Bad dates

By Andrew W. Griffin / March 11, 2022

It was 21 years ago today that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had planned for convicted Oklahoma City terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh to be executed at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

It would be exactly six months before September 11, 2001.

But for reasons I don’t recall, the execution date was pushed forward three months to June 11, 2001. And it took place.

It would be exactly three months before September 11, 2001.

And on September 11, 2001, I immediately thought of McVeigh’s execution date and wondered if there was some sort of connection between the date(s) and that horrific date, as the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center burned and dustified in a short period of time, changing our world forever.

A few days ago I was at my post office, recently named after Oklahoma City civil-rights activist Clara Luper. It was there when the bomb(s) went off. And now the OKC National Memorial is where the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was located. It was a nice day and – wanting to avoid encountering an erratic, ranting homeless man in the post-office parking lot, I walked over to the memorial site and stood in with a tourist group.

The National Park Service tour guide was speaking in the Field of Empty Chairs to approximately 20 tourists who listened to his scripted speech intently. I stood there, my arms folded, staring directly into his eyes. I sensed that he knew I was on to him and his officially-sanctioned propaganda about what happened in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

I was involved in the making of a documentary exposing the lies of the official report about the Oklahoma City Bombing. It was called A Noble Lie, and local media wanted nothing to do with it. It was ignored and eventually disappeared. That was over a decade ago and the bombing is further in the rearview mirror.

 McVeigh was involved in the bombing in the same way Lee Harvey Oswald was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There is more there than meets the eye – and everyone knows it.

On June 11, 2001, McVeigh’s final words was actually the oft-referenced poem Invictus by English poet William Ernest Henley. Basically, it was McVeigh’s way of telling the world he was “unbowed” by what awaited him in the execution chamber that day. It was his way of saying he was a self-disciplined killer, able to stand-up straight in the face of adversity, even death.

“Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.”

Curiously, exactly 60 days and two days prior to 9/11/01, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons as things in Europe were dangerous and uncertain – roughly three months before the Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii (Sept. 9, 1941):

“The mood of Britain is wisely and rightly averse from every form of shallow or premature exultation. This is no time for boasts or glowing prophecies, but there is this—a year ago our position looked forlorn, and well nigh desperate, to all eyes but our own. Today we may say aloud before an awe-struck world, ‘We are still masters of our fate. We still are captain of our souls.'”