Word: oklahomas
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...THIS ISN'T AMERICA, this can't be America," Sam Gwynne remembers thinking as he arrived in Oklahoma City on the afternoon of its darkest day. But it was, and Gwynne, Time's Austin bureau chief, was the first of six Time correspondents converging on Oklahoma City from all parts of the country (backed by two dozen others elsewhere) to report this week's unusually disturbing cover package. All had seen death before; each was nonetheless shaken by the enormity of the Oklahoma tragedy. Says correspondent Ann Simmons: "You can't become inured to suffering on this scale...
...Allis, our Boston bureau chief, examined the atrocity's wider repercussions: "It was not until a Muslim student at Oklahoma University told me he feared for his life that I realized the bombing would hurt different people in different ways." Correspondent Ed Barnes' hunch that the terrorists might this time prove to be American was cinched when he learned the birth date that was cited on the fake driver's license used to rent the bomber's truck: April 19. Barnes recognized the date as one that is near talismanic to the survivalist fringe he had observed while reporting...
...CENTRAL QUESTION RAISED BY THE OKLAHOMA CITY bombing is whether a free society can prevent terrorist acts. A good deal of loose talk will be heard about the subject in the next few weeks--some of it urging the FBI to "do whatever is necessary," and some of it cautioning the government to "protect the Constitution." We have been through this before, and we ought to remember what we learned in order that we not, again, lose our bearings...
...hope that did not happen in this case and will not happen in the future. The FBI ought to be, and is, committed to defending the Constitution. It doesn't need instant experts, immediate second-guessing or quick fixes from any quarter. If Oklahoma City is a trumpet announcing a long siege, we all need, as they say in the Navy, to take an even strain...
...intelligence guidelines under which the FBI operated would not have barred infiltration of the group responsible for the Oklahoma bombing, assuming that anybody had heard of it in advance. But the bureau has been whipsawed so many times by contrary political pressures--"Stop terrorism!" "Protect civil liberties!"-that many of its top officials may have adopted a perfectly understandable bureaucratic reaction: "Who needs the trouble? If there is any doubt, leave it alone...