NOT OK

"Where the hell was the ATF, I want to know. All fifteen or seventeen of their employees survived..." she said, refering to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the government agency primarily responsible for the Waco massacre of two years earlier. It turned out they were all away that day.

On January 9 1998, Niki Deutchman explained why she and the rest of the jury had been unable to sentence Terry Nichols: "I think that there are probably other people out there. I think the government dropped the ball".

You can't fool all of the the people all of the time.

At the end of the Nichols trial, the media found relatives of the victims who were disappointed in the jury's lenient conclusion. They want revenge, and should have it, was the unstated message. "One purpose of punishment is to civilize the wholesome... desire for vengeance against the vicious", pontificated one columnist. The media have ignored Oklahomans like Edye Smith, who, more interested in truth than revenge, co-operated with Timothy McVeigh's defence team in a dogged attempt to find those responsible.

One of the most transparent tricks used by the Clinton administration to cover up his government's foreknowledge of the bombing is to amalgamate all conspiracy theorists together. They have had a more difficult job dealing with Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, author of The Secret Life of Bill Clinton,  Regnery Publishing, Washington DC, 1997. The best they have been able to do is to claim that his employer, the London Daily Telegraph, is a "tabloid". This journalist has written the most effective exposé of the Clinton regime yet. It starts with a carefully-documented account of how government agencies, the FBI and the BATF, knew about, and had some connection with, the bombing.

Evans-Pritchard shows how the prosecution manipulated the Timothy McVeigh trial to exclude the overwhelming evidence that others, known to the government, were involved, and asks why. The answer appears to be that the cause of the bombing was a government sting operation which went wrong. The FBI and BATF, apparently working against each other, hired agents to entrap neo-Nazis by persuading them to build a bomb to avenge Waco and other issues. But why did the government let it go wrong? According to Evans-Pritchard's evidence, so many of the leading fascists in the USA are government agents provocateurs, it makes you wonder how much of a movement there would be without them. It certainly suggests that, if the police had not tried to provoke the neo-Nazis, the bomb would not have been planted.

There was a bomb squad in Oklahoma City the morning of the bombing -- why weren't McVeigh and his two or three accomplices arrested? It may be going to far to claim that the government deliberately allowed the bombing to go ahead, causing the deaths of dozens of its employees and their children, in order to strengthen the state and in particular Clinton's election chances. There are conspiracy theories. There are cock-up theories. This appears to have been a cocked-up conspiracy. But they've also cocked up the cover-up. Millions of Americans now know there's a few pieces missing in the rubble of Oklahoma City. The mainstream media are always ready to do for Clinton what Paula Jones wouldn't do. To find a more critical perspective, click here.