The Cruelest Month

Two years ago I had just started a little guest-blogging for Patterico, and the ten-year anniversary of the Murrah Building bombing came up. The post I wrote about it is here, and for me, anyway, it was worth re-reading. Here's an excerpt; the bolding is new:

I wish I was alone here. I wish this was just an Oklahoma thing and nobody else really understood the insult and the grief this kind of attack leaves on your psyche. But I’m afraid you all do understand now, after another fine clear morning in 2001, when we were all New Yorkers. That old scar for us Okies was torn anew, and it’s still raw and aching.

...

We’ve not forgotten. There are terrorists in Oklahoma and across the US and around the world, terrorists who want to turn our cities into giant slumped puddles of concrete and steel, with our sons and daughters and our deer-hunting buddies buried and bleeding within them. Evil stalks the world like a roaring lion, seeking whom it may devour. My patience for those who pretend otherwise ran out long ago.

There's one important thing that I think has changed since I wrote that two years back: Khaled Sheikh Mohammed appeared in court and confessed to his crimes. He was running Islamic terror out of the Phillippines when the Murrah building was being planned, and while Terry Nichols visited the Phillippines. Now, KSM confessed to a great list of crimes--more than enough to justify his execution. Some pundits complained that he was just making things up, taking credit for acts of terror he was never actually involved in. I don't see any reason to believe that, but no matter: the point I'm driving at here is that KSM's confession to acts of terror all over the world made no mention of Terry Nichols or Oklahoma City.

Probably the closest thing to what might be considered a "conspiracy theory" I believe in--believed in--was that Islamic terrorists were somehow tied in to the OKC bombing. I won't say I even "believed" in it, but merely that I was very receptive to arguments about it. It was not without reason; having followed the case carefully I knew there were gaps in the FBI investigation that might have missed such a contact. As I pointed out in the old post linked above, ten years later they were still discovering explosives in a crawl space under Terry Nichols' house. Meanwhile reasonably credible voices like Jayna Davis and some other folks I knew laid out the case for Islamist involvement. KSM seemed a prime suspect; he had, after all, been involved in another fertilizer bomb attack in the U.S. two years before the Murrah Building attack--at the World Trade Center.

But he didn't mention OKC. While it's possible Terry Nichols could have met someone else entirely in the Phillippines, someone we haven't heard of at all, KSM's organizational skills and MO suggest that if Nichols went there to talk shop, KSM was the man to see. And it didn't get mentioned.

It's still possible that there are conspirators, foreign or domestic, we don't know about involved in the OKC bombing, and I would still consider new evidence about it. But why wouldn't KSM have talked about it? Why no confirmation of this plot amid the dozens he did cop to? I think it makes the whole theory unwieldy to the point that I just can't put much stock in it anymore.

As hard as it is to accept, it is inescapable that in the modern world, just one or two people can carry out acts of repulsive violence on a massive scale. It is one of the scariest aspects of liberal democracy--that we must trust our fellow man with his freedom, in spite of constant reminders of the horrid ways we find to abuse it.