American Bombing: The Road to April 19th
A documentary about the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the lead up to that event
Features interviews with Katherine Belew, a historian who wrote a decent book on the topic (“Bring the War Home”) that I read in a class for skool.
I had forgotten a few of the details of the story but there are definitely unanswered questions regarding Oklahoma City. Even though McVeigh subsisted off the white power underground during the 90s, the funding for the action & perhaps even some of the reasons regarding why that particular target was chosen remain obscure. I think it’s definitely clear that some others in the movement were directly/indirectly involved in the planning and execution of the bombing…but ultimately the federal government, chagrined after failing to convict a host of movement activists on sedition charges in 1988, gave a pretty narrow focus on McVeigh and Nichols. Nichols claims that the operation benefitted from the actions of a “rogue FBI agent” who essentially directed the actions of McVeigh & co. but who knows
The detail about the bombing taking place on the same day as Richard Wayne Snell (a white supremacist revolutionary & murderer who had previously identified the Murrah building in OKC as a target to fire homemade missiles into) was scheduled to be executed, that was an interesting detail I thought. Also how closely the OKC bombing resembled a similar bombing in the book “the turner diaries”, from how the bomb was constructed to even the time it was detonated
