Timothy McVeigh and other foreign countries. The handwritten essay, submitted to and published by the alternative national news magazine "Media Bypass", was distributed worldwide by the Associated Press on May 29, 1998. This was written in the midst of the 1998 Iraq disarmament crisis and a few months before Operation Desert Fox. The essay, which marked the first time that McVeigh publicly discussed the Oklahoma City bombing, continued: McVeigh included photocopies of a famous Vietnam War-era picture showing terrified children fleeing napalm bombs, and of nuclear devastation in Japan. He said in a preface that the essay was intended to "provoke thought
Timothy McVeigh he did not believe in a hell and that science is his religion. In June 2001, a day before the execution, McVeigh wrote a letter to the "Buffalo News" identifying himself as agnostic. However, he took the Last Rites, administered by a priest, just before his execution. Father Charles Smith ministered to McVeigh in his last moments in death row. McVeigh claimed that the bombing was revenge against the government for the sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge. McVeigh visited Waco during the standoff. While there, he was interviewed by student reporter Michelle Rauch, a senior journalism major at Southern