GAPA Party Newsletter, British Auxiliary Office - The "Grow a Pair, America" idea just will not leave Unqualified Offerings alone. It expects to become quite obnoxious on the subject in the near future. But there's something to it, dammit, as British journalist Philip Knightley recognizes in this column:

If you go to the opera you risk being taken hostage. If you go on holiday you might be blown up. If you stop for petrol you could be shot by a sniper. Open a letter – does it contain anthrax? What's going on these days? Where will the next outrage be? People feel a sense of unease and a loss of innocence. Safer and happier times, they believe, are now gone for ever. But is life really more dangerous, or are we becoming wimps?

Read on. There's a lot more.

Happy Birthday! to Samizdata and the eponymous Natalie Solent blog. Unqualified Offerings couldn't imagine a better way to celebrate both birthdays than by directing you to this major essay by Perry de Havilland, appearing on Samizdata today.

Spree Graphs - We all knew this was coming, right?

Police link September shooting to sniper suspects
Friday, November 1, 2002 Posted: 9:57 PM EST (0257 GMT)

ROCKVILLE, Maryland (CNN) -- Task force investigators late Friday linked yet another shooting to the D.C.-area sniper suspects -- this one 2 1/2 weeks before the deadly 21-day spree that left 10 people dead and three others wounded in the Washington metropolitan area.

Suspects John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, have also been linked to killings in Washington state, Louisiana and Alabama.

In the latest case, Benny Oberoi, 22, an employee of a liquor store in Silver Spring, Maryland, was shot and wounded by a single bullet soon after he and his boss closed up the store Saturday, September 14. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Oberoi was shot at 10PM on a Saturday night, so the killer would have had time to finish his job at the store and - never mind!

UPDATE: CNN writes

Montgomery County Police Capt. Nancy Demme told CNN ballistic evidence was inconclusive, but that the circumstances of the shooting, witness accounts and the fact that the sniper suspects' 1990 Chevrolet Caprice was in the area that day resulted in investigators tying the shooting to the other cases.

but doesn't say how they place the Caprice in the area that day. We know that they traced it to Louisiana based on receipts found in the car. Could be they did the same for the DC area, but it would be nice if they'd tell us.

What about that pistol Montgomery, AL, police saw Muhammad holding outside the liquor store? They may have found it:

A .22 caliber Magnum handgun was found Wednesday in the area where an officer said he was pursuing Muhammad, said Wilson. The gun, covered by leaves, was found by a civilian.

The pistol was stolen from a Texas gun show in July.

UPDATE: In the For What It's Worth Department, James Ballenger, whose wife Hong was murdered with Muhammad and Malvo's gun on September 23 as she blamelessly exited her bu - ahem. Must - reattach - mask of - objectivity! Anyway, Mr. Ballenger tells CNN that the death penalty contravenes his Christian beliefs.

James Ballenger, in an interview on CNN's "American Morning," said John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, (aka Lee Boyd Malvo) "should live in prison for the rest of their lives and think about what they did" and receive Christian counseling for killing his wife, whom he calls an "angel."

Not that he is any kind of softie:

Ballenger said the two "didn't know what they were doing." He said they "just needed money" and "were too lazy to work for it." They committed a cowardly act by shooting "my wife in the back of the head."

I am going to go cry now. I am not joking.

UPDATE: Wow. Those rat fucking bastards. Funny how it comes on you all at once. I've been up to my elbows in the guts of these two losers' body of work for a month now, and it's been like dissecting a frog in biology class. It's when you pull back for a minute and get a good whiff and a slightly different view that the nausea comes.

UPDATE: The Post has a story on Muhammad and Malvo's time on Antigua. The government did not release its official report today, after all, because "officials said the attorney general needed more time because more information had been received." (Earlier stories covering the episode have characterized Antigua's government as notoriously corrupt, so perhaps some of the information that has been received concerns what the government finds it prudent to keep out of the report. In other Antigua news, a teenage girl "filed a lawsuit Thursday charging the island's leader with statutory rape, abduction, conspiracy and sexual assault.")

Make of this passage from the Post story what you will:

When others recited Christian prayers, Muhammad's children stood out for their Muslim traditions. The island has a small Muslim population, but there is no mosque, and other Muslims said they never met Muhammad or his children.

You may also be wondering how a sophisticated document forger and con artist like Muhammad could go so broke. Here's your answer:

He obtained citizenship and a passport by using a birth certificate from Louisiana that falsely claimed that his mother was born in Antigua. A close look at the document shows that the mother's name is in a different typeface and appears to have been pasted over the real entry.

"A 10-year-old could have done it better than he did," said John Fuller, who is heading a four-person government-appointed commission trying to sort out Muhammad's and Malvo's stays on the island.

UPDATE: Can we look on the bright side for a minute? Philosophers have long wondered, Is Man basically good or basically evil. Given that there appears to be a decent chance that Muhammad and Malvo committed just about every murder in the United States in recent memory, we may soon conclude that Man is, except for those two, basically good. Toward that end, Tony Adragna nominates another shooting crime for the list of possibles, a robbery from September 6 in Gaithersburg. (Here is the Gaithersburg Gazette account.) I'm going to go out on a limb here and doubt that the Gaithersburg robbery was Muhammad or Malvo, because the M.O. seems wrong:

A man approached them, showed a handgun and yelled for them to get on the ground, while demanding money, said Officer Joyce Utter, a police spokeswoman.

When the men and the woman did not comply, the suspect fired a round into the ground, Utter said. One of the men told the others to run.

The Potomac man tried to run and the suspect shot him in the back before running from the scene.

Every other robbery/shooting we've seen linked to Muhammad/Malvo so far has been shoot first, steal later. It's possible that the botch in Gaithersburg convinced them to take that approach, though. (For a few minutes, UO figured that, since Muhammad apparently first "tasted blood" with the murder of Keenya Cook in the spring, he'd already be well past trying to rob live bodies. But that's jumping to conclusions.)

But it's certainly worth police going through the mountain of receipts they've got and testing any recovered bullet against that .22 from the Alabama woods.

UPDATE: The Post has a little more about police thinking in the Hillandale matter, plus some info on the Michigan shooting.

Huh, you say? (Unqualified Offerings can hear you from here.) This is your very early, unconfirmed development of the night:

Police in states in every geographic region of the nation are looking at unsolved killings in connection with the pair's movements. One of those occurred in Lansing, Mich. on June 21, 2001. Lt. Steve Mitchell said police are looking at the fatal shooting of Bernita White at a picnic area in the Potter Park Zoo. Mitchell said White appeared to have been shot from 200 yards away with a high-velocity bullet. "We had no witnesses," he said.

If that one pans out, certain people are going to be reduced to theorizing that "Muhammad and Malvo expressed support for the attacks of September 11" three months before they happened. However, Unqualified Offerings is given to understand that whenever a spree/serial killer gets apprehended, numerous agencies entertain dreams that the suspect will be the key to closing their unsolved cases that have been hanging around. The hell of it is, it seems to be working pretty well for your local police in this instance.

And no sniper update would be complete without a "man bites dog" item. In this case, FBI Learns from Mistakes (Maybe):

As prosecutors look ahead, the FBI is examining some glitches in the investigation. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday that the bureau is reviewing the performance of its agents, analysts and trainees in the sniper investigation, which many law enforcement officials have said was hampered by its massive size and may have missed opportunities to catch the two suspects sooner.

Speaking to reporters during a wide-ranging briefing at FBI headquarters, Mueller said reforms to the FBI's "Rapid Start" crisis response system were being considered in the wake of the sniper hunt, including improved computer capabilities for those fielding citizen tips and a possible requirement that all hotline calls be recorded.

"Every time we hit one of these situations, we try to do it better," Mueller said. "I think we did a remarkable job with what we had as it went along."

Department of Corrections and Amplifications - Anent UO's fantasia on John Muhammad and Osama bin Laden, reader Eric Mauro writes, "You're a mean bastard, Jim Henley!" which makes Unqualified Offerings feel good, as it treasures praise from Eric.

About last night's post on self-defense, libertarianism, citizenship and deputization, Kevin J. Maroney writes

I am not sure that I care about "moral valence". I am sure that I care that people who are cold get coats. I believe, based on some experience, that more cold people get coats under a charity system with some elements of compulsion than under one which is completely voluntary.

UO has to wonder if Kevin is a real libertarian!

Okay, less fliply: There is no getting around the fact that, contained in the complex of beliefs this site sketched last night, there is a willingness that some indeed go without coats (or your good of choice), under the "right" circumstances. Different libertarians draw the line around acceptable "elements of compulsion" differently. Unqualified Offerings is a minarchist/constitutionalist sort. A more anarcho-capitalist type, like Gene Callahan, will concede much less than UO.

When UO wrote last night's piece, it was because it didn't know what it really thought about the whole "pack, not a herd" question. No such uncertainty plagues Chad Orzel of the ironically-named Uncertain Principles, who responds to just the musings on vigilantism, and does so emphatically. Chad seems to argue that any heavy-handedness by government law enforcement merely reflects baleful tendencies in the population. He also avers that, if anything, government law enforcement acts as a damper on public mania. It apparently never acts as an amplifier, or forms self-contained institutions that channel and cultivate the worst impulses of the populace for its own benefit.

Reader CLW informs Unqualified Offerings that "the .338 is a high-powered rifle caliber," not a pistol load, as UO wrongly asserted the other day. That means Muhammad and Malvo were driving around with rifle ammunition they do not appear to have had the means to use. Perhaps optimistic police departments across the country are digging through their files looking for unsolved shootings involving a .338 even now.

Meanwhile, on Shoutin' Across the Pacific, Chuck Watson explains how it probably happened that John Muhammad managed an honorable discharge after what appear to be years of objectionable behavior, and it's the answer you expected:

Probably to avoid discredit to the unit, they handled these infractions matter administratively. The Unit CO just about always has that option. Unless you end up with a courts-martial, you pretty much get an honorable.

(See comments to this item.)

Discoveries - Unqualified Offerings is greatly enjoying the ferment that is No War Blog. It has also discovered some great blogs among its collaborators, for instance, Franklin Harris. His blog, Franklin's Findings, covers politics, comics and pop culture from a libertarian/paleoconservative perspective. His writing is pithy and concise, and it's not like you're going to get that here! Consider:

The Comics Journal has a Web log. (I've included TCJ among my "Blogs of Note" for amusement purposes only.) Unsurprisingly, the TCJ blog, written by Dirk Deppey (if that is his real name), reflects all that is insufferable about the print version of TCJ.

He also runs PulpCulture Online. and he was on the staff of Warblogger Watch for ten or even twelve minutes, presumably when he was drunk.

Brad at DC Blows has favored UO with a kind mention. I get the impression from his site that, despite its provocative title, he cares a great deal about his city and wishes the best for it. Check out Would You Like Flies with That?, about misadventures in the school lunch program.

Duckboy leads Unqualified Offerings to this precious (there is no other word for it) encomium from Ellen Goodman for Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend:

The eldest of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children, Kathleen was born on the Fourth of July. She climbed the Matterhorn at 18 and Mount Rainier at 50, and after eight years as lieutenant governor, she is reaching for the top.

Unqualified Offerings can't think of a better place for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend than the Matterhorn!

Congrats to the legendary Unseen Editor! Your Talking Dog has given his site a makeover, with the UE's help, and it looks damn good.

Kuro5hin has a report on the San Francisco antiwar march, along with 313 comments on the report (two pending).

Newsrack covers some "distributed community-defense measures" to combat a specific, allegedly nonlethal scourge. (Unqualified Offerings must note, because it has a massive ego, that it offered "a voluntary, non-regulatory solution" to this very menace last December. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.)

Lynxx Pherrett, whom Unqualified Offerings decidedly did not discover through No War Blog, quietly demolished the briefly-ballyhooed John Muhammad-Camp Ground Zero-al Qaeda nexus last week. In Whose Lie Is It Anyway he considers one patch of the great fog surrounding the Moscow theater "rescue," and considers it scrupulously.

He also offers a lengthy critique of Paul W. Schroeder's argument against a "preemptive" conquest of Iraq that appeared in a recent issue of The American Conservative. Unqualified Offerings happens to think Lynxx is mostly wrong on the matter. However, it's refreshing to see a hawkish blogger go beyond Ick! Pat Buchanan! when approaching TAC.

Colby Cosh wonders, somewhat to his surprise, if avoiding TV really might make you smarter.

Speaking of crime and paternalism, Diana Moon finds paternalism alive and well at the New York Post. And she has a series of fascinating posts on recent developments on the Israeli settlement front, including her interaction on the topic on a site Unqualified Offerings would as soon you find from her site rather than this one. See NES NESSIM and PSEUDO-JUDAISM.

Morning Murder Minute - The Chicago Sun-Times has a story on Muhammad's misadventures in the army and National Guard - striking a superior officer, stealing a rifle, setting someone's tent on fire with an incendiary, you know, that kind of thing. Naturally he received an honorable discharge in 1994.

Several stories pick up on the possibility of a third shooter in Alabama, based on witness descriptions at the scene. While we've seen that witnesses can be wrong (white van, anyone?), there are a couple of intriguing loose ends. Muhammad and Malvo had a box of .338 ammo in their car when arrested, but no .338. Alabama witnesses describe Muhammad as holding a pistol, though ballistics show that the victims were shot with the rifle. And LoneWacko has links to an Ashland story where a witness saw a second car interacting with a blue Caprice. This second car was...burgundy. (Cue Pascal Charlot witness reports.) Nothing definite yet, but intriguing.

The Post reports

"The investigation into possible involvement of Muhammad and/or Malvo in other local crimes is continuing," Englade said at a news conference. In addition to ballistics tests, he said, the two suspects were linked to the killing by dated store receipts found in the Caprice that show they were in Baton Rouge on the day Ballenger was slain.

Muhammad, a Louisiana native, grew up in Baton Rouge and has relatives there. They said that he and Malvo visited last summer and that Muhammad appeared destitute.

Meanwhile, amid the unedifying spectacle of state and federal prosecutors clawing their way past each other on the way to the limelight, this small bit of dignity. Discussing just where the Bowie shooting outside Tasker Middle School should fall in the trial schedule, Prince George's County State's Attorney Jack B. Johnson tells the Post

"I don't think we had standing to insist that these cases are tried first in light of the amount of death we had in other jurisdictions," Johnson said. "We're thankful to God, really, that we don't have that issue here."

On the adventures in professional law enforcement front, this:

ABC News reported tonight that it had obtained a recording of a call by one of the suspects to Rockville police. "Good morning," says a voice on a tape aired by the network. "Don't say anything, just listen. We are the people that are causing the killing in your area. Look on the tarot card: It says, 'Call me God.' Do not release the threat. We have called you three times before, trying to set up negotiations. We've gotten no response. People have died."

The call-taker replied: "I need to refer you to the Montgomery County hotline. We are not investigating the crime. Would you like the number?"

The caller then hung up.

The call was made on the morning of Oct. 15, and Rockville officials immediately turned the tape over to the multi-state task force, said Neil Greenberger, a Rockville city spokesman. He said he believes that the tape played by ABC News was authentic.

The Post also says that the Antigua commission looking into Muhammad's activities on that island has turned in its preliminary report to the attorney general and that it may be released as early as today.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Don't miss John Muhammad's letter to Osama bin Laden, below.

Oh There You Are - Several kind readers wrote in with a link to the Washington Post story about Mildred Muhammad's neighborhood in Washington, DC. It's right here. Thank you, everyone.

Music Notes - Elvis Costello - The Trainspotter's News has a bunch of items about the ongoing North American tour, including set lists and links to reviews. (La Familia Offering hoped to attend the DC show with Eve Tushnet last weekend, but tickets fell through.)

A written account of Warren Zevon's appearance on David Letterman last night appears on the Late Show website. (Link will grow stale, but there's an archive lookup function on the page.) From the Big Show Highlights page you can get a RealAudio clip of Zevon's discussion with Letterman. No music performances available, alas.

(For much more consistent and wide-ranging music coverage, see The Minor Fall, The Major Lift.)

The Citizen And/Or the Police - Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Glenn Reynolds picked up and carried forward a phrase Unqualified Offerings tossed off last week in the context of the sniper shooting, that we citizens needed to be "a pack, not a herd," and that by treating us as a herd, police were endangering us by their paternalism. Patrick's discussion on Electrolite stimulated some fascinating discussion of the ethics of what we might call spontaneously-organized community defense. Patrick also makes the case against police paternalism pithily. (I meant to alliterate! Oh yes I did!)

In other words, if the choice is between catching the sniper by empowering the populace, or grasping at secrecy even while the sniper continues to kill people, your basic cop impulse is to run headlong in the direction of secrecy. Are you kidding? Let people have the information they need to protect themselves? What kind of cockamamie idea is that?

Glenn Reynolds picks up the "pack, not a herd" idea for his most recent Tech Central Station column, generously crediting UO for the phrase, and extending the concept with comparisons to the Flight 93 action and the orderly cooperation near Ground Zero during the September 2001 atrocity in New York City. Here's the nut graph:

Regardless of whether or not the D.C. snipers count as "terrorists" under your particular definition (they do under mine, but the authorities seem to be shooting for a much narrower standard) there seems little question that in coming weeks, months, and years we're going to be dealing with a lot of fast-moving, dispersed threats of the sort that bureaucracies don't handle very well. (Every domestic-terrorism victory so far, from Flight 93 to bringing down the LAX shooter to spotting the D.C. killers was accomplished by non-law-enforcement individuals, after all). Rather than creating new bureaucracies, we need to be looking at ways of promoting fast-moving, dispersed responses, responses that will involve members of the public as a pack, not a herd. Even if doing so reduces the career satisfaction of shepherds.

It's a vision for which I have instinctive sympathy. Something along the lines Glenn advocates has to happen - will happen, messily or smoothly, because it must. Because, as he notes, it has. (And at some point our neolibertarian friends may pause in their enthusiasm for government action abroad - a.k.a. war and occupation - to ponder whether the same principle might better serve us there too.)

I see two problems that we need to think about. The first, obvious one, is vigilantism. Now, call me a fire-breathing right-winger (please!) but I'm not convinced that vigilantism is the unalloyed calamity Progressive Humanity considers it to be. At which point the reader demands, But what about the whole, abominable history of lynching in the Jim Crow South? What about mobs with pitchforks shouting "She's a witch!" What about avengers gunning down acquitted molestation defendents on their front lawns?

It's a fair question. And I'm not settled on this stuff. But wasn't the real problem in the Jim Crow South racism rather than vigilantism as such? It's not like the government-approved law enforcement system did so well by blacks. Lynchings, as I understand them, took place as an all but official auxiliary of the media-law enforcement complex. Moving on to the "Try telling that to an angry mob" front, surely far more "witches" and "heretics" were killed by secular and religious authorities in the course of their official duties than were slaughtered by rampaging villagers. And what did prosecutors, media, judges and the "helping" "professions" do to sex-offender jurisprudence with superstitions like recovered memory therapy? Only recently has that tide of official madness begun to recede, and it has stranded numerous innocent men and women in prison on its way back down. That's not counting the suicides and estrangements where the state can say "Look ma - no hands!"

That's not to say there's nothing to the worry about vigilantism. (There's also the view that paternalism infantilizes, and that an empowered citizenry would learn the responsibility required of it.) That leaves another worry.

Libertarianism, in my view of it anyway, isn't really about individualism. It's about preferring voluntary cooperation to conscription, because only voluntary actions can have a moral content. If you are cold and I give you my coat, my act can be said to have a certain valence. If at the end of a lot of rigamarole, I am required to pay an outside agency (the state) a certain portion of my income, which, at the end of some more rigamarole, it uses to buy you a coat, my act has no moral valence whatsoever.

A particular kind of conscription is deputizing. As I understand California law, a teacher is required to report even the suspicion that one of her students is suffering abuse, however construed, to law enforcement, or face the possibility of serious penalties. She has essentially been conscripted into an open-ended law enforcement mission, with an imperative to construe her mission broadly. Auden's famous distinction between "the citizen or the police" has been erased.

That is not an unalloyed good thing. If "a pack, not a herd" ends up making us less like citizens and more like a barracks, I want no part of it. I don't think it needs to. But it could. Because, as Patrick points out, channeling Hayek and Buchanan, "The number-one task of most organizations is to preserve itself and its perquisites." To the extent that citizen community-defense empowerment becomes an official mission, the officials will attempt to see that it, too, serves their needs. They may not be able to pull it off, but it's a danger.

For instance, let's take the War on Drugs that we do not enjoy. Its recent history is replete with the de facto deputizing of more and more of the population. Sell a car for cash? Did you report it? It's your duty, citizen, if you got more than ten grand for it. Sell someone some grow lights? Are you sure they don't want to grow Disapproved Plants? You'd better be, or we can clap you in jail, court-martial you for dereliction of duty in the war. Did you lend your grandson your car without making absolutely sure he wouldn't use it to engage in forbidden commerce? Bad deputy! We're keeping your car for the rest of the force, and good luck getting it back.

I could easily imagine some assistant district attorney or congressperson invoking the mantra "a pack, not a herd" in defense of these depredations. "We" have to defend "ourselves" from drug "predators." Or "we" will make "ourselves" very very sorry!

My god, I guess I'm saying, what have I started?

(See this older Offering on "my sister libertarianism" by way of comparative reading.)

Dear Osama - I am God. We recently furthered the cause of Islam by shooting and robbing a beauty shop owner in Baton Rouge, thus terrorizing "an ever thickening ring around the nation's capital." This Jihad stuff is great! We simply do exactly the same sort of stuff that violent drifters in a downward spiral have done as long as there have been drifters and violence, and it serves the faith. Or so the clever discern, anyway. They no doubt will figure out that we chose our target, not because she had money and was vulnerable and we a) possessed a gun, and b) lacked consciences, but because:

1) As an immigrant she symbolized the openness we despise about America;
2) As a beautician, she leads women into unchaste behavior;
3) As a working woman, she violates the strictures of our faith;
4) Baton Rouge symbolizes, um, it means red stick... um, penis! By striking at Baton Rouge we strike at the very symbol of America's manhood!

Anyway, that's our plan. To keep doing the same stuff people like us - murderous crooks - have always done, only it's "terrorism." Thanks to you, O Great One! because of your clever fatwa:

We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.

Once you put it like that, you assured that every easily-spooked worry wart in the United States would see almost any bad thing that happens as your doing. Check this out!

This of course, will make the spin meisters even more upset, since nothing - absolutely nothing since September 11, 2001 will be called terrorism. Not the American Airlines flight over New York City a year ago, not the string of oil refinery explosions, unexplained train derailments, not the nutcases attacking Greyhound bus drivers, and heaven forbid - that Anthrax thing was an anomaly, just like the West Nile Virus and the new cases of malaria popping up in the same area of the shooting.

You don't even have to have a muslim name to scare them out of their wits, Osama - you can be a mosquito!

The genius of your plan is clear: your bitterest foes suffer from a strange kind of hysteria. They are the ones who keep saying "We're in a war, dammit!" but in the movie of that war, they'd be the weak-reed private who begins jabbering about how the enemy is everywhere, until the tough sergeant slaps him once across the face, demanding, "Get a grip on yourself, man!" (The tough sergeant would be played by Wesley Snipes these days.)

Those most devoted to the "war on terror" do the most to spread terror - and suffer it the most. Nicely done! Word is Bond, Osama! and your word has them bound up but good! Instead of making you earn your rep by requiring proof that you were behind the latest sick chicken or stillbirth or whatever, they build you up by laying every calamity at your sandals. Sweet.

Anyway, gotta run. Lots more terrorism to commit, like knocking over liquor stores and finding my bitch ex-wife. I miss my kids, man, but I think I've figured out how to set them up for life - since they ain't gonna have no mama to take care of them by the time I'm done, and let's face it, they probably won't have me. My new son swears he'll do right by them, and like I said, "Word is bond."

In the name of Allah the Merciful, the Compassionate, the...Me!

Yours,

God

Morning Murder Minute - Boy, these items have gotten a lot less...frantic. And that's a good thing. This morning's Post reports that the famous rifle was used in the Alabama slaying after all. Early reports were that it was a different gun. Early reports also stated that the police found a handgun in the blue Caprice, which turns out not to be true. (There was .338 ammo, which sounds like a handgun load, but no handgun.)

Wilson said witnesses saw John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, the two suspects in the sniper shootings, at the scene of the Montgomery shooting. But they said Muhammad had a handgun and Malvo was holding a magazine -- and neither appeared to have a rifle, Wilson said.

That, Wilson said, has led him to suspect that a third person may have been involved and possibly fired the Bushmaster XM-15 rifle that authorities found in Muhammad's Chevrolet Caprice last week.

"It's frustrating. Just at the time you figure it out, it grows another leg," he said.

Law enforcement sources said they have found no evidence to suggest that a third person was involved in the Washington area sniper shootings, but investigators have not ruled out the possibility.

This last would mean that police never encountered more than two people during the ten freaking times they peacefully interacted with the blue Caprice during the spree. Unqualified Offerings will not not not not not mention the name of a man with a long criminal record, jailed after a sniper incident, who may at least theoretically have met Muhammad and Malvo at some point.

A baleful chronology of Caprice sightings also appears in the Post.

Annoyingly, a rather good story in yesterday's print edition of the Post about Mildred Muhammad's neighborhood in Clinton, and recent sightings of John Muhammad in that area, is either not online or not findable by UO. That story connects a lot of the remaining dots. It quotes Muhammad's divorce lawyer as having discussed with his client the imperative of finding Mildred to get the court's custody and visitation orders reversed. It gives Muhammad a motive for coming to this area and taking his violence to a grandiose level. It notes that the FBI spirited away Mildred Muhammad, her children and the relatives with whom she was staying last Wednesday night before the arrest. They have not returned. It was a good story. This site apologizes for not showing it to you.

March Mail - Some interesting mail came in about UO's piece on Saturday's antiwar march item. (Perhaps the first weblog item in internet history to be favorably cited by Antiwar.com and Instapundit on the same day. As Glenn Reynolds put it, "Jim, you should take this as either a sign that you're doing something right, or that you're doing something very, very, very wrong. . . . ")

Reader CJ Mellor writes:

I agree with much of the tone of your coverage of the DC anti-war demonstration, especially re: some of the dimmer participants. A small circle of fools thought I was a Secret Service agent as I went about shooting the protest with my digital camera, all because I had my hair wetted back (to keep it from blowing) and was wearing sunglasses. So about three or four people were pointing me out, coming up to me asking why I was filming, wanting to have my picture taken with me.

My instant reaction to them was: I drove 9 hours to be with these idiots? Two, do you really think George Bush and his cronies give a flying fuck about us out here? That 10 or 10 billion would make the slightest different to this war? Three, that the Secret Service is the Treasury Department; they wouldn't be here at all unless George Bush was making an appearance and last I heard Bush wasn't showing up at this peace rally. And four, here's a real update, morons: Secret Service agents don't buy their sunglasses at the Dollar Shop.

But that's just what they want us to think!

Meanwhile, Unqualified Offerings received another intriguing suggestion: get a group to protest outside the ANSWER coalition's DC office, demanding that they strip away the ancillary leftist grievances from all antiwar events. Unqualified Offerings is so there, if someone with more organizational energy then UO decides to set this up.

Tom Biggs writes:

Your experience was practically identical to mine. I tuned out the leftish cant from the stage. My friends and I filtered out of the crowd and ended up at the start of the march. I was almost about to use the thick bushes to pee (I know exactly where that was), but instead went to the Renwick's bathroom. Then we did the front of the march, but cut out after the White House and went back to see the tail-end of the march.

I too have "become a peacenik in middle-age". I rode down to Washington in a bus with Quakers and Mennonites.

Next time, let's let the lefties do the organizing but bring a "libertarians against the war" banner! :-)

One guy handing out communist literature sneered at me when I said "you guys got power and killed 100 million. it's not the answer". But he went away peacefully.

Hey, you and I and the other 100,000 there were all communists! David Horowitz said so! (what a loony).

Our local news back in PA said only that "thousands" marched,
which is technically true but quite deceptive.

Certainly "thousands" fails to convey the scale of the march. The "reparations" demo got "thousands": two thousand, apparently. That's about one fiftieth the size of the Washington antiwar march.

Coalition Antiwarfare - Ladies and gentlemen, we present Stand Down, (aka NoWarBlog), an alliance of left and right-wing webloggers opposed to the military conquest of Iraq. Our "Statement of Unity" has the virtue of brevity, probably because we don't agree on all that much. We expect it to become one of the liveliest fora on the web and we hope you'll like it.

Distant Marches - I'm coming to realize that the prospect of writing about my participation in last Saturday's antiwar march in Washington bores me silly. Dunno why. Probably because I felt like I ought to write a "major" piece, and I can't work up the energy. So let's take it in bits and pieces. For more detail and color, see Justin Raimondo's useful, exasperated report of his experience at the San Francisco march from his Monday column.

Why I went. There are three reasons. I think conquering Iraq is a bad idea. My friend David called up to see if I was going and was willing to keep me company. Loyal UO reader Nell Lancaster suggested, in a comment on Maxspeak, that while the chief organizers of the marches in Washington and elsewhere are dorkwads (Nell might not have put it quite that way), they're what we've got, and the question of the war is more important than the shortcomings of the organizers. If the commies-as-farce of the ANSWER Coalition and Not in Our Name want to put the effort into getting permits and scheduling buses and printing up signs, fine. Let them. They have zero chance of replacing the fitful corporatism we are pleased to call free enterprise with the socialist utopia of their dreams. I was willing, that is, to let the pinkos be my "useful idiots."

(Raimondo describes a similar motivation in his own piece.)

2. How many people were there? I've actually seen some hawkish commentators repeat the early Post misprint about "hundreds" of demonstrators. The number is absurd. I'd put the crowd in the upper five figures, plausibly 100,000-plus. I don't count crowds for a living. But I used to manage a bookstore at the corner of 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue and saw a lot of marches go past my door. This march was at least as big as the big march before Gulf War I, probably bigger.

For people who know Washington DC, here's a qualitative account of the size of the crowd. We joined the march near its head but bailed out to find a place to, well, pee. (A thick shrubbery. There's just something extra satisfying in peeing where you're not supposed to, isn't there, men?) We rejoined the march near the head again, at the turn from Constitution to 17th Street NW. About halfway up the Ellipse we bailed again, so that I could rest my flabby feet. We watched the march go by for about a half hour. We rejoined the march and stayed with it past the Old Executive Office Building at 17th and Pennsylvania. Here David asked if we could stop in the Renwick since we were there.

We did the Renwick. It's not a huge gallery, but it has two floors, and we did not rush through an interesting exhibit devoted to the American painter George Catlin. We circuited the second floor too.

When we left to rejoin the march, we could not see its tail. We stayed with it to the turn at H Street, then headed home.

It was a big march.

3. So how was it? Strange. I mean for me, but then, it's strange discovering that you've become something of a peacenik in middle age. On the question, how far along does the march take us toward a patriotic antiwar movement, I would say, a little ways. In Justin Raimondo's account, he dwells on the inanity of the "usual suspects" speakers' platform, with apparent justice. But we were cleverer than Justin! We timed our arrival to coincide with the end of the speeches.

The usual suspects also had their tables and booths with Che stickers and Mumia buttons and ugly paperbacks with Castro's picture on them. But it would be a mistake to make too much of them, or the speakers. Quite a lot of the crowd we saw was either browsing the tables out of polite curiosity or simply ignoring them. An awful lot of people showed no interest in the speakers platform either.

Still. On the way to the mall, I saw some folks with a red, white and blue "Peace is Patriotic" sign. I found one for myself, and a "patriot for peace" button, at one of the booths, but it was harder than I would have liked. The sign got some very positive reaction, and I gave the button to a woman who admired it and had none of her own. The official printed signs the organizers made were pretty restrained and to-the-point, but socialists seem pretty devoted to brand management, since each model had the name of the organization prominently at the bottom. I liked some of the homemade signs better.

4. What about the crazies? As Justin points out in his own account, the question is precisely to what extent the organizers want to oppose this war, and to what extent it's simply a peg on which to hang their recruiting efforts. I'll give them this much credit: the march was pretty focused. (I can't speak to the speeches.) The signage and chants were largely war-focused, even by the visiting groups. There didn't seem to be the grab bag of causes I recalled from the 1990 march, let alone the recent catch-all "anti-globalization" rallies. Maybe one percent of signs and banners bemoaned Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. A smaller number than that nattered about Central America or Korea or whatever.

I recall no Mumia posters on the march.

That's to the good. Were there a ton of conservatives, libertarians and skeptical citizens otherwise uninterested in causes? Not enough for my tastes. (We ran into two young libertarians from AU and marched with them for awhile.) I think the potential is there if the organizers will build on what they did right (the march focus) and suppress their own socialist inclinations.

There were about four "anarchists" in ninja pajamas watching the parade by the ellipse. They looked as though they dimly suspected that most of the marchers had no use for them. David and I gave them an "Anarchism sucks!" jeer as we went by.

Topless chick census: eight. This shortage needs rectifying for future marches.

5. What about the counter-demonstration? From what I could see from the corner of Constitution and 17th, it looked dinky. If they had even hundreds of participants they were pretty discreet about it. Their signs were not any cleverer than the signs of the antis. But the truth is that the counter-demonstration didn't need to be impressive: the pro-war folks are already on schedule to get what they want.

6. Will I do it again? Yes, despite the annoyances. Because it's more important than the annoyances. But next time, I'll make my own sign. It will read

P E A C E N O W
SOCIALISM NEVER

and anyone who doesn't like it can kiss my ass.

(See this Hartford-Courant article on the qualms other protesters have about the shrill rhetoric from the podium. Again, which way will the organizers jump?)

Where You Went Wrong - Having donned the hair shirt itself regarding its mistakes in covering the sniper spree, Unqualified Offerings now turns to dressing the rest of you - you being bloggers, columnists and talking heads.

You pretty much made the same mistake I did.

No, UO isn't saying that you overestimated the centrality of Montgomery County in the killer's life and mind. That mistake of UO's was simply a particular expression of what we might call "It's all about me" syndrome.

If you were a liberal, you figured that the killer was a white supremacist. When Robert G. Baker, said to have "ties" to white supremacist groups was picked up for auto theft and questioned, you were all "Ah hah!" If you were anti-gun, you figured the killer was part of the "sniper subculture." If you worry about violent video games, you were sure it was two kids trying to live out Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six. If you were a neocon columnist, you couldn't believe the cops wouldn't say it was clearly "al Qaeda's fall campaign."

Whatever bugs you, you saw it. One nice reader was convinced that the Bush Administration was behind it because Republicans do better when the public's mind is on "law and order."If you were a psychologically-minded, you derived a psychosexual motive, despite the example of profit-driven serial killers like Richard Kuklinski.

And you were persistent! They must be foreign terrorists because a witness described them as "olive-skinned." (Muhammad and Malvo turned out to be medium-to-dark-complected black men.) They must be terrorists because they used an AK-74. (It turned out they didn't, but that didn't change your story.) It's someone on the fringes of white racialism even if he's killing some whites because the DC Metro area represents mongrelization. So long as there was the possibility of a white perp, the name "Timothy McVeigh" was on certain leftist lips. Once it turned out to be black NOI members, the faith of some that the killers must have been acting for the sake of radical Islam has been unshakeable. As for the people fixated on "power games" and "sexual anger," even after we learned that the killers wanted money to stop, we were told that their demands were just a way to taunt the police.

Had any of you turned out to be right, you'd get no credit for it: your theories were, for the most part, based on your preconceptions; they were expressions of your interests and antipathies more than responses to evidence. Any correspondence between the revealed facts of the case and your predictions would be chance.

You were, in short, no worse than me.

Some of you have been pretty kind to yourself in retrospect too, like the fellow who "knew" it was foreigners. He "knew" this because he theorized that they were using a voice distorter to place the famous call to the police. In fact, we have no evidence that a voice recorder was recovered, nor even that the actual foreigner (Malvo) was the one on the phone. What we had was a long-distance call from an outdoor payphone, possibly conveying a prerecorded tape. Plenty of voice distortion right there, tape or no.

And for all that, you all got some stuff right too, as Matthew Yglesias first pointed out. Even the lefties looking for a white male gun nut don't seem to have gone wholly wrong. Apart from race, Muhammad turns out to be a washed-out vet with a fondness for firearms. Malvo's fingerprint at the Alabama liquor store was found, reports say, on a gun magazine. The weapon of choice even came from that ever-so-scary category, assault rifles. We still don't know what psychosexual dramas may have been playing out in the Muhammad-Malvo pairing, though I suspect it has more to do with David Blankenhorn than the Marquis de Sade. And while reports vary on the extent of Muhammad and Malvo's anti-Americanism, and they look for all the world like garden-variety criminals, Muhammad appears to have at least one bias crime in his history, having fired two shots into an unoccupied synagogue this spring.

But it's not like you hurt anybody, you journalists and pundits. It's not like you were...the police. While you won't see much made of it on the Official Chief Moose Fan Page, Tony Adragna points out that the police had early descriptions of a Caprice that were at least as worthy as any light truck descriptions, and wrongly deprecated them.

As it turned out, a witness had reported seeing a Caprice driving slowly with its lights off near the scene of the Oct. 3 shooting in northeast D.C. But in the dark, the witness remembered the car’s color as burgundy, not blue, and the lead was lost in the chatter over white vehicles. A witness outside the Fredericksburg, Va., Michaels craft store, scene of a shooting on Oct. 4, reported a “dark-colored vehicle with New Jersey tags” leaving the scene. A woman calling the tip line on Oct. 7 said she had spotted a black man crouching beneath the dashboard in a dark Chevy Caprice. The woman was struck by the intensity of the man’s stare. The agent on the tip line brushed her off. “We’re looking for a white truck,” she said.

That's from Newsweek. It bugs me a lot more than any pontifications I encountered during the spree or since.

A Never-Ending Battle - Upon the enunciation of the Bush Doctrine, some worried about the expansive tone of the President's rhetoric. Once this "axis of evil" was disposed of, wasn't there a real danger that interventionists would invoke Bush's rhetoric to involve the US in yet further conflicts in yet more corners of the globe?

That worry turns out to have been misplaced. They're not waiting until AoE I has been dealt with:

"We must prevent a nuclear-armed Axis of Evil in the Americas," says Constantine Menges, a senior fellow in the Washington office of the Hudson Institute. Since last spring, the former advisor to President Reagan has offered spoken and written warnings of da Silva's mounting menace. "Lula's a supporter of terrorism," Menges continues. "He will, I believe, permit covert support to be given to bring about anti-American regimes in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru."

Da Silva chillingly hinted on September 13 that Brazil should resume its quest for atomic weapons. Speaking at the Air Force Club in Rio de Janeiro, he criticized Brazil's compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

That's Deroy Murdock from Front Page Magazine. (Link via Gene Healy.) Lest there be any doubt what Murdock advocates, here's his close:

The election of Lula da Silva could shift Earth's eighth largest economy and its 180 million people into the "problem" column in the War on Terror. Combine Brazilian nukes with Venezuelan petrodollars and Cuban subversion, and Washington policy makers will suffer migraines for years. While the Bush Administration's plate already overflows with Iraq, al-Qaeda and homeland security matters, it better find some space for Brazil — pronto.

Let's see. Iraq...The Deroy Murdocks of the world want us to ramp up the low-grade war we've been waging since 1991 ASAP. al Qaeda... Not sexy. Old hat. But they're at war with us, tedious as that apparently seems to our policy-makers. It's not hard to figure out what Murdock figures we need for Brazil. If that de Silva fellow gets in, anyway. But lets reprint a brief excerpt from the already-quoted passage.

The election of Lula da Silva

Unqualified Offerings has no love for Latin American pinkos, god knows. But note that Murdock could give a rat's ass that Brazil is a democracy and de Silva would be its freely-elected leader. No pieties about the club of democratic nations for him, or suggestion that, if Brazil is truly the eighth-largest economy in the world with only 180 million people, it must be doing something right. No, de Silva apparently likes some people we don't like, and that's enough. To get an idea of the baleful possibilities before us, look at what Murdock's monsters, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro are getting up to:

He and Castro have held numerous, private visits in and out of Cuba. Chavez hosted Castro's three-day-long 75th birthday bash in August 2001.

Birthday parties! And Cuba only 90 miles from Key West. Or Miami. But that's not all!

More important, since fall 2000, Chavez has sent Castro 106,000 barrels of oil daily in exchange for Cuban doctors and sports specialists.

Sports specialists! With Latin Americans already dominating major league baseball, isn't it at least possible that the Red Tide will next surge over the NBA? The NFL? Even...hockey? If Hugo Chavez breaks into our January pre-game shows some year soon, demanding, "Socialize the means of production and distribution or no Super Bowl!" will Americans have the will to resist? I fear not.

Understand, were Castro to die tomorrow, Unqualified Offerings would say, like the Joker in the first Batman movie, "I'm glad you're dead!" But the strange combination of anxiety and relish that Murdock brings to the prospect of the Da Silva election (there's that word again!) is a perfect illustration of Patrick Nielsen Hayden's dictum that our neoconservatives represent hubris in search of nemesis.

News You Can Use - Useful advice from Jesse Walker on getting out of jury duty.

Unqualified Offerings innovated a similar method of avoiding job offers while receiving unemployment compensation. Every job interview eventually comes to the "What questions do you have for me?" phase. Simply ask your interviewer, in an inquiring tone:

"Do you have a weapons policy?"

Creepiness Watch - The manager of "my" Outback Steakhouse in Aspen Hill believes she saw Muhammad eating there, alone, on October 21. The Post has a story this morning including other sightings. Some will be false, of course. A lot of witnesses claim to have spotted Muhammad by himself. And the end of the article, about sightings along the Hagerstown-Myersville-Frederick stretch of I-70, suggests to me that that was the next contemplated shooting site.

You Can't Fool Us! - This curious passage from CNN's Muhammad profile tonight:

A motive in the sniper shootings remains unclear. Why would a Gulf War veteran and a Jamaican teenager launch a deadly spree of sniper shootings, as authorities allege?

No way CNN is going to be taken in by the old "give us ten million bucks or we keep shooting people" letter trick! They're so much smarter than that that they don't even mention the existence of the extortion letter.

And Counting - Raise your hand if John Muhammad probably didn't shoot you too. There aren't many of us. Authorities have now linked him to not just the murder of Keenya Cook but to a shooting at a synagogue in early May. (The synagogue shooting is one of those rare firearm discharges involving Muhammad where no one died, or was even hit.) Moral of the story? Don't loan your guns out, loyal reader!

Police Chief David Brame said a local citizen contacted the FBI last week and said he'd allowed Muhammad and Malvo to borrow his weapons, including a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun.

"As a result, we now consider John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo as suspects in the Keenya Cook homicide," Brame said.

Cook was shot in the face last Feb. 16 when she opened the door to the house where she lived.

And

In the synagogue case, Brame said a .44-caliber Magnum, borrowed from the same man, was used in a shooting at Temple Beth El between May 1 and May 4. No one was believed at the synagogue at the time.

Brame said there are no plans to charge the man who came forward.

May 1 was a Wednesday, so that means that four days passed before anyone noticed, presumably, a bullet hole. Evidence from the synagogue shooting is at a state crime laboratory. It's not clear whether any evidence from the Cook case is being analyzed to specifically tie it to the borrowed .45.

Where I Didn't Go Wrong - Since people read blogs from the top, it behooves Unqualified Offerings to note that the item below this one is full of mea culpas (mea culpae?). This item is reserved for tedious self-justification.

"Retail worker theory" and "Construction worker theory." Neither of these turned out to have applied to Muhammad and Malvo. But Unqualified Offerings argues that they don't constitute him being wrong. No wait! This site never said "The killer works in a store" or "The killer works construction" and the police need to drop what they're doing and pursue these leads instead. In a kind of grass-roots "CSI-at-home," UO was asking applicable citizens to devote a finite amount of time to possibilities that fit known facts. It still seems like the contemplated effort was worth the potential benefit.

Better, both theories were agnostic as to motive. This was good, as the apaprent motive - money - wasn't even on anyone's list for much of the case. Even after the extortion letter appeared, experts opined that the demand for money wasn't really a demand for money at all, but a way to taunt the police. (The reverse was more nearly true. Such taunting of the police that took place was a way to get money.)

I didn't predict that the witness we came to know as Matthew Dowdy, sighter of the olive-skinned male with the AK-74, was lying. I should have, and so should everyone else. Dowdy said "The guy lifted a rifle to his shoulder and shot the woman..." But why would he have done that rather than assume a more stable, prone position somewhere else?

Whatever, fact is, I did say that between the Dowdy report and another witness report from the Home Depot shooting that "Someone's wrong."

I'm pretty sure Unqualified Offerings was the first "media organ" to publish a comparative handwriting analysis of the extortion letter, concluding, correctly, that it was not written by John Allen Muhammad.

I think I did a reasonably good job throughout the spree of not citing only items and opinions that agreed with my own.

I think this site became, in a minor way, a comfort for at least some people during the episode. I was conscious of the opportunity to make some small repayment on the karmic debt I owe Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds for their blogging during a much larger crisis.

Where I Went Wrong - Postmortem sniperblogging moves into high gear as UO considers its own errors!

1) I drank the geographic profile kool-ade without understanding the recipe. I was fixated on Montgomery County, starting and ending point of the spree and, not at all incidentally, my home. The whole reason I started blogging about the sniper incident in the first place was that it was so close to where I live. That meant that it unnerved me, and writers tend to write about what bothers them, and it meant that I knew some of the early crime scenes firsthand. I was mostly agnostic about motive until this last weekend, but I figured that the killer had some Montgomery County connection. Even if he was Uday Hussein's right-hand man, I figured he was Uday Hussein's right-hand man in Montgomery County.

But unless there turns out to be more to the "Oregon National Guard" coincidence than there appears to be so far, the shootings turn out to have essentially nothing to do with the County as such.

If Muhammad really was staying for a time at his ex-wife's house in Clinton, as records appear to indicate, you can make a retrospective argument that Montgomery County was significant for being on the other side of the Beltway from Clinton. But it's hard to find any predictive value there. Whether it's a weakness of the concept of geographic profiling itself or just my understanding of it, I simply made more of the Montgomery County connection than was warranted.

2. The white van. I put considerable energy into arguing against the idea the white van sightings were perceptual artifacts. I nominate this as the absolute dumbest thing I did during the whole spree. That I was no dumber than the cops - who dismissed the October 2 sighting of a dark Caprice creeping away from the scene of Pascal Charlot's murder with its lights off while accepting far less contextually-significant reports - is no consolation. No self-respecting libertarian can accept "no worse than the government" as his standard of achievement.

3. The Matthew Dowdy Incident. Remember the false witness? When police decided to hold Dowdy without bail over the weekend, Unqualified Offerings had a hunch it was because they suspected him of material involvement in the sniper spree, specifically of being an accomplice. There is no evidence that this was the case or that police ever thought it was the case. On the bright side, this proves UO wasn't fixated on a "white loner!" On the down side, since Dowdy is a real person, though not a praiseworthy one, speculating about his involvement in a capital crime on such thin evidence was close to reckless.

Tomorrow: Where you went wrong.

Our Text for Today comes from Mother Jones of all places. Justin Raimondo's article for that magazine calling for a patriotic anti-war movement has garnered deserved praise from some unusual quarters. Tonight, Unqualified Offerings hopes to discuss how Saturday's Washington March (which UO attended) did and didn't live up to the standards Justin enunciates.

Goodbye to All That - Picking up on the "pack, not a herd" concept, liberal blogger Dave Roberts says it's time to sunset the FBI and figure out what 21st-Century law enforcement and domestic security should look like. He has an intriguing outline.

Wilderness of Germs - Interesting analysis in the Post today by Guy Gugliotta and Gary Matsumoto, in which biological warfare experts express doubt on the "domestic loner" theory of the anthrax attacks. The Church Lady might find it awfully convenient that these scientists pick now of all times to express their doubts, with the Administration still trying to gin up international support for the war. But that doesn't make them wrong.

Fables of the Reconstruction - Your Talking Dog formally joins the "Grow a Pair, America!" Party, and adds a WTC-related plank to the platform:

The Israelis are right, when they insist on building things EXACTLY the way they were before an attack, as a big "F-you" to those who would impose their will be violence. So, I'm going to use this occasion to say, let's lose this maudlin sentimentality. It won't bring a single WTC victim back. BUT, our resolve to show the bastards that perpetrated this MAY stave off the next attack. So you got it: TWO GIANT TOWERS, exactly the way they looked before (with a tad better safety features, this time!)

Is UO imagining things, or does the GAPA movement show some preliminary signs of flourishing? Maybe we should write a manifesto or something, and produce a spiffy logo for GAPA Party members to put on their websites! Nah. That would be dorky.

A Farewell to Arms - The fine libertarian blogger Radley Balko had been leaning in favor of a US conquest of Iraq for some time. In this superb and closely argued piece, he explains why he has changed his mind.

Your Tax Dollars at Work - Egyptian state television will start broadcasting a 30-part "documentary" based on the notorious forgeries, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Egypt is the second-largest recipient of US foreign aid.

Remember, the only reason we non-interventionists oppose foreign aid is because we're "xenophobes." (Link via Geitner Simmons via Instapundit.)

Persons Unknown - Oh by the way, al Qaeda theorists: Prominent in the bill of particulars in the argument that Muhammad and Malvo were agents of a foreign organization was this passage from the Bellingham Herald story:

At the mission, Archer said, Muhammad would stay for a few days and then leave, saying he was traveling to Denver and New Orleans, among other places. The odd part was that Muhammad was traveling by airplane. Archer learned that when an airline ticket agent called the mission asking for Muhammad.

"At the mission, not many airline agents call and ask for residents," Archer said.

Muhammad's frequent flier status seemed odd to other people. One of them was Greg Grant, a real estate agent in Bellingham who owns and manages an apartment complex about two miles south of Sumas on Highway 9. Last year, Grant said, he would often drive residents of Lighthouse Mission - including Muhammad on several occasions - to the apartments to do yard work and other chores, then back to the mission once the work was done.

Once, Muhammad told Grant that he had to travel a long distance, possibly to Jamaica or the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean, to sign some papers on a land sale, Grant said. Grant said he wondered why Muhammad would fly to do that when the job could be handled by mail.

But we now have reports that Muhammad was involved in passport and airline-ticket scams with a confederate or confederates in Antigua.

He seems, in other words, to be just the sort of person who would still have access to airline tickets while at the shelter.

Can I Get a Witness - Here's an interesting passage from today's Post article on the backgrounds of Muhammad and Malvo:

Muhammad left town. When he came back, a few weeks later, he told Singh he had something to show him. It was mid-May when the three met at the co-op. Muhammad showed him the steel rod, a book about guns and the instructions on making silencers.

"He told me, 'Look, we are planning to shoot a fuel tanker to cause a big explosion and maximum damage on the freeway. We want to hide in the wooded area along the highway -- just shoot and disappear,' " Singh said. "They wanted the silencer so nobody would know where the shot came from."

Muhammad also said they wanted to shoot and kill a police officer, then massacre the officers' mourners by blowing up a funeral home, Singh said.

"I think they were just hijacking Islam to justify their actions," Singh said.

Afraid of landing in jail for associating with them, Singh told them he didn't know anyone who could help them make a silencer. He left the co-op without looking back but said he was afraid to go to the police.

"These people knew where I live," he said.

Over the next two weeks, Muhammad and Malvo phoned him at home. Eventually, he told his wife to say he no longer lived there.

In early June 2002, Singh was arrested and jailed on domestic violence charges. On June 5, as a Bellingham police officer took his statement, Singh told him about his conversation with Muhammad.

The officer left and returned with a detective and an FBI agent. Singh told him everything he knew. He said the officers acted as if they did not believe him.

And here's an interesting passage from the October 25 Bellingham Herald:

Bellingham Police Chief Randy Carroll confirmed that Singh told police and FBI agents months ago about conversations he'd had with Malvo and Muhammad.

"It was pretty much just general information and certainly did not give us any indication that Mr. Malvo or Mr. Muhammad's future would lead them to where they are today," Carroll said. "The information he gave us did not lead us to a criminal investigation and in fact did not lead us anywhere."

The FBI and police went back and talked with Singh on Wednesday, Carroll said. He said Singh gave different information from what he said earlier, but would not elaborate.

"I think that Mr. Singh is trying to position himself in this community to be a bigger part of the totality of the circumstances than he truly is," Carroll said.

We still need to hear more from Nathaniel Osbourne, co-owner of the blue Caprice, who is reported by the Post to be cooperating with authorities. The same Post article says that a handgun was found in the car, and authorities are very interested in whether it might have been the gun used in the Montgomery, Alabama liquour store robbery and the murder of Keenya Cook in Tacoma, Washington on February 16. DC-area police are also checking into recent bank robberies they think might have been committed by Muhammad and Malvo.

The Post backgrounder suggests a reason why Muhammad went straight from the island paradise of Antigua to a Bellingham homeless shelter: He was trying to hide himself and his kids from his ex-wife.

Mildred Muhammad was looking for her children. She asked authorities in Tacoma to help her find them and get them back. She told them that her husband had kidnapped them and threatened to kill her.

Unbeknownst to her, John Muhammad arrived at the 80-bed Lighthouse Mission homeless shelter in Bellingham in early August 2001 with at least two of the children, said the Rev. Al Archer, the director of the shelter. The men's shelter wasn't set up for families, but he allowed them to stay anyway.

"We help everyone," he said. "We don't screen out people."

The family's time in the shelter was uneventful until Muhammad enrolled the children in school under assumed names and applied for government assistance. On Aug. 31, 2001, authorities took the children out of school; a judge ordered them returned to their mother.

Neighbors said Mildred Muhammad went "underground" with her children. John Muhammad stayed on in Bellingham, using the shelter as a base. He would disappear for days only to return and say he'd been out of town.

The article is hazy on why Muhammad returns to Bellingham. One reason would be "Flitcraft syndrome," named for the famous anecdote in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. (It's not in the movie.) As William Marling puts it in a web essay:

Having deserted his family after a falling beam nearly killed him, Flitcraft returns to the same patterns of life he had abandoned: "he adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell and he adjusted himself to them not falling" (54). Man is adaptive and habitual, Spade intimates

(You can see a dramatized reading of the Flitcraft Parable at PBS.Org's Hammett Page from the American Masters series. Low bandwidth and high bandwidth are available.)

In the "Oh the irony" department, Hammett tells us that Flitcraft lived...in Tacoma, Washington. On this view, adaptive and habitual Muhammad returns to Bellingham at some risk (his wife is there) because it's what he knows, but goes the homeless shelter route to try to hide from the same wife. It didn't work. Criminals aren't that bright sometimes.

It's possible that Muhammad's departure from Antigua involved legal trouble there, or was related to Malvo and his mother's emigration from Antigua. The Smoking gun has copies of the INS papers on Una James and Lee Malvo. If they are accurate, James and Malvo were in Florida by December 2000. The document says "they later travelled to Tacoma and eventually to the Bellingham area," but it's not clear when they reached Bellingham. Muhammad could have been following James and Malvo, or James and Malvo could have been following him. (For that matter, it's not clear when Muhammad left Antigua. This article says "Although Muhammad's passport was issued in 2000, Antiguan officials said he first arrived on the island in May last year. They had no record of his departure. Nelson said he last saw him in March." We know Muhammad appeared in court in Washington State in April for his name change. And the Antiguan arrival date flatly contradicts the timeline from the Post, which has him staying with Antigua resident Janet Kellman by March 2000.)

Muhammad appears to have been involved in passport and airline-ticket scams while in Antigua, so it would be comparatively hard to track his movements.