McVeigh's Death Wish.(Timothy McVeigh )(Brief Article)

The death penalty is an issue that provokes surprisingly little public debate in the United States, except when a celebrated murderer--or someone who may have been convicted wrongly--is up for execution. Then the controversy flares again, at least for a news cycle or two. But even staunch opponents of capital punishment may be willing to make an exception in the case of Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to die on May 16. McVeigh, now 32, was convicted of blowing up a government office building in Oklahoma City six years ago, killing 168 people, including 19 small children in a day-care center. It was the bloodiest act of terrorism in American history, and according to a new biography, McVeigh is not sorry for what he did. He dismisses the dead babies as mere "collateral damage" and brags that he timed the bomb to go off when the building was full of people. "I did it for the larger good," he declares.

The authors of the book, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, are newspaper reporters in Buffalo, New York, McVeigh's hometown. They interviewed him in prison for 75 hours all told, extracting his first public confession of guilt for the bombing. Their book, to be published in the United States this week, is called "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing." McVeigh confirms that the bombing was revenge for two lethal actions by the FBI: the fiery raid on the compound of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993, in which about 80 people died, and a 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which the wife and son of a white separatist were killed. The U.S. government, says McVeigh, was a "bully" that had to be taught a lesson.

Although he had help in preparing the bomb (two accomplices were sentenced to prison), McVeigh insists he set it off all by himself. "It was my choice... to hit that building when it was full," he says. Borrowing a Jack Nicholson line from the film "A Few Good Men" (which he saw on cable TV in prison), he snarls at people who think he could not have acted alone. "You can't handle the truth," he says, "because the truth is, it was just me."

After his conviction, McVeigh was sent to a high-security prison in Colorado called Supermax. There he shared a special cellblock with three other mass murderers: Theodore Kaczynski, the technophobic Unabomber; Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, serving a 240-year sentence for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center ...