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.

The Fighting Young Blog That Can Talk to the Young - richard e-mails the following:

The Post, and other newsmedia are fucking stupid. A lot of people used to say word is bond, it was mid-90's slang. to try and tie it to a song, political outlook, or anything specific is likely a waste of time, if only because there are so many potential links, most of which mean nothing at all.

Ask some people in early-mid 20's, especially people who listened to rap music during that period.

Even though Unqualified Offerings surely qualifies as "other media [that] are fucking stupid," it takes richard's point. "Five-percenters" may believe all kinds of things, but the culture is going to transmit words and phrases from any given in-group beyond its boundaries. richard likely feels like roleplayers or video gamers do when media idiots draw more conclusions than they are qualified to draw about subjects they don't understand.

Ain't a Damn Thing Funny - Why did Muhammad and Malvo murder all those people? We're now in a pretty good position to say what it was all about, from the first. Money. The money demand was not simply a power game, as one media expert opined before their capture. Nor were they making it up as they went along, surprised to find themselves still alive and wondering what to do next. It was about a payday from the first.

Go back to the Ashland extortion letter. There they complain that "your failure to respond has cost you five lives." If five is correct, that would place their first attempt to contact the police between the murder of Mrs. Rivera at Kensington Shell the morning of October 3 and the murder of Pascal Charlot near the District Line twelve hours later. If you assume that the killers can't count, and it was only four, then they first contacted police no later than the murder of Dean Meyers at Battlefield Sunoco on October 9.

And the priest? This was not one of them trying to expiate guilt and get caught, contrary to the first report. If it had been, they wouldn't list it among the failed contacts in the extortion letter ("iv) Priest in ashland." [sic]). This was never about getting caught. It was about getting paid. There's nothing tortured about the extortion letter. The only emotion evident is annoyance. They revealed their involvement in the Montgomery, Alabama shooting to convince the police to take them seriously. They surely left the shell casing at the scene of the Bowie shooting because they wanted police to be sure it was them. They took the calculated risk of revealing more about themselves over time to attempt to jolt the police out of what the snipers felt was their incompetence and lethargy.

Stealing is what these guys were about. The officer who witnessed (allegedly) Malvo at the Montgomery, Alabama shootings saw him rifling the purse of one of the victims. That was September. There was the Flagstaff bus driver's stolen credit card from March 2002, and Muhammad's shoplifting arrest the month before.

Those are just the incidents we know about. We may not know about all the murders either. CNN reports that

Police in Tacoma, Washington, are also taking another look at the February 16 slaying of 21-year-old Keenya Cook. She was killed with a single shot from a high-caliber handgun as she cooked dinner in her aunt's home.

The woman's aunt, Isa Nichols, was Williams' friend. Nichols told police she first met him in 1995 and even worked as his tax accountant for his car repair business.

And there's the Hillandale shooting on September 14. That would have been three days after Muhammad got title to the blue Caprice - time enough for him to add the gun port. That could have been a dry run for the extortion plot.

These guys were crooks. They may, conceivably, have been crooks recruited by al Qaeda. They may, conceivably, have been heeding the terms of Osama bin Laden's fatwa. But they weren't attempting to "terrorize an ever-thickening ring around our nation's capital" or whatever. Had they gotten their money, they'd have been foolish to keep shooting people in DC. Likely they'd have chilled in the Islands for a bit and then taken their sick little show to another town.

Th-th-th-that's...You Know - Finally finished updating the post immediately below this one. Done for the night.

This Just In... - The letter is out. The Post has the PDF here. Tony Adragna, who just tipped me to this, already has some analysis. I don't. I haven't even read it yet. I wanted to get the word out first, especially in light of the close of the item below.

UPDATE: First Impression. The english is not as bad as rumored. It could be Muhammad writing a first draft while stuck in a car without trying to impress a court and kind of on a jag from, you know, killing all those people in cold blood. But it doesn't read to me like the same guy who wrote the statemenf from Muhammad's divorce case. (See item below.) I'm guessing Malvo wrote it.

The closest thing to any political content is the phrase "Word is Bond," which appears in quotes in the letter text, as in

"Word is Bond"

Case is as shown. Blogger Chris O'Brown points out that this is the title of a song by the Brand Nubians. O'Brown has the lyrics on his site, and several items considering whether Muhammad and Malvo may have been influenced by the "five-percenter" offshoot of the Nation of Islam. (Start at the top and scroll down. Link via Kathy Kinsley.)

UPDATE: Kathy also links to an orthodox Islamic site discussing what it considers the UN-Islamic aspects of the Nation of Islam. Near as I can tell, it's as if a church calling itself Christian averred that "The risen Christ is Lord, and so is this guy..."

UPDATE: The Post's analysis of the letter notes that "Word is Bond" is also the title of a House of Pain song.

VERY INTERESTING: They really did want police to reactivate a stolen credit card and put ten million bucks in the account.

The woman whose credit card was stolen is a Greyhound bus driver in Flagstaff, Ariz., who had her driver's license and credit cards taken on March 25. The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the cards were taken from a pouch behind her seat while she was driving a bus on the 337-mile route between Nogales, Ariz., and Flagstaff.

She did not realize the Visa card had been stolen until Bank of America's fraud control branch wrote her on April 11, saying it had automatically closed the account after the Visa was used for a $12.01 gasoline purchase in Tacoma, Wash., that the bank believed to be "fraudulent."

This is starting to answer some questions, the biggest being "Where did they get their money." Unqualified Offerings' tentative answer: They were crooks!

The Post finds someone who disagrees with me about the letter:

Carole E. Cheski, a linguist in Georgetown, Del., who researches syntactic variations and has testified in state and federal criminal cases, said she was struck most by the relative sophistication of the language. "These are not illiterate ramblings," she said, pointing to the letter's use of Roman numerals, gerunds, complex sentences, hyphenations at syllable breaks and the use of parentheses and quotation marks.

The letter appears to be too sophisticated to have been authored primarily by Malvo, a 17-year-old high school dropout, she said, although the stars bordering the handwriting on the first page are more common among teenagers

Well, she makes an interesting case. If Malvo were an American high school student, she'd have a definitive one. But he apparently attended high school in the Jamaica until 13, and after that may have been in Antigua for a time. (Thanks to reader Edward Schulze for the link.) My impression has always been that the schools in Caribbean nations are run on the British model and actually teach kids things. (I knew a guy once whose parents emigrated from Belize to Chicago. But they kept their kids in Belize so they'd finish high school in Belize schools. Chicago schools were not considered adequate to educate their children.)

But hey, she may be right.

UPDATE: D'oh! We can be our own handwriting experts in our spare time! Because we have samples of Muhammad's handwriting at The Smoking Gun on his name change application to compare with the handwriting on the PDF of the extortion letter.

I'm saying the letter is not by Muhammad. Note: I don't believe for an instance in "graphology," meaning a scientific system of discerning personal traits from handwriting style. I do believe that people have handwriting styles. I also believe I haven't paid any attention to the topic since high school and I'm outside my sphere of competence. Nevertheless...

o Muhammad's name change application features text slanted strongly to the right. The ransom letter text goes straight up and down. I believe a professional would call this not terribly dispositive, since the degree of slanting varies from document to document by a single person, despite general tendencies. Mine does.

o Like me, Muhammad in the name change application mixes styles on his lower-case "n"s, switching between true lower-case and small-cap style. Inspecting the extortion letter, I see not one instance of this, despite many, many lower-case n's.

o Muhammad in the name change application writes a true capital-A in "John Allen Williams" and "John Allen Muhammad." The author of the extortion letter uses a "large lower-case style" capital A. (The straight stem with the three-quarter circle attached to it.)

o Muhammad uses a true-cap "N" in "New Orleans" (place of birth) on the name change application. The author of the extortion letter uses a "large lower-case style" capital N in "Name:" on "Pg 2.

o I don't think the various numbers common to both documents bear much resemblance to each other either.

Now, keep in mind that: 1) Someone may have filled out Muhammad's name change application for him. 2) I could be full of shit. But I'm predicting that the extortion letter will prove to have been written by Lee Malvo (or an unknown third party...) rather than John Muhammad.

I can always do multiple where I went wrong posts!

Oh by the way, The Smoking Gun rocks.

Onomastics, or the Study of Names - Unqualified Offerings pretty much took the day off blogging, and after MSNBC's Weblog Central was kind enough to mention UO's sniper coverage. This was especially generous of Weblog Central given the extent to which this site bashed some of MSNBC's reporting during the course of things. Coming this weekend, Where I Went Wrong, Where the Rest of You Went Wrong, such info as we can glean about the suspects and their motives, baseless speculation and, likely, a report from tomorrow's antiwar march in DC. (A buddy of mine is coming down from PA and we're going to attend despite the freakazoid organizers.)

Tonight, just a little about the naming of John Allen Muhammad. We've seen the reports that Muhammad changed his name "last year." We know that something very bad involving violent muslims happened "last year," too, and the question is, did the latter have something to do with the former? UO had on its list of questions yet unanswered, When did Muhammad change his name?

I should have paid better attention yesterday.

Thanks to The Smoking Gun, we know that Muhammad filed to make the legal name change in April 2001. (Go to TSG and you can listen to the hearing in either RealPlayer or Windows Media format.) I haven't listened to the proceedings, but TSG describes them as routine.

But wait! There's more! April 2001 is when Muhammad filed to legally change his name. But documents on TSG make it clear that he and his family were using the Muhammad name well before that date. Remember the restraining order from March 2001 I blogged about yesterday. Because I am a total doofus, it didn't sink in that his wife filled the form out as "Mildred (Williams) Muhammad," named her husband as "John (Williams) Muhammad," and listed all her children as having the surname Muhammad. The February restraining order (dismissed because of Mrs. Muhammad's failure-to-appear) follows the same naming pattern.

Note that Muhammad signed this document from his Summer 2000 divorce case, "John Williams." This makes sense as it was a legal document, and his name was legally John Williams at the time. And on the name change application itself, Muhammad listed the reason for the name change as "For birth certificate and SS number."

It seems pretty clear that the April 2001 name change application was a legal formality to ratify a previously established usage of Muhammad and his family.

Now let's go back to that divorce paper for a minute. Some people have taken the fact that Muhammad spent time in a homeless shelter and expanded it into a lifetime's pauperhood. ("How could he afford the rifle, huh? Huh?") Muhammad's statement to the court regarding the disposition of assets make it clear that his resources were not always nil. He writes that in the divorce decree, Mildred Muhammad "was awarded a 300 ZX and a Jaguar" (and all I got was this lousy rifle!).

The letter is also a first person statement. It doesn't read like a lawyer putting words in someone's mouth - it's not lawyerly. It reads like a man discussing his divorce. There is nothing of "broken english" about it. Muhammad writes clearly, with sophisticated sentence structures.

So who wrote the letters to the police? And, who was the motive force behind the spree?

Arm torpedos! - Unqualfied Offerings guarantees that, unlike Doug Turnbull at Beauty of Grey, you did not realize the similarities between a sniper spree and submarine warfare. Interesting.

Department of Unambiguously BAD News - Ginger Stampley has retired What She Really Thinks, the fine weblog she maintained for most of the last year. I'm far from the only reader or blogger to be saddened by this, but I'm especially blue for a couple of reasons: Ginger was the other founding member of the "Grow a pair, America!" Party, it was her October 2001 promise that "I'll read it" that gave me the confidence to start my own weblog and, dammit, I promised that What She Really Thinks would forever be the top link on my blogroll. However, Ginger has pulled her archives from the web and requested that everyone remove all links to her defunct site. So rather than leave a "Ginger Stampley Memorial Pseudolink" or something, I have complied with her stated wishes. Thank you, Ginger, for some great writing during WSRT's lifespan.

Ginger's blog is survived by Ones and Zeros, the blog of her husband, Michael Croft. In lieu of flowers, Michael would probably appreciate it if sympathizers smashed the RIAA.

Charles Kuffner has a WSRT appreciation here.

Department of Ambiguously Great News - The Bush Administration nominated Dana Gioia to head the National Endowment for the Arts yesterday. If I thought the NEA should even exist, I would consider this an inspired choice. Gioia is a very good poet and a terrific critic, conservative with strong libertarian leanings and, I assume, a loyal Republican. I have no idea why MSNBC.com writes

Stepping outside the bounds of conservative ideology, the White House announced Wednesday that it will nominate Sonoma County poet and outspoken cultural critic Dana Gioia to head up the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gioia is no liberal. It's one of the many things I like about him. I imagine that, unlike me, he is all for whomping hell out of Saddam Hussein. (For the record, I haven't had any communications with Gioia in something approaching five years, and we were never close, but I was for a time a minor hanger-on in what can justifiably be called his circle.) Gioia loves high culture - poetry, opera, dance, you know, like that - but not from a distance, like a lot of neocon Defenders of Western Civilization. But he's not just a Pillars of Civilization guy either. He's written the libretto to an opera, yes - about vampires. I've seen him swap fantasy novels with people. He's famous (as these things go) for helping found the "New Formalism" movement in the 1980s, and for urging poets to try to reconnect with "the common reader" in Can Poetry Matter, but these facts must not be misconstrued. Gioia is no doctrinaire "rhyme-and-meter guy" in either his writing or his reading. And by "common reader," he didn't mean the entire audience of the sitcom Friends. He meant that poetry should try to connect with an audience of the size and temperament of that for literary fiction.

Gioia has been what passes for a controversial figure in American poetry. I've read pieces that savaged him unmercifully (and unfairly). But he's gone through it with good humor and, from what I can tell, genuine enjoyment.

I can vouch for Gioia's work because I first encountered it the best way possible - anonymously, on the printed page. Vintage sent out publicity folders for its Raymond Chandler reissue program - this was in the mid-1980s, and the packet included, as a broadside, Gioia's poem, "In Chandler Country."

I felt an immediate thrill.

...quiet women in the kitchen run
their fingers down the edges of a knife
and eye their husband's necks. I wish them luck.

And

...No,
she wasn't beautiful, but at that age
when youth itself becomes a kind of beauty

a line that I understand much better, two decades on.

I'm just not sure Gioia thinks the NEA should exist either...

Sniper Snippets - The Smoking Gun has a facsimile of a restraining order that Mildred Muhammad applied for against her husband John in March, 2000. Page 3 has the most information.

TSG has all sorts of other documents accessible from this page, including the federal weapons charge filed today. Apparently the firearms charge and the restraining order go together. For the time being, Muhammad is in jail simply for owning a gun and transporting it across state lines while subject to the order.

Unqualified Offerings is no lawyer. (The Talking Dog is a lawyer!) But the logic behind the weapons charge seems...rococo. It does identify the Bushmaster as a "Model A-35, XM15-E2S.

It turns out the mug shots that were flashing around the world today were from a 1995 traffic violation in Pierce County, Washington.

If you're wondering how Muhammad went from a presumably skilled, career position with the army to homelessness and transience, maybe its his chronic attendance problems. In addition to failing to appear for the restraining order hearing, he also skipped the court date for his shoplifting charge.

Isn't It Ironic? Kathy Kinsley notes that the man who found the (alleged) killers' Chevy Caprice for the police was driving - a white van.

Killing Monsters. Tony Adragna was kind enough to wonder: UO jumped the gun a little this morning, taking great pleasure in telling Offering Boy that "They caught the bad guys!" Big big smile and wriggle of pleasure.

Contrariwise, UO's Local Niece, who has apparently been reading to many blog comment sections, simply will not believe that police have arrested the real killers. Why do you think that? I asked her. "I don't know."

Department of Unclear Timing. With more pith and, likely, more eloquence, The Talking Dog posted his own demand that police release what information they had to the public so we could do a better job of protecting ourselves sometime on the same day that UO published its own. His piece is date-stamped, though not time stamped. Given that your TD usually unburdens himself of a major item sometime in the early afternoon, there's a very good chance he beat UO to "press." Unqualified Offerings swears it did not look on your TD's paper. Read his piece because it's good and...

WE WERE RIGHT, DAMMIT! It was a citizen armed with knowledge the media picked up from police scanner transmissions, not from official releases, who found these (alleged) motherfucking creeps for the police.

And Colby Cosh spoke to the point an entire day before, tongue a bit more in cheek.

(Yes, UO is way behind on its favorite blogs this week. Yes, only a serious press of events could keep this website from its daily doses of your Talking Dog and Colby Cosh.)

This Just In. According to NBC4, Chief Moose has announced that "Two Men Arrested Considered Sniper Suspects." This is weird, as UO had heard they were just wanted for questioning or something.

Match Game. I have managed to catch up with a couple of blogs tonight, including Scott Koenig's useful Indepundit updates, and got the impression that a ballistic link between the (alleged) Bushmaster A-35 and the various, um, coldblooded slaughters of the innocent has been sort of on-again, off-again. For now, the Washington Post is reporting that it's On.

Yay! Everybody Run with Scissors! The Post also reports some long hoped-for news:

As soon as the press conference was over, Montgomery County schools officials announced news that school children have been waiting three weeks to hear: School operations will return to normal on Friday, with children allowed outdoor recess, physical education, open lunch at high schools and field trips. Other schools systems were likely to follow suit.

Oh THAT'll Settle the Matter. Also from the Post:

A U.S. intelligence official said today that there is no evidence that Muhammad or Malvo are connected to terrorist organizations or terrorist associates. Investigators are examining reports from acquaintances that Muhammad may have sympathized with al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and approved of the 9/11 attacks. "This was a free-lance operation, and it's not clear that his sympathies were even a part of his motive," the official said.

Retired Admiral James Woolsey has already begun his own independent investigation into Muhammad's background. (Kidding!)

UPTIME UPDATE: Bushmaster's site is back up, but very slow. I do not see an "A-35," but there are several "XM15 E2S" models pictured at the rifles and carbines link you can access from their shopping page. So as usual, it seems you can't get useful gun information from the major media.

Bless Me, Father...? - Here's an angle on the sniper case that actually hasn't been widely reported yet. It looks like it speaks to the depth of young Lee Malvo's "Islamist" commitment and the dynamics of the Muhammad/Malvo relationship, if I interpret it correctly. And, of course, if it's true.

Department of Developing... - So they found a Bushmaster .223 rifle in the car, according to many sources. They also have confirmed that the same gun was not used in the Montgomery Alabama shooting that was used in the DC-area murders. This will be a day when there's a lot more reporting than facts. (And we'll do our share here at Unqualified Offerings!) The big question is, So what have we got here? I see, broadly, four scenarios:

1) Poor, poor pitiful me. These guys could conceivably be innocent. I should have made that clear in an earlier post. But if the ballistic tests on the Bushmaster come back positive, this one is, for all practical purposes, closed.

2) Aqualung, my friend. Named in honor of album-cover model Richard Reid, the Shoebomber. Foreign masterminds channel the dark energies of two homegrown losers, recruiting them as agents in an international plot to attack the United States in the general vicinity of its political center. It is way too soon to rule this one out. We need to know if anyone helped provide the cars, the guns, safe haven, etc. One report has another name on the Caprice registration and police talking to this second man in Camden, NJ. Right now there's no publically-available evidence that requires this explanation, but none that precludes it either.

3) That 70s show. Assume that Muhammad and Malvo seriously intended a political "statement," but dreamed the whole thing up themselves. They become a kind of Symbionese Liberation Army of Two, though without the poor getting any actual groceries. Militant Islam is the noughties peg on which they hang their disaffection, replacing the muddled Leninism of the New Left's Decadent Period or Timothy McVeigh's half-baked racialism.

4) Ain't that America. Muhammad and Malvo's biographies and criminal actions actually fit the classic "spree killer pair" profile pretty darn well - disaffected losers (see marital and, likely, career history of Muhammad, and Malvo's apparent juvenile record), military background (but not "elite" military background), geographical rootlessness. Muhammad's race and religion throw people off, but one Tacoma neighbor describes him as "just country," who got towed to more cosmopolitan regions, and to war zones, by the military. In this interpretation the pair's religio-political notions and resentments are simply ways their delusions of grandeur express themselves.

Your warblogger types are going to want to skip right over the military background and go straight to the religion stuff. Time will tell if they are right to do so.

Things I want to know before I make up my mind, that I am not likely to find out today:

o Who fired the shots? At least one unnamed FBI analyst has broached the "taking turns" possibility this site suggested a couple of weeks ago.

o When did the killers come to the Washington area? (They were staying with Muhammad's ex-wife in Clinton from ________ to _______.) Why?

o What did they do here when not shooting people? Did either of them have a job? What kind?

o Why Aspen Hill? It's all the way around the Beltway from Clinton and farther off the Interstate system than any place else they operated.

o Did they have any help procuring guns, vehicles, lodging? And what about the other vehicles in last night's BOLO?

o What did the letters say? This gets one a certain distance toward deciding among options 2,3 and 4 above. Ditto the tarot card(s).

o When exactly did Williams change his name to Muhammad "last year?"

o We know about a shooting in Alabama on 9/21 where Malvo's fingerprint was found. That shooting actually looks like an attempted robbery. Might they have committed other crimes between here and Alabama?

o We read that Muhammad had a shoplifting charge against him in Washington State. Might they have committed other crimes between there and here?

Knowing the answers to these two questions let us start to decide the extent to which their "anti-American sentiments" are motive or excuse.

o Where were they heading last night? Had they been transient for some time, sleeping in their car(s)? Were they blowing town because it was getting hot?

o Who was supposed to get the ten...meeellion dollars? Terrorist organizations have used robberies and kidnappings to fund themselves before. This could have been an attempt to use what amounted to a giant hostage situation to replenish, say, al Qaeda's coffers. On the other hand, it could have been an attempt to get rich and blow the country. One report says the bank account where the killers wanted the wire transfer to go was in Jamaica and traced to one of the two men specifically. That sounds less like an institutional fundraising operation than a personal one.

Around and About: Scott Koenig is back at Indepundit and on the case. The Quasipundit folks have lots of updates, including Tony Adragna's live overnight blogs right through the pre-dawn capture.

Glenn Reynolds has some stuff too, including links to some "It's al Qaeda!" folks who are crowing, UO thinks, a bit prematurely. In a desperate attempt to get angry e-mail, The Road to Surfdom is not only posting sniper case updates but also debating - gun control. Matthew Yglesias thinks what we have is a kind of suspect designed by a committee. He's right, actually. Atrios has a lot of items, mostly aghast at the rush to embrace Option 2, above.

Also, I just checked and the Bushmaster Rifles site is down. NBC4 says the police found a "Bushmaster assault rifle," but they don't give a model name/number, and I just don't put much stock in a hasty major-media description of a weapon. From this Post page there is a sidebar down the right-hand side with links to line drawings of about a dozen Bushmaster .223s. Which one is it? Can't say yet.

Like a Duck in a Noose? - NBC ran down this odd locution of the sniper (as spoken through Chief Moose). It appears to come from a Cherokee legend, "Rabbit Goes Duckhunting." You can read it here. Since the duck gets away, the sniper (soon we will just say "Muhammad") seems to have been forcing the police to cryptically taunt themselves while building him up.

But Unqualified Offerings kind of likes the "noose" idea, if it doesn't work pretty hard to keep its opposition to the death penalty in mind.

Read other Cherokee legends on the same site. You never know when there will be another spree!

Morning Murder Minute - We are tantalizingly close to being able to move into the postmortem phase of sniperblogging. Officially, "two men" are in custody. Unofficially, the two men are John Allen Muhammad and Lee "Malvo" (Q: Malveaux). Officially, police aren't saying they suspect these two of being the killers. Unofficially, they think they've got their men and expect to file six first-degree murder charges in Montgomery County as early as today.

I am so far working from the morning NBC4 newscast rather than an internet text source.

The two men were arrested around 3:30AM at a rest stop near Frederick, sleeping in the blue 1990 Chevy Caprice mentioned in last night's reports. A motorist identified the vehicle by its make and license number at 1AM and called Frederick police on his cell phone. NBC reporter Greg Williams notes an irony: Police complained a great deal about leaks in the case. In the event, they did not officially release the license numbers to the public. The motorist knew the license numbers because of a leak.

"Make us a pack, not a herd," someone said.

Those of us playing with timelines seem to have neglected the September 21 ABC Liquors shooting in Mobile Alabama! Apparently, police found a fingerprint of one of the two men at that scene. They are also reporting that one of Malvo's fingerprints was on one of the letters to police.

This from MSNBC this morning:

The Seattle Times reported Thursday that Muhammad was stationed at Fort Lewis outside Tacoma in the 1980s, served in the Gulf War and was later stationed at Fort Ord, Calif. Malvo, who authorities said is a citizen of Jamaica, attended high school in Bellingham, Wash., last year.

Several federal sources told the Times that Muhammad and Malvo may have been motivated by anti-American sentiments in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Both were known to speak sympathetically about the men who hijacked jetliners over Washington, New York and Pennsylvania, the sources said.

But neither man was believed to be associated with the al-Qaida terrorist network, sources said.

That, of course, remains to be determined. The police searched Camp Ground Zero yesterday, in Marion Alabama. I'd want to know if they found anything there before deciding they were not working with al-Qaeda. I'd also like to know how they acquired their various vehicles. If it turns out that Muhammad bought them himself, that's one thing. If it turns out he had help procuring them, that's another.

Blogger John Bono points to an ABC News report about Camp Ground Zero that suggests that it has been used by Islamist networks for training purposes.

Glenn Reynolds avers that "It's terrorism. It may be terrorism of the "leaderless resistance" variety -- or not -- but it's pretty obviously Islamic terrorism, and neither the authorities nor the media commentators are enhancing their credibility by pretending otherwise."

WTOP has a section on the Alabama shooting. It appears that the sniper actually called in to take credit for that one.

Here's the Seattle Times story, which is by newspaper staff and not wire services. From the Seattle Times:

The two were last known to be living in Clinton, Md., a Washington suburb, law-enforcement sources said. Muhammad, a Muslim convert who changed his name from John Allen Williams last year, lived in Tacoma from 1994 until 2000 and had visited there since. He was stationed at Fort Lewis in the 1980s, served in the Gulf War and was later stationed at Fort Ord, Calif.

Clinton, Maryland is in PG County, not Montgomery County. PG County was hit only one or two times. (The Sept. 14 Hillandale Beer and Wine shooting is still in question. It's interesting that the Alabama shooting was a liquour store - connection with the muslim prohibition on alcohol?)

A fingerprint lifted from a piece of paper found at the Alabama shooting scene was traced to Malvo, the official said. Police then traced Malvo to a Tacoma house where he had been living with Muhammad

Some reports identify Malvo as Muhammad's stepson. Others are unclear. Unqualified Offerings will thank you to keep your Dick Grayson jokes to yourself. The Seattle Times article seems to have more "red meat" than other sources so far. Part One:

The task force in Maryland had received a tip from a man in Tacoma, a friend of Muhammad’s and Malvo’s, who said he “had suspicions” about the pair, a source said.

Both Muhammad and Malvo were at the Tacoma house within the past three months, a federal source said. The tipster described the pair as “transients” or “nomads,” who sometimes took target practice at the property, according to the source, even though it is in the middle of a densely populated residential neighborhood near Tacoma Mall.

Part Two:

Interviews with law-enforcement sources, former wives and acquaintances created an emerging portrait of Muhammad: A Muslim convert and former Fort Lewis soldier sympathetic to Islamic terrorists. A man who has gone through at least two wives, with bitter custody battles over his children. A neighbor who was friendly but a control freak who kidnapped his own children.

More. Apparently Muhammad was not trained as a sniper after all, as misreported below by, um, me below. From the ST:

Although Muhammad served in the Army for many years, he was never trained as a sniper, records show. He apparently has no felony record in Washington state, according to court records.

He converted to Islam many years ago, after his first divorce, about the same time he joined the Army, said Carol Williams, his first wife and the mother of his first son. The couple divorced 17 years ago.

On the "dog bites man" front, this particular serial killer "wasn’t a quiet type. He liked to talk; he liked to mingle with people,” according to Williams.

Williams may have changed his name only last year, but his conversion seems to have been years before that. A neighbor from the 1990s, friendly with his wife, describes them as "a strong muslim family" even then. And there's this tidbit:

Leo Dudley, a friend who lived a block from Muhammad in south Tacoma, said Muhammad once provided security in Washington, D.C., for the Million Man March.

Muhammad was in excellent shape and knew karate, said Dudley, himself an ex-Marine.

The ironic thing about the case is that, to whatever extent Islam-inspired anti-Americanism turns out to have fueled Muhammad's spree, it still doesn't seem like settling early on the "terrorist theory" would have helped catch him. Everyone wanted the police out there looking for foreign sleeper agents with "olive skin" and "broken english." But Muhammad is as American as I am. Call him, with reservations, "the black Tim McVeigh."

More later.

Late Night Sniper Squib - If anyone's wondering, Verizon's website shows a half dozen "J Muhammads" spread across the District, Maryland and Virginia. One is from Baltimore, one from Chesapeake (far from the District). The other Maryland listings are in PG County, not Montgomery. There is a single John Mohammad and about a hundred pages worth of "J Williams."

Here is the Post story, updated as of 11:38PM. The "appeal to the immigrant community" that has gotten other bloggers excited comes off, in this Post article, as very Latino-centric. Basically, Aspen Hill, Bowie and other neighborhoods affected by the sniper have strong immigrant presences, including many "undocumented workers." Police think some of them may have seen things they are afraid to report for fear of being deported. Monday morning's excitement didn't help:

Officer Luis Hurtado, the Latino liaison for the Montgomery police, said the decision to deport the two men detained at a gas station near Richmond on Monday had created "a huge problem" among Hispanic immigrants. The men, Guatemalan and Mexican natives, were arrested by police who mistakenly believed their white van was linked to the sniper. They were found to be laborers.

"What they [immigrants] are viewing is, these guys had nothing to do with it, they're arrested, they're being deported," Hurtado said.

A Google search turns up nothing on "John Muhammad" or "John Williams Muhammad." Searches like "John Williams"+"Fort Lewis" proved uninformative. (I'm not talking about Google News. I was looking for that internet spoor people are convinced everyone has left.)

Suddenly the Post has updated its story again. New material:

Moose warned the public to not assume that the naming of Muhammad meant that he was the sniper and then went on to deliver yet another cryptic message to the gunman.

"We understand that you communicated with us by calling several different locations. Our inability to talk has been a concern for us, as it has been for you. You have indicated that you wanted us to do and say certain things. You asked us to say, 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.' We understand that hearing us say this is important to you."

Moose then asked the sniper to call police or to write to P.O. Box 7875, Gaithersburg, Md. 20898-7875.

Official statements aside, unnamed officials in the story say they hope Muhammad (and his possible traveling companion) might be the guy(s). They apparently found what they think are bullet fragments in the trunk of a tree in the yard of his old house in Tacoma, Washington, and a neighbor apparently phoned in a lot of complaints about what sounds like regular target shooting in January of this year.

The Post does not name the juvenile also sought as a person of interest, but NBC4 does: 17-year old Lee Malvo. "Lee Malvo" also numbers among those opaque to Google.

This latest development has the potential to scramble a lot of theories. Muhammad makes a poor white supremacist. He's an African-American. Interestingly, Post columnist Courtland Milloy noted yesterday that "Despite a common perception, no one group has a monopoly on serial killings, according to the FBI. Indeed, African Americans, Hispanics and Asians commit serial killings in a proportion to their populations that is roughly the same as for whites."

He's no foreigner, either, as some have assumed he must be. And he is a trained military sniper, despite protestations from certain quarters that that couldn't be the case.

On the other hand, he has an obvious muslim name. That opens up the possibility that he was recruited as a terrorist or acted on his own initiative in sympathy with the radical Islamist cause. On the other hand, it doesn't require that that be the case. Like all other sorts of citizens, African-Americans with muslim surnames commit crimes, including murder, for all sorts of nonpolitical reasons.

The last possibility that has to be acknowledged is that Muhammad may prove to be a blind alley, like the famous fellow with the white van and the AR-15 in Baltimore last week. (It seems like forever. Was it two weeks?)

It would be very interesting to know when Muhammad left the service, when he converted to Islam (some "orthodox" version, or "Nation of" variety? the name suggests NOI to me, since he didn't change his given name), when he arrived in the DC Metro area (if he did) and what he and young Lee have been doing here. Perhaps some of these things will be known sometime Thursday. As always, Unqualified Offerings has this story like a duck in a noose. Or something.

Poetry Wednesday - [After something of a hiatus...I said I'd be restricting myself to the more political poems in the, ahem, oeuvre. But a death poem seems somehow germane - a very different kind of death than the ones we've been focusing on here lately, I'll admit.]

Mrs. Crystal

Flipped like a pack of matches, the photograph
spins to the counter in front of him: a face.
He worked with the woman every day for a year.
Her family in another state has asked him,
as her employer, to identify the body
so things can be in motion when they arrive.
He had steeled himself for toe tags and long drawers.

A moment's confusion before he understands
why the picture doesn't look much like her –
you aren't supposed to see your employees
like this: supine, eyes closed, without their glasses.
He has just learned that whatever else we are
we are certain facial muscles held in tension.
That gone, this could be almost anyone
hit by a bus on her way home from work,
and that as much as anything is why
he says, "Yes, that's her." Then, knowing the answer
already, he asks the uniformed attendants
if they'll be needing anything else from him.

© 1998, 2002 by Jim Henley

Everybody's a Critic - Apparently the circle of those disenchanted with the sniper investigation includes - the sniper himself. According to this morning's Post:

An angry letter found tacked to a tree behind a restaurant where the sniper wounded a man last weekend complained of six failed attempts to reach police, and threatened more killings -- of children in particular -- if millions of dollars were not deposited in a bank account within two days, according to law enforcement sources.

The letter listed half a dozen calls that had been "ignored" by operators answering phones at the command center in Rockville, the Montgomery County police station and the FBI. It even named some of the people who had taken his calls.

They had hung up, the letter stated; that was "incompetent."

"Five people had to die" because of it, the letter said, according to one law enforcement source who has seen a copy of the letter.

(Thanks to reader "me," surely the spookiest possible e-mail sobriquet in this context, for the link.) Now, Unqualified Offerings believes that, if you are having trouble reaching someone on the phone, the polite course of action is to call back rather than murder strangers. But that's just Unqualified Offerings!

NPR this morning said some news organization was reporting that a "similar letter" to the Ashland letter was found yesterday in Aspen Hill, making similar demands. The demands include a specific figure of (bring pinkie to mouth) "ten meeeeellion dollars," to be wired to a secure bank account. This is what Chief Moose was apparently announcing was "technically impossible."

Unqualified Offerings knows what you are thinking! Jim, if there's investigative incompetence, the FBI must be involved somehow! You are a terrible cynic, loyal reader. That notion is absolutely...correct:

One law enforcement official said the man believed to be the attacker failed to get through at least three separate times.

A follow-up call went through, but an FBI trainee who answered the phone did not recognize the call for what it was and cut the conversation short, the official said.

"The individual taking the call did not understand the importance of what was happening," the law enforcement official said. "She pretty much blew him off."

One official described the caller as "extremely angry." The caller, he said, used such phrases as "Just shut up and listen," or "Hear me out," or "I am God," or "I'm in charge."

Counting back four deaths from Saturday's letter, that would indicate that the killer began calling the task force between the shooting of the boy in Bowie and the murder of Dean Meyers in Manassas.

NBC4 has the "new letter" story:

Authorities received the latest message from a person they believe to be the killer after Tuesday's shooting, a source familiar with the case told The Associated Press. The Baltimore Sun, citing unidentified sources, reported that a letter left Tuesday at a park near the shooting repeated demands first made in Saturday's note

Now what about some baseless speculation?

It's very interesting that the killer has asked for money to be wired somewhere, possibly to a foreign bank account. That would seem to notch the "French deserter" theory slightly higher up the probability scale. That assumes that Chief Moose is lying about the technical feasibility of following the killer's plan. Contrariwise, Chief Moose may be telling the truth. The killer may have heard of undisclosed bank accounts and such on TV but has a lot of mistaken notions of how they work. That would fit with Susanna Cornett's theory that the sniper is making it up as he goes along. That would make the sniper's own incompetence as big a problem as any failings anyone finds in the police.

Elsewhere - Useful sniper updates from Tony and Will at Quasipundit. Will knows Richmond. Tony simply absorbs media through the data jack in the base of his skull and synthesizes it into digestible output using an internal organ unique to his physiognomy. I'm pretty sure.

Diana of Letter from Gotham e-mails to argue that a stranger could pick up a place like Montgomery County pretty quickly. (I had suggested the sniper couldn't be the French deserter because whoever the sniper is knows Monrgomery County better than any of the other target areas.):

I do not agree that you have to be a native of an area to know it intimately. I think an intelligent young man, trained in military recon, can learn a place in a couple of weeks. At least learn getaway stuff. Of course, the "shootist" could be the deserter and the driver a native, or a resident. I believe there are two of 'em.

Diana also has an interesting item discussing a "French Connection" story she found via Nexis. This story looks similar to others, except that it contains the following:

Reports in the French media said that students at Saint-Cry alleged they recognised their comrade in an unofficial police composite drawing of the sniper reportedly shown on TV.

Saint-Cyr is the French military academy. Did French TV show an unofficial composite drawing? Where did they get it? Did American TV ever show one? I would have thought the answer to all these questions would be No.

On The Bottom Line, Arnold Kling worries that police may be patting themselves on the back for entirely the wrong "achievements":

During one of the futile police dragnets, I heard a reporter on the radio say that "The good news is that police are catching all sorts of other violators." That is *not* good news. The police are supposed to be trying to catch the freaking sniper, not haul people in for having missed the deadline for their emissions inspection or whatever. Any police chief who encourages that kind of behavior on the part of his or her officers ought to be fired.

Arnold also explains what he thinks the police should do.

Live from the Scene - Strictly on a FWIW basis, Unqualified Offerings notes that there are an awful lot of helicopters out there tonight, we can hear them passing over every few minutes. Nothing on the all-news radio station, though.

Updated Shooting Schedule - More or less at the request of Dave Meehan of Orifice World, a tabular view of dates, times and places. The table includes two tentatives: the "zeroeth" incident on 9/14 outside Hillandale Beer and Wine, and the Aspen Hill shooting from this morning. Both are italicized so they look different than the official entries. I am told that the table completely hoses NS4.x. If you use NS4.x, you can't even read me saying this. But if someone you love says they can't read Unqualified Offerings on their computer, dammit, tell them that's why. They deserve to know.

Saturday	14-Sep	10:00PM	Hillandale Shopping Center, New Hampshire Ave near I-495	MD
Wednesday	2-Oct	5:20PM	Michaels, Aspen Hill Rd and Georgia Avenue, Wheaton	MD
		6:04PM	Shoppers Food Whse, Randolph Rd and Georgia Ave, Wheaton	MD
Thursday	3-Oct	7:41AM	White Flint, Parklawn Dr and Rockville Pike, Kensington	MD
		8:12AM	Mobil, Aspen Hill Rd and Connecticut Ave, Wheaton	MD
		8:37AM	Leisure World, Norbeck Rd and Georgia Ave, Silver Spring	MD
		9:58AM	Shell, Knowles Ave and Connecticut Ave, Kensington	MD
		9:15PM	Petworth neighborhood, Kalmia Rd and Georgia Ave, Washington	DC
Friday	4-Oct	2:30PM	Michaels, Plank Rd near I-95, Fredericksburg	VA
Monday	7-Oct	8:09AM	Tasker Elementary School, Bowie	MD
Wednesday	9-Oct	8:15PM	Battlefield Sunoco, Sudley Rd near I-66, Manassas	VA
Friday	11-Oct	9:30AM	Exxon, Rt 1 near I-95, Fredericksburg	VA
Monday	14-Oct	9:00PM	Home Depot, US 50 and VA-7, Falls Church	VA
Saturday	19-Oct	7:59PM	Ponderosa Steakhouse, 809 England St, Ashland	VA
Tuesday	22-Oct	6:00AM	Bus stop, Grand Pre Rd. and Conn. Ave, Silver Spring	MD

As many readers know, Unqualified Offerings has suggested two tentative structural hypotheses. Actually, it suggested one, and its sister suggested the other. Both are still alive, and the facts appear, to UO, to fit "retail worker theory" rather well. UO suggested in the original "RWT" post that the sniper would, if he were a retail worker, would likely ask for last weekend off specifically to break his pattern. That would also have meant a busier-than-normal work schedule during the work week. What we saw was a quiet week (after Monday the 14th) followed by the Saturday night murder.

The sniper appears to have been in the Richmond area Monday morning.

Now humor me here. None of this proves anything. The facts fit the theory, but they don't require the theory. Nevertheless. Suppose you're the sniper, you work retail, you had the weekend off and Monday too, or at least Monday morning. You pull your payphone stunt bright and early and head home. Later you see on the news that the police tried to get cute and nab you at the payphone. Not sporting! you think. Got to teach them a lesson.

But now you're back home. In Montgomery County, the area you obviously know best, the only part of your hunting grounds where you've gone any appreciable distance from the interstate system. And you have to work Tuesday.

So you get up earlier than ever, and you shoot somebody right quick. And then it's off to the store. (Or the jobsite.)

Or you're a French marksman looking to make a huge pile of money and vanish and the preceding is a crock. Or whatever. But check those schedules, managers, just in case. I thank you.

What the President Meant to Say - The preceding item does not mean Unqualified Offerings has changed its mind about school closings and event cancellations and general duck and cover behavior. Nor, judging from the crowd at the Aspen Hill Outback Saturday night, has anyone else. The outdoor waiting area was full of people not continuously moving through the darkest areas along a serpentine path. It was in fact full of people sitting. And dammit, if we can do that in Aspen Hill, "The New Murder Capital of America!" you can do it wherever the hell you are.

Grow a pair, America! as this site has advised regarding other issues.

Lifeboat Games, the Continuing Series - So for an hour or so this morning I had an ethical dilemma. I got the "sniper says he'll start killing children if he doesn't get paid" story from a reporter I know whose organization was sitting on it, sincerely concerned about a possible panic. And I wondered, should I post this? There were all kinds of reasons in either direction, from the base ("Scoop!") to the noble ("How dare they keep it to themselves!") to the mundane (my informant does not know I have a weblog and have been writing about the sniper). Did responsibility lie in making the same call that official media had made in consultation with the police? I half thought that it did.

The dilemma dissolved once it became clear that at least two official media organs were running a version of the story anyway. (See previous post.) That left something akin to guilt, which wouldn't do, so I replaced it with anger.

We sent our son to school today, despite the threat, and so did my informant. So did many other parents. But we did so on the basis of information the other parents didn't have. So did the parents of the task force and important federal agencies and connected media outlets.

Don't let anyone tell you there's no elite. Don't let anyone tell you the elite is purely or even primarily a matter of money.

Tonight, reader "me" points me to the latest official police statement:

Tuesday night: "The