McVeigh is gone, but 'hate groups' still with us
By MORRIS DEES and MARK POTOK
TIMOTHY McVeigh is no martyr and is not going to become one. Judge Richard Matsch's refusal to stay McVeigh's execution, which took place on Monday, may for a time add some fuel to the far-right theory that McVeigh is merely a pawn in an expansive conspiracy led by a group of John Does that may even have had government involvement, that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing was orchestrated by the government and that Tim McVeigh was merely a pawn. But only a small fringe will cling to this theory for long.
After all, McVeigh effectively dispelled this charge recently by admitting that he bombed the building in 1995. He did it, he said, with little help from anyone. He said there was no John Doe.
He had done an almost masterful job of manipulating the press coverage of his pending execution. But his timing was a bit off: His confession, unfortunately for him, came before the revelation of withheld Federal Bureau of Investigation documents which might otherwise have spurred a new trial.
The militia movement did grow after McVeigh set off his fertilizer bomb. There were about 220 militia and antigovernment groups in 1995, a number that skyrocketed to more than 850 by the end of 1996.
This was partly due to the movement's momentum before the bombing. Another factor may have been the belief circulating among militia groups that government agents had planted the bomb as a way to justify antiterrorism legislation. No less than a retired Air Force general has promoted the theory that, in addition to McVeigh's truck bomb, there were bombs inside the building.
Had McVeigh claimed credit and used his trial to make a political statement about Ruby Ridge and Waco, he might have had more success at achieving martyrdom. Instead he remained silent, pleaded not guilty and compelled the government to present a case against him.
In the last few years, the militia movement has practically evaporated. Today there are fewer than 200 such groups, most of them small and fragmented. Only recently a once-robust Michigan militia, which in 1995 claimed thousands of members, announced its demise.
Over time Timothy McVeigh's crime -- murdering 168 people -- became too much even for all but the most rabid of militia members to excuse. When most militia followers saw the picture of the bleeding, dying baby in the fireman's arms, they were repelled.
It's one thing to shoot pine stumps on weekend maneuvers, but quite another to kill babies in the name of freedom. McVeigh's idea that the death of innocents was merely "collateral damage" was the militias' collective undoing.
Are we any safer now that the militia movement has faded? Probably not. The radical fringe's willingness to resort to violence has long been with us. In the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, the anti-Semitic Posse Comitatus raged through the Midwest. In the late 1980s and early 1990s neo-Nazi skinhead groups grew, and they were responsible for a series of murders around the country.
Today's "hate groups" -- smaller, more Nazified, more revolutionary -- are perhaps even more dangerous than some of the groups in the militia movement. So while the particular movement that spawned Timothy McVeigh is dwindling, the threat of domestic terrorism remains very much alive.
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Dees, co-author of Gathering Storm: America's Militia Threat, is the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala. Potok is editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.