Chapter 2 FEAR IN THE LAND: RUBY RIDGE, WACO, OKLAHOMA

                                                                        Chapter 2

                                                            FEAR IN THE LAND:

RUBY RIDGE, WACO, OKLAHOMA

©2000 Nita Renfrew

A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.

                                                                                                George Washington

The way the story began, in the summer of 1992 a federal marshal was killed in a gun battle on the remote Idaho mountaintop of Ruby Ridge, in circumstances that were never fully accounted for. It happened during surveillance by a team of U.S. marshals on the property of a man named Randy Weaver, where he lived with his wife, son, three daughters, and a young friend he considered a son. The death of the U.S. marshal had resulted in an eleven-day siege by some 500 federal law enforcement officers. Randy Weaver, a former Green Beret who made his living as a logger, earlier, had attended meetings of the Aryan Nations—one of several heavily-armed, religious, white supremacist groups that had spread through the Midwest during the '80s farm crises and industry downsizing; many white working and middle-class people in that part of the country had lost their means of earning a living, or found it much reduced, which had fueled the movement. At the same time, an altogether other America, highly-publicized in the media—mostly already in the upper reaches of the economy—had been experiencing a boom for a decade. 

As a woodcutter, Weaver's finances were never good even in the best of times, and so it was that he was chosen to be set up by an undercover government informant he had met at an Aryan Nations meeting. For several months in 1990, the informant had assiduously cultivated this close-knit-family man's friendship, visiting him frequently in his wilderness cabin, then offering to pay him to saw off two shotguns at a fraction of an inch below what was allowed by law. When Weaver came back with the first sawed-off shotgun at regulation length, the government agent badgered him into making it shorter. Wanting sorely in his finances, the woodsman complied.  

The federal agency behind this episode turned out to be the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or ATF, whose prime reason for existing was now gun control (though it also presided over such things as liquor licenses and taxes, and arson). Although the ATF had since come to occupy a prominent position in the news, at the time of Ruby Ridge it was relatively unknown to the general public. Earlier in the century, during Prohibition, an earlier version of the ATF had been just as unpopular in rural America, raiding stills and confiscating moonshine. When Weaver was arrested, the ATF had quickly revealed its intentions, offering to drop the charges if, like the man who had set him up, he became a government informant. Weaver said he refused. 

Feeling terribly wronged, he then failed to appear in court to respond to the gun charges, and for a period of 18 months, stayed holed up on his property with his family, his wife Vicki in the lead, vowing to fight to the death if the authorities came after him. At one point, an ambitious, local U.S. Attorney—wanting to emphasize a supposed threat from white supremacist groups, it was thought—in order to score some points with the media for his own political purposes, rather than go after one of these heavily-armed groups, gave the order to federal marshals instead, to do whatever it took to arrest Weaver. The marshals began prowling around the heavily-wooded property at Ruby Ridge in small groups dressed in camouflage, with stockings over their faces.

On August 21, 1992, Weaver's fourteen-year-old son Samuel and young-friend-like-a-son Kevin Harris heard Sammy's dog Striker barking furiously and ran outside. The Weavers often hunted for food, always carrying rifles outdoors, and they followed the barking Striker down a dirt road. Harris said later they had thought it was a large animal—a deer, or perhaps even a bear. As they closed in on the camouflaged marshals hiding in the woods, one of them shot Striker, and the bloodied dog, his back broken and yelping pitifully, dragged himself back along the ground toward Sammy. A gun battle ensued. Harris testified in court that the U.S. marshals had not identified themselves, and he and Sammy had not known it was the police. When the gun battle was over a few minutes later, both Sammy and one of the marshals lay dead.

The government claimed that the dead Marshal William Degan had shot Striker to keep the marshals' location from being revealed, and then Sammy had shot Degan. Harris and Randy Weaver had quickly joined in the shooting, went the marshals' story (although Randy was out of sight), and there had been an intense firefight, with the marshals simply defending themselves. But Sammy had been shot in the back.

Marshal Degan, also, as it turned out, had been shot in the back, which raised serious questions. 

In the wee hours of the morning that followed, several hundred FBI and ATF agents surrounded the cabin. The FBI brought in its prestigious Hostage Rescue Team, or "HRT" (as yet untried), which had been trained as part of a new program, by Randy Weaver's very own Green Berets—the Army Special Forces. Under the deadly-force rules, normally, the police were allowed to shoot only if there was "imminent danger" to them or someone else. But on this occasion, the rules were modified at FBI headquarters in Washington, and the snipers in the field were issued a convoluted order that amounted to, "shoot on sight" any armed adult. While it was still dark and the Weavers lay asleep, on the pine-covered hill overlooking the rustic mountain cabin and shed, the HRT took up positions behind the tree trunks and bushes, and waited. As dawn came, Randy Weaver emerged with his oldest daughter Sara, who was sixteen, and young-friend Harris, all three carrying rifles.

While the friend and daughter disappeared behind some boulders in front of the house, Randy proceeded along the path at the side of the cabin to the shed where the body of his son lay, in direct view of the snipers. FBI senior sniper Lon Horiuchi, according to the official story, aimed with his rifle through the powerful telescope at Weaver; according to another argument, it was not Horiuchi at all, but his second in command. In any event, the woodsman, not being in a hurry, would have been moving slowly, allowing plenty of time for the sniper to aim, and whoever that member of the FBI's HRT was, when Weaver had his arms lifted to slide open a bolt on the door to the shed, that officer squeezed the trigger. In all versions of the story, Randy Weaver was shot through the back of the shoulder and he yelled. Weaver and the daughter and friend, from different directions, all ran towards the cabin as fast as they could. Randy's wife Vicki, their ten-month old daughter Elisheba in her arms, held open the front door, calling out to them to hurry.

Lon Horiuchi, it appeared, by this time was already aiming his rifle at the window in the cabin door; the window had red and white check curtains neatly tied back to let the daylight in. This recent graduate of West Point—for that was what Horiuchi was—with his highly-honed marksmanship skills that qualified him for sniper on the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, for the first time, or again, proceeded to pull the trigger, blowing off half of Vicki's face, barely missing the 10-month-old baby. Randy had already made it inside, but Harris was wounded by the same bullet as Vicki. Sara, pushing up against him, barely missed being hit.

Only then did the FBI call over the loudspeaker for the Weavers to come out and surrender. Understandably, they refused. For eleven days the siege continued, with over 450 law enforcement personnel surrounding the area, and the FBI taunting the Weavers over the loudspeaker with such things as asking the dead Mrs. Weaver what she had had for breakfast. There was no phone in the cabin, and at one point the FBI sent a remote-controlled robot up the hill with a telephone. Weaver refused to come out and talk because, strapped to the robot also, was a high-powered rifle pointed at the door. 

Meanwhile, the media were reporting that the U.S. Marshals had been deliberately ambushed by the Weavers, with the marshals claiming they had been pinned down by gunfire for nine hours. Ruby Ridge, the media described as being a well-fortified compound, probably with underground bunkers and sophisticated booby traps put there by Weaver using his Special Forces training. The Weavers were "white separatists," "white supremacists," "neo-Nazis," "anti-Semites," and clearly, "dangerous" to the public.

It was only after retired Colonel James "Bo" Gritz, a fellow former Green Beret, living in Idaho also, arrived on the scene with Officer Jack McLamb, and they persuaded Randy Weaver that he and the friend would have a fair trial, that the Weaver family agreed to give themselves up. Bo Gritz, who was the most-highly decorated American soldier to come out of the Viet Nam war and had been the inspiration for the film Rambo, took the credit, but Weaver said later it was the gentler McLamb who had convinced him to come out. Gritz also was able to persuade the legendary Wyoming lawyer, Gerry Spence, who dressed in buckskins and cowboy hat and boots, to accept the Weaver case. And eventually, both Weaver and the friend were acquitted by a jury of all the charges relating to the firefight and death of the marshal. Randy Weaver was awarded $100,000 in damages, and his three daughters a million each. He was, however, found guilty of the initial gun charges, even though it was clearly a case of entrapment by the ATF, and for having failed to appear in court, even though it was shown that he had deliberately been given the wrong date.

It was during the standoff at Ruby Ridge that the country as a whole had its first glimpse of the nascent Militia movement; most people did not know that was what it was. Crowds of angry neighbors, and people from many parts of the country and even Canada, congregated outside the police perimeter to protest the methods of the ATF and federal marshals, and government abuse of power in general. This was the other America, that had been left out of the much-touted boom in the '80s economy, carefully swept under the rug by the media. These angry citizens could be seen on the evening news during the siege, carrying signs and shouting insults at the authorities. Among them were a number of skinheads and other angry white supremacists, but many of them were farmers and such, struggling desperately to hold on to their family farms and way of life in the New World Order. When they were not in front of the cameras, some of these people had begun taking another look at the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and at the Declaration of Independence. 

One was a man named John Trochmann, with his family, from nearby Noxon, Montana. The Trochmanns were stalwart members of the burgeoning patriot community, and friends of the Weavers. One of the boys dated Sara. It was the Trochmanns who were to launch the high-profile, public wing of the "Militia movement" soon, when they founded the Militia of Montana, or M.O.M. The Trochmanns, a year and a half later, in early 1994, would compile a manual on how to start a Militia, filling orders from all over the country, sending it out with a catalogue of Militia and survival-related publications, videotapes and cassettes, urging people to claim their Second Amendment rights—to arm themselves and form Militia units. The Trochmanns urged people to prepare for the day when, like the Weavers, they might have to defend themselves from government tyranny.

During televised Senate hearings later on Ruby Ridge, contrary to what the marshals said, the picture that emerged was of a fourteen-year-old Samuel Weaver being shot in the back when he turned to run—by which marshal, it could not be established conclusively (the bullets had disappeared). At one point, the marshals even advanced the theory that Randy Weaver had killed his son by mistake. The problem was, Randy had been on the other side of thick woods, half a mile away. Gerry Spence called it a case of another "magic bullet," recalling the single-bullet theory in the JFK assassination. It was nevertheless clear by now that although several shots had been fired from the dead marshal's rifle, Marshal Degan himself had been killed by a fellow marshal. An FBI forensic expert reported that the dead marshal had been hit in the back of the head with a bullet from a .9 mm handgun, which only the marshals carried. Sammy and Harris carried rifles. (Randy Weaver, with his .9 mm pistol, which he fired into the air, was a quarter of a mile away on the other side of thick woods.)

About the FBI killing of Vicki, the FBI said that sniper Horiuchi had not meant to shoot her, that the curtains had been drawn on the window in the door, and he couldn't see who was behind it. But all the inhabitants of the cabin stated that the curtains were always kept open, to let light into the dark interior where there was no electricity during the day. Also, there was no bullet hole in curtains. And it was clear that even if the curtains had been drawn, Horiuchi would have known that the only people inside the house were Vicki and two daughters, one of them an infant; so if it hadn't been Vicki holding open the door, it would have been the younger daughter Rachel, age ten. In the first drawing Horiuchi made of how the window looked when he aimed at it, he had drawn two heads. Later, he drew only one. It was established during the hearings that the ATF had considered Vicki the driving force behind Randy Weaver, and had believed that her presence made him more difficult to deal with. Although the FBI denied that it had known prior to the surrender that Vicki Weaver was dead, Bo Gritz said he had been told so by an FBI agent soon after he arrived on the scene.

"I swore to God," wrote Gritz in his newsletter, "and said under penalty of perjury, that Richard Rogers, Special Agent in charge of the Hostage Response Group, stated to me immediately upon my return from the 1st session with Randy Weaver: 'Bo, we targeted Vicki Weaver because the psychiatrist profiled her as the maternal head of the family who would kill her children before allowing her to surrender.'"

A sign in front of the FBI camp on the site, wrote Gritz, read "CAMP VICKI."

The FBI said Horiuchi (who took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify) had been aiming at Weaver and Harris, and that they had only come into sight as they reached the door. But it was proven that both men were clearly in this crack sniper's line of sight some yards before they arrived at the cabin. In any event, the question remained, why had Horiuchi shot at two men who were clearly running away? As for shooting Randy Weaver in the back at the shed, the FBI said Horiuchi had done so because Weaver was aiming his rifle at the police helicopter overhead. But the pilot testified that he had been on the other side of the ridge, out of sight.

As earlier, in the initial firefight, when Sammy and the marshal had both given up the ghost, the crucial bullets had disappeared. Bo Gritz, who examined  Weaver's and Harris's wounds as well as Vicki's dead body before the surrender, said that in his opinion, the reason the missing bullets had never surfaced was:

The projectile that shot [U.S. Marshal] William Degan dead... was a 9 mm Parabellum. The marks confirm that it came from the barrel of a Colt submachine gun fitted with suppressors—fired by Lawrence Cooper, U.S. Marshal. There was never a question about Sammy. He was shot in the arm and back by a .224 caliber fired from an M-16 rifle with a 3-round burst control device. Arthur Roderick pulled that trigger. Vicki and Kevin were hit by Hor[iuchi]'s 7.62 mm bullet. Weaver was hit with a .223. Why haven't they recovered that round? It would prove that Horiuchi was aiming purposely at Vicki. Randy was shot by Horiuchi's #2 (observer, security, commo) firing an M-16... Too bad that all the dead were cremated (but convenient for the government).

During the Senate hearings, There was heated discussion of changing the rules of deadly force—or "rules of engagement," as they were beginning to be called by the FBI, using a military term. The Supreme Court had said that deadly force could be used by law enforcement only in the case of "imminent" danger; the changes being suggested, presumably, were meant to further tighten the rules, so this could never happen again. In fact, as Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) pointed out, the new wording offered by Louis Freeh (the FBI's new director) only served to broaden the definition of "imminent," to mean an unspecified time in the future. (The FBI argued that there had been imminent danger at the time that Horiuchi had shot at the fleeing Weavers, because once back inside the cabin, the Weavers would have been able to shoot at the FBI through the windows.) Interestingly, under Freeh's proposed changes, what had happened at Ruby Ridge would have become perfectly legal.

The marshals were all given medals for their "heroic" participation.

The same press, meanwhile, that had once shown a keen appetite for exposing police brutality when it was against the left (during the Viet Nam war and civil rights movement in the '60s and '70s), showed little interest now that it was the so-called right that was the target. It was as if when the police abuse was against what were perceived to be unsavory characters, somehow, it was not worthy of media attention. The entire matter soon died in the media.

Interestingly, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi, being a graduate of West Point, had been trained, not as a policeman but as an Army officer (and a gentleman), with entirely different rules of deadly force. Soldiers, imminent danger or no, were trained simply to "kill" the enemy. Which only served to illustrate the militarization of the police that was gradually coming about, that the patriots were so angrily denouncing. Officer Jack McLamb said he thought Horiuchi ought to be in prison. (The state tried to bring charges against him, but they were disallowed by a federal judge, who remanded it instead to a federal court, where the charges were dismissed.) McLamb's good friend, Bo Gritz, was running for president that year, and began publicly calling for people to form civilian Militias.

As I sat with Tom Church, overlooking the serene farm valley far away, Tom continued, "I was aware of the fact that there were other Militias in the country, that this was an important movement to reestablish 'unorganized Militia.' When I was in the National Guard they told us we were part of the Militia, and they were right. The National Guard is the 'organized Militia.' We the People are the 'unorganized Militia.' So I started to organize people in central New York.

"As I had traveled, I had established friendships, and we had information flowing across state lines, ideas, developments. And then we came to Waco. Of course, Waco was a long ways away. Even for those of us in the Militia, the idea of coming to the aid of a—at least, the way the government presented him—a child molester, a child abuser, wasn't very palatable. We felt sure that we weren't getting all the truth, given what the media was doing, but still, in all, it seemed as though there was enough smoke to the fire on David Koresh, that we just didn't think this was anything that we wanted to rally around. It would give the Militia a bad name, you know.

"Then, I remember that day—I didn't see it right off when it happened, but when I saw the replays, they were on constantly all day, of the fire—as soon as the fire was on the screen before me, I knew what the deal was. It was like all the scales dropped from my eyes. This was the same enemy that I had seen use fire in the past to cover up their crimes—Gordon Kahl, MOVE. With Randy Weaver, as I understand it, there were plans to use fire, and they didn't get that far."

Ruby Ridge had been followed, after only nine months, by the even-more-terrible ordeal of citizens at the hand of the government—known simply as "Waco"—on the outskirts of the city by that name in Texas. Waco, like Ruby Ridge, also involved federal gun control by the ATF, and a lengthy standoff with the FBI that ended badly for all concerned. This time, the number of innocent people killed rose to over eighty. More than anything, it was due to Waco that the Militias emerged as a full-fledged, nationwide, grass-roots citizens movement, although they did not yet call themselves a movement.

The Waco story began when a hundred and some members of an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, known as Branch Davidians, set up a religious commune they named Mount Carmel, on the outskirts of Waco. They followed a man named David Koresh, and lived there in a two-story wooden building, or church complex, that they built with their own hands. As it turned out, they had not done a very good job; it was a flimsy structure. During the seven-week standoff with the feds, following the unsuccessful initial ATF raid, the media nevertheless made such frequent reference to it (as they had earlier to the Weaver cabin) as a "well-fortified compound," that the word "compound" itself, in the minds of the general public, came to mean a heavily-manned fortress, by dangerous, anti-goverment radicals. But it was a plain wooden building with no military features whatsoever. The so-called, "reinforced concrete bunker" that the media continually trumpeted turned out to be simply a concrete basement storage room that was the foundation of the building. Moreover, it was commonplace in Texas for people to have guns, and buy and sell them at shows, and this was one of the ways the Mount Carmel community supported itself; several of Koresh's followers living there had licenses to sell firearms. 

It had all started in the days immediately after the badly-bungled operation at Ruby Ridge the previous fall. Inside the ATF there had been worries that the agency might be phased out and its police duties given to the Justice Department, and it was felt that the gun control agency needed a spectacular success to ensure its continuing existence. (If the ATF was successful at Waco, they would be seen as heroes rescuing children from child abusers and religious gun kooks.) The ATF began intense surveillance of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, renting a house across the way for undercover agents posing as students, who frequently visited Koresh and his followers and read the Bible with them. Religious communes with controversial religious practices and apocalyptic beliefs, the government well knew, could be easily demonized. The ATF's rationalization to the public for the operation was that David Koresh was "stockpiling weapons." In fact, the number of weapons in the complex—which the ATF said, for effect, was four hundred but turned out to be roughly three per adult—was half the average per capita in Texas.

Since, in itself, stockpiling weapons was not illegal, the ATF added that the group was converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic, and converting deactivated hand grenades sold as paper weights (which were popular at gun shows, and of which, indeed, there had been an order placed) to live ones. But there was never any evidence produced of this. Nevertheless, the ATF began planning a raid to arrest Koresh. They requested special assault training from the Army's Green Berets, as well as the use of three military helicopters, under the pretext that there was also a methamphetamine laboratory. This, they made up completely out of thin air: Under the guidelines for military participation or the use of military equipment in any domestic law enforcement operation, it was necessary for there to be drugs. 

On February 25, 1993, some seventy-five to a hundred ATF agents arrived hidden in cattle cars at Mount Carmel, and even though they were alerted by one of the undercover agents living across the way that the Davidians had found out they were coming, the ATF went forward with what they claimed was meant to be a surprise assault. Koresh was standing outside the front door waiting, and tried to talk to them. As several ATF agents moved toward the front door, presumably to serve an arrest warrant on Koresh, a firefight broke out when shots were fired into the roof from an overhead, ATF-manned helicopter. The agents on the ground quickly retreated to regroup. Koresh himself was wounded in that initial firefight after he ran back inside, by a bullet that went through the door. During the several-hour standoff that followed, six (some said eight) of the Koresh people inside, including a nursing mother, were killed by bullets that went through the walls and the roof. Four ATF officers died. (Patriots claimed they had been able to trace their names, and they were all former Clinton bodyguards—presumably, ones who knew too much. Certainly, if this was true, they joined some twelve of the president's former bodyguards and associates who had died or would die in suspicious circumstances by mid-'98—most reported as suicides or plane crashes.)

As had happened earlier at Ruby Ridge after the death of another fed, immediately, the FBI was called in. Within hours, the same highly-trained Hostage Rescue Team that had shot Randy Weaver in the back and the young friend fleeing, and had killed Vicki Weaver carrying her baby, arrived at Waco. What followed was a 51-day standoff, where Koresh kept promising to come out—first, after certain requests were fulfilled, such as providing milk for the children, and later, after he finished a manuscript having to do with the seals in the Book of Revelation.

On the news, the media played over and over a video clip where Koresh could be heard saying, "I must be God," reinforcing the image in the public mind that he was crazy. His followers later claimed that when Koresh had said that, he had simply been replying to an accusation that he had impregnated a sixty-nine-year-old woman, and his complete sentence had been, "And if I did that, I must be God." Since nearly half the inhabitants of the complex were Hispanic or black, it was not possible for the media to describe Koresh as a white separatist or supremacist. There were instead charges of child abuse, that included his having sex with underage girls (whom the Branch-Davidian religion allowed Koresh to take in multiple marriage). Clinton's newly-appointed attorney general, Janet Reno, declared publicly that children were being beaten, which turned out not to be true. At night, the FBI flooded the house with bright spotlights and played loud music and the sound of dentist drills and rabbits being killed, purportedly, to make it so unpleasant for Koresh and the other adults that they would release the children and surrender. But the real effects must have been on those same children, who, when they did sleep, must have had terrible nightmares.

On April 19, in the fifth week of the siege, in the early hours, an FBI agent began to intone over a loudspeaker outside the complex again and again, "This is not an assault, this is not an assault," while at the same time, M-60 tanks, CEVs and Bradley fighting vehicles began rolling up to the big house and ramming it. The FBI-U.S. Army tanks punched large holes in the wooden structure, causing the walls to collapse in some places, including over the main staircase, making it almost impossible to get out. They inserted CS gas—a tear gas that was illegal for use by the military under the Geneva Conventions because it was known to be lethal, especially in closed areas; it was especially dangerous to sick and older people, and children, and was classified as a chemical weapon. (As the patriots saw it, the same U.S. government that was prepared to go to war with Iraq because of its chemical weapons, thought nothing of using such weapons of mass destruction against its own citizens.)

A fullscale firefight erupted between the Branch Davidians and law enforcement. Then, suddenly, fire burst out in several places as the building rocked. With the wind blowing at some thirty to forty miles an hour, the wooden structure quickly burned to the ground. Inside, by the Branch Davidians' count, were eighty-two charred souls, nineteen of them children, two yet unborn. Only a few adults made it out. The government charged that Koresh and his followers had set fire to the building to fulfill the prophecy in Revelation. But serious questions were raised about this when the people who managed to escape said the kerosene lamps inside had been knocked over by the tanks crashing into walls (the electricity was cut off), rocking the flimsy building from end to end. The wind, blowing through a hall that ran the length of the entire front of the building, they said, had caused the fire to spread quickly.

As it turned out also, CS gas was flammable. Although the FBI argued that it was impossible for CS gas to catch fire in these circumstances, in 1997 the San Diego Union Tribune reported that in a drug raid in San Diego, after law enforcement had used CS gas, the official report had stated that the CS had caught fire and caused the house to burn down. It was, moreover, known that when CS gas caught fire, it turned to cyanide gas. As the Militias often put it, the people at Waco died of cyanide gas poisoning, "like the Jews in the Holocaust." 

The front and back doors, meanwhile, had been blocked in the damage done by the tanks, and the six men and three women who did make it out, apparently did so under heavy machinegun fire coming from the FBI armored vehicles. The government's FLIR (infrared) film footage, shown in late 1997 in the documentary, Waco, Rules of Engagement, which was nominated for an Academy Award, showed this clearly. On camera, the inventor of infrared film stated that the FLIR footage showed unmistakable gunfire traveling from the location of the FBI troops toward the building's exits. Although the FBI said it had anticipated the possibility that Koresh would set fire to the complex (which the government claimed he and his inner circle had done), there were no firefighters on hand. The fire department was called only after the fire started.

There was a bus buried under the complex, where the FBI claimed in the Senate hearings, it had expected the children to take refuge, away from the gas. But during these same hearings, it was clearly established by one FBI agent that they had filled the bus with CS gas deliberately to keep people out. Furthermore, as it turned out, the entire quantity of gas, that the Justice Department said was meant to be pumped into the complex over a period of many hours, had been inserted during the first half hour. The reason for the "dynamic entry" (another military term that had crept into law enforcement jargon), rather than waiting the Branch Davidians out, the FBI claimed, was that the Hostage Rescue Team was tired and needed to be relieved, and there were no more of these highly-trained agents with "perishable skills" to take their place.

As Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin put it the day after, "They were totally exhausted from doing absolutely nothing... people of such superior skills were required for the job of keeping a farm surrounded that the bureau simply had no way to replace those men out there in Waco." And after all that, added Breslin, "the case against Koresh was for simple gun possession."

The Koresh followers testified in court hearings and before the Senate that during the initial raid the ATF had fired first. Helicopters had fired through the roof while the agents at the front door fired at Koresh, who quickly ran inside. The ATF had continued firing at the closed door, which was how Koresh had been wounded. Wayne Martin, one of the leaders, had dialed 911 for help, and on an audiotape released later, with gunfire in the background, he could be heard pleading, "There's women and children in here. Tell them to stop!" In answer to a directive from a deputy sheriff to put down his gun, he could be heard replying with a pathetic wail, "I have a right to defend myself. They started firing fist!"

Dick DeGuerin, a highly-regarded Texas lawyer who had acted as Koresh's lawyer and a mediator during the standoff, testified at the Senate hearings that on one of his trips inside, he had inspected the roof and the front door, and the bullet holes had clearly been made from the outside. One of the front doors, made of metal, bore the evidence of this and had disappeared. DeGuerin called on the authorities to find it, which they never did.

The commanding ATF officer testified, moreover, that he had left the arrest warrant in his vehicle when they had gone to the front door, where Koresh was, which belied ATF claims that they had merely been trying to serve the warrant. As for the charges that Koresh was converting semi-automatic weapons to automatic, although the FBI said they found several such weapons in the rubble, this was never satisfactorily established, so far as Dick DeGuerin and other knowledgeable observers were concerned. There were other serious questions, relating to the autopsy reports, which said that some of the people had been shot in the head. While many thought the beleaguered people inside had simply shot themselves and their loved ones in order not to suffer a slower, more painful death from burning, it was a measure of how far trust in the government had eroded, that among patriots and the Militias, many of the reactions were, "The evidence was faked," or, "They were shot by infiltrators who were inside." (There were theories about this, which I would learn more about later.)

With tears in his eyes, the local sheriff said on television shortly after it had all ended in fire and gas that he was certain Koresh would have come to his office if he had phoned and asked. The ATF could have arrested him there. Also, neighbors said that Koresh went out jogging regularly, and they had seen him alone on the road a few days before the ATF raid.

No one in the FBI or ATF, even after the Senate hearings, when both agencies were clearly found at fault, received more than a reprimand or a suspension from work, with pay, which for ordinary mortals, patriots liked to point out, would simply mean a paid vacation. The same had been the case with Ruby Ridge. Some of the agents were later given medals. Larry Potts, who had presided over the decision to shoot on sight at Ruby Ridge, and was a supervisor at FBI headquarters during Waco, was actually promoted to Deputy Director. The promotion was rescinded, however, after a public outcry from the patriot community.

Meanwhile, on the day after the gassing and burning, and whatever else had happened at Waco, the Justice Department orchestrated a public relations blitz of television appearances by Attorney General Reno. The phone calls and faxes, that initially had been ten to one against her decision to order the insertion of CS gas by tanks, by the end of the day were eight to ten, in favor. This was followed by public commendations for Reno's decision, by several members of Congress.

Although the Clinton administration chose to portray this as public acceptance for its actions, in fact, what all too often happened with such PR campaigns, was the clear perception by critics of heavy-handed pressure to support a particular opinion—in this case, support for the government's decision to insert CS gas with tanks rather than wait out Koresh. Those who disagreed with the official version would be discouraged from expressing their real opinions, while the media reports would be of widespread public support (this happened regularly with controversial policy matters). In fact, it would only mean that the voice of dissent had been stifled. The feelings of being gagged and outrage would remain, ignored by the media, without an outlet for expression. These feelings would then fester beneath the surface of supposed public approval, inviting a backlash in the form of an angry action at some time in the future.

As with Ruby Ridge the year before, the media showed little appetite for taking the government to task for police brutality at Waco. They focused on some of the individual police transgressions, but not on the larger, policy picture, and the mainstream media reports, rather than inform, simply confused people and caused many of them to turn away from the story. And again, the disgust and outrage felt so strongly by a goodly sector of the public at seeing how the new gun control measures were being applied, was given no voice. Liberals, in general, chose to remain silent.

The Treasury Department's own investigation of the conduct of the ATF, with all its omissions concerning the actual raid, in fact, yielded some eye-opening items for anyone who chose to read it. As part of a brief history of the ATF in its Appendix G, Treasury admitted:

In a larger sense... the raid fit within an historic, well-established and well-defended government interest in prohibiting and breaking up all organized groups that sought to arm or fortify themselves... From its earliest formation, the federal government has actively suppressed any effort by disgruntled or rebellious citizens to coalesce into an armed group, however small the group, petty its complaint, or grandiose its ambition.

This confirmed what many in the Militia movement had been claiming all along: that the initial assault on Waco hadn't been because of illegal weapons activity at all, but for political reasons. And so, for many of the seventy to eighty million gun owners in the country, both Ruby Ridge and Waco were the result of the government's agenda to do away with the Second Amendment and disarm the people—a question of civil liberties. Ironically, over a quarter century earlier, the Viet Nam war had roused another group of Americans—liberals then—to protest government tyranny and a loss of civil liberties. And although the protests had had to do with the draft forcing young Americans into a war overseas, on another important level, the protests had also been about the U.S. government denying the right to self-determination, in that case, to the North-Vietnamese. Similarly, the Militia movement today was the result of outrage at the government's denial of the right to self-determination and self-defense of a people—this time on home soil, concerning meat-and-potato Americans.

Granted, many Militiamen came from the ranks of those who had not protested the Viet Nam war, but had, rather, been proud to fight in it. Nevertheless, as a group veterans had come to understand the war's terrible injustices; they felt they had been duped into believing they were somehow fighting for democracy and they now believed the war had been wrong. But today, with the draft gone, it was a moot question. The military now were all volunteers—a professional army (some called it mercenary). And so, the silence of the former Viet Nam protesters in the face of today's widespread loss of rights, or liberties, on the home front, raised the question of whether their loud protests had not been simply because they didn't want to be drafted, or for their loved ones to be—not from any principle or for any larger issue, as they had claimed. That as long as it was professionals committing the atrocities abroad (even if they were Americans), and now at home also, many former Viet Nam protesters would be willing to look the other way. 

Ever since the draft had been done away with in the 1980s, these same liberals, full of righteousness during the war, appeared to have lost interest altogether in defending individual civil liberties. And so, the same people who had earlier protested so vigorously in support of the foreigners' right to self-determination, were not willing to apply the same standard to fellow Americans. The body of former Viet Nam protesters was vehemently supporting gun control, along with whatever anti-democratic measures it took for it to be enforced. (Hadn't President Clinton himself been a protester, and a draft dodger?)

Tom continued, "By the time we got to Waco, I said, the only way that we as a people are going to survive, other than becoming the slave of the system, doing whatever it was that they wanted you to do, irrespective of your rights coming from your Creator, the only way was if you organized to defend yourself. And so it was that I organized people that I knew from my long life in central New York. Many of them thought the concept of the Militia was pretty radical. And so it wasn't for everyone. I was aware of the fact that the Militia was something we were entitled to. After all, I'd read the Second Amendment.

"So at that point, things began very much more in earnest. There was a groundswell of information coming from alternative sources, patriot-type publications. Some of it was true and some not, but you could not get it in the mainstream media. I suggest that the Militias were the result of this groundswell, because Americans knew they weren't being told the whole truth, and they saw the government killing small children in the name of protecting them. It was quite obvious to any thinking person. The patriot-Militia movement—both of the movements—took off.

"It was late ‘92, early '93, when we first formed the Militia, before Waco. We just called it a Militia and knew we had to form ourselves into tight-knit groups—all law-abiding people, no drug users. We knew that if there was that problem we would be vulnerable. We knew each other. It was very grass-rootsy. It was very self-defensive. When it started out, it was like, on a volunteer-fire-department basis. Very localized, not statewide. We agreed to a mutual self-defense pact. We believed we could be required to defend against gun confiscation—search warrants, the result of wiretaps on how we were preparing to protect ourselves. They might want to come in and seize our war materiel, equipment. We thought it might be on some type of security violations, or drugs. We recognized very well that if the government wants to get you, drugs are a very easy thing to plant. A hunter can drop a few seeds on your property, and next spring they fly over with a helicopter, trespassing on your air space, and the government finds it." Motioning to the long slope of broken and bent pale-yellow stalks on the mountain where we were, Tom said, "You know, this field will be three foot in another couple of months." In the valley below were sprawled storybook farmhouses and barns, glowing in the morning sunshine.

He paused for a moment and said, "We knew the capacity of the government to do these things, to abuse their power. Your family didn't even know what the stuff looked like. People who had property began to patrol it. The stuff also grows wild." After another pause, he continued, "As I traveled, truck-driving, a place I went to a lot was Michigan. I came to meet Mark Koernke, Linda Thompson."

Mark Koernke and Linda Thompson had been two of the Militia movement's earliest and most vocal leaders during and after Waco. Koernke presented himself as a former career Army intelligence analyst and counterintelligence coordinator, who had also taught methods of foreign warfare in the military. At present, he had a job as head of maintenance in a dormitory at the University of Michigan. He had his own Militia, the Michigan Militia at Large. On his daily, one-hour program on shortwave radio, the "Intelligence Report," with co-host John Stadtmiller, Koernke billed himself simply as, "Mark from Michigan." He preached the coming of the New World Order, or "NWO," as it was commonly referred to by patriots, urging people to prepare, and to resist.

Koernke had put out several videotapes that circulated widely among the Militias, the best-known of which was America In Peril, made in 1993 during the Waco siege. On this tape, Mark from Michigan had described the takeover of the country by UN troops as being imminent. It was being heralded, he explained, by waves of unmarked black helicopters and white vehicles with the UN symbol and Russian heavy-military equipment being sighted across the country, of which he showed footage. There were Russian and other foreign troops on American soil, on joint training missions with American troops and law enforcement. These foreigners were members of the new, secret federal police forces—the Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force (MJTF) and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FIN-CEN) police—being formed under UN authority. They wore black ski masks to keep their identities secret. So long as they didn't talk, no one would know who among them were foreigners. A large number of “concentration camps” were being built, and areas were being designated at the main airports for civilian collection and transshipment points. The patriots would be the first to be rounded up, with their families. Their guns would be confiscated, and they would be locked away and put to work as prison labor. The UN would become a world government—all this, in the manner of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  

A wave of outrage and apprehension washed over patriots—prompting an explosion of gun and ammunition purchases, the likes of which had never been seen in modern times. To the general public, however, unaware of what was creeping up gradually across the nation, Koernke appeared to be an alarmist and a crackpot. While it was true that unmarked black helicopters were being spotted across the country, they were not normally seen in waves so heavy that it was difficult to count them, as Koernke described one incident on the Canadian border. And it had never been established that they were doing anything wrong, or that they were in any way under UN authority. Likewise, while more and more raids on gun owners were being conducted by men in black fatigues and ski masks, they appeared, rather, to be Americans in the ATF and other federal, state and local police forces—often "multi-jurisdictional," but not under UN authority. (It did, however, surface in the Waco hearings that, secretly, there were British military present during the siege, from the anti-IRA task force; the U.S. government claimed they were merely observers. Later, it surfaced also that there had probably been Israelis actually taking part in the last assault. Twenty-four spent .223 cartridge casings with "I.M.I." (Israeli Military Industries) on them were found near the scene in an FBI safehouse.)

One aspect of the trend toward militarization by the police was their new attire in the 1990s. They often wore black helmets and body armor, commonly referred to as "ninja suits," and were beginning to arrive in military personnel carriers and tanks—or at least practiced in them—while at the same time, the military forces were themselves increasingly being used for law enforcement. It was true that the distinctions between the police and the military were being lost. And while it was true also that commercial factories were being built inside prisons—owned by the private sector as well as the government—and prisoners were being put to work for corporations such as Victoria's Secret, manufacturing women's lingerie, and TWA, making reservations, and even political campaigns, canvassing voters, again, there was no evidence that this was being done in accord with some secret UN agenda.

That was the way it struck me in 1996, when I first watched Koernke's tape. After my own initial disbelief, however, I began finding out that a lot of what he was saying about the overall picture, in essence, was true, and I concluded that it was possible that Koernke had done what many people did when they felt an urgency to make a difficult point, greatly exaggerating and jumping to conclusions. If indeed he had information that such a plan did exist, it seemed that he had also grossly exaggerated its imminence. And Koernke had oversimplified the supposed methods being used, thereby appearing to discredit in the general public's eyes what was perhaps true in the larger picture. After the Oklahoma bombing, Koernke's tapes and broadcasts were widely reported on by the mainstream media, and his claims of a UN takeover being in the works and "black helicopters," which most people had not yet seen, were seized upon to show how wacky and paranoid the Militias were.

In most people's minds at the time, the UN was a pathetic, do-good organization that simply advocated saving children and the environment, and world peace, but couldn't get its act together—not the instrument of powerful hidden forces bent on one world government, subject to New World Order rules. The American government, likewise, in most people's minds was made up of a bunch of inept agencies, where corruption, certainly, was to be deplored, but nevertheless was random, not part of some larger pattern or grand design to do away with the Constitution. Mark Koernke had jumped the gun. (It crossed my mind also that this was what agents provocateur often did, mixing in just enough untruth or exaggeration to discredit the overall message. And indeed, there were some in the movement, as I would learn, who thought this was what he was doing. I would ask him personally about this later.)

Many in the Militias, however, believed that by exposing the government's plans, they had brought about an actual change in the New World Order plans, or at least slowed them down. In early 1996, the Militias believed they had bought time to continue to educate the public and exhaust all peaceful means of achieving a return of the government to the Constitution.

Linda Thompson, whom Tom Church had said he had also met early on, was a former American Civil Librties Union (ACLU) lawyer who lived in Indianapolis. Like Officer McLamb with the police, she had discovered, as she explained it, that lawyers in general didn't know much about what was Constitutional or not. She had formed one of the early Constitutional Militias, naming it, "The Unorganized Militia of the United States of America." Not without a sense of humor I thought, she had assigned herself the grand-sounding title of, "Acting Adjutant General."

Thompson had been at Waco during the standoff in the spring of 1993, wearing camouflage and waving a rifle (for which she had been briefly arrested), denouncing the actions of the ATF, and calling for the formation of an "unorganized Militia." After the Branch-Davidian complex went up in gas and flames, she made some videotapes on Waco. One was a half-hour tape that was widely circulated, titled, The Big Lie, which showed footage of a tank knocking down walls, with bright flashes coming from what many claimed was a flamethrower. During the Senate hearings, it was argued by the FBI that these bright flashes were simply sunlight glinting off metal.

In 1994, Thompson issued an ultimatum and a call for a national march on Washington that September by the Militias, carrying their weapons, to arrest the Congress for a failure to uphold their oaths of office "to uphold the Constitution," and for their many unconstitutional actions. Amid much debate by the Militias as to whether or not they should take part, including extensively on the Internet, Thompson suddenly called off the march. Later, in an interview, she replied to a question about this that, "Calling attention to the Militias was a way of getting people to focus attention on the law that is available to us, because the Militia is the law, and people need to be taught that." She added that she saw herself more as a Constitutionalist activist than a Militia leader.

Thompson explained that she had realized during Ruby Ridge and Waco that she had gone all the way through law school "and didn't know a thing about the Constitution." Since that was the experience of most lawyers, she thought this "was an abysmal commentary" on the legal system as a whole. She believed, furthermore, that there was a struggle going on between the various federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies and branches of the military, for control of the country. It was the FBI and the military, in her opinion, not the CIA, that stood to gain the most from the passing of President Clinton's Anti-terrorism bill.

Ultimately, it wouldn't work, she said, because there were too many good guys on the inside—guys the patriots and the Militias were talking to—and they weren't going to let it happen. Amid reports in late 1995 that Linda Thompson had cracked up and was behaving strangely, and claims by her that the federal government was harassing her, zapping her with electronic wave frequencies and conducting a character-assassination campaign, she disappeared from public view. She would reappear on the public scene, however, in the spring of '97, when she brought suit against the government, backed by a massive amount of documentation on their efforts to destroy her.

Tom continued, "I met Mark through an associate who was a member of his group, and I went to a meeting. They were secret, once a month. I brushed up against McVeigh there, never met him. It’s a true story of his involvement with Mark of Michigan. It was in the media briefly. It was clear to me that McVeigh was part of some sort of inner circle. I point this out not as a criticism of Mark, but for the purpose of historical correctness. I myself did not go to the meetings all the time. When I saw the composite picture come out, I thought, 'That guy looks familiar.' He was just sitting there. He was one of the bodyguards. Why security? There were security problems with government agents surveilling. We could be stormed by government agents. I asked the question if he was part of the organization I was part of and was told he never did belong. I was told he was talking about things that were more radical than us."

Timothy McVeigh, as the entire country knew, was the prime suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing, that had taken place on April 19, 1995. The whole front of the nine-story, Alfred P. Murrah federal building had been blown off, the government said, by a car bomb made of 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate, or fertilizer, and fuel oil (ANFO), killing 168 people, including nineteen children in a day care center on the second floor. More than four hundred people were wounded. There had never been an act of terrorism of this magnitude in the U.S. For months afterwards, at every chance, the media ran footage of the mutilated bodies lying in the rubble, or being carried away, with heart-rending, capsule biographies of the victims, especially the children and their families. People in the Militias often remarked that the media had never done as much for the victims at Waco, where the loss of innocent life, especially of the seventeen children (or nineteen, depending on whether you counted the two that were not yet born), had been just as much a tragedy. 

The Oklahoma bombing had taken place, as everyone knew by now, on the second anniversary of Waco, causing a finger to be pointed at the Militias. The top floor of the Murrah building was headquarters to many of the ATF agents who had taken part at Waco. Many of the FBI at Waco were also headquartered in Oklahoma City, though not in the Alfred P. Murrah building. It had been widely reported that April 19, the anniversary of the battle in 1775 at Lexington which had set off the American RevolutionaryWar—dubbed "Patriots Day"—was therefore also "Militia Day"—in order to reinforce the idea of Militia links to the bombing. But it also happened to be the anniversary of the burning of the Warsaw ghetto in 1945, as Jews in the patriot community noted. Although at first, there had been heavy speculation in the media that it was Arab terrorists, after a few days the authorities had pointed a finger at the Militias, announcing that the prime suspect was Timothy McVeigh, describing him as a "right-wing," "anti-government," "extremist," "Militia member."

As it had turned out, McVeigh was a decorated Gulf War veteran who had received a number of commendations for outstanding service in the military, and even the Bronze Star. He had been a gunner on one of the Bradley fighting vehicles that the Army had used to mow down thousands of Iraqi soldiers in trenches, trying to surrender. Tanks had driven along the middle, their treads straddling both sides, while other vehicles had driven along the sides with mechanical shovels, burying the Iraqis alive. The gunners in the Bradleys had shot into the earth as it covered the Iraqis waving their arms. This had been reported on at length by Newsday a few months after the war. (I had shuddered at the time to think what the experience of killing men trying to surrender would have done to our own soldiers.)

McVeigh was arrested an hour and a half after the bombing, driving on a highway without a rear license plate. A traffic violation would not have been sufficient for an arrest, but he was carrying a concealed handgun, which he meekly handed over (an unusual action, noted patriots, for someone who knew he had just blown up a building, killing and maiming hundreds). Interestingly, there were reports that the arresting officer had stated that a brown vehicle pulled over in front of McVeigh's car and waited until the arrest was complete, though later the officer said he couldn't remember.

McVeigh, it was said, was a member of the Michigan Militia, he was a close associate of Mark Koernke. He was wearing a t-shirt with, on the front, a picture of Abraham Lincoln, and on the back, Thomas Jefferson's words in 1787:

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

The longer quote, from one of Jefferson's letters in late 1787, was:

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty... And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. 

Patriots often wore t-shirts with quotes of the Founding Fathers, and while the selection of this particular quote was played up in the media as proof that McVeigh was a Militiaman and an example of right-wing extremism, no one bothered to mention that only days before, on C-Span, former Democratic governor of California and presidential candidate Jerry Brown—who was considered far to the left—had ended a speech about the dire straits the country was in, with that same quote by Thomas Jefferson.

The following year, former high UN official Conor Cruise O'Brien would publish a book on Thomas Jefferson that questioned the suitability of Jefferson's revolutionary beliefs in today's world. In interviews, O'Brien repeatedly likened Jefferson to Pol Pot, saying that the bloodthirsty Cambodian guerrilla general would likely be the person that Jefferson would most admire if he were alive today, and that Jefferson's heirs were the "far-right" Militias (he noted that Timothy McVeigh's t-shirt when he was arrested bore a Jefferson quotation). This way, even those who didn't read the book were sure to get the message.

One Militiaman, James Murray, after noting in an article in Race Traitor that O'Brien had "recommended that the writing of Thomas Jefferson be "removed from the American Canon," because he was "a racist" and "his writing tended to encourage rebellious elements to use violence to affect political change," wrote:

O'Brien complains that Jefferson accepted no limits on the holy cause of freedom—neither geographic boundaries nor conventional ideas of morality and compassion. O'Brien must believe that geographic boundaries can be placed on freedom (a system that has worked so well in his native Ireland)... Wild-eyed peasants in Chiapas and hicksville farmers in Montana still believe the "holy cause of freedom" is worth fighting (and killing) for. They possess a moral authority that O'Brien and his owners are not capable of comprehending.    

O'Brien had said (concerning Jefferson's "tree of liberty" quote), "That is something very much like a Jeffersonian charter for the most militant segment of modern American militias, is it not?" And Murray had answered, "Yes, Mr. O'Brien, it is, and the charter cannot be revoked by foreign nationals..."

Recriminations of Jefferson's ideas on revolution were soon being echoed loudly throughout academia; in one book, even, Jefferson's role as the author of the Declaration of Independence was minimized, as if somehow he were unworthy of this place in American history. Indeed, one New York City highschool student told me that in his American history class they had been taught about Jefferson only that he was a "loose cannon" and "not well educated," when Jefferson was one of the most educated people of his time. A Militiaman said to me about all this, "They need to destroy our heritage, so Americans will submit to one-world government under the UN."  

Stories in the press at first claimed that McVeigh had immediately invoked his right to be treated as a prisoner of war, giving only his name and rank, presumably in the Militia. But later the story was dropped. McVeigh, everyone who knew him said, had been obsessed with Waco, and on the first anniversary had returned to the burned-out site. He had known that the ATF team that had stormed the Davidians at Waco was headquartered in the Murrah building; he had done it—the Militias had done it—was being said, as retribution for Waco.

Immediately, however, the Michigan Militia, along with all the other "Constitutional Militias," as the "unorganized" Militias were calling themselves, had publicly condemned the bombing, as well as all acts of terrorism, stating that that was not what the Militias were about. Anyone could attend a Militia meeting, they pointed out, and indeed, already, the feds were infiltrating the Militias. Often they were agents provocateur, and there was speculation among the Militias that McVeigh had been such a one. The word among patriots was that the Michigan Militia had said that McVeigh had attended several meetings, as Tom had said, but had been asked to leave because his views were too extreme, and he had never been a member.

Two members of the Michigan Militia's Oakland County 6th Brigade claimed that McVeigh had attended one of their meetings at a truckstop near Detroit, on January 25, 1995, where Koernke was present, and again three days later at a smaller meeting on a farm. A member of the St. Lucia County, Florida Militia recalled that at a March 1994 meeting, a man who looked like McVeigh, wearing camouflage, who was upset about Waco, had been acting as Koernke's bodyguard. Both McVeigh and Koernke had denied this, and McVeigh insisted that he had never been to any of these meetings.

The outright charges of Militia involvement in the bombing, in any event, ceased, and indeed, it would be determined in the McVeigh trial that none of the suspects had ever belonged to a Militia. But in the minds of the public, the damage was done. Doubts about the Militias would persist, especially since, in the media, the Militias were being routinely lumped together with the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, despite Militia protests to the contrary. The vehement condemnations by the Militias of the bombing were lost in the noise.

Already the summer before the bombing, there had begun a relentless campaign against the Militias, with reports circulated to the media, government and opinion leaders, primarily by two special interest groups—the Anti-Defamation League of the B'Nai B'rith, or ADL, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). After Oklahoma, these reports became more expensive and slick. They called loudly for something to be done about the Militias. Both these well-funded groups had long kept watch on the Ku Klux Klan and other anti-Semitic groups, and should have known better. The argument went that even if McVeigh wasn't formally a member of the Michigan Militia, he "mirrored" these "extremist," "right-wing," "anti-government" Militia people. McVeigh's was a "militia mentality." Even if the Militia hadn't done it, it was the sort of thing they "would" do. In the media, the ADL and SPLC reports were hyped at every chance; these reports multiplied and they kept coming. Soon, Oklahoma and the Militias were inextricably linked in the minds of the public. As a result, many people came to believe that even if the Militias had not been directly involved, with their strident denunciations of government corruption and abuse, they were inciting, or at least laying the ground for, such actions by society's malcontents, and were therefore responsible. 

Clinton's iron-fisted Anti-terrorism bill, "The Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996," which had failed miserably to gain support in Congress that spring, because of serious concerns that it cut deeply into normal civil liberties with its provisions for drastically-increased surveillance without probable cause, and secret courts and such, meanwhile, was introduced immediately after the bombing, and passed. Many in the Militias saw a nefarious connection.

Tom continued, "This organization of mine, the U.S. Militia, is undercover. Within Michigan I'm aware of five Militias. There may be more. In the open is the Michigan Militia, with Norman Olson, Ken Adams out front, like Jerry Loper in Chemung."

Norman Olson was the outspoken Baptist preacher and gun store owner, who lived in Alanson, Michigan, and had started the Michigan Militia in the early days of the movement. The Michigan Militia had quickly grown to between seven and ten thousand members. Ken Adams was his Communications Officer. Jerry Loper was the gregarious, public-minded commander of the Chemung Citizens Militia in upstate New York, where I attended my first Militia meeting.

"Members of the public Militias are in the tens of thousands, in my estimate," said Tom. "But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Then, underground, you have succeeding layers with different levels of covertness, that usually correspond to the degree of seriousness of the group.

"Mark from Michigan does have a Militia—quite large, with significant military capability, helicopters, armored vehicles, communications, medical facilities. They have done wargames against the ATF. Mark occupies a very public role—public speaker, tapes. What did I feel about the Oklahoma bombing? I don't believe anything the government tells us, with its lapdog press. If the government told me it’s snowing, I would have to look outside. I do not believe anything that the enemy tells me. They are my enemy.

"So, while I thought the bombing was a horrible tragedy, the day care center and all, as the story unfolded, the whole thing became increasingly preposterous. So I said to my flock, 'Reserve judgment until we have a chance to sift and sort all the information. This may take time.' Those of us in the Militia movement know what the movement is all about, and a bombing seemed an unlikely event—at least, as far as 'unorganized' Militia are concerned. I believed at the time that the federal government or wayward elements of the federal government were involved in the implementation of that terrorist act.

"We know now that the building did not fall as a result of the truck bomb parked at the kerb, no matter what size they tell us that bomb was. Let's say that instead of 4,000 pounds it was 40,000 pounds of fertilizer material, such as they tell us was used. Looking at how the Murrah building was constructed, you have a skeleton of heavy, steel-reinforced concrete columns that are massive—three foot in diameter, maybe four, with one-inch size reinforcing steel bars woven into a matrix inside. For those things to be sheared off at a certain height—it is conceivable that the bomb in the truck could have completely denuded all of the attaching windows, doors, partitions, sheet rock, etc., from one side of the building to the other, front to back, without it doing what it did to those columns. That was a dead giveaway to anyone who has ever been involved in controlled demolition of buildings, which I have, in urban centers, where they had to be taken down very carefully, by a controlled explosion.

"I know what it takes, drilling holes in these columns and placing charges in them, to do the type of thing that was done there. I knew what it would take with those columns. And who am I? Yet, there were other people who came forward with similar views, independent of me. People like the former special agent in charge of the L.A. branch of the FBI, Ted Gunderson, retired Air Force General Partin, and others, all with the same voice, said it didn't happen. The federal government changed the story numerous times. Frankly, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention, knowing that it was all just propaganda for the generally-dumb public, to incite them against Militias and patriots in general."

Brigadier General Benton K. Partin (USAF, Retired) had been the most vocal critic of the government's actions following the Oklahoma bombing. For this, he was eminently qualified. During his career in the Air Force, General Partin had commanded the Armament Technology Laboratory and was chairman of the joint services committee responsible for harmonizing air munitions requirements for the four services. He managed weapons testing of all types of explosives, engaging in extensive research and design, and was a Command Pilot and a Command Missileman. General Partin also had been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Legion of Merit three times. When it was decided by the government only a few weeks after the bombing to undertake the total demolition of the Oklahoma building, General Partin had written to fifty-one members of Congress, asking them to delay it until there had been an independent examination of the site.

In the letter he explained that it was technically impossible to have this pattern of damage unless supplementary demolition charges had been used at some of the reinforced concrete column bases. This could be easily determined, he said, upon inspection by an independent team of experts, which he proposed to lead.

Nevertheless, on May 23, little more than a month after the bombing, the entire building was brought down by the government, with explosives placed there openly this time. The rubble was hurriedly carted away to a landfill, where it was buried and put under guard, and not allowed to be examined. General Partin proceeded to declare that it was "a classic cover-up of immense proportions," and wrote a report based on a study of the test photographs of the site. He said the photographs indeed "proved" demolition charges had been placed on the columns, and that it was these, not the truck bomb, that had caused the extensive structural damage.

I had determined from the start of my research to use the same, mostly-alternative news and information sources the Militias based their opinions on, so I could see the world through their eyes and convey this to the general public. I felt that in this way I would be giving a clear sense of what these sources were, and how the information was presented. I wanted to maintain the integrity of the Militia view. The official view, which everyone knew already, I would pretty much leave to the mainstream media.

And so, the best account of the physical evidence surrounding the bombing of the Murrah building was contained in an issue of the weekly magazine, The New American. It was a special issue on Oklahoma, in the summer of 1995. Copies were given to me at various times by Militia people. In it were a summary and excerpts of General Partin'a 23-page report: Bomb Damage Analysis of Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Included were several color photographs and a floor diagram.

The floor diagram of the rectangular building showed that its nine floors were supported by three rows of reinforced concrete columns rising from the ground to the roof. These three rows of columns ran parallel and lengthwise, across the front, middle and back of the building. On the left, in front of the building in the drawing was a large red dot to mark where the truck carrying the bomb had sat, fourteen feet from the kerb. Around it were concentric circles indicating the blast waves. The diagram showed that seven columns had collapsed in the front, and only one in the center row: seen from above, the building appeared to have had two bites taken out of it, one larger than the other, on the far left, penetrating almost all the way to the back of the building. This was where the damage was deepest; in the photographs it appeared as an empty, gaping space from ground to roof.

It could be seen here that four of the front columns that had collapsed were on the right of the blast's epicenter, and three on the left. As Partin explained, this raised the question: Why didn't they collapse symmetrically? In the center row also, the two columns that were closest to the epicenter had remained intact, while one farther away had collapsed. According to the laws of physics, General Partin explained, this would have been impossible if there had been only the truck bomb.

The columns in the front row were not all the same size, with the base of every other column rising from a reinforced concrete beam header on the third floor. And moreover, the columns that rose from the ground level had been double the thickness of the others, to carry the additional weight. Two columns that had collapsed on the right were actually farther away from the blast epicenter than the columns in the center row that had survived. In addition, one was a larger one, double the thickness of the others, which made further suspect any notion of only a truck bomb.

General Partin's report said this all meant that there had to have been demolition charges attached to several of the columns. One telltale sign next to the center-row column that had collapsed, he noted, was that much of the sheetrock covering the adjacent columns was intact, while the columns "were not even chipped or scratched." There had to have been three other charges as well in the front row, said Partin.

The thick, reinforced header beam on the third floor—some three by five feet—had broken into three forty-foot sections that tended to be smooth and rounded at the junctures, which Partin said would indicate "a high-energy explosive in contact with that structural member," directly on the base of the columns. This, he said, showed that the charges had actually been placed on the third floor, which raised another question: "You don't just walk in off the street through security with explosives like this."

Furthermore, he added, 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate would have produced a blast wave with a mere 25 to 38 pounds of pressure per square inch on the farthest columns, when the yield strength of the concrete was around 3,500 pounds per square inch. In his opinion, the blast wave from the truck bomb could not have brought down the column in the center row, much less the seventh and eighth columns in the front row, especially the one that was double the thickness. Furthermore, all the columns that collapsed, explained Partin, rather than being "blown into the building," "went straight down," which was "consistent with demolition charges." 

The New American pointed out that although two explosives experts who were queried for the article had said they were in complete agreement with General Partin's analysis, another two, one of whom was a consultant to the government at the Oklahoma bombing site, had disagreed. One (an Army Special Forces officer) gave as an example the Marine barracks in Lebanon, to which General Partin responded, "In the Lebanon barracks bombing, the truck was driven directly under the building, so that the explosion had maximum effectiveness against much lower and much smaller columns." Demolitionists, he pointed out, rarely dealt with the size of explosive charge used in the Oklahoma truck bomb, and didn't know about the effects. They usually used a couple of hundred pounds of explosive in dozens of small charges placed directly on the structure. Just a few feet of air, General Partin explained, would cause the blast wave to drop precipitously and have very little effect on reinforced concrete.

Indeed, he pointed out, this was the reason that precision-guided munitions were so much more effective than ordinary bombs on hardened structures. Much of Partin's work in the Air Force had been running field tests using large-yield bombs, developing such weapons. He had worked on the "smart bombs" that were used in the Persian Gulf War, that burrowed their way inside buildings before exploding, to great effect on the newscasts.

The former Air Force general illustrated his point, explaining that "the entire building remains in Oklahoma City were collapsed with 100-plus relatively small charges inserted into drilled holes in the columns. The total weight of all charges was on the order of 200 pounds." To further support his argument, he pointed out that in the World Trade Center bombing, which was also done with a truck bomb, "the column in the middle of the bombed-out cavity was relatively untouched, although reinforced concrete floors were completely stripped away on several floors above and below the point of the bomb's detonation." This was why in Oklahoma, in the so-called "pit" area behind the two columns closest to the explosion in the center row, the first and second floors were blown out, but not the columns.

Partin also recalled how, in a local Oklahoma City news broadcast on the day of the bombing, an official had said that two other bombs had been found in the building and were in the process of being defused. Later, the government had said these were ATF "training aids," but, noted Partin, if this were so, they would have been clearly marked. Many wondered why live bombs would be stored at all by the ATF in an office building. Questions about ATF behavior continued when it became known that the ATF had been told not to go to work that day. No children of federal agents had been in the day care center. (Although the FBI offices were in another building, some of their children attended this day care center, but they had been told to keep them away that day, according to a woman who knew some of the wives.) At first, the ATF claimed that some of their own had been wounded in the blast, but this had been quickly disproven.

There were more questions as to why there was a day care center in the first place in a government building that housed police agencies, especially this building. Already in 1984, there had been a plot to blow it up, supposedly in retaliation for Gordon Kahl's death. One of the plotters, Richard Wayne Snell, had gone to jail. Interestingly, he was scheduled to be executed in Arkansas on the same day as the Oklahoma bombing. Snell, it was said, had breathed his last breath in the execution chamber shortly after watching the first reports of the bombing on television. For some reason, however, any speculation that there might have been a connection between the bombing and this execution was played down in the media, if it was mentioned at all, while unsubstantiated reports of "Militia ties" continued to be pumped up for all they were worth.

One, most-curious story that appeared soon after the bombing was that then-governor of Oklahoma Frank Keating's brother, Martin Keating, had written a proposal for a book the year before, that involved a group that was planning to blow up that same Alfred P. Murrah building, and there was a character named "Tom McVey." Governor Keating happened to be a former FBI agent and senior Treasury and Justice Department official (who had supervised the Secret Service, Customs and the ATF), and it was said that he had introduced his writer brother to some of his former colleagues in Washington, and they had helped with suggestions for the book. Two other suggestions, it was said, had been removed from the manuscript after they had come true: One was the New York World Trade Center bombing. The book was eventually published in 1996 under the title, The Final Jihad, by an obscure California publisher. It received almost no attention.

Echoing General Partin's efforts to stop the Murrah building from being torn down, Nebraska lawyer John DeCamp and a group of families of victims and survivors, at the same time, had been getting ready to file a motion for an injunction to prevent the demolition, to preserve the evidence—something normally done after a crime. McVeigh's counsel, Stephen Jones, however, had requested that he be allowed to take over this action, and DeCamp had turned over the paperwork to him. To his horror, McVeigh's court-appointed lawyer, after making a perfunctory inspection of the building himself over the weekend, told the government to go ahead with the demolition. They proceeded to begin preparations on Sunday, May 21, before the weekend was over, and before DeCamp could file an injunction on Monday, for the demolition on Tuesday—barely a month after the enormous crime.

Ordinarily, the fact that a lawyer was court-appointed would not have been an issue, but in the case of a high-profile political matter—such as an act of terrorism on this order of magnitude—who that court-appointed lawyer was could make a big difference. When I learned about Jones' transgression concerning the building's demolition, I couldn't help recalling a television interview I had seen immediately after he was appointed, where he had said something to the effect that national security could be a concern with him in the defense of a client. That, coupled with the fact that he had once worked for Richard Nixon's law firm (meaning that he had close ties to Washington and the Establishment), had caused me to think when I heard him at the time that I would not want him representing me in a case where Washington had a political stake in the outcome.

But General Partin's report was not the only damning finger pointed at the government's official account of the Oklahoma bombing. Immediately after the bombing, there had also been considerable confusion over the seismographic data collected at the University of Oklahoma by the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS), which appeared to show two separate explosions, ten seconds apart. To try to clear up this mystery, explained The New American, during the final demolition of the Murrah building, six seismometers had been placed at different distances, to determine whether separate air or ground waves traveling at different speeds could have caused the illusion of two blasts. In a press release put out after the test by the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, on June 1, 1995, titled, "Seismic Records Support One-Blast Theory in Oklahoma City Bombing," federal authorities had stated just that—that there had been the illusion of two blasts. With this press release and subsequent statements, the distant federal agency had caused considerable confusion over what the experts really believed.

Although it was made to appear in this press release that the Oklahoma agency that had made the original seismographs was in agreement with the federal agency, in fact, Dr. Charles Mankin, Director of the OGS, along with the lead scientist he had appointed to investigate the data, Dr. Raymon[d] Brown, said they continued to believe there had been two separate explosions. In an interview, Dr. Brown explained that they were considering five main scenarios for a final report at some unspecified time in the future.

The first three scenarios considered the possibility that there were two shock waves from the same blast traveling at different speeds, which appeared on the seismometer as two events. In the first of these, there would have been waves of different frequencies, which Brown said he didn't see as a possibility. The second scenario envisioned the possibility that the first event was a ground wave and the second an air wave, which Brown said was impossible because it would have had to travel at a supersonic speed to go the distance to their seismometer in ten seconds. The third model considered a phenomenon known as a Rayleigh wave, and the possibility that there was a second Rayleigh wave pushed by an air wave. Brown thought this was implausible because the air wave was felt mostly to the north of the blast, when the OGS seismic station was to the south.

In the two remaining scenarios, the view was taken that the seismic signals, indeed, had registered two separate events. In the first of these, the second event would be due to shock waves coming from the actual collapsing of the building, which, Brown said, was also unlikely. It would mean that the building only began to collapse ten seconds after the explosion. Also, the second signal was shorter, which would mean that the building had taken less time to collapse than the duration of the blast, an impossibility. This left only one scenario, which Brown said he believed was the simplest explanation—two explosions.

During the months that followed, as Timothy McVeigh's trial came and went, I would learn through the Militias and patriot literature, of many more inconsistencies in the government's version of the worst terrorist act ever to take place in the United States. (If General Partin and the University of Oklahoma scientists were correct, Timothy McVeigh's trial, even if he had been involved in the bombing, was a horrible travesty.)

"To get back to the people in Michigan," said Tom, "I met people in the U.S. Militia, Michigan Regiment. It was probably late 1993. I looked at the paperwork and talked to them, and they seemed to be on the same wavelength with what I was doing, and I brought that back and we formed what is now known as the New York Regiment."

©2000 Nita Renfrew