Botching The Big Case

Missing documents surface, McVeigh's execution is delayed, and the FBI is left scrambling to explain its latest fiasco

Even war criminals usually go to the trouble of claiming some moral justification for their crimes, some moral equivalence with their enemies. Timothy McVeigh argued that the arrogance of the Federal Government, the government that wanted to take his guns and cramp his rights, was so vast and so dangerous that he needed to blow up a building, start a revolution. "I did it for the larger good," he claimed, and if innocent people had to die, well, that's what happens in war. He called the 19 dead children "collateral damage," and bragged that even if he is executed, he still...

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