The South Florida University bomb - 19 April 1996

I was down in Florida a few weeks ago, and was reminded by a university student that the spring break was over, and the 26th of April would loom, and she had no time to socialise. And what was so ominous about the 26th? It was the first day of her final examinations to go on through the 2nd of May. I doubt I should ever have recalled this chance encounter if I hadn't noticed casually on Tuesday a story out of Tampa, Florida announcing that the University of South Florida had decided to push its final examinations up a week, and start them on Friday the 19th of April. Some big story eh?

Well without tantalising you further, I'd better say at once why the story, in a serious newspaper ran to about 1,000 words. The University's decision, taken by the president and the vice-presidents, was in response to a letter sent to the university newspaper at the end of March. It said, without any moralising, quite simply, that the author – who carried the grand signature, Leader of the War Purgers and helped us all by declaring a connection with Hamas, the militant Palestinians – was going to blow up the main administration building and in the process kill quote, "a white female professor".

Now I don't know how often the University of South Florida has received similar threatening notes, you know that the president of the United states gets them directed at his flesh and blood several times a month. There is indeed a special section of the Secret Service that examines all obscene and threatening letters addressed to the president and uses the skills of spectrographic chemists to analyse the writing and from the dated postal marks the movements of so called "repeaters", the same people who threaten more than once.

This is something every president learns about the morning after he's sworn in. I remember how appalled President Eisenhower was to discover this, but they have to get to take it as all in the days work. How many of us ever stop to imagine the sort of anxiety that a threatening letter or phone call can generate. Have you ever had one? I once had a call and I can tell you only that it's very unpleasant to be on the receiving end. I tried to take it in my stride but I have to admit my normal blood pressure, what kindly critics call ebonite, was not restored for several days.

I bring this home to us personally, as to ask you to wonder what you would have done if you'd been the president of the University of South Florida, which I ought to say, has five campuses, the biggest and the central one is in Tampa. It has 20,000 students, 6,000 faculty and attending staff and maintenance workers. When I first read that lead paragraph, I thought this is absurd caving in to one letter. Well you read on and think again. The letter mentioned April the 19th as the anniversary, if that's the word, of the ghastly bombing of the government, the federal building in Oklahoma City. The letter also referred, I gather in a strange way, to one Ramadan Shallah, a professor of Middle Eastern politics who quit the university a year ago, in order to lead a group of Islamic radicals who proliferate it seems every month.

A lady who spoke for the university, one Kathy Stafford was obviously challenged by the suggestion that the university had jibbed. She was quite blunt, she said: "We got a specific letter threatening violence and that letter put down a specific date, we can't discount it".

Well I suppose it's one thing if a single terrorist threatens the president of the United states and the Security Services of half the world swoop down on the suspects. But if you're in charge of 26,000 human beings, and on April the 26th, the several thousand students will be bent over examination papers, and where will be that specified white female professor? The stress on the word "white" may strike some people as odd. Not in this country. There are alien cultures and many sorts of immigrant and passionate newcomers who look on the whites as the establishment enemy, no longer, as they did 90 years ago, as role models. Hence, the derision of advanced graduate students at several American universities about, as they put it, the obsession of the curriculum with D.W.E.'s – Dead, White, Europeans, like Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare.

This very last week, Columbia University, New York, was stopped in its tracks by students who in the manner of the 1960s, occupied administration buildings when they weren't parading around, they wanted a whole new faculty of Hispanic and Asian studies and some of them wanted to pick the professors who would teach them and what they be taught.

Well back to vice president Kathy Stafford and her decision that they couldn't discount the threat. She mentioned that all around the country officials of all sorts – and, she implied, universities – were well aware that Friday April the 19th was the anniversary and maybe the fateful anniversary, of the Oklahoma City bombing, and mentioned that only last week in California, a truck belonging to the federal government, the Department of Labor was bombed, just after an anonymous telephone voice said over the telephone: Timothy McVeigh, lives on. Timothy McVeigh, is a held suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Whatever happens on the 26th, the Leader of the War Purges, has achieved something: he has put 20 odd thousand people on the rack. A young woman who works in the university library said: "People are freaking out at the library, a lot of students are stressed out."

The day this story appeared, both houses of Congress and up, to much debating back and forth and as is the American way finally compromising their differences in a bill produced by a conference committee of both House and Senate members from both parties, they have produced what is popularly called "an anti terrorism bill." Its main provision is to reverse or abandon the American tradition whereby people condemned to death can use a whole series of appeals through state courts and eventually on to the United States Supreme court to delay their execution.

Let's put it this way, I don't have the figures at my elbow, but this is the rough truth. Let's say there are at this moment 300 humans on death row. Most of them will never die, some convictions will be commuted to life imprisonment but the average appeal against the death sentence lasts something like 12 years. Most Americans and both political parties are fed up with this interminable procedure and the enormous burden it puts on the taxpayer. Of course life imprisonment costs more. The main argument of people in favour of capital punishment is that they think it's unfair and scandalous to have to pay something like a quarter of a million dollars a year to keep a hopeless monster like Charles Manson alive.

The new bill also has prohibitions against defined terrorist groups raising money in the United States. It also can deport aliens suspected of terrorism without bringing them to trial. And here, liberal Democrats have raised an outcry against what amounts to the sin of suspending Habeas Corpus, which literally means, "having the body there" and since, I think the time of Charles I, in England has meant the preservation of a basic liberty: the right of every accused person to be brought into court to have a charge brought before a magistrate or a grand jury.

A very eminent American journalist wrote a blazing column about this the other day, Mr Anthony Lewis, who is most of the time on President Clinton's side, but the power of the government to expel aliens merely suspected of terrorism, he believes, reinstates a bad law born during the shabbiest days of the McCarthy era, the expulsion of people from entering the United States who somebody in or around government thinks could be a threat to the government.

This preposterous law stopped Graham Green, Carlos Fuentes, Bertrand Russell, till somebody came to their rescue, and once, I hate to recall, almost arrested the late great Professor Sir Denis Brogan – the most distinguished student and admirer of the best of American history and law – stopped him because at the dock he was carrying the works of the sainted third president Thomas Jefferson. The immigration inspector however, knew Jefferson only as the name of a highly suspect left-wing society. However, Mr Clinton got what he could in this bill and is going to sign it.

The sad fact is, all arguing and legal niceties aside, the country is so frustrated by the threats and the facts of terrorism from so many groups native and just arrived, that no politician from the White House down dare go on through this presidential campaign year without signing an anti-terrorism bill, that in the final form is to nobody's satisfaction. But then in a democracy, when ever did you hear of a bill in this country anyway, that was ideal.

Remember when a party comes into power in the American system, it can't go ahead and make the laws and shove them through and say: "If you don't like it, wait till the next election and put in your own guys to dictate what you'll pass." Here no matter how grand, how brilliant, how noble a president's policy and how fair and sensible the policy of the opposition, they both have to be exhaustively debated, first on the floors of both houses and then in committees of Congress, and then in a conference committee before the powerful men and women of both parties. Any president, especially one faced with the opposition party in control of both the Senate and the House, can only say to Mr Lewis accusing him of selling out Habeas Corpus – sorry I did my best!

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