The Timothy McVeigh Tapes

While grotesque in appearance the biography of Timothy McVeigh’s convictions through hundreds of hours of recorded cassette tapes on MSNBC offers a telling expository narrative of a post traumatic Desert Storm veteran. Skilled and cunning McVeigh was indoctrinated by non other than the American armed forces during Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. After viscerally living a life of combat against terrorist forces, McVeigh found despondency returning to the continental United States. A mundane life of daytime television and fast food could not meet the expectations of a tried and true war veteran. After suffering a year’s tenure of depression and post- traumatic stress, McVeigh in a futile attempt began to conceive his own vigil based upon the mistreatment of the Branch Dividian followers of David Koresh at the Mount Carmel property near Waco, Texas. In McVeigh’s eyes the 168 human beings murdered during his bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building were martyrs intended to represent the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims persecuted by an increasingly fascist American government. Posthumously his own execution was a Socratic touché vehemently objecting to his own hypocritical indoctrination during the United States military’s war against Iraq. It was a plea for peace.