------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">Make good on the promise you made at graduation to keep in touch. Classmates.com has over 14 million registered high school alumni--chances are you'll find your friends! </FONT><A HREF="http://us.click.yahoo.com/03IJGA/DMUCAA/4ihDAA/zzNVlB/TM"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> APRIL 01, 13:26 EST McVeigh Book: I Would Die for Bombing Timothy McVeigh AP/ [15K] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) ‹ Driving down a street with fuses already lit and their smoke filling the cab of his rented Ryder truck, Timothy McVeigh was prepared to crash his mobile bomb right into the Oklahoma City federal building if necessary. ``If I needed to, I was ready to stay in the truck and protect it with gunfire until the bomb blew up,'' McVeigh says in excerpts from a new book, ``American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing,'' in the April 9 issue of Newsweek. Instead, McVeigh says, he breathed a sigh of relief when he arrived at the building on April 19, 1995, because no cars were sitting in front to block his chosen parking spots. When the truck bomb exploded, it killed 168 people. McVeigh, 32, is scheduled to be executed May 16. ``I'll be glad to leave,'' he says. ``Truth is, I determined mostly through my travels that this world just doesn't hold anything for me.'' While being held in a federal high-security prison, McVeigh met Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, who told authors Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck he found McVeigh likable, but thought the Oklahoma City bombing was ``unnecessarily inhumane.'' In 75 hours of prison interviews, McVeigh talked to Michel and Herbeck, reporters for The Buffalo News, about how and why he bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Buffalo is near his hometown of Pendleton, N.Y. McVeigh said he acted ``as calmly as any delivery-truck driver making a routine drop-off,'' parking right below the tinted windows of the America's Kids Day Care Center on the building's second floor. Among those killed were 19 children. Michel told ABC's ``PrimeTime Thursday'' last week that McVeigh's only regret was that their deaths proved to be a public relations nightmare. Authorities have said the truck contained 4,000 pounds to 4,800 pounds of explosives, but McVeigh told the authors it was more than a ton heavier. As he drove toward the building, McVeigh stopped to ignite a five-minute fuse, which soon filled the cab with acrid smoke. McVeigh said he had to roll down both windows to let some of the smoke out. A block from the federal building, McVeigh had to stop for a traffic light, and he lit a second fuse, one he had measured at approximately two minutes. McVeigh told the authors that both fuses were burning when he parked the truck and walked away. In the next 30 seconds, he said, perhaps a dozen people saw him. He was wearing a nondescript blue windbreaker over a T-shirt. On the front of the shirt was a drawing of Abraham Lincoln and the Latin phrase that John Wilkes Booth screamed after he assassinated Lincoln ‹ ``sic semper tyrannis,'' or ``thus ever to tyrants.'' On the back was a picture of a tree dripping blood and a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: ``The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.'' McVeigh says the bomb was intended to avenge raids by federal agents at the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, and the cabin of white separatist Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. About 150 yards away from the building, he says, he started jogging and wondered if something had gone wrong because, by his calculations, the bomb should have exploded. ``Oh man, am I going to have to walk back there and shoot that damn truck?'' he thought. Then the explosion lifted him off his feet. He said he had no regrets, and in fact could feel anxiety leaving his body. ``It's over,'' he thought. While being held at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., McVeigh found that among neighboring inmates he had the most in common with Kaczynski, who is serving life after a mail-bombing spree that killed three people and injured 23. At first, Kaczynski refused to speak with McVeigh because he had misgivings about the way McVeigh had executed the bombing. However, Kaczynski eventually believed that his fellow bomber had been demonized by false media reports. Kaczynski, 57, laid out his feelings about McVeigh and the bombing at Oklahoma City in an 11-page letter to the book's authors. ``On a personal level I like McVeigh and I imagine that most people would like him,'' Kaczynski wrote. ``He was considerate of others and knew how to deal with people effectively.'' However, Kaczynski said ``the bombing was a bad action because it was unnecessarily inhumane.'' http://wire.ap.org/?PACKAGEID=oklahomacitybombing Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
