8.02.2007

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - Thomas Jefferson

April 19, 1995


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. He wore a printed T-shirt with the slogan Sic semper tyrannis ("Thus ever to tyrants", the phrase 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 (incidentally situated under the building's day-care center), locked the vehicle, and headed to his getaway vehicle.

(from the Oklahoma City bombing entry in the Wikipedia)

August 2, 2007


TIME: Were you then completely repulsed by the idea of war at that point?

MCVEIGH: I was taken aback by what I had been told. We all thought we were doing this for your country and these people are terrible, every single one of them. You get over there and you realize two things, they're not so terrible and how is this helping my country?

A Look Back in TIME: Interview with Timothy McVeigh

Oh, and btw, McVeigh was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

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