If you read post 9, Howye said it was easy to build and to pull off. I disagreed. It was a massive bomb.
Timothy McVeigh was not part of the Michigan Militia or any other militia.
There is, however, ample evidence that Terry Nichols, the other conspirator in the bombing, was involved with Muslim groups in the Philippines. Two of his wives were Filipino and he had ties with terrorist groups in Mindanao. Nobody ever talks about this though. It’s a forgotten element of the bombing.
True, but his political views were pretty clearly in-line with the Militia movement, and he wrote and talked about them extensively both before and after the bombing, and during his imprisonment. If you think he was some sort of secret Islamic terrorist, then you have to believe he went to extra-ordinary lengths to make it seem like he was a right-wing extremist. And even if you think that’s plausible, its pretty difficult to think of why an Islamic terrorist would bother to pretend to be a right-wing nut. Usually such people want people to know their motivations, there isn’t much point otherwise.
According to wikipedia, his first wife was named Lana Walsh, and following the link from wikipedia, she was apparently raised on a dairy farm in Michigan.
His second wife was a mail-order bride from the Phillipines. She and Nichols apparently visited her home country frequently. McVeigh’s defense lawyer apparently tried to float a story that Nichols was really making the trips to meet with an Islamic terrorist, but he appears to be the only source for that, and he talked up several different conspiracy theories while trying to defend McVeigh, so I don’t think I’d put much stock in it.
And again, if Nichols was really an Islamic terrorist, its pretty bizarre that he spent the years prior to the bombing trying really hard to give people the impression that he was an anti-gov’t tax-protester.
I don’t think they were Islamic terrorists, just that there was a connection there (which is more believable than a connection to Iraq.) They were against the US government and they hated the Jews. This means they were natural allies.
A lot of ignorance gets spread about McVeigh. The two biggest falsehoods were that he was a militiamen and that he acted in the name of Christ. McVeigh did take last rites on his deathbed but he was a lifelong atheist and at the time of his bombing he was not affiliated in any way with Christianity or any other religion.
They may have been “natural allies”, but they weren’t actual allies. And even the ‘natural allies’ thing is a stretch, they were both “enemies of the US gov’t”, but that didn’t really mean the same thing to both parties: McVeigh wanted the Federal government to tax him less and not regulate guns, Al-Queda wanted the US gov’t to stay out of the Middle East.
I agree, but the evidence McVeigh was in league with various radical Christian groups is stronger then that Nichols was nipping off to meet with Islamic terrorists. Which isn’t to say that I think McVeigh was secretly in league with radical Christians, but that both theories are equally silly.
Doesn’t seem all that hard to me. From Wiki:
You couldn’t whip it up in a few minutes, but for two men who were reasonably fit I don’t think it’s all that big of a job. Would have been a lot of carrying and grunt work, sure.
-XT
And if you don’t put them on, we got an alley and a whole lot of time to fill.