I have refrained from commenting on McVeigh for years now. I guess I’ve been waiting to see how it all turned out. From the beginning, it’s been an odd case, certainly a monstrous disaster, and a very telling episode in our nation’s history.

Let me tell you a few stories:

• Today, guerrillas took 15 people hostage in the Phillippines, adding to the 13 people they already have captive. Among the new hostages are two 12-year-olds. They burned down five houses and a chapel. 

• Today, a five-month-old baby boy died in Jerusalem, the son of Jewish settlers, who was hit in a Palestinian stoning attack. He joins a 10-month-old Israeli girl in Hebron who was shot by a Palestinian sniper and a four-month-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli tank shell is Gaza. Among many others. A thousand people demonstrated with the baby’s corpse, demanding retaliations.

That was just today.

You want some more? 

• In Bosnia, they’ve found the remains of more than 4,000 piled up in an underground tunnel. It’s being described as the worst civilian massacre since World War II. More than 8,000 Muslims are believed to have been executed and dumped here. More than a thousand remain unidentified. There are 12 more mass graves that we know about that have yet to be opened, as many as a thousand more people, more than 1,600 remain missing from a single town. Jasmin Odobasic, deputy head of the Muslim commission, said, ‘‘looking down, one cannot see the bottom, only where the pile of bones starts.’’

I would never want to diminish the pain felt by the people of Oklahoma City, those who lost their children and family members in the explosion. It was a horrific act of terrorism, not only against our government, but against the peace and dignity of the United States.

Here’s the rub: There are horrific acts of terrorism every single day somewhere in the world. We don’t care about them because they’re not us. How the rest of the world must sneer at us, obsessed with the Oklahoma City bombing because such things never happen to us. We dismiss the bombing-of-the-day in Israel and Palestine because we’re so insulated in our little corner of the world that we forget tragedy does happen, terrorism is real, innocent people are killed every day, and if none of them are American, it won’t make the news.

I could talk forever about the Middle East, and it’s so much fun to blame all the terrorism of the world on them. But remember something the media has conveniently forgotten: for several hours after the Murrah Building exploded, all the news outlets were yammering about Middle Eastern terrorism brought to the American heartland. They ALL had to eat crow when it turned out a good ol’ American boy blew up those children.

But enough of perspective. Let’s talk about the death penalty. McVeigh has brought the question back, albeit briefly. I personally don’t believe in it, for a number of reasons. If you do or if you don’t, please read the rest of this. We can only discuss if first we listen.

1) It provides no closure whatsoever to the victims. Certainly, it is distressing to think that your child’s killer is still alive. But killing him doesn’t bring back the child, and falsely promoting the “closure” they will receive causes much more psychological damage to these poor people.

I took an incredibly unscientific poll on a web community to which I belong. Here are the preliminary results to my question: Should Timothy McVeigh have been executed?

• No, the death penalty is wrong, even for McVeigh -  40 percent 
• Yes, he was a murderer and deserved to die - 35 percent
• No, now we'll never know who else was involved in the bombing. - 15 percent 
• No, McVeigh was innocent. - 10 percent 
• Yes, the families deserved closure.  - 0 percent.

2) It is much more expensive to execute someone than to keep him in prison for  the rest of his life. That statistic has been stated over and over, yet people keep denying it. True, it seems impossible. But consider this: there’s about 3,600 people on death row throughout the U.S. Guess what? That’s out of 1,932,000 people in prison nationwide, and the number is expected to hit 2 million this year, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. That is a negligible impact on the cost-effectiveness of prisons. 

But total up the cost of the appeals process involved in a death-penalty case, the maintenance of death rows, arranging for the family and witnesses, the execution itself... You do the math. And that’s per person; imagine what Texas must spend on executions, when they executed a stunning 37 people last year, a record-breaking number that appeared almost nowhere in print. Under then-Gov. Shrub, 157 people were executed.

3) Sooner or later, we’re going to screw up and execute the innocent. Many argue this has already happened. It very well may have. The stunning incompetancy of the FBI in failing to turn over thousands of obviously pertinent documents in the McVeigh case should be proof enough that bungling is common. For heaven’s sake, this was only the most important prosecution in the last decade, and even then they couldn’t get the rules right? Little things like a possible third bomber and a potential alibi (most likely false) for McVeigh were “irrelevant?” 

As much as I like to dance around and crow about the morons in Washington, they're not this stupid. There is a reason they didn't hand over this evidence before. Part of it, I imagine, is the absolute need for a scapegoat to personify the evil of the bombing and be the sacrificial lamb. McVeigh suits it perfectly, because he was intricately involved and totally remorseless. 

At any rate, from a legal point of view, those documents are clearly relevant and should have been handed over. They detail massive evidence of additional  conspirators, possible exoneration evidence, alternate theories of the crime. 

4) Death is too good for them.

This is one most people disagree with. Oh, they go on and on  about the country-club prisons, cable TV and exercise rooms as they enjoy a happy existence. Spare me. I’ve seen prisons. They’re worse than your junior high school, and the other kids in gym class are in for rape and murder. Prison is prison, and no matter how gilded the bars, you're still sleeping a few feet from a mass murderer with nothing to lose.

In my humble opinion, execution was far too good for McVeigh. It's true that there are human monsters, and McVeigh certainly qualifies. But I have never supported killing them. There are far better punishments.

McVeigh's act was to protest what he perceived to be the tyranny of government.  So we should have let him spend the rest of his natural life in a maximum-security Oklahoma prison.  Let him spend the rest of his life finding out what REAL loss of freedom is. Let him be subject, every moment of every day, to the government he hates so much. Don’t make him a martyr to the cause of governmental oppression; let him  grow old behind cinderblock walls.

And let the inmates of Oklahoma mete out their own justice.

5) Finally, there’s one that is both specific to McVeigh and can be extended to other legally-sane yet obviously nuts people who have committed heinous crimes. McVeigh was obviously not alone - hush, FBI, we know damned well that boy was not capable of planning this assault on his own. 

Did you know that McVeigh called a white-supremacy compound, asking for one of the leaders, the day before the bombing? Of course not. He must have been calling for the weather. I didn’t find out about this because of McVeigh coverage, of course. That would have been responsible journalism. I found out about it through the obituary of the leader of the compound. He died of natural causes on his compound, shortly before McVeigh filed his last-minute appeals.

Another angry lone nut commits an act of terrorism or assassination, but he did it alone, and no one will follow him. Of course. We’ve never heard this story before. Apparently we’re as stupid now as we were in the 1960s.

Too bad. The prospect of a life of torture, virtual slavery and forcible sodomy might have made McVeigh cough up whatever intelligence he might have had about the militia movement in America. And there’s a hell of a lot of them out there. They’re not just on compounds in Montana; they’re on the internet, they’re in three-piece suits, they’re in high school cafeterias. 

They are a clear and present danger to civilians in America. They feel that the government has lost touch with its people, and certainly there’s arguments to that effect. They see themselves as the descendents of the patriots on Boston Common, and there’s nothing scarier than a fool with a cause.

Ruby Ridge and Waco have infuriated them, and they're not done yet. That concerns  me a hell of a lot more than McVeigh, who would never be able to hurt anyone again from Supermax.

How does this relate beyond McVeigh? This occurred to me after I read that Theodore Kasczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, became friends with McVeigh in Supermax. (There’s a pairing that ought to chill your blood.) Tim and Ted became rather close. They have some politicial beliefs in common, of course, as well as rather antisocial tendencies. But Ted decried the bombing, said it was unnecessarily violent. Go figure. 

Then I was watching a movie starring Sigourney Weaver as a housebound psychiatrist who studies serial killers, I believe the movie was called “Copycat.” She said she believed the best disposition of serial killers was to lock them up and study them, a la Hannibal Lecter. Okay, maybe not the best example, but hey, that was fiction. In reality, Ted Kasczynski is never leaving Supermax. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been put in there, he’d be there still (talk about prison justice. They tortured him for two years and killed him.) 

But behind bars, the shrinks and experts in Behavioral Science at the FBI can study them, find out how they tick, which helps them catch the next psychotic bomber or serial killer who comes along. 

There are so many ways we could better have honored  the 168 people who died at the Murrah building other than this anticlimactic ritual sacrifice. It’s good politics, it satisfies the mob mentality, it’s a few short steps away from the rope at the tree on the edge of town. But whatever McVeigh knew about the bombing, about the militia movements in America, whatever dark secrets he held in his diseased brain, he took with him this morning.

And we must wait for the next one.