The Oklahoma City Bombing had one of the highest total deaths of any bombing on American soil. A total of 168 people were killed, with 19 of them being children.
A new documentary about the Oklahoma City Bombing, “An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th,” includes some of the reasons why Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier bombed the Murrah Federal Building.
McVeigh and his two accomplices became friends in the military. They fought in the first Gulf War, a conflict between 42 countries, including the US and Iraq.
Many of the far-right people in America went to Waco, Texas to watch the siege on the compound that belonged to the Branch Davidians. McVeigh was one of those people, and this event was the one that fueled the fire in McVeigh’s mind to attack the government.
The part that surprised the most people in the movie is that some extremists in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of them being Richard Wayne Snell, who had been having issues with the Internal Revenue Service, originally planned on bombing the Murrah Building 12 years before the Oklahoma City Bombing earlier. Some time around 1993, was the first time that the U.S. Government had heard about those specific plans. The people from Arkansas began these plans after the Agricultural Revolution around 1988, when where farmers were left to go bankrupt. The Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord was one of the extremist groups in northern Arkansas, founded by Jim Ellison. They fought back against the government by creating their own civilian SWAT team and had weapons training multiple times a week. The police wanted to raid their compound and arrest Jim Ellison on an illegal weapons charge. The CSA eventually surrendered after a three-day raid conducted by the police.
Overall, I thought that this documentary had many emotional moments but also had a large amount of information that the majority of the public did not know. The documentary consists of many interviews with government personnel, as well as people who were a part of the far-right militia groups. These interviews provided the documentary with a majority of the information that is public but also some previously private information. The private information is thanks to people who are in witness protection, such as Kerry Noble, one of the co-leaders of the CSA.
There was no CGI or animation, which is a nice change, due to all of the movies and TV series nowadays that do use CGI. This provides for a very interesting watch.
The Murrah Bombing was one of the worst terrorist attacks in American history and had one of the highest death tolls as well. McVeigh, an American man, created a bomb, which killed almost 170 people.
Contact Wes Matlock at [email protected]
