The Beltway Sniper Case: What's Race Got to Do with It?

Well, I guess I had it all wrong. It seems that race was a non-factor in the Beltway Sniper case. I know that, because New York Daily News columnist Pete Hamill told me so. In a race-obsessed column, Hamill informed the reader again and again, that this was not about race.

"'I woke up and turned on the TV, and I was shocked,' an anguished black friend of mine said yesterday. 'I felt a little stab in the heart, too. This is definitely not a black thing. I mean, this is all black folks need right now.'"

"And we should remember one man whose face became familiar as the melodrama played out: Charles Moose.

"He did not choose to be forced into an international spotlight. But he did what a responsible cop must do. He was cautious, tight-lipped, occasionally irritable. And we saw him change. He dropped little hints of what he knew, using "them" instead of "he" or referring to the shooters in other ways in the plural. And his anguish seemed to intensify as communications were opened with the killers.

"Almost certainly this was because he knew they were black. He is clearly a decent, tough, disciplined black man, an American before he is anything else. But he also must have known what my friend knew yesterday: Black people didn't need this. He almost certainly knew one other large truth: Race had nothing to do with it."

Maybe I'm out of line here, but I thought responsible cops enlisted the public's help in catching bad guys. That's certainly what they do when the bad guys are white, and they usually do so, when the really bad guys are black. But Chief Moose and his fellow D.C.-area chiefs did the opposite. Early on in the case, though Moose & Co. had not a scintilla of evidence pointing to a white man, they told officers to look for a white or a Hispanic man. At the time, Chief Moose told the public that he was not closing out any possibility, including a white woman. But he was fibbing: He had foreclosed on the possibility the killers were black men.

Indeed, Muhammad/Williams and Malvo were pulled over no less than five times by police, and the license on their Chevrolet Caprice taken down no less than ten times, yet were able to continue on their way unhindered. Are we supposed to believe that "anti-profiling" (or rather: anti-common sense) ideology had nothing to do with the ability of Muhammad/Williams and Malvo – a middle-aged American man and an unrelated boy with a Jamaican accent – to drive around unmolested in the D.C. area with out-of-state plates? Imagine a middle-aged white man driving around with an unrelated, foreign boy. I think police would have demanded some hard proof that the two were stepfather and stepson.

Chief Moose's later knowledge that the fugitives were black caused him anguish, but "race had nothing to do with it."

I'm not sure when it became clear that the killers were black, but one of the suspects called the police tipline five times. Muhammad/Williams is a northern black; an experienced listener will almost never mistake the voice of a northern black for that of a white. (As a Yankee, I find the differences between the voices of black and white Southerners to be less distinctive.)

And one of the suspects left at least two notes, one of them four pages long. During six-and-a-half years of teaching all levels of college English, I learned that the mistakes of black and white and Hispanic writers have different signatures. (Some members of each group cannot be identified from their writing, but I did not teach students with that level of education, and the police were not facing Andover-schooled killers, either.) One phrase quoted from the letter read, "Word is bond" – a distinctively black phrase.

Once Chief Moose knew the killers were black, he refused to divulge this information. Had he been more forthcoming, would black bus driver Conrad Johnson still be alive today? We will never know.

Note that it was not the police, but a white Christian man, 61-year-old trucker Ron Lantz, of Ludlow, Kentucky – from the group that is the source of all of the world's ills – who caught suspects John Allen Muhammad/John Allan Williams and Lee Boyd Malvo aka John Lee Malvo. (And the evil, white Christian southern male Lantz said he would not accept any reward due him; instead, he wanted the money to go to the dead victims' survivors.)

Pete Hamill is a working-class, Irish, Rooseveltian Brooklynite. He often idealizes the Brooklyn of his 1940s and '50s youth, which drives many younger lefties nuts, since that was the Brooklyn of Italians, Jews, Irishmen and Swedes. It is impossible to praise working-class, white Brooklynites for the world they made, without at least implicitly damning the blacks who unmade it. The "integration" of Brooklyn destroyed it, and racial socialists cannot abide to hear anything positive about working-class whites, anyway. And so if Hamill is not to betray the white, working-class heroes of his childhood, he has to go silent about race ... or become shamelessly patronizing, as in his praise of the Montgomery County (Md.) Police Department's Chief Charles Moose. (Hamill also took the opportunity to make a frivolous statement on behalf of gun control, insisting that Muhammad/Williams would never have killed anyone, had rifles not been available.)

After the arrests were made, Al Sharpton said, "we are proud, profoundly proud, of Chief Moose." "We" apparently means all black folks. But why would all black folks be proud of Chief Moose? How would Sharpton have reacted, if the chief had been white, and white folks had expressed their "pride" in him? The second question was rhetorical.

Note that this praise comes from a man who since the 1980s, has done everything in his power to handcuff white policemen and empower black criminals, murderers included.

What's race got to do with it? As far as Pete Hamill and Al Sharpton are concerned, EVERYTHING.

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .

The Washington Times
www.washtimes.com

FBI checking links between al Qaeda and sniper

Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published 10/18/2002

     U.S. intelligence officials and the FBI plan to question al Qaeda and Taliban members held at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay in an effort to establish any possible link between Islamic terrorists and the serial sniper who has killed nine persons in the Washington area.
     Although authorities believe it is unlikely that the unidentified shooter is an international terrorist, that possibility has not been ruled out. The interrogations, according to federal law enforcement officials, are part of an effort to cover all bases in the probe.
     "There is nothing to be lost in asking questions," said one law enforcement official, although he noted that an extensive review of U.S. intelligence data beginning shortly after the first shooting on Oct. 2 in Montgomery County had turned up no known terrorist connection.
     About 600 al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners are being detained at Guantanamo Bay. The interrogations, first reported by the New York Post, will involve an undetermined number of prisoners. But authorities said that those questioned are expected to talk to others about the sniper shootings and that those conversations also will be monitored.
     U.S. intelligence agents have said that several international terrorist groups, including the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, have trained their members as snipers and intended to use them to target Americans.
     Self-professed September 11 organizer Ramzi Binalshibh told U.S. authorities after his arrest last month that al Qaeda had decentralized its leadership structure, making it more dangerous, and that terrorist cells now have more autonomy to conduct attacks around the world.
     U.S. intelligence agencies have estimated that as many as 5,000 al Qaeda members may be operating inside the United States.
     Before September 11, Binalshibh was involved in planning terrorist operations and helping with the logistics of terrorist attacks, including funding operations, U.S. officials said. He also reportedly was involved in recruiting Islamic radicals to join al Qaeda.
     Earlier this month, six suspected terrorists were charged in Portland, Ore., including a former U.S. Army reservist, with conspiring to join al Qaeda and the Taliban to wage war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
     The arrests stemmed from an incident that occurred two weeks after the September 11 attacks when a Skamania County, Wash., sheriff's deputy saw five of the men taking target practice in Middle Eastern garb. Armed with a shotgun, Chinese assault rifle and semiautomatic pistols, they were spotted by Deputy Mark Mercer in a private quarry in Washougal, Wash., near Portland.
     A few weeks later, Deputy Mercer noticed that one of the men, Ali Khaled Steitiye, had been arrested on weapons-related charges. He called the FBI, and an extensive investigation began after federal authorities tied Steitiye to terrorist group Hamas and learned that he had received paramilitary training with pro-Palestinian militants in Lebanon.
     One of the men, Jeffrey Leon Battle, joined the U.S. Army Reserves in 2000 and received training in weapons and tactics before he took an administrative discharge.
     Earlier this week, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said that investigators in the sniper case were hesitant to rule out the possibility that foreign or domestic terrorists were involved.
     A key Justice Department official also said that while the potential involvement of known terrorists in the sniper shootings had not been dismissed, investigators believe that the random targets and lack of any apparent political, social or religious motive made it unlikely.
     "Nobody has ruled out the possibility that the shooter belongs to some international terrorist organization," the official said. "But it does appear, for now, that this person is acting on his own, choosing his victims at random and for no apparent reason.
     "There are no clearly defined targets. He's left no calling card or made any demands or claims. The only common denominator appears to be that he wants to kill people," he said. "A terrorist would be expected to seek a bigger impact, spraying bullets into a crowd to kill more than one person at a time."
     The sniper's shooting spree began with the killing of a 55-year-old man in Wheaton. His victims have ranged in age from 13 to 72, and there is no evidence that any of them knew each other. The only link is the type of bullet the sniper used: high-velocity .223-caliber rounds, fired from a distance.
     A task force of state and local police, augmented by agents, analysts, profilers, ballistic experts and computer specialists from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the U.S. Secret Service, are sifting through sparse forensic evidence and following up on thousands of telephone tips.

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