It was a potpourri of evidence, which I think the prosecution presented with mixed success. Some of the elements were proved pretty definitively and are very important to the prosecution’s case. Some of the elements were not even close to being proven beyond reasonable doubt.

What were the key elements of the prosecution case?

There were basically six major prosecution contentions connecting Nichols to the bombing. One was the break-in at a quarry in Marion, Kan., from which Tovex explosive, blasting caps and detonating cord were taken. Second was the robbery of gun collector Roger Moore in Arkansas. The third was the purchase of two tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from a farm co-op in McPherson, Kan. A fourth would be Nichols driving McVeigh from Oklahoma City to Junction City on Easter Sunday. Fifth, that Nichols helped build the bomb at Geary Lake (State Park). And finally, that he did a bunch of other stuff including making phone calls to get plastic barrels for the explosives.

What was the weakest?

The Geary Lake evidence. I don’t think the prosecution came close to convincing the jury that Nichols personally helped McVeigh mix the bomb on the morning of April 18, the day before the bombing. For good reason. There wasn’t enough time. There was too much to do. There were too many other sightings of Ryder trucks, it just wasn’t compelling evidence.

Why is that so important?

Because if Nichols can’t be shown to have been involved in mixing the bomb, the other incriminating activities of Nichols could be explained away as being done unknowingly or without recognizing the probable intent of McVeigh.

But in federal conspiracy cases, the defendant need not know the intent of the conspiracy to be liable.

You can’t mix a bomb innocently. But you can place telephone calls innocently to plastic barrel manufacturers or to racing fuel people. You could even buy a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. You can explain that away innocently. You can explain the use of aliases to a certain extent. That’s why April 18th was so important, and that’s where the prosecution came up a little short. That doesn’t mean they won’t get a conviction, but it’s also important because if there is a conviction, lack of personal involvement in making the bomb will be a major statutory and case-law factor in whether the death penalty can be imposed.

Why?

Under the applicable federal law, if the jury finds Nichols guilty, they then consider a number of statutory aggravating and mitigating factors. Mitigating factors include that the individual played a relatively minor role in the whole crime, and that others who were equally or more culpable do not face the death penalty. So if someone else other than Nichols mixed the bomb with McVeigh and those people have never even been arrested, that’s a statutory mitigator. There’s also case law from the Supreme Court indicating that, while having deliberate indifference to the value of human life is enough of an intent requirement, you cannot impose the death penalty if the individual’s participation in the overall crime is relatively minor compared to others.

So jurors would have to believe Nichols was McVeigh’s right-hand man?

The key thing is that he be shown to be something other than a minor participant. The longer that Nichols is actively and knowingly involved in the conspiracy, the more chance of that. So if he can cut off his involvement with McVeigh on the morning of the 18th when he loaned him a truck, or perhaps on the 16th when he drove him from Oklahoma City to Junction City, well, that would help Nichols at sentencing.

What were the strongest elements of the prosecution’s case?

They came down to a couple of pieces of paper and too many storage
lockers. A receipt with McVeigh’s fingerprint was found in
Nichols’ home in a place, quite frankly, where McVeigh couldn’t have put it. That was driven home when Nichols’ wife, Marife, helpfully told the prosecution
that McVeigh had never even been in their Herington [Kan.] home, eliminating the “McVeigh framed him” defense. Nichols also had enough aliases to make up a whole baseball team. Ten aliases, and that’s about 10 too many. It isn’t just that they were
phony names. The Mike Havens alias was used to purchase ammonium nitrate
in large quantities.

There’s also storage lockers that were rented at very inopportune times.
Marife Nichols leaves for the Philippines on Sept. 22, 1994, and on that
same day McVeigh, posing as Sean Rivers, rents a storage locker in
Herington. Eight days later is the first purchase of a ton of ammonium
nitrate. This is followed by the quarry break-in, followed by
Nichols using a pseudonym at a storage facility in Council
Grove. The next day another ton of fertilizer is purchased. Then there’s
the so-called robbery of gun dealer Roger Moore, followed two days later by
another Council Grove rental by Nichols, under yet another
assumed name. Motel records show Nichols used names similar to Mike Havens
pseudonyms all the time.

You put all that together and you’ve got a real
tough situation for the defense, even though when all these storage lockers
or sheds were originally searched there was no sign of explosives residue.

What about the defense?

It put on a very good showing attacking many aspects of the
prosecution’s case. But why didn’t they attack other aspects? Probably because they didn’t have a way to do it. No one’s ever explained, for example, how the ammonium nitrate receipt is in Nichols’ home. Why is the quilt owned by the
girlfriend of Roger Moore (the Arkansas gun enthusiast whom star
prosecution witness Michael Fortier has said Nichols burgled to raise
money for the bombing) in Nichols’ home? The hardest thing to explain is why Nichols has Roger Moore’s Florida safe deposit box key and his quilt.

Although the people accusing Nichols of the robbery
ain’t too believable either. And anyway, it’s not even necessarily connected,
because unlike the theft of explosives, there’s another possible motivation
for Nichols to commit this crime without having been involved in the
bombing — and that’s greed.

How damaging was the testimony of Marife Nichols to the defense?

It was quite damaging, for what she said and for what she didn’t say. She tied down that McVeigh was never in their Herington home, she established that Nichols left quickly after getting a call from McVeigh on Easter Sunday, and she provided no
alibi for him on April 18, the day of the Geary Lake scenario. She provided no explanation for all the aliases.

Couldn’t the defense have foreseen this?

Sure. But somebody had to testify
as to Nichols breaking off of his
relationship with McVeigh. Someone had to testify that he
packaged ammonium nitrate and sold it at gun shows for enormous profit, and not necessarily to bomb people. Somebody had to show the jury that this was a married man who had children and people out there who cared about him. Unfortunately, sometimes we have to make bad choices as lawyers. Using Marife Nichols to act as Terry
Nichols’ surrogate was one of them.

What other bad choices did the lawyers make?

Well, there was bad personnel choice. Several of the prosecutors were
seemingly cowed by Michael Tigar (the lead defense attorney) and the
judge’s seeming lack of warmth for them. There were some witnesses who
probably would have come off a lot better if other prosecutors had handled
them. There were bad luck decisions for the defense. They could not present
their case in chronological order because of witness problems. But that’s
about it. This is not a case in which major blunders were made. In fact,
part of the reason that so many people said that calling Marife was a
mistake was that to that point it appeared that nobody had done anything
terribly wrong. There was no Chris Darden getting O.J. Simpson to try on the
blood-stained gloves.

How do you think it looks for Terry Nichols?

He’s going to get convicted of conspiracy because of the ammonium nitrate
receipt and the lack of alibis and all that. The real question is, are
they going to get him on any substantive counts, and that comes down to
whether the jury can understand the concept of complicity — that is, aiding
and abetting a criminal act. For example, buying ammonium nitrate could be
aiding and abetting as long as you knew what the ultimate objective was.
But that’s a little more complex, because the indictment talks about
constructing a bomb of mass destruction and detonating it. And there is no
evidence that works that Nichols mixed the bomb.

So …?

He’ll possibly be found guilty on the substantive
counts. The odds are stacked against Nichols because of the number of deaths and because of
the victim impact testimony. Still, he’s got a much better chance than McVeigh of avoiding lethal injection.

Do you think he’ll avoid it?

This is a man with
two kids, a wife, who is portrayed, whether it’s true or not, as
someone who was basically pressured, cajoled, pushed, threatened by Tim
McVeigh to go along with this bizarre and disgusting plan. You can so
easily depict him as a sheepish follower that he has a decent chance of
avoiding the death penalty.

The problem is that 168 is an awful lot of deaths.

They are also killing people in what are called “mismatch” car crashes. Some auto insurers are planning rate raises for SUVs because research suggests they inflict worse damage to smaller vehicles and their occupants in such crashes.

Salon talked with Kim Hazelbaker, senior vice president of the Highway Loss Data Institute. The insurance industry-funded institute, along with its sister organization, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, are conducting studies on “mismatch” car crashes this fall and winter.

What are “mismatch” crashes?

There are a couple of issues when you have large SUVs getting into crashes with smaller passenger cars. One is the obvious size mismatch. The average SUV is heavier than the average passenger car and physics being what it is, that’s a bad thing for the passenger car in a multi-car collision.

The second mismatch is the bumper height. Most SUVs are four-wheel drive, which were designed originally for off-road use. They sit up higher than passenger cars, and many times when they get into crashes with passenger cars the bumpers do not meet. So you have a collision in which the SUV suffers little or no damage to its bumper, but that bumper’s done a lot of damage to the metal panels of the vehicle that it hit.

Is this mismatch reflected in the injuries involved?

So far we’ve only done a limited investigation, into property damage losses. We don’t at this point have hard data on the injury side, although one would unfortunately have to come to the conclusion that the likelihood of injuries is greater.

But there has been some comparative crash testing done in Europe.

Yes, and they show what you would expect — that more physical damage is done to the smaller car and that dummies inside that car are more likely to sustain injuries. A German study crash-tested a Nissan SUV and a Volkswagen Golf nearly head-on. The crash test dummy in the Golf got head injuries measured at nearly 3,200, on a scale where 1,000 is fatal. A British study indicated that SUVs and pickups are especially dangerous when they hit an ordinary car side on.

Isn’t it true that in the U.S., while mismatch crashes still are a minority of two-vehicle crashes, they now account for the majority of deaths in two-vehicle crashes?

Yes.

Many people buy SUVs because they look safer. But really it’s safety at someone else’s expense.

The data are pretty clear that SUVs do a good job of protecting their own from death and injury, and a pretty good job of not suffering much vehicle damage in collisions. The downside is, the other vehicle in the crash is not going to fare as well. The message on the safety side is: It’s good for the occupants of the SUV but not good for the occupants of the other vehicle.

Apart from the height and weight mismatch, do people also tend to drive SUVs less carefully because they’re driving such big vehicles?

The marketing data the car companies share with us shows that one of the aspects people really like about SUVs is the feeling of invulnerability. You sit up high — that’s always mentioned. You can see over other traffic. On the other hand, the message the driver gets is that he’s going to be able to push everyone else out of the way. That’s not a good thing.

Isn’t there also the danger of rollovers with some SUVs?

Yes. The small SUVs are particularly troublesome. They’re very popular with kids. Unfortunately, we as a society have a tendency to put our least experienced drivers in some of our more dangerous vehicles.

Is the increasing popularity of SUV’s leading to more deaths and
injuries overall?

Well, for many years we’ve seen a decline in the overall deaths caused by
auto collisions. In the last couple of years, that decline has stopped.
There’s a number of reasons for that, including raising the speed limit in
many states. But clearly the change of vehicle size in the nation’s fleet
also has an effect.

SUVs seem to be getting bigger and bigger. Aren’t there regulations
limiting their size and weight?

No, there really aren’t. For example, Ford has one of the hottest products
on the market right now, the Ford Expedition, which I understand you have to
pay a premium to buy. They’re planning to build a vehicle which would be so
large it would not be categorized as a light-duty passenger vehicle, and
would fall outside of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy — the so-called
CAFE law — which regulates what the overall fleet of a manufacturer has to
get in terms of gas mileage. This new one would weight more than 8,500
pounds; it would be a medium-sized truck! I guess I don’t quite understand
the market for that sort of vehicle.

How much bigger is this 8,500-pound monster than the SUVs currently on
the road?

The biggest SUVs out there now are the Chevy Suburban and the Ford
Expedition, both of which are in the 5,000-6,000 pound range.

What does a mid-sized car weigh?

3,500 pounds or so.

It makes one wonder if the next SUV will be a tank.

Exactly, and that’s sort of out there in the Hummer.

What regulations are there on bumper height?

There’s a range within which the bumpers must fall in. Unfortunately, if you
have a passenger car, which is toward the bottom of that range, and you have
an SUV toward the top of that range, they don’t meet.

So what happens when they collide?

You get stiff bumper material pushing rather dramatically into car panels.

About where a driver’s or passenger’s head and chest are.

Certainly in the case of a side impact, it’s potentially lethal.

What specifically are you looking for in your studies?

We’re updating a previous statistical study that documented the higher
losses associated with the liability coverage for SUVs. The second thing
we’ll be doing is a fairly detailed analysis of fatality data, to look at
what happens in SUV and passenger car crashes. The third thing is we’ll be
doing some crash testing between sport utility vehicles and passenger cars.

Can you give us an idea what you’ve learned so far?

Early indications in the statistical study are that it will show pretty much
the same kind of pattern that we saw before: higher losses being caused by
the SUVs. That’s important because there are many insurers looking at
repricing portions of their insurance for SUVs.

Two have already upped their rates.

Yes, Farmers and Progressive. And based on the
phone calls I’ve been getting, there are a number of other insurers that
are certainly interested in looking at the data. I’m also getting calls
from drivers of small cars who say, “You’re telling me I’m getting run over
by these bigger vehicles and I’m also subsidizing their insurance?” And the
answer’s yes.

How high might the SUV rates go?

Liability rates for drivers of SUV’s could be hiked by as much as 20
percent over the next few years, while car owners would get a cut of 10
percent.

Do you think insurance increases will affect the SUV market?

I have to say, you’re looking at people who are willing to put out — what?
– $40,000 up front for one of these things, plus high operating costs and
less gas mileage. Is getting the liability portion of their insurance
increased a disincentive? I don’t believe it would affect very many people.

So what would you want to see?

If something could be done about the height mismatch, I think both property
loss damages and potential injury could be lessened. We’ve had some
interest from manufacturers, including Ford, in seeing what could be done
about this.

What do you drive?

A Lexus.

Why?

It’s done well in our crash tests. And in the real world of injuries and
fatalities, it’s done very well. In terms of my safety and the safety of my
family, I’m happy with it.

But is the Unabomber any more or less insane than other serial killers of the recent past? What makes his actions and motivations different from others? Salon spoke with Jack Levin, director of the Program for the Study of Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston, and coauthor of more than a dozen books, including “Overkill: Mass Murder and Serial Killing Exposed” (1994, Insight Books) and most recently “Killer on Campus” (1996, Avon).

The Unabomber killed three people and clearly had hoped to kill many more in his 17-year bombing campaign. Do you see him differently than other serial murderers you have studied?

Yes. Most serial killers are sexual sadists. They kill for the fun and the pleasure, and they do it through intimate physical contact. Typically, they don’t distance themselves from their victims, like the Unabomber did, because their greatest pleasure is to literally squeeze the last gasp from their dying victim’s body.

Like Ted Bundy?

Ted Bundy, Kenneth Bianci the Hillside Strangler, John Wayne Gacy, who killed 33 boys and men in Illinois …

… Jack the Ripper?

Jack the Ripper also used intimate physical contact. These killers typically slash and sodomize, dismember, strangle, and they do it because it makes them feel so good. It gives them a feeling of superiority that they don’t seem to be able to get by behaving themselves. But the Unabomber was quite different in that he distanced himself, in some cases by thousands of miles, from his victims.

And he didn’t know them.

That’s pretty typical of serial killers. They usually target absolute strangers. Very few know their victims at all well.

They don’t kill their relatives.

Typically they have a small circle of relatives and friends who they don’t harm. Somehow they have this incredible ability to dehumanize strangers so they can do anything they want to them with moral impunity.

Is there a serial murderer who compares with the Unabomber?

There have been other bombers, for example, George Metesky, the New York mad bomber of the 1940s and ’50s. He was a middle-aged man who roamed the city blowing up people with bombs.

Did he mail them?

No, he planted them. So he also never saw his victims. He had these homemade bombs and he left letters with the newspapers after each incident.

Did the have the semblance of a normal life? A job?

Yes, and that’s typical, too. Most serial murderers kill on a part-time basis. It’s a hobby, not a career. Often they have a wife and a family; they play with their children, attend religious services and hold a full-time job. Then on Saturday night they go out to play the game of murder the way other guys go out and play cards.

For Kaczynski, allegedly the Unabomber, it was full time. He took voluminous notes.

That’s true. Kaczynski was quite different in that respect. His whole life became devoted to his killing spree. I think his motivation was a lot more like that of a mass murderer than a serial killer.

What’s the difference?

A mass murderer kills a large number of people simultaneously, like George Hennard, who killed 23 people at the Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, in October 1991. He took out an AK-47 and opened fire after ramming his pickup truck through the plate glass window. Or Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad commuter killer.

What distinguishes them, apart from the fact that they do it all at once? How do you see Ted Kaczynski as a mass murderer?

Their motivation is revenge. Serial killers typically have fun; they are sexual sadists who want to feel superior to their victims. Mass murderers want to get even with all the people they feel are responsible for their problems and miseries.

Kaczynski’s writings suggest that he saw technology as responsible for preventing mankind from being truly free — like he was getting revenge on anyone associated with technology for screwing things up.

And I think that as a young man he was genuinely concerned about what we now call postmodern, high-tech society. It was a longtime concern that became a fatal preoccupation.

How does a genuine concern become a murderous preoccupation?

Many of these mass killers have a long-term cumulative set of grievances. That’s why they don’t typically kill until they’re middle-aged men. If you want to understand Ted Kaczynski’s motivations, you have to go back to his days as a young assistant professor at Berkeley. Apparently his life started to fall apart then. He was not good in the classroom and he was very frustrated in the role of academic. Things apparently got worse from there. He never found his niche, his place in life. And as he made it into middle age — at the very time when he might have reached the pinnacle of success — he went in the opposite direction. I’m speculating here, but that’s what I would look for.

He was able to carry out this slaughter and maiming over 18 years. What does that say to you?

First of all, serial murderers are the greatest challenge to law enforcement. Most homicides are solved within the first 14 hours after they’re committed, and most of them are not really murders; they’re manslaughter, in the heat of the moment without malice aforethought. These guys can get away with murder for months, years, decades. Some serial murderers are never caught at all. Once reason is they’re so organized and methodical.

But the Unabomber, you say, was operating out of the heat of revenge.

Yes, but like other mass killers it was methodical and selective. He thought long and hard before he committed his crimes and as result got away with it for a long period of time. That doesn’t surprise me. We’ve got a pretty large country here, 260 million people in 50 states, and keep in mind, he literally blew up his victims and all the evidence with it.

What about the taunting? It seems very arrogant.

I think his motivation changed over the years. As a young man he may have been seriously concerned about the direction of American society and he may have felt strongly about the role that high-tech was playing and then decided he was going to try and reverse that. But I think later he became more interested in power and feeling important than he did in changing society.

That’s why it always aggravates me that the Washington Post, among others, published his 35,000 word manifesto. I realize that is part of how the Unabomber was apprehended, but I contend we could have caught Kaczynski with excerpts from the manifesto. By giving this killer what he wanted, which is a perverted form of “publish or perish,” we have inspired serial killer or mass killer wannabes all over the country, people who want to gain some attention. Would we have printed Jeffrey’s Dahmer’s 35,000-word manifesto?

One of the things that bothers me about this case is that we treat the Unabomber as some sort of anti-high-tech Robin Hood, who went astray but whose intentions were honorable. He had a Harvard education and a Ph.D. He was better able to justify his killing spree in a way that would play in Peoria. To me he’s just another mass killer and he should be treated that way.

Reportedly, his defense team will argue that his childhood was traumatic. Is that enough to make someone a mass killer?

That’s the hardest question. There are those who would argue it’s faulty wiring, some kind of genetic defect, or some repeated head trauma. There are others who would say it has more to do with some profound interruption in early childhood that occurs so that a young child never bonds with adults. Either way, they’re going to plead insanity.

But they haven’t so far, and Kaczynski has refused to take court-ordered psychological tests.

The insanity defense is a last-resort defense, but in this case it’s the only possibility. The physical evidence is irrefutable.

How do you think they will argue insanity?

They’ll have to show profound suffering as a child. They have to show where it comes from, so they’ll have to look for things like abuse, abandonment, neglect, sexual molestation. The question is whether they’ll find that without fabricating. My guess is they’ll have a very difficult time.

Especially when you see his brother who dropped out, came back in to society and now by all accounts is a moral, mild-mannered social worker.

And here’s a factor that people never talk about: Most serial and mass murderers are middle-aged men. If it were caused by early childhood or some genetic factor, why didn’t they start killing when they were 12 or 18 or 20? I think there are critical variables in the transitional phase toward adulthood and middle-age and we ignore them.

Such as?

There are many men in this country who are drifters, transients. They have no place to turn. They lack the support systems, the encouragement; they’re psychologically on their own. Maybe if they had the right kinds of support when they needed it, they would grow out of the problems they had as youngsters. But instead they make the same mistakes over and over and they begin to drift in and out of jobs from one state to another. I think that explains why states with large numbers of transients and drifters have the largest number of serial killings.

His defense lawyers have said Kaczynski probably suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.

That’s the other possibility. Often paranoid schizophrenia develops in late adolescence and early adulthood, and they may argue that Kaczynski’s psychosis developed in this transitional stage. But even psychosis as a defense, because of a tightening of the standard since the Hinckley case, really doesn’t work in federal trials. It’s not enough.

What is enough?

Before Hinckley, some sort of mental defect, like psychosis, could absolve someone for responsibility for a criminal act. Now we’re back to the basic standard: Does he know the difference between right and wrong? Does he realize what he did is wrong? Could he control his murderous impulse?

Did Kaczynski?

Gosh. I think he understood very well that he was killing human beings not gophers. He may have rationalized his behavior as doing something wonderful for humankind, but that doesn’t let him off the hook. Lots of serial killers kill prostitutes and they say they’re cleaning the streets of filth. One other thing: The fact that he killed from a distance may indicate that he had a conscience and he couldn’t face his victims.

So you don’t hold out much chance for a defense insanity plea?

The insanity defense is usually ineffective. It’s only attempted in 1 percent of all felony cases, and it’s successful in just one-third of those cases. I don’t think a jury will buy it. It’s very hard to predict, but I would say he’s going to be found guilty and he’ll get the death penalty.

Salon spoke with British television reporter Peter Taylor, who has covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for 25 years for the BBC and commercial television. Taylor is the chief reporter of “Behind the Mask,” a “Frontline” two-hour special to be broadcast Tuesday on many PBS stations. The author of an upcoming book of the same name, Taylor gained unprecedented access to members of the Republican movement, including former key “Provos” engaged in the struggle, and was able to produce a detailed account of what lay behind the fratricidal “Troubles” of the past 30 years.

The “Frontline” documentary is based on a four-part series that just finished on the BBC in Britain. Given the amount of play you give to actual IRA members, were you howled down like Tony Blair was when he went to Belfast?

We had the predictable criticisms in the beginning about giving terrorists the oxygen of publicity, of being insensitive in our timing, jeopardizing the talks and all that kind of nonsense. But it died away. Most people I think were drawn into the series for what it was — an attempt to relate the remarkable evolution of the IRA, from nothing in ’69 to where they are now today. I was really gratified by the huge number of people who said it had helped them understand what was going on and why.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the documentary is the amount of access you had with the IRA. We’re behind IRA guns, at private meetings, witnessing a training session in bomb-building, inside the Maze prison, watching an FBI videotape of a sting involving IRA arms buyers. Have viewers in Britain or the U.S. ever seen this detail before?

No, never. I made a documentary inside the Maze prison in 1990, which was the first time people had seen IRA members talk the way they really did, and without their masks on. Most of the people on “Behind the Mask” had never been interviewed before. The Republican movement was, to say the least, a little nervous they would say something they shouldn’t. But in fact what they did was absolutely straight. Which is the great strength of the series.

In what way?

It’s not intended to be judgmental. It’s judgmental in as much that I do not approve of people planting bombs that blow people to pieces on Bloody Friday (July 21, 1972, when the IRA planted 26 car bombs all over Belfast, killing nine people and injuring 130). But it’s not judgmental in the sense of saying that the IRA are a bunch of murdering bastards, they’re thugs, they’re Mafiosi, they haven’t a political idea in their heads, they enjoy killing. That standard British view of the IRA is thrown out of the window in the documentary. I show them as they are. It’s an eye-opening and rather disturbing experience for many people.

Many of them seemed quite ordinary.

Well, they are quite ordinary. They kill people. They kill people because they really do believe they are fighting a war. Guys like Tommy McKearney (who would become a senior commander of the IRA) and Richard McAuley (sentenced to 10 years on weapons charges, now Gerry Adams’ press secretary) are highly articulate, intelligent, highly motivated individuals who, had they not been brought up in Northern Ireland, might be doctors or dentists or lawyers or journalists or whatever.

Who were quite capable of the most terrible bungling.

Absolutely. Like Enniskillen (Nov. 11, 1987, when 11 people, including children, were killed by an IRA bomb at a Remembrance Day parade), like Bloody Friday, when you have those awful shots of bodies looking like black treacle being shoved into bags. That’s the reality of it. They were bungled operations. As I said to Sean MacSteofin (the Provisional IRA’s first chief of staff), if you plant bombs you mustn’t be surprised if people get killed.

The Republican reaction has been generally favorable to your series, though there was one criticism, in an Irish newspaper, An Phoblacht (Republican News) that you were too English to understand the deliberateness behind the British government actions.

That was Danny Morrison, a very senior Provisional through the ’70s and ’80s, and whom I’ve known for years. He sees the whole thing as an intricate, brilliant plot on the part of the British, everything thought out in advance. To him, “Bloody Sunday” (a march in Derry in January 1972 in which British paratroopers killed 13 unarmed Catholics) was not a huge, tragic cock-up but a deliberate attempt to go in and kill people and teach the Catholics a lesson. Frankly, I regard all that as nonsense. He gives the British far more credit than they deserve. Many Republicans can’t accept that they are not on the receiving end of some master British intelligence plot.

You state matter-of-factly that both Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, now Sinn Fein MPs, were both in the IRA. Isn’t that rather controversial?

Yup. But it doesn’t come as any surprise. The surprise would be if they had hadn’t been in the IRA.

But they deny it.

McGuinness doesn’t really deny it. He was convicted twice in the early ’70s of IRA membership.

What about Adams, who has denied it repeatedly?

Adams has never been convicted of membership, though the British brought a case against him which was dropped. Those who are in a position to know, like Sean MacStiofain, chief of the staff at the time of the secret 1972 IRA meeting with then-Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw in London, suggest otherwise. He said that the delegation that met with Whitelaw was an IRA delegation, there were no Sinn Fein people on it. I say, “Martin McGuinness, IRA?” and he says, “Yes, Of course.” And I say “Gerry Adams?” And he says, “All IRA.” So do you take Gerry Adams’ word or do you take the word of the man who was their military commander at the time and who put the delegation together?

Why must he insist he’s not and has never been a member then? Why does Sinn Fein deny it’s the political wing of the IRA?

What Sinn Fein is trying to do is distance itself from the IRA for political reasons, to get into all-party talks. But it’s absolute nonsense because they are different faces of the same organization. The reason that Adams denies it is that if he admitted it, he’d be convicted and the last place that Gerry Adams wants to be at the moment is in jail.

How important has the American role in Northern Ireland been?

Irish Americans have viewed the IRA as the IRA viewed itself. They saw the IRA as being the historical descendant of the IRA that many of the older people, like the George Harrisons (a leading IRA supporter in the U.S. who arranged arms shipments) knew from the ’30s. Irish-Americans knew their money was going for guns. That’s why they gave them money.

And the Clinton administration?

Absolutely critical in the current peace process. What Clinton did was act as guarantor. He told Adams, through his security advisors, look, you get your men to end their bombing campaign and we will give you — i.e. Sinn Fein — moral and political support and make sure the Brits don’t screw you. That’s why Clinton was so deeply pissed off, to say the least, when the Canary Wharf bomb went off last year and the first cease-fire ended.

When you say “get your men,” you mean the IRA, even though the only way Adams could get into the States was as leader of Sinn Fein?

Of course. Washington had no doubt that Adams was IRA because there’d be no point in dealing with him otherwise.

What about the Canary Wharf bombing, which, as you say, “pissed off” Clinton? What did Adams know about it?

Adams and McGuinness must have known that a decision had been made to end the cease-fire. It is inconceivable that they would not have known that the IRA had made a decision to go back to “the war.” But they would not have known where the attack would have taken place or when it would have taken place.

Why did they want to go back to war?

I almost believe the reason that Canary Wharf happened was to prevent a split in the IRA.

How so?

All the IRA are hawks. But some are more hawkish than others. After 17 months of a cease-fire, with no progress, with no talks, obstacle after obstacle, as they saw it, being out in their way, the hardest men would say, “The only thing the Brits understand is a bomb.” So the Canary Wharf bomb was probably agreed to as a message that they were fed up with being messed about. I suspect that Adams and McGuinness would have been party to that debate.

You conclude the documentary by saying, “The euphoria belongs to the politicians, not the soldiers.” Why?

Well, because the soldiers are still waiting on the sidelines. They will only hand over their weapons, or decommission or bury them, when and if there is a settlement. They are an army and they are waiting for their orders from their commanders.

Who are …?

In the broad military and political sense, Adams and McGuinness.

How do you see the future of the peace process?

Peace has to be out there on the horizon somewhere beckoning, otherwise Adams and McGuinness could never sell it to the IRA. They recognize they’re not going to have a united Ireland in the near future, like today or tomorrow or next May. But that doesn’t mean that in 10 years’ time the situation may not change.

What needs to happen in the next 10 years?

The Unionists have to recognize the necessity for cross-border institutions that actually mean something. The Republican movement has to accept that there will be no united Ireland in the immediate future and compromise by agreeing to a locally devolved government. Basically, it’s like the abortive Sunningdale agreement of the 1970s, but with rather more weight to it. It has to offer the Republicans the possibility of evolution towards their goal. It’s Michael Collins (the IRA leader who made the Ulster/Eire partition agreement with the British in 1921) all over again. One just hopes that Mr. Adams and Mr. McGuinness don’t meet the fate of Mr. Collins. Their great achievement this time is they’ve brought the movement with them. But they will not try and sell a settlement they know the movement won’t buy. That’s critical.

Some would call it overconsumption, or as a documentary that airs Monday night on public television calls it, “Affluenza.” Partly tongue-in-cheek, partly serious, the documentary looks at what it sees as an epidemic of consumption — “Too much stuff, too little time” — a near-addiction that may have unanticipated social, personal and environmental consequences.

Salon spoke with the John de Graaf, co-producer of the one-hour documentary. De Graaf, producer of the 1994 PBS show “Running out of Time,” has won numerous national and international awards for his documentaries.

How did you come up with the term “affluenza” and what does it mean?

We came across it in an article written by Vicki Robin, co-author of the book “Your Money or Your Life.” As soon as I saw it I thought it was a great name for the program. She was also the person who strongly encouraged us to do a program on overconsumption. Affluenza is a whole set of symptoms, from never realizing that one has enough to the kind of continual pursuit of more. We pointedly call a it a virus of overconsumption.

What are the main symptoms of this virus?

One we call “swollen expectations,” the drive that every generation has to have more than the previous generation. Another is “shopping fever,” the fact that adults spend more hours a week shopping than playing with their kids.

And more Americans visit shopping malls in a week than go to church or synagogue.

Right. Then there is the rash of bankruptcies; this past year more Americans — 1 million in total — declared personal bankruptcy than graduated from college. We also talk about resource exhaustion, and the social scars, like fractured families. We wanted to look at it tongue-in-cheek, but there is an element of disease to it, an element of addiction.

You’re saying this epidemic of stress, overwork, shopping and debt comes from the dogged pursuit of the American dream.

Yeah, the American dream has been defined as essentially consumerism, increasingly since World War II. Having the right to more stuff than previous generations, instead of the old ideas of democratic participation, freedom and even frugality.

In the documentary, Theodore Roosevelt equates overconsumption with a corrupt civilization.

Yes. Throughout our history there have been these expressions of concern and there’s always been an undercurrent of voluntary simplicity and frugality as well. What’s telling these days is that Pepsi-Cola can run an advertising campaign in which they just say, “Drink Pepsi, Get Stuff.” It’s undifferentiated. The assumption is, if it uses resources and it takes up space, we’re going to want it. This word “stuff” is so very telling. Since the 1980s it’s really come into the American dialogue. Whoever dies with the most toys wins. We’ve so much stuff, our homes are so much larger …

Nearly double the size they were in the ’50s.

Yet the average family size is smaller than it was. And we have all this garage space, and at the same time the number of commercial self-storage facilities in the United States has leaped 25-fold since the 1970s. To me that’s phenomenal. This is where people store all this “stuff” and leave it there for years on end.

In the documentary, you touch on another trend, toward huge, gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles. I once saw an advertisement for one vehicle that had, I think, enough holders for 14 drinks.

Right, the “suburban assault vehicles.” In terms of size, Chevy had the lead with the Suburban, which is 18 feet long, and now Ford wants to make one that’s 19 feet long. They’re immense vehicles. Over 80 percent of the people who buy them never leave paved roads, but they want a four-wheel drive, most of which get about 11 to 14 miles to the gallon.

So you see this as more conspicuous consumption than anything else?

The sports utility craze has become the most obvious recent manifestation of affluenza. It’s stunning how many you see. In Seattle, every third or fourth vehicle is an SUV, with one person in it, commuting on the freeway. I did an interview recently on a commercial station in Seattle and afterwards the fellow who interviewed me said that he had thought about it and would be getting rid of it. He realized he never really takes it anywhere, it’s big and bulky and it’s costing him a lot of money each month that he could use for something else.

It was also shocking to learn just how many advertisements are used in schools. You have an amazing example of one book that wants kids to learn about World War II by learning about Tootsie Rolls.

It’s outrageous just how cynical some of the people are who are marketing to children. You see ads in the schools that say things like, “M&Ms are better than straight A’s.”

You had one man at a workshop on “marketing to children” saying that antisocial behavior in pursuit of a product is good. That was after his comment on “branding” children — as in brand names — and “owning” them. Like you’re talking about cattle.

Yes, capturing, owning, branding. That’s the language that’s used in children’s marketing. As a parent with a 3-year-old, I find it frightening. I think people of all political stripes who think about this fear for their children.

On the other hand, you also have a trend-watcher saying he’s never seen such a strong trend as “voluntary simplicity.”

What he meant was that this is not a fast-breaking trend that everybody all of a sudden jumps onto, like the Hula Hoop or even sport utility vehicles. It’s one of the trends that has legs and he thinks will continue, towards finding a new “balance” in life, not going back to the Stone Age but getting away from mindless consumerism. There is this undercurrent, at the same time that the assault of mass marketing is only getting worse. It’s hard to say which trend will win. We made “Affluenza” because we feel it’s time for a dialogue: “What is the American dream and what should it be?”