United States Government Buildings

As long ago as 1992, suspected Oklahoma City federal building bomber Timothy J. McVeigh railed against what he saw as the mendacity of government and hinted that bloodshed might be the answer. Two rambling letters from McVeigh, published three years ago by a small-town newspaper in Upstate New York, provide the first look at the unvarnished thoughts of a man allegedly responsible for the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

It's a Washington cover-up of a different sort. The Justice Department has spent $8,000 on blue drapes to hide two giant partially nude statues in the Great Hall of the agency's headquarters, spokesman Shane Hix said Monday. Drapes were occasionally hung in front of the aluminum Art Deco statues before formal events "for aesthetics," Hix said. The department used to rent the drapes, but has now purchased them and left them hanging.

U.S. and Tanzanian officials broke ground Saturday for a new American Embassy, a year to the day after a powerful explosion ripped through the previous building, killing 11 people and injuring dozens. Investigators believe that the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by Islamic militants inside a refrigeration truck. The truck was parked outside the embassy compound in a residential neighborhood in the capital, Dar es Salaam.

The White House war room, where staffers patrol the information front of the war on terrorism, looks more like a convention hall than a bunker. Placards announce the various units: London Desk, State Department, Terrorist Finances, Investigations. Huge poster boards on opposite ends of the room list the Media Grid of interviews by public officials in Washington and London (British Prime Minister Tony Blair did the BBC at 6:30 p.m.

The FBI in Ft. Myers, Fla., arrested the younger of two brothers wanted for questioning in the firebombing of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration office. The bombing caused $4 million in damage but no injuries, and came two days after the brothers were indicted on drug charges. John Lewis Ciganek, 22, was arrested on the drug charges. Authorities continued searching for Jeffrey A. Matthews, 23, formerly known as Jeff Ciganek.

One of the eager conservative Republicans who swept into Washington on an anti-government tide last fall has been caught up in the far-reaching fallout surrounding the Oklahoma City bombing. Freshman Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.) has been thrust into the limelight to explain how he received an anonymous fax about the bombing and his own links to anti-government militia groups.

Government investigators have put together a reconstruction of the moments before the Oklahoma City bombing, which indicates that the fuse attached to the bomb was lit inside the rental truck even before the Ryder vehicle came to a stop in front of the federal building. According to sources close to the case, the re-creation was done with the help of at least two video cameras located near the Alfred P.

Bad luck dogged bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh as he drove north toward the Kansas border on Wednesday morning in a battered yellow Mercury Marquis with a rusted bumper and no license plate. Bad luck's name was Trooper Charlie Hanger. Hanger, a 22-year veteran of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, is a road hawk--the sort of alert patrolman who takes his job so seriously that everyone in his hometown has either been stopped by him or knows someone who has.

A Pacoima man drove a stolen pickup truck through the glass doors of the Federal Building in Westwood on Thursday, narrowly missing people in the busy lobby. Russell Anthony Anzalone, 24, was immediately pulled from the truck by a building guard and arrested by FBI agents, whose offices are in the building. No injuries were reported in the lobby of the building on Wilshire Boulevard.

It took a terrorist's bomb to introduce America to the Oklahoma City Fire Department, an unsung force that has galvanized the nation with unflinching courage and down-home charm. But here in Oklahoma's capital, where a special sales tax generates $20 million a year for fire services, nobody is surprised that the men and women of the OCFD have emerged from the rubble as heroic figures in the public eye.

Neither rain, nor cold, nor fear of anthrax could keep several hundred visitors from the Capitol for the first public tours Saturday in almost two months. "We're here from a long ways away, and I refused to leave without seeing it if I got the opportunity," said Whitey Klassen of Vergas, Minn., making his first visit to Washington. "I just don't like all the barricades, but other than that it's great."

Trace amounts of anthrax have been found in the offices of three more U.S. senators, including Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), bringing to 11 the number of senators' suites found in recent days to be contaminated. All 11 are in the Hart Senate Office Building, where an anthrax-filled letter was opened Oct. 15 in the office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).

As members of Congress scavenged for information after the Capitol was evacuated Sept. 11, some wandered nearby parks, tuning in news bulletins on battery-powered radios. Others gravitated to hastily assembled briefing rooms at the Capitol Police headquarters. But a small group of lawmakers, showing perhaps the best instincts of all, assembled at the doorstep of Rep. Porter J. Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Today, the south wall of the Energy Department's fortress-like Washington headquarters is a fitting symbol for an agency that itself has never quite established an identity: a 32,100-square-foot blank slab of concrete. Shortly before leaving office, however, the Clinton administration awarded a Chicago architectural firm a contract to explore converting the wall into something quite different: a vast solar array that would provide much of the building's heat and power.

In a visit meant to underscore the Bush administration's heightened concern about the California electricity crisis, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham met Thursday with Gov. Gray Davis in Sacramento to discuss federal energy conservation plans. "I think we have an approach that can result in significant savings," Abraham told Davis. The energy secretary said he was in California "to gauge what we can do to add to what California is already doing."

President Bush today will order federal workers across the country to lower the lights, turn off office equipment not in use and take other steps to conserve electricity in an effort to ease possible energy shortages this summer in California and other states. The president's directive will call for setting thermostats in federal buildings at 78 degrees--and allowing casual dress on hot days--during power emergencies in California. In Sacramento, a spokesman for Gov.

James D. Nichols, who is being held as a material witness in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing, once told a neighbor that Timothy J. McVeigh was testing homemade bombs and that it was possible to build one large enough to destroy a federal building, an FBI agent testified Tuesday. The FBI agent, Randal Farmer, said the conversation occurred after the neighbor visited the Nichols farm and smelled chemical fumes near a large shed. "My brother and an old Army buddy are out making bombs."

They do the dirty work, literally. On their hands, knees and sometimes their bellies, about 300 members of search and rescue teams brought in from around the country have gone about the grim and tedious task of sifting through the rubble of the federal building here, looking and listening for bomb survivors. "Our team hasn't found anybody alive yet," said Capt. Erik Heyer of the Phoenix search and rescue squad. "Just one would make us feel a lot better."

For more than three decades, the imposing, life-size portrait of George Washington has presided over the entrance of the National Portrait Gallery here--one hand graciously extended toward the tourists who passed through the museum's grand foyer. Now the painting, which has been on loan, could be headed for the auction block--with a $20-million price tag attached. The British owner of the 1796 portrait has notified the gallery that he wants to sell it.

Employees at the Treasury Department were evacuated from the historic building next to the White House on Wednesday after workers complained of noxious fumes that were causing watery eyes, breathing difficulties and nausea. The fumes, described as smelling like diesel fuel, came from sewer pipes in a tunnel under Pennsylvania Avenue that connects the main Treasury building with an annex, said Alan Etter, a spokesman for the District of Columbia Fire Department.