Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 17, 1995 TAG: 9505170096
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: OKLAHOMA CITY LENGTH: Medium
He has told them that the federal building in Oklahoma City was chosen as a target because it housed so many government offices and because it was more architecturally vulnerable than other federal buildings, the two people said.
McVeigh also has said he did not know there was a day care center in the building and was surprised when he learned from newspapers that children had died in the bombing, according to these two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
McVeigh has told them he was not ``directly involved'' with armed civilian paramilitary groups, one person said. In describing his life over the last year or two, he has mentioned ``relationships and acquaintances with a few people who have similar views,'' primarily people he met at gun shows, the person said.
McVeigh is being held at the Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Okla., on charges of carrying out the bombing, which occurred on April 19 and killed 167 people, including 19 children. His lawyer, Stephen Jones, has said he will plead not guilty.
The people who have talked with McVeigh said that although he had acknowledged responsibility for the bombing, he did not believe he had committed a crime.
Jones filed a motion on Tuesday seeking to delay the demolition of the federal building so that investigators for the defense can look for evidence that might help McVeigh's case.
The defense, which has hired investigators and begun interviewing people in Kansas, Oklahoma and elsewhere, will try to show that the government's evidence is weak or circumstantial, say people familiar with the McVeigh team's legal strategy. The defense team will try to show that government witness accounts are contradictory or implausible, and attempt to discredit testimony from witnesses who claim to have seen McVeigh at the federal building and in other places before or after the bombing.
The people who have talked to McVeigh in jail said he had indicated that planning for the bombing had begun at least nine months ago and that Oklahoma City was one of several cities that had been considered in a swath of the country stretching from Denver to Kansas City, from Texas to South Dakota. They said that McVeigh had been in Oklahoma City at least once before the bombing and had looked at the building but that he had not gone inside.
Federal officials have said that the building was particularly vulnerable to damage from an explosion because of its large glass windows, its nine floors that could collapse upon each other and the absence of any courtyard or plaza separating the building from the street, where a truck carrying a bomb could be parked. McVeigh's statements to those who have talked with him suggest that these factors greatly influenced the choice of the building.
The people who have talked with McVeigh said he had been motivated by anger at the federal government's actions in the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, and the 1992 killing of the wife and son of a white supremacist, Randy Weaver, during federal agents' siege of the Weaver family's home in Idaho.
But he was also motivated, they said, by a more general hostility toward the government, a sentiment that seemed to take shape toward the end of his years in the Army and might have been fueled by his inability to get a well-paying job when he left the military at the end of 1991.
``There's nothing in particular, one certain event, that happens to set off this extreme anger or resentment to the system,'' said one of the people who has talked with him. ``It is a growing resentment for the people running the government.''
As a result, they said, McVeigh explained that the bombing had not been specifically directed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, some of whose agents in Oklahoma City participated in the government's siege at Waco. Rather, the purpose of the bombing was to make targets of as many federal agencies as possible, according to the two sources.
McVeigh, they said, has talked in jail about the significance of the date April 19, the day of the bombing. April 19 also was the date of the FBI tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound, which came to a fiery end with more than 80 people dead in 1993. It also was the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord, where in 1775 the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.
In interviews, the people who have talked with McVeigh provided only a few details of the bombing plot. For example, they did not say how the plot had been financed, how many people had been involved or exactly how and where the bomb had been put together.
by CNB