Damage to the Murrah building before cleanup began.

The Oklahoma City bombing was an attack against the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, a US government office complex in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA. The bombing killed 168 people and was the largest domestic terrorist attack in the history of the United States.

The Bombing

At 9:02 am on April 19, 1995, in the street in front of the Murrah building, attackers exploded a rented Ryder truck containing about 5,000 lb (2,300 kg) of explosive material. The car bomb was composed of ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertilizer, and nitromethane, a highly volatile motor-racing fuel. Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf war veteran, was arrested by an Oklahoma Highway Patrolman within an hour of the explosion. At his trial, the United States Government asserted that the motivation for the attack was to avenge the deaths of Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, whom McVeigh believed had been murdered by agents of the federal government. McVeigh called the casualties in the bombing "collateral damage" and compared the action to actions he had taken during the Gulf War. The attack was staged on the second anniversary of the Waco incident. McVeigh is thought to have modeled the bombing on a similar event described in The Turner Diaries, a white supremacist novel that was found with McVeigh when he was arrested.

The effect of the bombing on the city was immense. Beyond the death toll of 168 (including 19 children and one rescue worker), the bomb injured over 800 people and destroyed or seriously damaged more than 300 buildings in the surrounding area, leaving several hundred people homeless and shutting down offices in Downtown Oklahoma City. Over 12,000 people participated in relief and rescue operations in the days following the blast, many of whom developed post traumatic stress disorder as a result. The national and worldwide humanitarian response was immediate and overwhelming, as was the media response. The area was flooded with rescue workers from around the nation and aid agencies coming to assist the survivors, as well as hundreds of news trucks coming to cover the story.

Effects on Children

In the wake of the bombing, schools across the country were dismissed early and ordered closed. The fact that 19 of the victims had been children in an on site day care center was quickly seized upon by the national media, and a still photo of a firefighter removing infant Baylee Almon from the rubble was reprinted worldwide and quickly became a symbol of the tragedy.

As well as effects on children with a direct connection to the bombing, stories of many children becoming distressed after hearing media reports about the bombing emerged. On April 22, the Saturday after the bombing, the Clintons gathered 24 children of employees of agencies that had offices in the federal building in Oklahoma City in the Oval Office. In remarks broadcast live on television and radio, the Clintons talked to children about the bombing and answered their questions.

Later research established symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder were present in many children exposed to media reports of the bombing. (See references).

The national focus climaxed on April 23rd, when President Bill Clinton spoke in Oklahoma City. In the weeks following the bombing, rescue efforts ceased and the building was imploded, and media interest quickly shifted to the trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

Trial and Aftermath

The remains of the half-destroyed Federal building were demolished in May 1995. Some legislation was also introduced in response to the attack, notably the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Until 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing was the worst act of terrorism within U.S. borders, but not the worst against the United States (the worst act of terrorism against the U.S. before 9/11 was Pan Am Flight 103). The site became part of the National Park Service. On February 19, 2001 an Oklahoma City bombing museum was dedicated at the Oklahoma City National Memorial Center.

Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 on May 27, 1998 for failing to warn authorities about the attack.

Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for the bombing, after being convicted of, among other things, murdering federal law enforcement officials. He was executed by lethal injection at a U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11, 2001. An accomplice, Terry Nichols, was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of manslaughter in a federal court trial. Nichols stood trial in McAlester, Oklahoma, on state murder charges starting on March 1, 2004, and was convicted of 160 counts of first-degree murder, plus other felony charges on May 26. The penalty phase of the state trial, in which he could have been given the death penalty, ended in a jury deadlock, which automatically resulted in the imposition of a sentence of life imprisonment. His brother, James was also accused of taking part in the bombing, but was released due to lack of evidence.

In many ways, the Oklahoma City Bombing spelled the end of the anti government Militia movement to which McVeigh was linked. In the years following the bombing most such groups either disbanded or were pushed further to the fringes of american politics. Additionally, by being the first major american city to suffer a mass-casualty terrorist attack, Oklahoma City's response to the bombing was carefully scrutinized by security experts and law enforcement in the years following the bombing, and then again following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In Febuary of 2004, the federal government reopened their investigation into the bombing after FBI agents investigating the MidWest Bank Robbers, (a white supremacist gang McVeigh had associated with prior to the bombing) discovered blasting caps of the same type used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

In 2004 a new federal campus (designed with a special focus on security) opened in Oklahoma City, a block from the site of the bombing.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial

Today, the site of the Murrah building is occupied by a large memorial. The memorial, designed by Oklahoma City architects Hans and Torrey Butzer and Sven Berg, includes a reflecting pool bookended by two large "doorways", one inscribed with the time 9:01, the opposite with 9:03, the pool between representing the moment of the blast. On the south end of the memorial is a field full of symbolic bronze and stone chairs—one for each person lost, arranged based on what floor they were on. The seats of the children killed are smaller than those of the adults lost. On the opposite side is the "survivor tree", part of the building's original landscaping that somehow survived the blast and the fires that followed it. The memorial left part of the foundation of the building intact, so that visitors can see the scale of the destruction. Around the western edge of the memorial is a portion of the chain link fence erected after the blast that thousands of people spontaniously left flowers, ribbons, teddy bears, and other momentos on in the weeks following the bombing. On a corner adjacent to the memorial is a sculpture titled "And Jesus Wept" erected by St. Joseph's Catholic Church. St. Joseph's, one of the first brick and mortar churchs in the city, was almost totally destroyed by the blast. The statue is not part of the memorial itself, but is popular with visitors nonetheless. North of the memorial is the Journal Record Building which now houses the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institute. Also in the building is the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, a non partisan think tank.

See also

• List of terrorist incidents
• Ronald Griesacker
• Jose Padilla

External links

• Oklahoma City National Memorial (http://www.nps.gov/okci/index.htm) (National Park Service)
• National Memorial Official Site (http://www.oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org/)
• Oklahoma City National Memorial Pictures (http://www.nationalparksgallery.com/parks/Oklahoma-City-National-Memorial) (Gallery of the National Memorial in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma)
• Internet Sympathy Card (http://www.brauer.org/OKLAHOMA/) (Internet Sympathy Card for the survivors and victim's families)
• The National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (http://www.mipt.org/) An anti terrorism think-tank based at the Oklahoma City National Memorial

References

• B. Pfefferbaum, T.W. Seale, N.B. McDonald et al. "Posttraumatic Stress Two Years after the Oklahoma City Bombing in Youths Geographically Distant from the Explosion," Psychiatry 63(2000):358-70.

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