Blood and Politics (79 page)

In large measure, the Internet had already replaced the smaller zine-style newsletters that had once flourished across the skinhead subculture. Now the Internet allowed new businesses to pop up and sell music, vying for customers in the mass market. The World Wide Web had emerged in the mid-1990s, after a long incubation inside a complex of military and academic institutions.
¹¹
Changes in technology and programming advances made a worldwide web of information sites available to the personal computer user; advanced software and commercial chat rooms provided a new and open field for young white nationalists. Among white supremacists, it was a cardinal belief that science and technology were their natural domain. They believed that it had been the so-called white gene pool that had conquered outer space. Now they had tackled cyberspace with a visible eagerness. With the advent of the Internet, Aryans of every type extended their reach beyond the computer bulletin boards set up by Louis Beam and Tom Metzger in the early 1980s.

The first movement website, Stormfront, had been established in 1994 by Don Black, the onetime Klan chief. After serving a prison sentence for his role in the abortive invasion of Dominica, and a brief period of Populist Party activism, he had found his own niche. Stormfront became an all-purpose site with its own discussion board and a sprawling set of Web publications. Eventually it featured pages in all the major European languages and links to a growing list of white nationalist, historical revisionist, and self-described racial conservative Internet sites managed by others.
¹²

Here was evidence that cyberspace provided an almost perfect opportunity for the music marketeers at Resistance Records. They established their first website in August 1995, with a compact disc catalog and other information. A potential customer could listen to sample musical selections and order directly over the Internet using a charge card or with a
check via the post. Other outfits did much the same, mimicking the larger commercial world’s turn toward Internet marketing. Like a niche market taste in unusual olives or rare books, white power music established itself within a definable constituency. Organizations and individuals with the time, energy, and inclination created dazzling and attractive websites.
¹³

The rapid proliferation of websites sparked a series of reports from human rights agencies, each seeming to outdo the other with predictions about how the Web would widen the exposure of white nationalist ideas to every schoolchild with an Internet service provider, enable groups to recruit untold numbers of new members, and lead to violence on the streets.
¹⁴
The Web was a deceptively flat medium, however, and almost none of these fear-laden predictions came true. Yes, students now gained access to materials that were once more difficult to get than a copy of
Playboy
magazine at the corner convenience store. But they also now read antiracist materials published in cyberspace, including those that criticized the racist Web materials. And no actual evidence emerged showing that any lone wolf killers entered the white nationalist world through an Internet portal. In fact, one profile of a World Church of the Creator member who shot ten and killed two people showed that he had joined the group after receiving an old-fashioned leaflet on his Illinois college campus.
¹⁵

A limited study of Internet users conducted by Carnegie Mellon University professors produced results that undercut concerns about racists using the Web. Scholars found a correlation between increased levels of Internet use and decreased levels of social engagement. For each hour in cyberspace, they measured a corresponding jump in depression and social isolation. Rather than feel good about being engaged in a virtual community of friends, participants in the study experienced a decline in feelings of well-being. They were less likely to join with others in noncyberspace. Critics noted that the study was limited to the Pittsburgh area and did not include a large sample of users under forty years of age, those most familiar with and likely to use the Internet.
¹⁶
Nevertheless, the study pointed at a conclusion that many human rights observers did not expect: people who spend a lot of time surfing through white nationalist websites could be expected to . . . well . . . spend a lot of time surfing white nationalist websites, but the initial evidence did not show that they were any more likely to join and engage in real-time political activity.

What the Web did accomplish for the movement were the same things that it did for other sectors of society. It sped up and thus increased commerce and communications. Much like the advance of the fax machine over express mail, it changed next-day delivery to same-day
delivery and then to same-moment delivery. Activists could use cyberforums to chat or discuss ideas or just spread trashy rumors about one another—and they did all three. A teenage boy with a credit card could buy a white power music CD over the Web, instead of sending his dollar bills through the mail. Smart organizational administrators could gather their troops under one cyberroof. Probably the most singular benefit was the way the Internet broke down international borders and allowed white nationalists in several countries to talk to one another quickly and easily. A secondary result was that paper-and-ink publications such as
The Spotlight
became less important to the process of movement building, and paid subscriptions declined, just as they did for many daily newspapers.

In the end, however, the World Wide Web was a little bit like the wallpaper in your aunt Suzy’s foyer: you knew it was there, but you didn’t pay any particular attention to it. It was easy to ignore. Other things were impossible to forget, however, like the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and the image of Timothy McVeigh dressed in a prison orange jumpsuit.

April 24, 1997.
Two years after the Oklahoma City bombing, the trial of Timothy McVeigh started in a Denver federal courthouse. Memory of the deaths, maiming, and shattered lives remained raw at that point, and survivors and victims’ families gathered at an Oklahoma site to watch the trial broadcast specifically to them. For the larger American public, McVeigh was still most remembered for the children murdered that day and for his seemingly complete lack of regret. Inside the white nationalist movement, conspiracy-minded journalists and paramilitary enthusiasts had tried to shift blame and public opprobrium away from the militia and onto the federal government. In the pages of magazines, tabloids, and cyberspace, and at gun rallies, constitution conferences, and survivalist expos, they had mustered an ever-changing assemblage of facts and fantasies about the still-missing John Doe Two.
¹
The government’s apparent decision to stop looking for the olive-skinned mystery man served to confirm those doubting the prosecution’s claims. Add to the seemingly endless reserve of conspiracy theories Timothy McVeigh’s court-appointed counsel, Stephen Jones, whose defense efforts worked this oil field like a two-hundred-foot jackknife derrick drilling with an eight-foot bit.

Convinced early that his client was guilty but did not act alone, Jones searched widely for Doe Two and “others unknown.” He traveled to the Philippines in search of an “Islamic” connection to the bombing and spent time in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, investigating a possible German connection to the bomb and talking with antiterrorist bomb experts. And his defense team seemed to be enveloped in an aura of intrigue and double-dealing. FBI investigative materials, including the McVeigh phone logs, leaked into the ocean of journalists actively reporting
on the case, virtually none of whom believed that all the perpetrators had been found. It was this doubt, more than any other, that Jones expressly sought to cultivate. Prior to trial, Jones submitted a 150-page brief contending that the bombing had been the work of either Iraqi terrorists or German neo-Nazis and pointing to a German national, Andreas Strassmeir, as the link in a nefarious conspiracy.
²
If the defense could prove that McVeigh had been just one cog in a much-larger terrorist machine, then presumably that would lessen his individual culpability and save the Desert Storm veteran from the death penalty.

Federal Judge Richard Matsch gave free rein to the defense prior to trial. Federal prosecutors considered Matsch a tough sell and not particularly friendly to government claims. In a twist of fate, Matsch had overseen one other significant trial involving white nationalists, the federal case brought against four members of The Order for depriving radio talker Alan Berg of his civil rights. In that trial, two were convicted, and two found innocent, seeming proof of Matsch’s lack of favor to prosecutors.
³
Prior to McVeigh’s trial, he had not only okayed spending for Jones’s overseas travel but sealed his firm’s expense records to protect its case from prosecutorial snooping.
⁴
The trial venue was also reset in Denver, a move that most pleased the defense. By any standard, Judge Matsch had provided Stephen Jones’s team of lawyers every possible pretrial accord.

When the case finally went to court, the prosecution opened with a trim, hard-to-shoot-at case. Over four weeks the government presented witnesses claiming that McVeigh had been angry at the feds for the conflagration and death at Waco in 1993 and that he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in revenge. They showed McVeigh searching for bomb ingredients at fertilizer co-ops, racetracks, and gun dealers. The FBI had McVeigh’s fingerprints on the receipt for purchasing two thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate. Phone company computer records identified the time, date, duration, and destination of hundreds of phone calls as twenty-seven witnesses explained dozens of these calls made on a telephone calling card issued by Liberty Lobby. A security camera in a McDonald’s restaurant pictured McVeigh just moments before he rented the Ryder truck at a shop down the road in Junction City, Kansas. The owner of the shop identified McVeigh as the man who rented the Ryder truck used in the bombing. A security camera in the apartment building across the street from the federal building pictured the Ryder truck just minutes before the explosion.
⁵

Despite all this, the case against McVeigh was largely circumstantial. As a consequence, prosecutors carefully presented the material evidence from the FBI. Before the trial the scientific integrity of the FBI’s
vaunted lab had been questioned when a lab supervisor claimed that evidence from dozens of cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing, had been mishandled. As a result, the prosecutor did not call any FBI witnesses connected to questionable lab practices. And he used a Scotland Yard scientist to confirm FBI testimony independently.
⁶

The heart of the case rested on the testimony of a couple of fellow travelers, Michael and Lori Fortier. Michael Fortier had met McVeigh when both were in the service, and they had stayed friends while the Fortiers lived in Arizona. In addition to sharing in some of the prebombing criminal activity, the Fortiers had been privy to McVeigh’s plans. He had shown them how to shape a truck bomb by arranging soup cans in their kitchen. The couple’s credibility could reasonably be questioned. Their lives had been drenched in guns and drugs and other illegal activity. And they testified that they had lied to friends, families, and investigators to hide their prior knowledge of the bomb.
⁷
Plus they had undoubtedly been coerced into becoming witnesses.

Unlike James Ellison and other turncoats at the Fort Smith seditious conspiracy trial, however, the Fortiers held up well under defense cross-examination. When Jones tried to demonstrate that Michael Fortier had lied to the jury, for example, the government countered with a brilliant courtroom maneuver. The prosecutor asked Fortier to show the jury the alley where McVeigh had said in advance that he would leave the getaway car. The next day prosecutors called an FBI photographer, who testified that he had found the key to the Ryder truck at that exact same spot.
⁸
The effect reinforced the Fortiers’ testimony. In the end the defense failed to discredit their story.

The government also presented uncontroverted evidence that McVeigh considered himself a militiaman. His sister Jennifer McVeigh read a letter by her brother to the American Legion: “We members of the citizen’s militias do not bear our arms to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow those who PERVERT the constitution.” The two siblings had regularly read Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
as well as other movement publications. He sold copies of
The Turner Diaries
on the gun show circuit. And he had signed up with a Klan group.
⁹
Although prosecutors did not express it in these terms, they objectively proved that McVeigh was, in fact, more than just an ex-military man angry at government misdeeds at Waco. He was not simply an “antigovernment” activist. He was a soldier who had switched enlistments from the United States Army to the white nationalist underground.

What the prosecution did not do, however, was present evidence on who actually mixed the bomb ingredients. And except for chemicals common to both gun ammunition and detonation cord, there were no
traces of bomb materials on McVeigh’s clothes or in his hair or nostrils or anyplace else on his body. For some reason, Jones failed to take advantage of these weaknesses in the government’s case. While Jones did cast doubt on some of the FBI’s lab findings and showed that McVeigh’s fingerprints were not found on the truck rental agreement, he was largely foiled during cross-examination by the prosecution’s courtroom strategy. While defense witnesses did point toward the involvement of an unknown John Doe Two, McVeigh had never volunteered any information on the subject to his attorney. And after two years of globetrotting and horse swapping with reporters, the defense failed to present an alternative theory of who actually constituted the bombing crew.