Not because he was a killer. Because killing is often necessary and sometimes good, even godly. McVeigh was wrong because he was a bad soldier. His target was wrong. His timing was wrong. And there was no clear moral grounding in his plan. His plan violated the libertarian concept of not initiating force. And it violated the Judeo-Christian concepts on murder pretty clearly, even assuming its executor was at war with the Federal Government.

Which is why many of us believe that this is not the real reason Oklahoma City happened, but that it may have been a device by agents of the government to provoke us into acting with haste, or perhaps even a strawman set up to pursue the patriot movement: a “burning of the Reichstag”, if you will. It’s not something we would do. But as we have learned throughout history, it is exactly what a tyrannical government without any moral code or grounding WOULD do.

And the United States government has never had a problem killing innocents for its purpose. Just ask Vicki Weaver. Oh…that’s right. You can’t.

Copyright, 2001, LizMichael.com, www.lizmichael.com Permission to reprint granted so long as the website and the copyright remains referenced, and the text, quotes included, remians fully intact. No exclusivity may be retained by any individual or press entity which reprints.

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Liz Michael for United States Senate

The Gulag Archipelago Vol. I
by Thomas P. Whitney (Translator), Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn


This is Solzhenitsyn’s massive indictment of the former Soviet Union’s system of justice as told from the author’s personal experiences and from the oral and written accounts of survivors and others familiar with many of the incidents related in the book.

Stalin’s system, born under Lenin, resulted in the deaths of millions of patriotic Soviet citizens, many of them loyal Communists and earlier supporters of Lenin, and many of whom were directly involved in the events leading to the overthrow of the tsarist regime. Many of the accusers (as the government prosecutors were called in the Lenin era), interrogators, prison officials, and even judges were themselves later swept up under Stalin.

It was Article 58 of the broad-sweeping Soviet Criminal Code that resulted in the execution or imprisonment of the millions whom Stalin called counterrevolutionaries. Article 58 included acts ranging from crimes against the state (e.g. a prisoner weakened from illness or malnutrition could be shot for being unable to work), to consorting with foreigners to economic sabotage, called “wrecking.” Examples of wrecking included a peasant’s making a bad decision that resulted in crop failure or a factory employee’s machine accidentally catching on fire.

Aptly referred to by Solzhenitsyn as the Soviet Union’s “sewerage disposal system,” some of the horrifying methods utilized by the Stalin regime to rid itself of “undesirables” include those of a suspect being arrested while undergoing surgery for repair of an ulcer, men and women under interrogation being beaten and tortured and deprived of sleep for days on end, camp internees’ dying from being deprived of food and water, and contracting typhus and other diseases from massive overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. Prisoners, denied bathroom facilities or even buckets, were forced to lay in their own urine and excrement or to eat their meager rations from unwashed pails which previously contained coal or human waste. Solzhenitsyn recounts the bizarre but true history of a man, mistakenly believing he was Tsar Mikhail (the successor to Nicholas II), who was given a long prison sentence for having composed and then having read a proclamation to the Soviet citizenry promising better times under his own reign. Most sickening of all, at least to me, were those Russian soldiers who became German POWs and who were imprisoned after the allied victory by their own government for allegedly humiliating their motherland by failing to elude their German captors.

Considering the millions who disappeared during the Stalin regime, it is amazing that there was anyone left, especially someone as gifted a writer as Solzhenitsyn, to chronicle these horrors. His words now must be heard by an American citizenry increasingly subject to its own Soviet-styled totalitarian system.

“Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of government power, not the increase of it.” Woodrow Wilson The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America by Bill Gertz Bill Gertz has written the definitive book on China’s threat to the United States. Highlights include: -Espionage, how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has infiltrated our government, our political system, including Al Gore and the Democratic Party, and even our military to obtain sensitive material; -Military Escalation, how the PRC is currently upgrading its short- and long-range missile systems to fight a multi-front war; -Economic Warfare, how the PRC subsidizes its industry and exploits its labor force to damage western industries and economies, particularly those of the United States; -Diplomatic Treachery, how PRC emissaries will say or do anything to gain advantage in matters of trade or state; and how China is already attempting to bully America. The China Threat sheds new light on the next “Evil Empire”–and suggests where China will strike next. “Sons of Scotland! I am William Wallace. and I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You’ve come to fight as free men, and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight? Aye, fight and you may die. Run and you’ll live. At least awhile. And, dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” –Mel Gibson as William Wallace, speaking to the Scots – outnumbered three to one – on the battlefield at Stirling Bridge, A.D. 1297. (Braveheart, 1995) No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton by Christopher Hitchens The most vocal critics of Bill Clinton’s presidency tend to be conservatives, but there are those on the Left who are fed up with Clinton as well. Among them is journalist Christopher Hitchens, who here outlines how “Clinton’s private vileness meshes exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style.” Hitchens is particularly damning on Clinton’s tendency to resort to divisive racial politics when it suits his purposes. Furthermore, the man who once connived his way out of the draft has become a chief executive so willing to use military air strikes as a means of foreign policy that, in the author’s view, the United States is now a “potential banana republic.” Hiroshima by John Hersey When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, few could have anticipated its potential for devastation. Pulitzer prize-winning author John Hersey recorded the stories of Hiroshima residents shortly after the explosion and, in 1946, Hiroshima was published, giving the world first-hand accounts from people who had survived it. The words of Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamara, Father Kleinsorg, Dr. Sasaki, and the Reverend Tanimoto gave a face to the statistics that saturated the media and solicited an overwhelming public response. Whether you believe the bomb made the difference in the war or that it should never have been dropped, “Hiroshima” is a must read for all of us who live in the shadow of armed conflict.   Thomas Jefferson American Terrorist : Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing by Lou Michel, Dan Herbeck The reporter’s account of the offical story of the Oklahoma City Bombing, using much testimony direct from Timothy McVeigh himself. I don’t consider the book reliable or accurate as to the actual truth: I believe both the government and McVeigh were lying and covering up a much greater conspiracy. But this is a pretty good account of the government’s “official” story, as confirmed by McVeigh, who was undoubtedly hiding the identity of his coconspirators. Â