Source:
The Guardian - UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardian/

Writer applauds executed killer McVeigh and his Revere-like message that
'the Feds are coming'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4240668,00.html

Special report: Timothy McVeigh
http://www.guardian.co.uk/mcveigh/

Fiachra Gibbons Arts correspondent
Friday August 17, 2001

The writer Gore Vidal yesterday compared the executed Oklahoma bomber
Timothy McVeigh to Paul Revere, the hero of American independence.

In a withering address at the Edinburgh book festival, the liberal novelist
and elder statesman of the Gore political dynasty, said the former soldier
decorated for bravery in the Gulf war wanted to send out a warning that the
government had been bought by corporate America and "its secret police, the
FBI, were out of control. What McVeigh was saying was, 'The Feds are
coming, the Feds are coming' "

In his strongest identification yet with the man who confessed to blowing
up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people in
retaliation for the FBI's "slaughter at Waco", Vidal described him as a
"Kipling hero" with an "overdeveloped sense of justice" who did what he did
because he was inflamed by the massacre, the FBI's subsequent cover-up, and
the way it "had shredded the bill of rights and the constitution. He was
the man who would be king."

Vidal, whom McVeigh asked to witness his execution in June after the pair
corresponded for three years, insisted McVeigh did not actually carry out
the bombing, and hinted he was now close to revealing the names of those
who did.

"I am about to drop another shoe. I have been working with a researcher
who knows at least five of the people involved in the making of the bomb
and its detonation. It may well be that McVeigh did not do it. In fact, I
am sure he didn't do it. But when he found out he was going to be the
patsy, he did something psychologically very strange. He decided to grab
all credit for it himself, because he had no fear of death."

Vidal maintained this was because "McVeigh saw himself as John Brown of
Kansas", the anti-slavery campaigner who was executed after leading a raid
into the south which sparked the American civil war.

Vidal alleged that the FBI not only knew about the plot, it was involved in
it. Having infiltrated the rightwing militia group that planned it, it did
nothing because it wanted to pressure President Clinton into pushing
through draconian anti-terrorist legislation he was refusing to sign.
"Within a week of the bombing, Clinton signed it for 'the protection of the
state and of persons', using the exact language that Adolf Hitler used
after the Reichstag fire of 1933."

America was in the grip of what he called "a revolutionary situation"
because wealth had become concentrated in the hands of only 1% of the
population. "The truth is that 80% are not doing well, and many of those
are farmers out in the mid-west who have been driven off their land by big
business. They are the backbone of the militia movement. Many of them are
as crazed as you can find. But they number over 4m, 300,000 of which are
active."

Vidal revealed that having had his last meal of mint ice-cream with
chocolate sauce, McVeigh spent his last hours watching the Coen Brothers'
film Fargo on a black and white TV. "It's a great film but bloody, a body
is shredded and suchlike, and not quite what he wanted to see, poor fellow."

He saved his greatest venom for Janet Reno, the attorney general during the
52-day Waco siege, for "persecuting a perfectly harmless bunch of religious
nuts" and for presiding over the "lies and cover-up" that followed
it. "Her mother was a very famous alligator wrestler in Florida, a family
profession she herself should have pursued."