Outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh admitted to a congressional subcommittee last week that his agency made horrible, awful mistakes ("serious errors") in its handling of evidence in the Timothy McVeigh case--and it's hard to tell whether it's a rare burst of Department of Justice integrity, or a breathtakingly cynical political ploy.

Conspiracy buffs, especially on the right, are having a field day with the revelation that the federal government withheld evidence in McVeigh's trial. They've been claiming for six years that the bombing was a successful government plot to discredit the militia movement, and that Timothy McVeigh is the fall guy for the mysterious John Doe #2 and assorted, unnamed handlers.

But the more widespread reaction to the delay of McVeigh's execution--a sickening spectacle in which the entire nation will celebrate the return of the federal death penalty by glorying in our collective bloodlust--was something a friend overheard in a bar on the day that the delay was announced: "Why don't they just go ahead and kill the bastard?"

Mind you, just like the 83% who, in one poll, didn't think McVeigh should get a new trial, he had only the word of the FBI's director that the evidence the FBI withheld wouldn't have changed the verdict. And one has to wonder at the timing of the revelation, just days before McVeigh's scheduled death--especially when we find out, as we did about a week later, that the FBI knew in January that evidence hadn't been handed over.

The postponed state murder of McVeigh serves the purposes of the FBI, and all of the various tentacles of our federal gulag, in a rather devious way: it communicates to us all that criminals, even the most murderous one in US history, are constantly coddled by a soft justice system that gives them too many rights, breaks, and appeals. McVeigh will become--probably already has become--Exhibit A, B, and C-W for those who hate these damned delays and who would like to gut the protections both accused and convicted criminals enjoy under the Constitution.

The problem is, most of those protections--including a sizable chunk of the Bill of Rights--have already been gutted. For the last 20 years, Republicans and Democrats and their newly appointed judges have all chipped away, hammered away, and more recently ripped away at things like federal habeus corpus, search and seizure, the Miranda ruling, and innumerable other legal protections against the invariable abuses of the state. Federal death row inmates--the less telegenic drug dealers and hapless killers who will follow McVeigh in death--cannot even appeal their sentences if new evidence emerges that clearly demonstrates their innocence.

That and other gems of our incipient, and rather popular, police state were a direct result of Clintonian and Congressional demagoguery after McVeigh's hour of infamy. They have nothing to do with terrorism, but everything to do with expanding state power and trashing civil liberties.

Now Timothy McVeigh can live an extra month in a cage, and millions howl that the state should be freer to kill, to imprison, to enslave. Louis Freeh, who is already retiring, can be the fall guy for the "scandal" without consequence--and his successor will be able to plausibly demand that the courts never be allowed to interfere with justice again. Freeh probably isn't nearly as sorry as he says he is.