Killing Tim McVeigh

I feel some real ambivalence regarding the death penalty. On one hand, the execution of a brutal murderer satisfies some dark visceral instinct within me. On the other, we've seen all too many cases of botched prosecutions or even worse, deliberate prosecutorial malpractice, wherein the State with deliberate malice aforethought, convicts an innocent.

McVeigh is no innocent. As recent events reveal, he's an intelligent and very articulate individual, who at a minimum, participated in what could be called the most violent act of domestic U.S. anti-State terrorism in the entire 20th Century. The full story of the Oklahoma City bombing will probably never be known, but McVeigh has admitted his part.

So now, he will die. A State executioner will inject a lethal cocktail to both stop his heart and still his breath. Supposedly a more u2018humane' alternative to frying him with electricity or forcing him to breathe cyanide gas.

What I'm forced to observe is this: Timothy McVeigh is a piker when it comes to killing.

The real champions of death are the State in all of its myriad forms.

Count the bodies. Literally hundreds of millions of individuals, both military and civilian were slaughtered by the State in the 20th Century. World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and The Gulf War (which still continues) are just a partial listing of the parade of death in which the leaders of the United States have embroiled its citizens in.

The atrocities committed by the Communist/Socialist regimes were even worse. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others of their ilk engaged in open warfare against the citizens of their lands, piling up dead human flesh in mountains so high that the stench must have surely offended the very nostrils of God.

Here in the dawn of the 21st Century, the picture being painted does not look much better. We have regional wars being waged almost everywhere, many of which hold the promise of erupting into major multinational conflicts.

In the Middle East, the Israelis continue to make war against Palestinians and of course Palestinians respond in kind. Israel, once held out as a beacon of hope, has become a symbol of oppression for millions of Islamic peoples worldwide. The Palestinians fight back with whatever pitiful weapons they have at their command, including their children.

In the former Communist State of Yugoslavia we have levels of ethnic hatred that certainly rival and perhaps surpass those in the Middle East. Added to the mix, we have United States troops, various forces from the EU States and military from the former U.S.S.R. The killing there won't stop.

Speaking of the former U.S.S.R., may I mention Chechnya? Since early September Russia has been carrying out a brutal war against Chechnya, first by launching air-strikes and then by sending thousands of troops into the republic. Troops, armor and heavy artillery, backed by ground attack aircraft and helicopter gunships have poured into the Chechen territory claiming to wipe out the "terrorists". However according to independent sources over 10,000 innocent civilians including women, children and elderly people have been killed so far in air-cum-artillery campaign. Which of course has the potential to involve Afghanistan and Pakistan if it widens.

There are dozens of other State-sponsored killing fields that I could mention. Let me end with one that right now is bidding to become the United States' new Vietnam. Columbia.

Torn by civil war, it is quickly becoming another chapter in history of U.S. meddling in Latin America. U.S. "advisers" are on the ground, training the armed forces; CIA officials are sharing "intelligence" with a drug-corrupted military that has one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere. According to Amnesty International, more than 1,000 civilians were killed in 1998 by Colombian security forces or paramilitary groups. However, the leftist Colombian narco-guerillas are no better. If history proves true, leftists almost always trump rightists when it comes to killing, should they gain full power.

Let me close by bringing this back to McVeigh. He did a horrible thing. The State in all its awful majesty will now poison him.

When will we poison the State?

    May 10, 2001