Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

Personally, I wonder how, given everything we now know, it is so difficult for some to believe that a federal “counter-terrorism” sting operation could get that far out of control. A more heated and less frequently posed questions is: at what point does a plot to entrap become a sanctioned plot to kill, directly or through an intentional looking away? At what point does a so-called terror plot become an FBI plot? Or the plot of another national security-minded agency? Where does the boundary lie?

To me, this is the most important question in this book full of really good questions. What seems to be unquestionable is that Timothy McVeigh was somehow involved in the bombing that occurred on April 19, 1995 at the Alfred P. Murrah show more Building in Oklahoma City, resulting in the deaths of 168 people. What also seems clear is that the "official" story is full of inconsistencies, apparent misdirections, deliberate ignorance, and lies, both on the part of McVeigh and the government. Painting uses the over 1000 pages of her book to detail the various theories about what actually happened with Timothy McVeigh and the OKC bombing, and though she never picks one as being *her* version, she has no shortage of scathing criticism for the people in power who propagated the official narrative. This book is a great primer on the more esoteric corners of the American state - Painting manages to find and untangle strands leading from McVeigh to CIA mind control experiments, UFO sightings and Area 51, Gulf War Syndrome, the JFK assassination just to name a few. I love a discursive book, and this is up there with the best of them. Painting doesn't hesitate to delve into these tangential subjects, and even when the connection back to McVeigh seems tenuous, the information and stories she shares are interesting enough to stand on their own.

So what is my take away from this book? As with most conspiracy theories, there seems to be a more villainous interpretation and what to my mind seems a more realistic one. In the first scenario, the government, seeking to sew chaos, undermine the freedoms of the populace, and discredit right wing movements "created" McVeigh through brainwashing, extortion, manipulation, or some combination of them all in order to plant a bomb at the Murrah building and kill hundreds of people. This is certainly not out of the question, but I think Painting's question in the quote above points at the more likely sequence of events: McVeigh, a highly traumatized veteran probably suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, was sucked up into an elaborate sting organization directed towards right wing militia and white nationalist groups. Through an intersecting web of true believers and undercover government operatives, her was led down a path he might have been predisposed to, but was certainly not explicitly fated for. The government operatives, being the kind of people that this kind of job attracts (overconfident, condescending towards normal people, incentivized to create work for themselves) eventually lost focus on what was part of the operation and what wasn't - the sting spun out of control and the bombing was a classic case of blowback. Painting spends a lot of time in the book focusing on Dr. Louis Jolyon (Jolly) West, who was a kind of Zelig of 20th century black ops in the American intelligence apparatus. Dr. West was one of the foremost experts on all manner of nefarious sounding topics: hypnosis, mind-control, hallucinations and drugs, torture, and disassociation. Painting herself seems to go back and forth on whether or not to characterize West as a figure of Mephistophelian evil. To me, what seems to keep her from outright calling him the devil are the same characteristics that make catastrophes like the OKC bombing happen - It truly seems like many of the people involved think they are helping the world. Through hubris and alienation from the people that their decisions actually affect, figures like West, despite their professed motivations, end up embodying the type of role that conspiracy theorist ascribe them as taking on purposefully and willingly. show less

a conspiracy is an agreement between two parties. a lot of intense information that will probably take me a good year plus to fully digest. was not surprised at some of it, shocked at others (especially the information that spoke to humanity; the volunteering at an HIV clinic during acute plague (1992) and the attempting to save the biracial child in Kingman) and a real marvel of research, meticulous note keeping, and flashes of real gen x humor.