February 1, 2021
BEEN THERE; DONE THAT:
Merrick Garland's 'flawless' work in Oklahoma City crucial in white supremacy fight: Those who know the attorney general nominee from the 1995 case say the US could have no better ally in the battle against extremism (Tom McCarthy, 1 Feb 2021, The Guardian)
The message was a stark one. "America is in serious decline," the person wrote. "Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that! But it might."It reads like an entry on a message board popular with the insurrectionists who broke into the US Capitol on 6 January - expressing a sentiment at once shocking and shockingly routine in 2021 America.But the words are from 1992 America, written in a letter to a newspaper by Timothy McVeigh, who three years later would carry out the Oklahoma City bombing, the deadliest incident of domestic terrorism in US history. An anti-government, white supremacist army veteran, McVeigh set off a truck bomb underneath a day care facility in a federal building, killing 168 people including 19 children.The attack spawned the largest criminal case in US history. With conspiracy theories threatening the public trust even in those relatively innocent times for the truth, and the contemporaneous murder trial of OJ Simpson having fed widespread disillusionment with the American justice system, federal prosecutors knew that they would be working under a microscope.But the lead prosecutor dispatched by Washington to Oklahoma a day after the bombing, Merrick Garland, demonstrated a particularly honed sense for what the investigation required and how to deliver it, according to former colleagues.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2021 12:00 AM