Come Clean Now With Any Secrets

Timothy McVeigh has been convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing and sentenced to death. In his closing plea to the jury to spare McVeigh’s life, defense lawyer Stephen Jones acknowledged his client’s guilt but suggested that he and McVeigh know “secrets” about the bombing which, should the bomber be executed, might perish with him.

Jones may well have been concocting yet another smoke screen; he has zigzagged around the truth before, debunking and then claiming authorship of the infamous leaked “confession.” Or he may truly be aware of details crucial to a full and final understanding of the worst mass murder in U.S. history. Certainly McVeigh knows.

Now that the trial has ended, it’s time for Jones and his client to talk. If they have “secrets,” let’s hear them. The stakes are too high--for our country, and for the thousands of Oklahomans who are still healing--to maintain a coy silence. We all deserve a complete and candid explanation of this monstrous act.

The Murrah Building bombing in my city was the most direct and costly internal assault on our nation since the assassination of President Kennedy. As with that earlier tragic event, a witch’s brew of exotic conspiracy theories is already swirling around the case. Those often-bizarre allegations will only grow with time.

Most Americans, like most Oklahomans, do not believe that McVeigh was enmeshed in weird, complex foreign conspiracies. We have confidence that the massive investigation of this crime has identified those involved and that future trials will lead to final justice. Those who imagine outlandish plots, especially the sad group intent on somehow implicating the government in blowing up its own building, have no real evidence and few followers.

But that does not mean that McVeigh and Jones should continue to stonewall.

More than three decades after the Kennedy assassination, there are still Americans who wonder. Gerald Posner’s masterful study of that case should have laid those doubts to rest for thinking readers, but the very fact that Posner found it necessary to write his book implicating Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone assassin makes it even more necessary that we know all the facts surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing.

There are striking parallels between Oswald and McVeigh. Both had extensive histories of expressing virulent anti-government rhetoric. Both keyed their hatred to a specific event. For Oswald, the motive was President Kennedy’s efforts to topple the communist regime in Cuba, which Oswald supported. For McVeigh, the triggering motive was the tragic end to the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco two years before the Murrah Building bombing.

Oswald acted alone, McVeigh apparently involved Terry Nichols, who will be tried later, and Michael and Lori Fortier, who testified as government witnesses.

We know the motives. We know much about the means used by Oswald and McVeigh to carry out their despicable acts. But we have an advantage in the bombing case: McVeigh is alive.

Reporters who covered the Denver trial noted that McVeigh seemed like a man who has completed his mission. He sat like a prisoner of war, they wrote, seemingly immune to the tragic accounts of survivors and those who lost family members on April 19, 1995.

Those people apparently meant nothing to him. Certainly his actions on that fatal day were as cold and callous as any in American history. So it should require no struggle for him to relate the final details, to tell us how and why and where and when, to fill in the gaps that even the most thorough investigation cannot reveal without a full confession.

The trial is over. The sentence has been imposed. Yes, there will be further legal action, including appeals and a probable second trial on local charges in Oklahoma. But the key verdict came on June 2, when 12 jurors in Denver found McVeigh guilty on all 11 counts related to the bombing. On Friday, they sealed his fate. Now he can tell it all.

Because 168 of his fellow Americans died on that day. Because hundreds more were maimed. Because thousands still grieve and wonder, while some are tormented by doubt. Because truth should be the ultimate goal of our justice system. Because the innocent victims of this crime deserve to hear that truth.

The time to tell the truth is now. Oklahoma is waiting.