Oklahoma City bombing Totally Explained

Everything about The Oklahoma City Bombing totally explained

The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist attack on April 19 1995 aimed at the U.S. government in which the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed in an office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The attack claimed 168 lives and left over 800 injured. Until the September 11, 2001 attacks, it was the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil. Within days after the bombing, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were both arrested for their roles in the bombing. Investigators determined that McVeigh and Nichols were sympathizers of a militia movement and that their motive was to retaliate against the government's handling of the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents (the bombing occurred on the anniversary of the Waco incident). McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001. Nichols was sentenced to life in prison. A third conspirator, Michael Fortier, who testified against McVeigh and Nichols, was sentenced to twelve years in prison for failing to warn the U.S. government. As with other large scale terrorist attacks, conspiracy theories dispute the official claims and point to additional perpetrators involved.
The attacks led to widespread rescue efforts from local, state, and federal and worldwide agencies, along with considerable donations from across the country. As a result of the destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the U.S. government passed legislation designed to increase protection around federal buildings and to thwart future terrorist attacks. Under these measures, law enforcement has since foiled over fifty domestic terrorism plots. On April 19, 2000, the Oklahoma City National Memorial was dedicated on the site of the Murrah Federal Building to commemorate the victims of the bombing and annual remembrance services are held at the time of the explosion.

Terror

Prelude

On April 15, 1995 Timothy McVeigh rented a Ryder truck in Junction City, Kansas under the alias Robert D. Kling. On April 16, he drove to Oklahoma City with fellow conspirator Terry Nichols where he parked a getaway vehicle several blocks away from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. After removing the license plate from the car, the two men returned to Kansas. On April 17 and April 18, the men loaded 108 fifty-pound (22 kg) bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, three fifty-five gallon (208 l) drums of liquid nitromethane, several crates of explosive Tovex sausage, seventeen bags of ANFO, and spools of shock tube and cannon fuse into the truck. The two then drove to Geary County State Lake where they mixed the chemicals together using plastic buckets and a bathroom scale. McVeigh then added a dual-fuse ignition system that he could access through the truck's front cab. McVeigh also included more explosives on the driver's side of the cargo bay, which he could ignite with his Glock pistol if the primary fuses failed. After finishing the construction of the truck-bomb, the two men separated. Nichols returned to Herington, Kansas; McVeigh drove the truck to Oklahoma City. At dawn on April 19, as he drove toward the Murrah Federal building, McVeigh carried with him an envelope whose contents included pages from The Turner Diaries, a fictional account of modern-day revolutionary activists who rise up against the government and create a full scale race war. He wore a printed T-shirt with the motto of the state of Virginia, Sic semper tyrannis ("Thus ever to tyrants", which was shouted by John Wilkes Booth immediately after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) and "The tree of liberty must be refreshed time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" (from Thomas Jefferson). As the truck approached the building, at 8:57 a.m. CST, McVeigh lit the five-minute fuse. Three minutes later, still a block away, he lit the two-minute fuse. He parked the Ryder truck in a drop-off zone situated under the building's day care center, locked the vehicle, and headed to his getaway vehicle.

Bombing

At 9:02 a.m. CST, the Ryder truck, containing about 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, nitromethane, and diesel fuel mixture, detonated in front of the north side of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The blast destroyed a third of the building and created a thirty-foot (9 m) wide, eight-foot (2.4 m) deep crater on NW 5th Street next to the building. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings in a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars around the site, and shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings (the broken glass alone accounted for 5% of the death total and 69% of the injuries outside the Murrah Federal building). The destruction of the buildings left several hundred people homeless and shut down multiple offices in downtown Oklahoma City. and could be heard and felt up to fifty-five miles (89 km) away. Seismometers at the Omniplex Museum in Oklahoma City (4.3 miles/7 kilometers away) and in Norman, Oklahoma (16.1 miles/26 kilometers away) recorded the blast as measuring approximately 3.0 on the Richter scale.

Arrests

Within 90 minutes of the explosion, McVeigh was arrested. He was traveling north out of Oklahoma City on Interstate 35 near Perry in Noble County, when an Oklahoma State Trooper stopped him for driving his yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis without a license plate. The arrest was for having a concealed weapon. Later that day, McVeigh was linked to the bombing via the Vehicle identification number (VIN) of an axle from the destroyed Ryder truck that had been rented under his alias name, Robert Kling. After a court hearing on the gun charges, but before McVeigh was released, federal agents took him into custody as they continued their investigation into the bombing.
Federal agents then searched for Nichols, a friend of McVeigh. Two days after the bombing, Nichols learned that FBI investigators were looking for him, and he turned himself in. After a nine-hour interrogation, he was formally held in federal custody until his trial for involvement in the bombing.
Ibrahim Ahmad, a Jordanian-American traveling from his home in Oklahoma City to visit family in Jordan was also arrested in what was described as an "initial dragnet". Due to his background, the media initially was concerned that Middle Eastern terrorists were behind the attack. Further investigation, however, cleared Ahmad in the bombing.

Casualties

At the end of the day of the bombing, twenty people were confirmed dead, including six children, with over a hundred injured. The toll eventually reached 168 confirmed dead, not including an unmatched leg that might be from a possible, unidentified 169th victim. Of these, 160 were killed in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, four people in the Athenian Building, one woman in a parking lot across the street, a man and woman in the Oklahoma Water Resources building, and a rescue worker struck in the head by debris. Nineteen of the victims were children, including fifteen who were in the America's Kids Day Care Center. The bodies of all 168 victims were identified at a temporary morgue set up at the scene. Twenty-four people, including sixteen specialists, used full-body X-rays, dental examinations, fingerprinting, blood tests, and DNA testing to identify the bodies.

Response and relief

Rescue efforts

At 9:03:25 a.m. CST, the first of over 1,800 9-1-1 calls related to the bombing was received by Emergency Medical Services Authority (EMSA). By that time, EMSA ambulances and members of the police and firefighters were already headed to the scene, having heard the blast. Nearby citizens, who had also witnessed or heard the blast, arrived to assist the victims and emergency workers. Immediate assistance also came from 465 members of the Oklahoma National Guard, who arrived within the hour to provide security, and from members of the Department of Civil Emergency Management. Victims were sent to every hospital in the area. By the end of the day, 153 victims had been treated at St. Anthony Hospital, eight blocks from the blast, over 70 at Presbyterian, 41 at University, and 18 at Children's. In an effort to recover additional bodies, 100 to 350 tons of rubble were removed from the site each day until April 29. More than a month after the bombing, at 7:01 a.m. on May 23, the Murrah Federal building was demolished. For several days after the building's demolition, trucks hauled 800 tons of debris a day away from the site. Some of the debris was used as evidence in the conspirators' trials, incorporated into parts of memorials, donated to local schools, and sold to raise funds for relief efforts.

Humanitarian aid

The national humanitarian response was immediate and, in some cases, even overwhelming. Rescue workers received large amounts of donated goods such as wheelbarrows, bottled water, rain gear, and even football helmets. The sheer number of donated goods caused logistical and inventory control problems until drop-off centers were set up to accept and sort the goods. Requests for blood donations were met by local residents Of the 9,000 units of blood donated to the victims, only 131 units were used, the rest saved in blood banks.

Federal and state government aid

At 9:45 a.m. CST, Governor Frank Keating declared a state of emergency and ordered all non-essential workers located in the Oklahoma City area to be released from their duties for their safety.

Children terrorized

In the wake of the bombing, the national media seized upon the fact that 19 of the victims had been children. Schools across the country were dismissed early and ordered closed. A photograph of firefighter Chris Fields emerging from the rubble with infant Baylee Almon, who later died in a nearby hospital, was reprinted worldwide and became a symbol of the attack. The images and thoughts of children dying terrorized many children who, as demonstrated by later research, showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, showed concern about how children were reacting to the bombing. They requested that aides talk to child care specialists about how to talk to the children regarding the bombing. President Clinton spoke to the nation three days after the bombing, saying: "I don't want our children to believe something terrible about life and the future and grownups in general because of this awful thing...most adults are good people who want to protect our children in their childhood and we're going to get through this". On the Saturday after the bombing, April 22, the Clintons gathered children of employees of federal agencies that had offices in the Murrah Building, and in a live nationwide television and radio broadcast, addressed their concerns.

Media coverage

Hundreds of news trucks and members of the press arrived at the site to cover the story. The press immediately noticed that the bombing took place on the second anniversary of the Waco incident. Some responded to these reports by attacking Muslims and people of Arab descent.
As the rescue effort wound down, the media interest shifted to the investigation, arrests, and trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and on the search for an additional suspect named "John Doe 2". Several witnesses had claimed to see the second suspect with McVeigh who didn't resemble Nichols.

Trials and sentencing of the conspirators

The FBI led the official investigation, known as OKBOMB, with Weldon L. Kennedy acting as Special Agent in charge. It was the nation's largest criminal case in history, with FBI agents conducting 28,000 interviews, amassing 3.5 tons of evidence, and collecting nearly one billion pieces of information. The investigation led to the separate trials and convictions of McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier.

Timothy McVeigh

The United States was represented by a team of prosecutors, led by Joseph Hartzler. In his opening statement, Hartzler outlined McVeigh's motivations and the evidence against him. McVeigh's motivation, he said, was hatred of the government, which began during his tenure in the Army as he read The Turner Diaries, and grew through the increase in taxes and the passage of the Brady Bill, and grew further with the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents. The prosecution called 137 witnesses, including Michael Fortier, Michael's wife Lori Fortier, and McVeigh's sister, Jennifer McVeigh, all of whom testified on McVeigh's hatred of the government and demonstrated desire to take militant action against it. Both Fortiers testified that McVeigh had told them of his plans to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building. Michael revealed how McVeigh had chosen the date and Lori testified that she created the false identification card that McVeigh used to rent the Ryder truck.
In his trial, whose venue had been moved from Oklahoma City to Denver, Colorado, McVeigh was represented by a defense counsel team of six principal attorneys led by Stephen Jones. According to Linder, McVeigh wanted Jones to present a "necessity defense"––which would argue that he was in "imminent danger" from the government (that his bombing was intended to prevent future crimes by the government, such as the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents). Although the defense argued for a reduced sentence of life imprisonment, McVeigh was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection at a U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11, 2001. The execution was televised on closed-circuit television so that the relatives of the victims could witness his death.

Terry Nichols

Terry Nichols stood trial twice. He was first tried by the federal government in 1997 and found guilty of conspiring to build a weapon of mass destruction and of eight counts of involuntary manslaughter of federal officers. After he received the sentence on June 4, 1998 of life-without-parole, the State of Oklahoma in 2000 sought a death-penalty conviction on 161 counts of first-degree murder. On May 26, 2004 the jury found him guilty on all charges, but deadlocked on the issue of sentencing him to death. Presiding Judge Steven W. Taylor then determined the sentence of 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. He is currently held in the ADX Florence Federal Prison.
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Michael Fortier

Though Michael Fortier was considered an accomplice and co-conspirator, he agreed to testify against McVeigh in exchange for a modest sentence and immunity for his wife.

Others

No "John Doe #2" was ever identified, nothing conclusive was ever reported regarding the owner of the missing leg, and the government never openly investigated anyone else in conjunction with the bombing. Though the defense teams in both McVeigh's and Nichols trials tried to suggest that others were involved, Judge Steven W. Taylor, who presided over the Nichols trial, found no credible, relevant, or legally admissible evidence of anyone other than McVeigh and Nichols as having directly participated in the bombing. In response, the U.S. Government enacted several pieces of legislation, notably the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. In response to the trials of the conspirators being moved out-of-state, the Victim Allocution Clarification Act of 1997 was signed on March 20, 1997 by President Clinton to allow the victims of the bombing (and the victims of any other future acts of violence) the right to observe trials and to offer impact testimony in trials. In response to passing the legislation, Clinton stated that "when someone is a victim, he or she should be at the center of the criminal justice process, not on the outside looking in."
   In the weeks following the bombing, the federal government ordered that all federal buildings in all major cities be surrounded with prefabricated Jersey barriers to ward off similar attacks. Most of these temporary barriers have since been replaced with permanent security barriers which look more attractive and are driven deep into the ground for sturdiness. Furthermore, all new federal buildings must now be constructed with truck-resistant barriers and with deep setbacks from surrounding streets to minimize their vulnerability to truck bombs. The total cost of improving security in federal buildings across the country in response to the bombing reached over $600 million.
   According to Mark Potok, director of Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, law enforcement officials have foiled over fifty domestic terror plots since the Oklahoma City bombing.
   Although multiple ideas for memorials were sent to Oklahoma City within the first day after the bombing, an official memorial planning committee didn't form until early 1996. The Murrah Federal Building Memorial Task Force, composed of 350 members, was established to formulate plans in choosing a memorial to commemorate the victims of the bombing. The memorial, which has become part of the National Park Service, was designed by Oklahoma City architects Hans and Torrey Butzer and Sven Berg. It was dedicated by President Clinton on April 19, 2000, exactly five years after the bombing.
   The museum includes a reflecting pool flanked by two large "gates", one inscribed with the time 9:01, the opposite with 9:03, the pool between representing the moment of the blast. On the south end of the memorial is a field full of symbolic bronze and stone chairs—one for each person lost, arranged based on what floor they were on. The chairs represent the empty chairs at the dinner tables of the victim's family. The seats of the children killed are smaller than those of the adults lost. On the opposite side is the "survivor tree", part of the building's original landscaping that somehow survived the blast and fires that followed it. The memorial left part of the foundation of the building intact, so that visitors can see the scale of the destruction. Around the western edge of the memorial is a portion of the chain link fence which had amassed over 800,000 personal items which were later collected by the Oklahoma City Memorial Foundation.
   On a corner adjacent to the memorial is a sculpture titled "And Jesus Wept", erected by St. Joseph's Catholic Church. St. Joseph's, one of the first brick and mortar churches in the city, was almost completely destroyed by the blast. The statue isn't part of the memorial itself but is popular with visitors nonetheless. North of the memorial is the Journal Record Building which now houses the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, an affiliate of the National Park Service. Also in the building is the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a non-partisan think tank.

Remembrance

From April 17 to April 24, 2005, to mark the tenth anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma City, the Oklahoma City National Memorial held a week-long series of events known as the "National Week of Hope."
   On April 19, as in previous years, the tenth anniversary of the bombing observances began with a service at 09:02 CST, marking the moment the bomb went off, with the traditional 168 seconds of silence - one second for each person who was killed as a result of the blast. The service also included the traditional reading of the names, read by children to symbolize the future of Oklahoma City.
   Vice President Dick Cheney, former president Clinton, Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry, former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating, and other political dignitaries attended the service and gave speeches in which they emphasized that "goodness overcame evil". The relatives of the victims and the survivors of the blast also made note of it during the service at First United Methodist Church in Oklahoma City.
   President George W. Bush made note of the anniversary in a written statement, part of which echoes his remarks on the execution of Timothy McVeigh in 2001: "For the survivors of the crime and for the families of the dead the pain goes on." Bush was invited but didn't attend the service because he was en route to Springfield, Illinois to dedicate the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Vice President Cheney presided over the service in his place. Multiple websites show alleged cover-ups and other possible perpetrators who helped in planning the bombing. Conspiracy theorists say that there are several discrepancies, such as an inconsistency between the observed destruction and the bomb used by McVeigh. One vocal proponent of this view is Brigadier General Benton K. Partin. Many critics of the official explanation point to a blast effects study published in 1997, utilizing test results from the Eglin Air Force Base, which concluded that "it is impossible to ascribe the damage that occurred on April, 1995 to a single truck bomb containing 4,800 lbs. of ANFO" so that the damage to the Murrah building was "not the result of the truck bomb itself, but rather due to other factors such as locally placed charges within the building itself".
   Several witnesses reported a second person seen around the time of the bombing; investigators would later call him "John Doe 2". There are several theories that the second person was also affiliated with the bombing and was even a possible foreign connection to McVeigh and Nichols. Although the U.S. government did arrest an Army private who resembled an artist's rendering of John Doe 2 based on eyewitness accounts, they later released him after their investigation reported he wasn't involved with the bombing.
   Some people have argued that seismic recordings of the event indicated multiple bombs. This contention was refuted by U.S. Geological Survey and Oklahoma Geological Survey scientists, who recorded and analyzed seismic signals from the demolition of the Murrah building. These demolition seismograms showed that the two pulses of energy recorded in Norman, OK from the bombing were due to the seismic response of the Earth rather than to multiple blast sources.
   In 2006, congressman Dana Rohrabacher said that the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the U.S. House Committee on International Relations, which he chaired, would investigate whether the Oklahoma City bombers had assistance from foreign sources. On December 28, 2006, when asked about fueling conspiracy theories with his questions and criticism, Rohrabacher told CNN: "There's nothing wrong with adding to a conspiracy theory when there might be a conspiracy, in fact."Further Information

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