On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb that destroyed the Murra Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The truck was parked at the loading dock, directly under the day care center. My daughter, three years old at the time, was in the day care center on the first floor of the Kennedy Federal Building in Boston. It is next to the loading dock. My wife was working on the 19th floor. When I returned to work the next day, someone in the elevator joked that it was too bad the bomb hadn’t taken out the IRS. The ride was short, and I was able to stay still.
Crime and Punishment
My Week Gets Weirder
One of my guilty pleasure is “City Confidential” a true-crime documentary show on A&E. Today I sat down to watch episode 41 – Ruthton: Tragedy in the Heartland which concerns the murder of two bankers in Minnesota during 1983. As the story progressed and they began to show pictures of the suspected murderer, a creepy feeling came over me. A little Googling confirmed my suspicion:
I knew the guy!
Hanging George Washington
So Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, stated in his tribunal that:
His actions, he said, were like those of other revolutionaries. Had the British arrested George Washington during the Revolutionary War, Mr. Mohammed said, “for sure they would consider him enemy combatant.”
Jonathan’s Point on a Smaller Scale
New Yorkers, finally fed up, voted in Giuliani. The applicability of that pattern to Jonathan’s muted optimism struck me in reading Theodore Dalrymple, who, in his usual pull-no-punches style, reviews A Land Fit for Criminals.
Going Towards the Sound of the Guns
The cable news networks are all abuzz about a reported shooting at The Rayburn House Office Building, one of the complex of buildings that house US government offices around the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
According to the talking heads sitting at their desks in the TV studios, someone called the Capitol Police and reported the sound of gunfire on the underground garage level. The police reportedly didn’t find anything, but they did sniff the distinctive odor of cordite (modern gunpowder). The cops locked down the building, refusing to allow anyone to leave, and now they are making a room-to-room search.
This is the proper response, of course. Footage shot by reporters being escorted out of the building by way of the parking area show it to be really huge, taking up more than one level and stretching for some distance. If somone ripped off a few rounds from an autoloader, it will take a fair amount of time to find the spent shell casings. They could have used a revolver, though.
There would be shell casings only if some shots were fired in the first place. I routinely hear distant sounds that I could swear are gunshots while I walk my dogs in the wee hours of the night. It turns out that it is only garbage trucks emptying dumpsters.
This could be a false alarm. We will see.
I have decided to watch the Fox News Channel. The reporters are able to phone elected officials trapped in their offices by the lockdown to get their impressions. Pretty neat.
There is going to be a press conference in 20 minutes.