PrimeTime: McVeigh's Own Words
March 29 -- Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh has no serious regrets for the attack that killed 168 people, and he calls the deaths of 19 children in the 1995 blast "collateral damage," according to a new book.
Authors Dan Herbeck and Lou Michel, who interviewed McVeigh for 75 hours, tell ABCNEWS' PrimeTime Thursday that he only wishes the dead children didn't distract people from his message, and he feels no pity for the victims or their families.
"I understand what they felt in Oklahoma City. I have no sympathy for them," McVeigh says in the book, American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.
In his interviews with Herbeck and Michel, reporters for McVeigh's hometown newspaper the Buffalo News, McVeigh publicly admits to his crime for the first time.
McVeigh says he was the sole architect of the plan to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. No foreign terrorists or domestic militias helped him, he says. "The truth is, I blew up the Murrah Building. And isn't it kind of scary that one man could reap this kind of hell?"
"He has never expressed one ounce of remorse for the Oklahoma City bombing," Herbeck tells PrimeTime, though McVeigh did get choked up when he spoke about once killing a gopher.
‘Dirty for Dirty’
When the bomb went off, McVeigh was two blocks away. He says he didn't look back and his feet were lifted off the ground by the blast's force. He recited to himself a bitter lyric from a song by Bad Company: "Dirty for Dirty."
"What the U.S. government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge was dirty," he says. "And I gave dirty back to them at Oklahoma City."
In 1992 at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, the wife and son of a white separatist, Randy Weaver, were killed by federal agents during a standoff.
McVeigh tells the authors he knew he would get caught and even anticipated execution as a form of "state-assisted suicide." He only wanted to make sure his message first reached the American public.
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