NewsMax Wires
Monday, June 11, 2001

In Washington, the Supreme Court rejected a request from lawyers for a Pennsylvania defendant who wanted to videotape McVeigh's execution in order to back up his contention that lethal injection is a form of cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution.

The defendant, Joseph Minerd, is accused of murder and, if convicted, could face the same fate that awaits McVeigh, who is scheduled to die at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., at 7 a.m. local time Monday (8 a.m. EDT). Without comment, the Supreme Court refused Minerd's request to overturn the decision of a federal district court in Pennsylvania to prohibit the taping.

Lawyers for McVeigh had said their client did not oppose being videotaped, but he was not a party to Minerd's request to the high court.

Early Sunday morning, McVeigh was moved from his cell on the Terre Haute prison's death row into a slightly larger one just a few steps from the room where he is scheduled to die. The 33-year-old veteran of the Persian Gulf War spent the day writing final letters to friends and relatives, according to prison officials and McVeigh's lawyers.

"He is calm, he is prepared to go forward," McVeigh attorney Rob Nigh told reporters outside the prison after meeting with McVeigh. "Quite frankly, he is ready to die."

Nigh, who along with co-counsel Nathan Chambers will be allowed to visit their condemned client Monday morning, until two hours before the scheduled execution, said McVeigh had "struggled … mightily" with the question of an apology to the loved ones of the 168 people, including 19 children, who died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

Once again, however, McVeigh offered no remorse.

In a series of letters to The Buffalo News, excerpts of which were published Sunday, McVeigh offered a qualified apology.

"I am sorry these people had to lose their lives," he wrote the paper, which serves McVeigh's boyhood home of Pendleton, N.Y. "But, that's the nature of the beast. It's understood going in what the human toll will be but that it was a legit tactic in a war."

McVeigh will be the first federal prisoner executed since 1963. As the minutes tick down to his execution, he insisted he had no fear.

An agnostic, he said he would "improvise, adapt and overcome" if it turned out that there was an afterlife and he found himself in heaven or hell, the Buffalo paper reported.

"If I am going to hell, I'm gonna have a lot of company," he said.

McVeigh wrote the letters to two Buffalo News reporters from his death row prison cell before and after the postponement of his original execution of May 16, in the wake of revelations by the FBI that it had failed to turn over more than 3,000 pages of documents to McVeigh's lawyers before his trial in 1997.

He wrote that his terrorist act was in defense of Americans' rights to personal freedom and was a response to controversial actions by federal law enforcement agents at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

The letters were sent to reporters Dan Herbeck and Lou Michel, co-authors of the book "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy." They interviewed the decorated Gulf War veteran in prison after his conviction. McVeigh was convicted of the worst act of terrorism on U.S. soil, which took place exactly two years to the day after federal agents raided a compound in Waco occupied by members of the Branch Davidian cult. More than 80 people died in the shootout and fire that ensued there.

McVeigh's victims in Oklahoma City included 19 children, whom the bomber has referred to, in military parlance, as "collateral damage." While he acknowledges that millions of Americans despise him, the Buffalo newspaper reported, McVeigh wrote that he hoped his countrymen would eventually come to view him as a "freedom fighter" who died for his cause. He compared himself to John Brown, who protested slavery in the mid-1800s by leading raids that killed men, women and children.

Amid recent court action in pursuit of a new trial, based on errors by the FBI in failing to turn over all documents in his case, McVeigh wrote that he was "shutting down operations" and "cutting off communications with all but a few people."

He wrote that he had turned down hundreds of reporters' requests for interviews and a request from the FBI for a "final debriefing" about his political views that led to the bombing, because he was concerned FBI agents would somehow use whatever information he gave them to hurt people who stood up against the government.

"I will not be doing a progressive (a k a repressive) interview with the FBI," McVeigh wrote. "I would hate for my insights to be used to kill more people, when they eventually abuse their power."

He wrote that he might have chosen another tactic for expressing his hatred for what he called an "out-of-control federal government" that has been bullying its citizens "like the Chinese and deployed tanks against its own citizens (in Waco, Texas)."

Copyright 2001 by United Press International. All rights reserved.

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