Afternoon Update - Informed consensus at our block party this afternoon (an outdoor event that was not cancelled) was that authorities were just throwing the book at Matthew Dowdy because they really, really hate his guts for screwing up a high-profile case. (This is James Rummel's opinion too.) The informed opinion sector of our block comprises an FBI analyst who works the al Qaeda beat and a reporter for a major national daily who is also an ex-marine.

I've decided that Dave Meehan and I have gotten a little ahead of the evidence on the Dowdy angle. I sure hope the police are considering it, though. To that end, I find it very, very interesting that no article quotes task force members ruling Dowdy in or out as a suspect or even being asked to.

Toren Smith argues that we should call the killer an "Assassin " and drop the word "sniper." I am unpersuaded. A "sniper" is simply "one who snipes," that is, one who shoots from concealment at an unaware target. This is exactly what the killer is doing. It doesn't matter that, on most accounts, the shots require no esoteric skill or training. "Assassin" carries strong connotations of premeditated selection of a prominent target. "Assassin" clouds understanding rather than improving it.

Paging George Smiley: You're a detainee at Gitmo. They ask you if you know anything about any al Qaeda plans to have snipers (there's that word!) kill random American citizens. What do you answer? You're an interrogator at Gitmo. You get an answer. Do you believe it?

The Matron of the Offerings is taking the family out to dinner for my birthday. (Not the blog's birthday - the blog will be 1000 years old in two days.) TTFN, as they say.

Midday Murder Update - The Smoking Gun site has Matthew Dowdy's rap sheet. (Thanks to Radley Balko for the tip.)

Constitutional scholar Glenn Reynolds responds to an e-mail query regarding the frequency with which Class 2 misdemeanor suspects are held without bond by pointing out, first, that it's not his field, and then that flight risk generally bulks larger than the severity of the charge. Interesting that Dowdy, who has been out of prison over four years if the rap sheet is up to date, is considered a flight risk. (He does seem to have a prison escape on his record in 1985.)

Could Dowdy be the shooter? The driver? Just malicious toward cops, who, after all, have been a baleful presence in his life? Or did he think there might be a little money and fame in appearing to be closer to the action than he really was?

The Post article quotes Dowdy telling two different neighbors that he was close to the Seven Corners shooting.

This part of the Post article just leapt out at Unqualified Offerings:

At the Dowdy home yesterday, a woman who identified herself as his mother said: "I don't think he would make up a lie like that . . . . My family was brought up that your word's your bond." She declined to give her name, and would say only that Dowdy was the youngest of three children and works in construction.

Emphasis, Unqualified Offerings. Emphasized because of the theory of this website's sister that the killer or driver is a construction worker.

UPDATE: Question Unqualified Offerings would like answered...

News reports quote police as saying Dowdy was really inside Home Depot when the shootings occurred. How did they determine this? Did other witnesses place him inside, or did Dowdy "confess" to being inside when confronted about his false description?

UPDATE: Orifice World notes that police say ballistics tests on the shell casing found in the Dulles rental truck yesterday - and presumably fiber and hair/skin searches of said truck too - will not be ready until Monday. He finds the timing with Dowdy's Monday court date interesting. It's especially interesting to note that, as Dave Meehan points out in a comment on James Rummel's site, police downplayed the notion of charging Dowdy for a full day. Then they make an actual arrest late enough on Friday that they have to hold him over the weekend.

See also this item where Dave speculates that authorities are now stringing the media along too, hoping to wrap the case up very quickly.

Official UO Tentative Theory: Dowdy is an accomplice of the shooter and they're hoping he'll give the killer up over the weekend.

UPDATE: But recall this e-mail from Pamela Gray earlier in the week:

So here's my theory. The van/truck is a diversion. The shooter is on foot w/a weapon that can be disassembled and packed in a backpack. This guy is walking away not driving. And I wouldn't be surprised if he actually walks over and watches the cops working his latest gig. I hope they are video taping everything going on around them because they might see the same face in the crowd at several of the shooting sites.

Is the world ready for Advantage: Pamela Gray?

UPDATE: In light of Pamela's notion about other sites, it's worth noting that one of the stories I saw this weekend indicated that police would be returning to the scenes of earlier shootings for additional investigations.

See Also - James Rummel of Hell in a Handbasket has a couple of interesting items on the sniper spree. In Why Aren't We Talking About It he laments that more bloggers and readers with real gun knowledge aren't blogging and posting comments to other blogs. In LET'S PLAY "SPIN THE TERRORIST" he argues that police have good reason to hold off resorting to the word in the sniper case.

I added a bunch of comments to the first post, for those interested.

Meanwhile, Orifice World gets the jump on Unqualified Offerings in Is 'witness' the sniper. In addition to the circumstantial evidence - no new shootings, Dowdy drawing attention to himself - Deve Meehan notes something that jumped out in this morning's Post story: Dowdy is being held without bond. Note that

The charge is a class 2 misdemeanor in Virginia, punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine upon conviction.

according to the Post. So here's a question for people who know law enforcement and prosecution. (That would be you, Guardroom blog!) How unusual is it to hold someone without bond on a misdemeanor charge?

Unqualified Offerings is in position of an interesting Dowdy-related tip from Counterspin that it will try to run down today too.

UPDATE: The Post also states that Dowdy has a minor criminal record, for what that's worth.

Morning Murder Minute - The Post story on regional responses to sniper fear, and the possibility that they've become excessive, now includes a photo of a gas station that has put a huge drive-through tarp over its pumps to hide its customers.

Meanwhile, what the police now call "traditional homicides" continue apace. Eighteen people in the region have died from plain old murder since the official start of the sniper spree on October 2. The Post article includes profiles of the victims. It's refreshingly light on chin-pulling re attention levels and resource allocation. And it notes that during the spree there has been only one "traditional homicide" in Montgomery County and none in Northern Virginia. So it makes sense for the Montgomery County and Fairfax and Spotsylvania County police to throw so many resources at the spree. And those of us with quaint notions about federalism note that the killer has crossed state lines, so the FBI presence is defensible too.

No word on the shell casing found in a truck at Dulles yet. As for Matthew Dowdy, the man charged with filing a false statement regarding Monday night's seven corner's shooting, there may be more to say soon...

Sniper Wrapup - Shell Casing Found in White Box Truck is the story of the evening (on which, BTW, Unqualified Offerings appears to have been scooped by the Guardroom blog).

Authorities are examining a shell casing that was found in a white box truck at a Virginia car rental agency, Montgomery County police said Friday night.
The truck and the shell casing were found this evening at a rental agency in Virginia near Dulles International Airport.

Montgomery County police spokesman Derek Baliles says it is unclear if this truck has anything to do with the investigation into the Washington-area sniper.

If I read the article right, they don't even know, yet, whether it's a .223 shell.

Baliles also says police do not expect to have any further information about the truck or the shell casing until Saturday morning.

UPDATE: Prenthekar Walekar, the cab driver murdered at Aspen Hill Mobil on October 3, left behind a wife and two children. This NBC4 story says his church (Walekar was a Seventh-Day Adventist) has established a trust fund for his children's college education.

UPDATE: Read it in Unqualified Offerings yesterday, or read it in the Washington Post tomorrow: the closings and cancellations backlash has begun.

Two perspectives on the closings issue. In the Post:

James A. Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, who has studied serial killings for 25 years. "The risk here is not restricted by any demographic characteristic, so everyone feels like a target. In Gainesville [at the University of Florida], for example, the victims were middle-class coeds, so it didn't have the broad impact. They didn't cancel football games there, because [the targets] wouldn't have fit the pattern. Here there is no pattern."

And when anyone might be a target, taking cover is natural.

In Orifice World (scroll down to "Washington Sniper: What Next?"):

Security is too high at many of these events, even awareness at a little league game would be high, so padding white van's would be viewed with extreme suspicion. The chance of detection and capture would be too high. I think he's looking for those chance shots, when no-one is really looking.

Right about now, you're probably asking yourself, what does it all mean for the pumpkin business? Answer: Nothing good.

The sales troubles are one more way a roving sniper has dampened business for most of October, a vital economic period for the farms, nurseries and garden centers that are selling a piece of Halloween this year. A farm in Dickerson, Md., said it is stuck with $50,000 worth of unsold pumpkins. A Centreville pumpkin festival has laid off 20 seasonal workers. And the owner of a garden center in Reston said pre-holiday sales have plunged 50 percent.

For many small businesses, Halloween festivals and sales represent more than half of annual revenue -- money that the unsolved shootings in Maryland, Virginia and the District are slowly eating away.

UO's modest proposal: places like Butler's Orchard should tout the safety features of their corn and straw mazes. When life hands you a pumpkin, make pumpkinade, UO says.

Contrarian Watch - Unqualified Offerings likes to think that at least a few loyal readers have wondered why UO hasn't written anything about the new American Conservative magazine or the full Steve Earle Jerusalem CD, which came out last month. (UO's reaction to the pre-release streaming audio of five of the album's songs appeared in August.) After all, longtime readers surely suspect that UO will tend to look more kindly on these off-the-reservation phenomena than most of the other warbloggers.

Here's the thing: Unqualified Offerings only just got its hand on a copy of American Conservative today, and not the first issue either. And it's only as of this week that the magazine has a website worthy of the name, with some actual content. So please give this site some time to digest.

As for Jerusalem, after the first listen, the Littlest Offering got ahold of the CD last month and by the time UO found it again it was pocked beyond playability. UO picked up a replacement copy last week and it's been in heavy rotation. Short version: this website likes the CD a lot more than it likes the liner notes. It's a better record than Unqualified Offerings expected it to be after hearing the preview. Long version: forthcoming.

The Real Culprit - At first Unqualified Offerings thought Arcadian del Sol was exaggerating in this interesting article about how police and the media still, a quarter-century after the initial release of Dungeons & Dragons, keep blaming crimes on role-playing games. Toward the end, Arcadian writes

Instead, they want to know if the presence of a tarot card at a crime scene might mean that (shudder), the murderer might be one of those dangerous role-players. On the other side, everyday people think that children playing D&D learn how to shoot 13 year olds with sniper rifles for entertainment, and immediately after putting the killer's parents to the guillotine, are ready to drag Gary Gygax and Steve Jackson to be stoned with equal ferocity.

Unqualified Offerings has, and this is the newsmaking portion of this post, been following the sniper case pretty closely. And it didn't recall any suggestion that those scary games (like the one UO plays in and the one UO runs) could be the source of our woe here in the DC Metro area.

Then UO searched Google news on Maryland sniper Dungeons Dragons and found one satirical and one earnest article connecting the sniper to D&D, at least hypothetically.

This New York Times article references them more ambiguously in connection with the case. It repeats the claim that Eric Harris of Columbine fame was "an avid videogame player," but takes a generally skeptical tone about alarmism toward tarot cards and games.

(Thanks to RGB Mike Jacobs for the pointer to Arcadian del Sol.)

Spree Graphs - Sniper Investigators Charge Witness Matthew Dowdy, 38, of Falls Church, Va., "with making a false statement, said Isabel Benemelis, spokeswoman for Fairfax County, Va., police.

Police have said his story began to unravel when authorities compared it to accounts from others who saw the fatal shooting Monday night of an FBI analyst in a store parking garage."

Ya know, it's unseemly to pat oneself on the back, but on further review, Unqualified Offerings actually thought there was something funny about the conflicts among the various witness stories at the time.

So You Say Dept. FBI Director: Sniper Case Going 'Exceptionally Well' Golly. What would he be saying if they actually arrested somebody? Or would the top of his head just fly off in sheer prideful exultation.

Haven't These People Suffered Enough? "Montgomery County, Md., Executive Doug Duncan has attended every funeral held so far for the victims of the Washington-area sniper, and he has two more this weekend," reports NBC4. If by some freak of chance, Unqualified Offerings becomes a sniper victim itself, Mrs. Offering is at all costs to keep this bastard away from the memorial.

Several sources report that authorities are questioning the Gitmo detainees about possible al Qaeda plans to shoot people and stuff. And Chief Moose said today that investigators will revisit the September 14 Hillandale Beer and Wine shooting, according to WUSA-TV 9.

Unqualified Offerings reminds police that it will be available to blog accounts of the capture or killing of the sniper all weekend. Don't hold off on UO's account.

Morning Murder Minute - Happily there is little to report so far.

Police Refocusing Falls Church Shooting Investigation - Because the main "witness" lied his ass off about seeing the shooter, police have realized that the shot may not have come from within the garage at all. They spent yesterday afternoon combing a parking lot across Route 50. The parking lot has an angle and line of site into the part of the garage where the victim was killed and the distance fits the shooter's MO.

Speaking of the witness, NBC4 reports in a separate story that

"It would have been better if it didn't happen, but it didn't cripple the investigation," said Fairfax police Lt. Amy Luba.

This strikes UO as an odd claim, since the false witness's description of the "cream-colored van" was distributed to units maintaining Monday night's roadblock. Also, see item above: it delayed police checking the plausible distant parking lot by two days - from Tuesday to Thursday. A lot of evidence could be lost in that time. Tires could pick up shell casings, powder traces could wash away in the heavy rains we had midweek.

Few Will Play in Sniper's Shadow says the Post. "3rd Weekend's Events Are Canceled or Moved." This does not strike Unqualified Offerings as unreasonable in the sense that, as it has argued before, there's a good chance that the shooter has scheduled this weekend to break his pattern. Prediction: this is the last weekend that mass event cancellations will seem reasonable even to the superannuated Safety Patrol that comprises our local elite. If there are no shootings this weekend, look for regularly scheduled events to resume.

MSNBC, which jumped earliest and hardest on the AK-74, um, lie, reports

NBC’s Bloom reported earlier Thursday that authorities were watching several new potential suspects, describing one as especially promising.

A Paranoid History of the Future - Tacitus is worried that the US doesn't have the troops to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and North Korea at the same time. (Unqualified Offerings is relieved, but it takes all kinds.) But in the course of worrying, he asks an interesting, seemingly rhetorical question:

And what happens when our occupation of Iraq leads our policymakers into conflict with Iran and/or Syria?

Unqualified Offerings has been thinking of that, and occasionally it wonders if The Best and the Brightest, 21st Century Edition, don't have plans - specifically, UO wonders if they don't hope to use the Iraqi Army against Iran and Syria.

Think about it. They really believe we're going to get quick surrenders all around and an outpouring of gratitude from the populace for kicking Salam Pax's sexual fantasy (see comments) out of the palace. Mightn't they also see Iraq's intact (because it surrendered, remember) and still-large on the regional scale army in the role previously made famous by the Northern Alliance and Kosovo Liberation Army? Even now, some hapless two-star, having gotten the word that he needs to "think outside of the box," may be drawing up plans for the invasion of Syria by an Iraqi Army backed with US air power.

Crazy Notion Two: Might the Administration also expect the Musharraf government to fall in Pakistan as part of the fallout from the Iraqi conquest, and want it to happen? Then they can declare an imperative to seize Pakistan's nukes preemptively. (There's that word again!) We've had a year of substantial presence in Pakistan since the Afghan War started, plus several years before that to at least worry about the matter - time to figure out where they are, that is.

UO bets we have a team in the Indian Ocean ready to go on an hour's notice.

What we critics see as a dire concern - the real (Pakistani) "Islamic bomb" falling into Islamist hands for the sake of preventing the virtual Iraqi bomb - the hawks (the real ones on the Defense Policy Board and in Rumsfeld's office, not the ones with weblogs) may see as an opportunity. Watch it fall, swoop in - no more Islamic bomb. It's playing with fire, mind you, and Unqualified Offerings very much worries about which way the Chinese might jump in such an event, but this crew loves playing with fire. They ask for gift certificates from Fires'R'Us for Christmas. They subscribe to fire magazines and play all the Shockwave games on the big internet fire sites.

They just might try it.

Modest Proposal - Law Professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a fine piece on FoxNews, arguing that if the UN is serious about preventing genocide, it ought to add - yes - the right to keep and bear arms to its human rights charter. Unqualified Offerings, which wrote something of a cri de couer last year about the farce that is "peacekeeping," thinks Reynolds is on to something, however hard a sell the idea may prove.

Note: Instapundit.com picks up Reynolds' column and adds some commentary.

Tough Enough

She walk past the clock
the clock won't tell time.
She walk through the college
professor lose his mind.
She's tough...Oooo Oooo Oooo she's tough...
My baby's tough, she's rough and tough
and that's tough enough.

The Fabulous Thunderbirds, "Tough Enough"

Radley Balko of The Agitator, another DC-area guy, e-mails Unqualified Offerings with a sniper-related question. The Big Question. He says he heard it this morning on the Don Imus Show:

What's the better scenario: the guy never kills again -- but we never catch him. Or he kills one or more more times, but because he does, he leaves behind clues that get him apprehended.

The e-mail came this morning, and Unqualified Offerings has an answer only now.

It's not quite 10:30 in the evening. It's 72 hours since someone was shot. Today the Littlest Offering and I took the Matron of the Offerings on an errand run. (No work today for UO as Mrs. Offering was out of town.) And yes, the head of Unqualified Offerings did some swiveling, some (laughably incompetent) checking of the horizon line. White vans were noticed.

But we did it. And there were other people doing it too. (As this site wrote a couple weeks ago, what else are you going to do?) And tonight, no one in the area having been the occasion of the fragmenting of a rifle round, Unqualified Offerings is feeling pretty good.

I give it a week. That guess may be too pessimistic. A week without a sniper shooting and people will hardly think about it. We're tough that way. Even here in whiny, safety-obsessed Montgomery County. Yes, even if the sniper goes uncaught and is still "out there." We'll fetishize the memory somehow, because we're good at that. But it won't mean much for how we act or what we think. We're Americans. Our historical memory sucks. It has its advantages, actually.

This is why the killer(s)probably can't stop, of course. Because we just won't give a damn about him if he does. But we don't have to secretly hope more of our fellows get offered up to the forensic god, either.

(Check out Radley's TechCentralStation column on rock & roll for libertarians. This goes way beyond Rush, which is a good thing, because if libertarianism meant I had to listen to Rush, I'd join the Green Party.)

[UPDATE: Rarely is the question asked, can our bloggers tell time? The first draft of this item said it had been 48 hours since the last shooting when it was really 72. Time flies etc.)

Conspiracy Theory - Various "terrorist theory" adherants have suggested that the sniper attacks are meant to "distract" someone or something, whether the government as a whole or local law enforcement. This is surely getting closer to the truth, but it leaves out the most important principle in these things: it's all about me. Couldn't this whole "sniper" "spree" be a ruse to keep Unqualified Offerings from writing more anti-interventionist pieces? That would mean that the shadowy organization behind the murders is either the Defense Department or al Qaeda, each of whom want a US war on Iraq as much as the other. (Can't be the CIA. The CIA is with Unqualified Offerings on this.)

So, while UO is distracted, check out

o Gene Healy, "Strong Hand Versus Iron Fist"

But what if the "strong hand" policy many hawks support isn't a strong enough hand? What if it proves strong enough to hold Iraq and Afghanistan, but operates to swell Al Qaeda's ranks? What if it's an inefficient "third way" between disengagement from the region and an unapologetically brutal antiterror policy? What if only the "iron fist" can put the fear of Allah into potential Islamofascist recruits sufficient to dissuade them from joining up? Will the hawks support a policy as indifferent to civilian deaths as Assad and Hussein did: Hama on a much larger scale? As the Sean Connery character keeps repeating to Kevin Costner in the Untouchables, "What are you prepared to do?" As we clutch the Middle Eastern tar baby closer to our chests in the years to come, I fear it's going to become a question we're forced to ask ourselves again and again.

o Ampersand avers that the good old days of last winter, when the US liberated the women of Afghanistan, are no more.

o In the course of doing so, he takes issue with a recent Offering on problems in Afghanistan. For more recent discussion, including a couple of rejoinders from UO, check out the comments thread for this Electrolite item.

o Noting the surge in al Qaeda-connected terrorism in recent days, and its coincidence with ramped up plans to conquer Iraq, Gareth Parker asserted that "If there is no Al Qaeda link to Iraq, then why were Australians attacked by Al Qaeda for supporting the US in the expected war with Iraq?" (Glenn Reynolds expands the principle here.) Bruce Baugh points out that al Qaeda doesn't need "connections" to Iraq to think that they stand to profit politically within their "target market" by being seen as the defenders of a muslim country.

Evening Update - What a fine thing it would be if this were the last sniper news update to need posting this evening. No, Unqualified Offerings takes that back. A fat bunch of stories detailing the sniper's capture or death would really hit the spot. Failing that...

First, from WTOP's site, regarding our now-famous False Witness:

Prosecutors are investigating the witness, whose name wasn't released, to determine whether he should be whipped with a length of barbed wire.

Excuse Unqualified Offerings! That was a misprint. The actual conclusion to the sentence turns out to be, on review, "whether he should be charged with filing a false statement." Unqualified Offerings urges law enforcement to think less conventionally, like Donald Rumsfeld is always doing with those pesky military professionals who think conquering another country needs to involve, you know, troops and stuff. Other things prosecutors should at least consider:

o Using the witness as bait for the next attack;
o Having the witness pump gas for anxious locals;
o The next victim may just be wounded and need blood; here's your source;
o The Syrian debriefing option!

Next topic: does the media still suck? Answer: yes. Here is WTOP on the weapon issue

Moose said the witness' description to police of the shooter's AK-74 assault rifle is also bogus. But investigators cautioned that they still believe the sniper is using one of a family of more than 30 similar assault-type weapons capable of firing a .223-caliber bullet.

Did you get that? "Assault-type weapons?" Recall that Unqualified Offerings provided you with a link to the afternoon press conference? The ATF stressed that the "30 similar weapons" included everything from semi-automatic military arms to "bolt-action rifles." Varmint guns, people. He/they could be using varmint guns.

Other business: Glenn Reynolds has some interesting links to skeptical discussions of "ballistic fingerprinting."

Unqualified Offerings has rechecked the official police instructions on Ways to be an effective witness. Lie like a sonofabitch does not appear.

The Bowie boy's condition has been upgraded from critical to serious! per CNN. CNN also has pretty pictures of the planes the military will be using in the sniper hunt, along with the sort of detailed information about their capabilities you might find in The Mini Page if defense contractors started advertising there.

Speaking of the military planes and civilian law enforcement, Gene Healy has some disquieting consideration of what it means for the letter and the spirit of what's left of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Janis Gore of Gone South discusses the limited utility of "olive-skinned" as a descriptor. She also has an account of the Starkweather spree, which may yet turn out to be a precursor of the capital sniper case.

Reader Pamela Gray tries to find light in the darkness (of insanity...):

Yesterday they said they couldn't produce a composite sketch because there were too many discrepencies in the witnesses' descriptions. Maybe, just maybe, with this guy's bogus info taken out of the picture, those discrepencies disappear and they can get a sketch together.

Dale Amon on Samizdata has a couple of items considering the spree from a "pro-terrorist perspective" (you know what I mean). Start here and scroll down.

See Also - The Road to Surfdom is also providing pretty detailed coverage of the sniper spree. Plus info on the Bali bombing and a bunch of liberal stuff...

Upon Further Review - Note that the police deprecation does more than kick the props out from under the "an AK-74 makes it more likely we're dealing with middle eastern terrorists" theory. It also wrecks UO's "He's getting more brazen, so it's less likely he's an al Qaeda operative" deduction too.

Gosh this detective stuff is hard.

NB: Kevin Maroney didn't think much of the "cool, collected al Qaeda operative" theory anyway. He e-mailed

Remember that Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was a "cool, collected al Qaeda operative", but many people probably owe their lives to the fact that he couldn't resist showing off. He could have gone to the bathroom to light the bombs, but he apparently wanted to see the faces of his fellow passengers as he did so.

Unqualified Offerings thinks simply that his al Qaeda guidance counselors assessed Richard Reid's talents pretty well when they slotted him for a one-and-done "martyrdom operation." Theoretically the shooter is not a total clown, based on his ability to elude capture so far. But it no longer matters. We're back to square one.

Nor is it, any more, remarkable that one witness saw "two olive-skinned men" annoyed with him for blocking their van's path in the parking lot. Annoyed is how people get when you block their vehicles, whether or not they've just shot someone.

UPDATE: This also means, O unnamed racist site that linked to UO's speculation about whether the police were holding back the "olive-skinned" description because of racial sensitivities, that you can relax. go away and, here's a suggestion, find a new hobby.

UPDATE: At Pad's Scratch Pad, the proprietor reminds the world of the early report that a witness saw the Seven Corners shooter in a blue pickup truck.

FURTHER UPDATE: Susanna Cornett and "The Last Page" ask

You live in the DC area. You are licensed to carry a handgun, and you have a good one on your hip that you know how to use. You are in the parking lot at the local shopping center. You see a man get out of a white van, sight along a rifle, and fire. You hear a scream. The shooter calmly starts lowering his gun. He doesn't see you.

Do you pull your gun and shoot him?

Kevin McGehee of Blogospherics finds the question misconceived, writing, in Susanna's comments section, "The question should be, "How many times would you shoot him?" -- followed by, "How many times would you reload?""

Yup.

We Interrupt This Mailcall... for some pretty stunning breaking news:

Police: Witness Deliberately Misled Authorities
Information About Cream-Colored Van Deemed Unreliable

Authorities said Thursday that information provided by one of the witnesses to Monday's shooting in the Falls Church, Va., Home Depot store parking garage is not reliable. Responding to a reporter's question, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose said, 'yes' when asked if police were deliberately misled.

Fairfax County Police chief Thomas Manger said the description of a cream-colored van with a broken rear taillight is not credible. He said authorities have also determined information provided about the suspect and the weapon used in the attacks is also not reliable.

That's from NBC4's site. Moose went on to say that "descriptions of a white box truck seen by witnesses in Maryland as well as a white Chevrolet Astro van described by witnesses in Spotsylvania County, Va., are still reliable." The obvious question is who is the witness and why did they lie.

Who foresaw this possibility? OrificeWorld, yesterday. OrificeWorld seems to lack item-specific anchors. Scroll down to "Washington Sniper: Not a sniper." De-fucking-veloping...

BTW, that blows the AK-74 weapon id too, for those keeping score at home.

UPDATE: Here's the CNN story. The witness, a habitue of the comments section of popular warblogs, "admitted he had been inside the store and had not been a witness, CNN has learned." Okay, UO made that up about the comments section. But the "in the store" part comes straight from CNN.

WHAT! AN! ASSHOLE!

This guy's lies could materially have led police astray during a critical time. Some of the blood of the next victim is on his hands.

UPDATE: The Post has a direct link to video of the 1pm press conference. Chief Manger specifically deprecates the description of the weapon and shooter from Monday night. ATF Agent Michael Bouchard points out that any of 30-plus firearms can fire the ammunition used in the slayings and that, with commercially-available mods, several of those gun models could look remarkably like others.

Murder Mail - Things in the mailbag the last couple of days that Unqualified Offerings hasn't gotten too. Chuck Pelto writes:

There is one aspect of the victims of the DC sniper that was not mentioned....

None of the victims, to date, look like they are Arabic or practicing Muslims.

This appears to be true. Also no Jewish or East Asian victims. (Wondering about Dean Meyers, killed in Manassas? So did Unqualified Offerings. He was to be buried in Christ Evangelical Congregational Church, according to this Post article.) It's hard to say at what point a particular hole in the killer's collection begins to look significant.

Wondering when the gallows humor would start? Now, per RGB Mike Jacobs, who sends this link. The site proprietor says he has gotten some very cranky communications. Please, Loyal Reader, do not add to his list of such.

Reader John McGrath simplifies:

first I think the killers (I believe there are 2) are being given too much credit for skill. They have been 'successful' because they are a needle in a haystack. No other reason, really.

are they changing vehicles or using the one vehicle as a decoy? come on, please! using the vehile over and over again for any reason is risking getting caught. they use the van because it is their transportation and it provides a covered place to fire from. the theory that they wait for a white van to drive by is all wet-- those van drivers would all have come forward long ago. the belief that they have snuck through roadblocks doesn'r make sense either. These individuals have never been stopped. They obviously have weapon with them and would probably not make it through a checkpoint, tho I suspect if it came down to that they'd try to shoot their way out.

Nope, the killers have managed to get away before the roads were blocked or got through seams in the dragnet. They have a window of at least 5-10 minutes before they'd get trapped and they've used their element of suprise to great advantage.

This seems plausible. The Monday witness seem to put paid to any "the van is a decoy/witness expectation phenomenon" explanation. We're stuck with a real vehicle that did not, so far as we can tell, get picked up. (There were early rumors that police found an abandoned van Monday night.) If there's a driver, the shooter could have disembarked with his weapon before the roadblocks. Or they/he could have a place to stay in the neighborhood. Or they/he just gutted it out and got through - ahead of the roadblocks or in spite of them.

John also writes "to me use of an AK-74 would mean these are middle east people with a grudge (not terrorists per se)."

Reader dean paid a visit to the Aspen Hill Michael's of the famous missed shot on October 2. He writes

I was up on the Michael's parking lot yesterday. He wasn't shooting downhill - he missed.

To me, it seems he seems to need an elevated advantage. In the D.C. shooting he used a wall. In the Leisure World shooting, he was definately shooting downhill and at very close range.

How'd You Get Here, Son - Caleb Carr in the Washington Post has one of the better pieces speculating on a terrorist connection to the current sniper spree. Carr argues that the killer(s) fit poorly into the classic patterns (stereotypes?) of either spree or serial killers. He notes that, as a matter of timing, the spree seems to have begun "just before the anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan," and that, as we have seen around the world, a whole host of al Qaeda-connected operations have been taking place, most calamitously in Bali.

Unqualified Offerings says, never say never. But Carr is too honest a writer not to undermine his own case as he goes. For instance:

Although the murderer does scout his ground like a serial killer, he does not display the type's taste for stalking specific victims...

Such murders almost always involve the transference of sexual anger -- the result of childhood trauma of a similar nature -- onto a specific group...

Finally, the taking of personal items and body parts as trophies -- a hallmark of serial killing -- is precluded in this case by the killer's need to escape...

Carr keeps acknowledging, with phrases like "almost always" and "the type," that these hallmarks are not universal. Not all serial killers are loners, some serial killers have good social skills, not all serial killers keep body parts. Something similar happens in his discussion of spree killers:

But unlike serial killers, they are disorganized, and their anger rarely lasts or subsides long enough to allow the kind of careful planning and execution of the next episode that we have seen demonstrated in the Washington area. Once the initiating rage is spent, the killer's capture or self-destruction becomes only a matter of time.

Again, Carr's intellectual honesty - found in a word like "rarely" - precludes a categorical rejection of the spree killer theory. There's also the vagueness of "a matter of time." (Two months passed between Charlie Starkweather's first murder and his apprehension. His actual "spree" lasted eight days. Andrew Cunanan, who straddles what may be the same border between spree and serial killer that the capital sniper may, lasted three months. We're just over two weeks into the official spree of the current murderer, just over a month if the 9/14 Hillandale shooting is the same guy.)

Strangely, after Carr argues that the capital sniper isn't likely to be a sniper because

In the Washington area murders, however, every type of citizen -- child, adult, male, female, white, nonwhite -- has been victimized.

that is, they don't belong to a "specific group," Carr argues that it must be a terrorist because they do, after all, belong to a specific group:

Take the issue of type: The victims shared neither sex, race nor age group, and this has led to a general declaration that they shared no characteristics at all. But they did: They were all Americans, engaged in the typical American activities of pumping gas, going to school, shopping, etc. -- activities that have suddenly been identified as potentially lethal in the capital area.

As we know, al Qaeda hates Americans. (And Unqualified Offerings returns the favor!) But the victims share other characteristics too:

o They are civilians.
o They are cosmopolitan rather than rural.
o They are human.

Those are just the categories that come immediately to mind. Every one of them is seriously intended. A particular kind of military or ex-military creep might hate civilians. Certain rural American extremists might have moved from hatred of minorities to hatred of "corrupt" urbanites and suburbanites generally. Someone hunting "The Most Dangerous Game" cares only about the victims' humanity. Carr is simply settling on the category that fits his theory.

Whether the killer(s) turn out to be international terrorists, domestic terrorists or serial/spree killer(s), they will be, in the American context, an unusual case. This country has not seen IRA style sniper terrorism before or undergone the dull national toothache of West Bank-style micromurder. When it comes to the international terrorism possibility, I ask myself, could I see terrorists doing this? and the answer is yes. When it comes to the question of spree/serial killer(s), I ask, could I imagine some sick bastard getting enjoyment out of doing this? and I get the same answer.

Big Bird - This is al Qaeda too, right? (Link via Eve Tushnet.)

Dog Bites Man - Dang. A presidential veto was my last hope!

Imitation Geek Blog Post - Apparently some readers are able to pull news from this site using a tool called Amphetadesk. Maybe you would like to do the same.

Spree Graphs - Little news made today. If there isn't a shooting tonight, that will break a pattern. WUSA-TV reports on a witness from Monday night who says an agitated middle eastern driver trying to get past him in a Chevy Astro:

Robert Young, a Washington construction worker, was among witnesses to Monday night's shooting who returned to the shopping center Tuesday to talk with police. He said he heard a muffled gunshot and saw a white van.

Young said as he backed his truck out of his parking spot, a white Astro van with two men inside tried to turn into his lane. He said the driver appeared very agitated to find his way blocked and instead drove by a neighboring restaurant and out of sight.

Young described the driver as a short man of slight build who appeared to be Middle Eastern. "I got a good look at the guy," he said.

The driver "seemed to be excessively irritated because he couldn't pull into my lane," he said. "I thought this fool was going to want to get out of the van and duke or something. But he didn't. He kept on going."

Well there you go! they're saying over at Jane Galt's blog. But I'm trying to synch this up with the report from the fellow who supposedly saw the shot and having some trouble.

Recall the report from the Post:

"He said he saw that van parked, a guy standing behind it," Guymon said. "The guy lifted up a rifle to his shoulder and shot the woman, who was standing by her car with her husband. He said the guy at the van got in the van and drove off."

That report has the shooter driving the getaway vehicle. But why have "two men" in that case? Someone's wrong.

It's still a code red day, folks. Let's be careful out there.

Midday Update - At least one witness saw the shooter shoot Monday night, according to the Post:

Glen Guymon, a Washington lawyer who was shopping at Home Depot at the time, said he talked to a witness who told him that he saw a man shoot Franklin from behind a cream-colored van. Guymon said he and the witness started conversing when police ordered that they remain at the store after the shooting.

The witness, who had already talked to police, told Guymon he was outside the store's main entrance when he saw a man standing next to the van at the end of the aisle where Franklin's car was parked.

The van was not parked in a space but was at a location closer to Route 50, facing west. The witness told Guymon that the man lifted a gun to his shoulder and shot Franklin.

"He said he saw that van parked, a guy standing behind it," Guymon said. "The guy lifted up a rifle to his shoulder and shot the woman, who was standing by her car with her husband. He said the guy at the van got in the van and drove off."

The witness apparently did not shout "Duck!" or whip anything in the direction of the killer or hop in his car and give chase. Pause to remind ourselves that we can't be sure we'd do any better.

This is brazen behavior on the killer's part. It has me lowering the likelihood of the "jihadist theory" after a recent rise. It seems like your cool, collected al Qaeda operative would gain by making his 12th shooting as operationally secure as his first. Contrariwise, a power-tripping "most dangerous game" killer would plausibly grow more reckless as a gets more drunk with his previous success. But this is not a slam dunk refutation of the jihadist theory. After all, as your left wing peacenik types remind us, Terrorists are people, too. Mr. al Qaeda sniper might be out there right now telling himself to calm down.

Note that the witness quoted says the shooter got into the van and drove himself away. No mention of a separate driver. Interesting and, like everything else the public knows, far from definitive.

And of course the police say the description of the shooter isn't good enough to give out yet. This WorldNet Daily article asserts that Chief Moose has been sitting on the "olive-skinned male" description:

Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, who is leading the multi-jurisdictional investigation, Tuesday said the task force has at least a "partial" description of suspects who he suggested are minorities.

But he elected not to release the information, explaining it might "paint some group."

WorldNet Daily ties the nonrelease of a personal description to terrorist-theory suppression, but DC Metro police forces and the local media are traditionally chary with suspect descriptions they worry will traduce racial sensitivities.

Unqualified Offerings also wonders if the "olive skin" might be another phenomenon of the yellow Home Depot garage lights.

Strange passage from WND:

Prince Georges Police Department Detective Paula Pascarella, who is part of the task force, told WorldNetDaily on Friday that authorities are investigating the possibility of teams of snipers using more than one .223-caliber rifle and traveling in more than one white vehicle.

If the bullets could really have come from different guns, then the media has, IUOHO, been very irresponsible in the way they've reported the ballistic "links" among the shootings. The articles I've seen clearly indicate that the bullets have been matched to the same (unknown) rifle, not just the same caliber weapon. Confirmation from ballistics experts eagerly sought. I know you're out there.

Meanwhile, if you're out there and you're a muzzle loading deer hunter or other hunter, you're going to have to find a non-metropolitan Maryland County to do it in, as of today:

The manhunt has government officials taking unusual measures. Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D) plans to sign an executive order today temporarily banning the outdoor discharge of firearms for recreational purposes in Prince George's, Montgomery, Howard and Anne Arundel counties for the duration of the search for the sniper, according to Glendening spokesman Charles A. Porcari.

Unqualified Offerings despises Parris Glendening, but this doesn't seem like a bad call. Note that

The order would not prevent gun owners from going to shooting ranges or using their weapons in self-defense.

(Emphasis, Unqualified Offerings.) We also still don't have an official lookout for an AK-47/AK-74/AKM/SKS. Nor have I seen that weapon identification, reported by MSNBC and picked up by Rand Simberg, repeated in an independent news source. MSNBC currently has this on the gun:

But Demme said one witness “firmly believes” that he saw the suspect firing an AK-74. Unlike the better known AK-47, some models of the AK-74 are capable of firing the .223-caliber rounds the killer has used, NBC’s David Bloom reported.

Still, Demme emphasized that the witness could be wrong and urged the public not to focus on a certain gun model.

This CNN story deprecates the shooter descriptions provided by Monday's witnesses:

"There are a couple of people who believe they saw a man shoot. Unfortunately, distance and darkness and, perhaps, adrenaline, have made them unable to give us a clear composite that we can disseminate," said Capt. Nancy Demme of the Montgomery County, Maryland Police Department, which is leading the multijurisdictional investigation.

Without knowing the background of the witness, it's hard to know how much to distrust his ID of the gun. Though heaven knows someone from Fairfax County is more likely to be right about something like that than someone from Montgomery County.

Morning Murder Minute - If UO were to start one of those color-coded warning systems like the Homeland Security people have, today would be a Red day. Look, alas, for a morning or midday incident, but look for something by the evening. Note: if today stays quiet, UO will happily be found wrong about this.

According to NBC4, Investigators Have Best Clues To Date, including license numbers on vans.

Some readers have wondered if you can e-mail the task force as well as call them. It turns out you can (taskforce@co.mo.md.us). Consolidated witness contact information can be found on this WTOP page. (Strangely, you can also snail-mail the task force [address provided]. Use extra stamps.)

Adults at Offering Boy's school were ticked off that ABC News filmed there yesterday, given that several of the shootings took place so closely to it that it seems likely the sniper would recognize it on TV.

We have now reached the point where the police themselves are releasing bullet points on how to protect yourself from snipers, which is to say, completely altering how you behave out of doors. (See the sidebard to this Post story.)

For an entire article of "maybe, maybe not" speculation re a possible Michael's tie-in, go here. UO hasn't gotten to its Michael's mail yet, but e-mailer Jeff points out that "Michael" means "Who is as God."

No one but MSNBC is talking about an AK-47/74 being used, as near as I can say. The rifle description has to be considered very provisional for now.

Voting:The Duty of Every Citizen - Salam Pax was a good boy. Salam Pax voted for Saddam Hussein. Salam Pax got a cool sticker for doing this. Read all about it at Where Is Raed before we blow him up or Saddam figures out how the internet works.

UPDATE: Some commentators suggest that it is a button Salam got, not a sticker. Developing...

Wrapup - CNN is reporting that three witnesses have reported seeing an "olive-skinned man" fleeing the scene in a light-colored van. One witness says the van had two people in it. As Unqualified Offerings has previously noted, the description narrows the suspect list to about twenty percent of the metro-area population.

Meanwhile the FBI has requested and received approval from the Pentagon for satellite intelligence and military aircraft reconnaissance. Thos would be the last stops Susanna Cornett expected the FBI to pull after one of their employees was shot.

MSNBC reports that one witness claims to have seen the shooter with a weapon inside the parking garage:

Sources told NBC News’ David Bloom that at least one witness saw the sniper inside the parking garage, perhaps 50 feet from Franklin. The witness said the assailant fired an unusual weapon that looked like an AK-47, which, in some models, is capable of firing the .223-caliber rounds the killer has used.

There's some discussion over on Transterrestrial Musings of the capabilities of the various AK-model rifles. The consensus there is that if it's an AK-47/74 then it's far more likely that the sniper is a Middle Eastern terrorist.

Van Mail from Some Flounder - A hot topic in today's e-mail is vehicles. Forbes Tuttle and another reader who prefers to remain anonymous make a point about the "cream-colored van." As Forbes puts it:

As the latest shooting occurred in a parking garage, the van is probably white nonetheless. You will notice that the commercial lighting used in parking garages plays pretty good games with vehicle colors, especially turning white into cream color (there is a lot of yellow/amber in those commercial light fixtures). Check it out next time you visit.

This conforms perfectly with what Unqualified Offerings saw of the parking garage on TV last night - bright sodium lamps. UO's question is whether the van was seen in the garage or not, and reports seem to conflict. But Forbes' point is probably why the lookout was later changed to "light-colored van."

Roger Clegg offers

How about this: The sniper is not driving a white van/truck, but he has a partner who is. After the shooting, the partner drives off, but of course the police find nothing when they stop him. Meanwhile, the police are less likely to stop the sniper, who’s driving some other kind of car.

Possible objections and responses: (1) The police ought to be suspicious if they stop anyone more than once in the vicinity of the shooting. (But are they keeping track of everyone they stop? Probably not.); (2) How did the two guys know beforehand that only the white van/truck would be identified? (Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the first few shootings they were both in the same car, but when the car was identified, they decided to split up. The ingenious thing was for one of them to keep driving the original car, so that it kept being identified and the police continued to keep the search too narrow.)

Certainly it's hard to make the timeline of the October 3 morning spree (four shootings in just over two hours, miles apart) work unless the shooter, at that time, is sticking pretty close to the vehicle. (UO discussed the Thursday timeline way back here.) But we know (or think we know) that at least one shooting was from outside a vehicle, the Bowie shooting. So it seems likely the killer (and any partner) is changing things up a little as he goes along.

The most intriguing thinking in this Invisible Hand post is vehicle-related:

The van has probably been stopped and examined but waved through any number of checkpoints when nothing suspicious turns up. It also seems to change shape on occasion.

Most likely the shooter finds a secluded spot and waits . . . waits for a victim . . . and then waits for a random white van to drive by. Think about it. If you’re looking for a white van, they’re all around you. Hell, there are websites devoted to white van conspiracy theories.

Witnesses now hear a shot and are conditioned to look for a white van and sure enough they’re there . . . going in all directions.

He's not the only one to wonder whether the shooter is in any vehicle at all, as we'll see. Problems I have: I'm not a marksman, let alone a professional sniper, but wouldn't turning your head away from the scope to spot a white vehicle, then turning it back to the scope to re-sight, tend to screw up your breathing, concentration and rhythm? Also, in a lot of the crime scenes, very long lines of sight are not to be had. Do you want to risk being without a vehicle in case someone spots you making a loud noise with a bangstick?

It's actually possible that white truck/white van has been a pure conditioning phenomenon from the beginning. But again, the killer was riding/driving something on October 2nd.

Pamela Gray has thoughts on the van and on the geography of last night's crime scene:

For any of your readers who don't know the Seven Corners area of Falls Church, it is a bloody nightmare to drive in, especially at night. The area was closed off VERY quickly after the shooting. I doubt that anyone in a white ANYTHING got thru w/o being searched. So here's my theory. The van/truck is a diversion. The shooter is on foot w/a weapon that can be disassembled and packed in a backpack. This guy is walking away not driving. And I wouldn't be surprised if he actually walks over and watches the cops working his latest gig. I hope they are video taping everything going on around them because they might see the same face in the crowd at several of the shooting sites.

Smarter people than UO have suggested that the entire white vehicle phenomenon is a pure observer effect. The road is full of white vehicles, as absolutely anyone in a three-state area can now tell you for certain, and an initial misidentification on October 2 could have spawned all subsequent misidentifications. ("I heard a shot! There's a white...! Must be connected!")

Padraic of Pad's Scratch Pad wonders what happened to the blue truck. There was a discrepancy between his print edition of the post and the online edition. Padraic:

The Post's sidebar story has excised the reference to a blue pickup truck. The third paragraph from the end in the linked story reads "A woman who said the shot had come from a vehicle parked near an exit to the garage." However, the same paragraph in this morning's paper, which I now hold in my hand, says "A woman who said the shot had come from a blue pickup truck parked near an exit to the garage." WHY IS THIS INFORMATION IN THE PAPER THIS MORNING AND OMITTED FROM THE ONLINE STORY? I want answers!

Unqualified Offerings can state, categorically, that it has no idea why the story was changed. It requests Pad's Pad let it know if Pad's Pad gets answers. Perhaps the Post decided the witness was wrong; perhaps the police told the Post the witness was wrong and confusing; perhaps the police told the Post that because the blue pickup truck is the right vehicle and they don't want the killer(s) to know they've gotten past the white truck confusion.

Theory B - The Official Sister of Unqualified Offerings has a different theory for the sniper's schedule and vehicle inventory than UO's "retail worker theory" below. It's a good theory, and because it covers the multiple vehicles, can arguably claim greater explanatory power than the theory her brother came up with.

She thinks the killer works construction. For years she worked for a firm that sold construction supplies to the trade, so she understands the business. She says

o It's pretty easy to slip away from a jobsite during the day. You can say you need to pick up supplies, etc.

o There would be a lot of white commercial vehicles around, and they would tend to show a lot of wear.

o She says that many workers would have fairly free access to company vehicles during the day and even on weeknights - a lot of places will let you keep company vehicles overnight Mon-Fri...

o ...but not on weekends.

This covers the appearance of the vehicles (the worse for wear), the timing of the shootings and the fact UO noted earlier - we don't have stolen vehicle reports (that the public has been told, anyway) that match up with vehicles used in the shooting. (We also don't have abandoned vehicles - again, not officially.)

This is action item two, basically. Go to it if you are in the construction business in DC.

Midday Minute - More stuff to write about than UO's lunch hour gives it time for, so some things, including some fascinating e-mails, will have to wait until COB or later. So, right quick...

Going a little farther afield for stories, UO found this passage from a Worldnet Daily article. The question has been, how good a sniper is the sniper. Informed opinion has been that we have no reason to think he's particularly skilled. However:

Last Wednesday, the sniper shot and killed Dean Myers, 53, from a distance of around 150 yards – a difficult shot, police said, because Meyers was hit in the head by a bullet that threaded a tight corridor between two fuel-pump islands, said the paper.

WorldNet Daily leads us to Capitol Hill Blue, and Doug Thompson's column from yesterday, headlined "I Pray to God We Didn't Train Him." Thompson recounts a discussion with an ex-military sniper he met through AA:

The Washington-area sniper had just taken out his tenth victim, a kill shot taken just 50 yards from a Virginia State Trooper working a traffic accident near Fredricksburg, Virginia. The shot said ["sailed"? - UO] over the troopers head, killing a 53-year-old father of six gassing his car at an Exxon station.

“Up until now, I thought this was a thrill seeking kid,” he said. “But this shot was the work of a pro. Well planned, scoped out. I’m starting to think this guy was trained by one of the services.”

Thompson notes that the task force has asked the Pentagon to check military records of "trained snipers recently discharged from service." Unqualified Offerings has to say, Huh? We're sliding quickly from War A to War B and we're discharging snipers?

On the matter of last night's shooting, it has been conclusively linked to the others by ballistics. The victim was a 47-year-old female FBI analyst. For reasons of incipient self-interest, Unqualified Offerings wishes to stress that this is by no means "elderly," a word it used last night based on TV coverage. The woman was not working the sniper case, but, as Susanna Cornett puts it today, "Whatever stops weren't pulled yet [in the investigation], just got yanked."

NBC4 reports that

Police said some witnesses were able to give police license plate numbers of vehicles seen leaving the scene. Manger said they continue to talk with witnesses about the shooting, but he refused to comment on whether anyone has seen the shooter face to face. "There was some additional information that we were able to get from last night's case, and I am confident that that information is going to lead us to an arrest in the case," Manger said.

Other sources confirm the license-plate numbers story.

As for the famous (soon to be legendary, UO predicts) Baltimore van reported by Instapundit and others, the Post quotes police as follows:

A law enforcement source said, "We have three or four of these [fruitless tips] a day." The only difference yesterday was "you found out about this one."

And the suspect list is indeed undergoing revision, as speculated earlier this morning:

About half a dozen men were considered for a time the "most promising" sniper suspects, but none of the leads turned out, the source said.

For those who want to declare definitively that this is or is not foreign terrorism or a "sniper culture gone wild" or nihilists from the Howard the Duck strip or whatever, these cautionary words from Chief Moose:

When asked why police would not release a psychological profile, which the FBI has been working on, Moose said: "None of that has been released because, again, we do not want to paint a picture that somehow causes people to exclude the possible suspect or people involved in this."

Unqualified Offerings believes that it material evidence - time, space, matter - will play a much bigger role in apprehending the killer than any amount of "getting inside his head." Take it from UO: inside his head it is dark and nasty. That's about as interesting as it gets.

That's if he gets caught. In an article on what the weekend lulls might and might not mean, the Post quotes a retired NYC cop on an earlier sniper case:

Joseph J. Maginnis, a retired New York City police inspector, recalled voicing this concern to his boss in 1984 after he was assigned to a task force searching for a serial sniper near Penn Station in midtown Manhattan.

"I told the chief of detectives that we have absolutely nothing pointing towards anybody, and if he stops shooting, we may never get him," Maginnis said. The gunman, who killed one victim and wounded six over 11 months, did stop shooting -- and was never caught.

Finally, Spotsylvania County police have released two different van sketches of vehicles that might be involved, per WTOP.

Not finally: The Instapundit item has a useful update on The Baltimore Van - no tarot card was found. The man was also in jail and his rifle in the hands of police at the time of the Seven Corners shooting. And the Seven Corners shooting really is ballistically linked to the others. So this guy is as off the hook as you can get while still being shot by your girlfriend, owning an AR-15 and a white van.

How many of us can say the same?

Morning After - Sifting through the wreckage of last night's news coverage. From the Post this morning:

A Virginia State Police spokesman said the latest lookout was for a cream-colored Chevrolet Astro van with a silver ladder roof rack and its left taillight out.

NB: Last night we were told it was the right taillight. UO says, don't be picky, loyal readers. You see a cream or white Astro with a bad taillight on either side, you pull the stem on your Superman watch right then and there.

Police say the ballistic work will be done today. Any connection to the official sniper shooting list is provisional at that time, based on nothing more than it looking, walking and quacking like the others.

In what may be an eerie coincidence, there is a Michaels craft store in the shopping center where last night's shooting took place. Two of the previous shootings connected to the sniper occurred near Michaels craft stores. (In the first shooting, no one was hit, but a bullet hole was left in the store window in Aspen Hill.)

Hm. UO is still skeptical of the Michaels connection. As this otherwise annoying Hank Stuever article points out, there's a Michaels almost everywhere. (Guarantee: Guys did not know this.) It sure would tie in interestingly with UO's retail worker theory though.

Speaking of the retail worker theory, thanks to those sites that have already linked to it as UO requested. This site will try to put up a thank-you post at some point. It should stress that the retail worker theory is agnostic on the question of the shooter's motive - it even allows for the foreign terrorism possibility.

Speaking of foreign terrorism, UO came up with a couple of structural reasons to think it might actually be true last night. One of them is that witness may be right about the vehicle IDs, in which case multiple commercial vehicles are being used. But we haven't heard of any stolen vehicle reports. This would fit if, say, the vehicles were acquired for sleeper agents by a witting co-conspirator. (It would probably also fit a number of other scenarios.)

Reader George Byrd brings up the matter of precedent:

vaguely recall (all recall is vague without enough coffee, then it's just garbled) that a few years ago a sniper parked on a freeway somewhere near Langley VA, and was shooting somewhat randomly at cars, maybe specifically at cars taking an exit to CIA HQ or something like it.

I also recall, perhaps erroneously, that he was not caught immiately, but was extradited from Europe or the MidEast some months or even years later. I beleive he was a citizen of some MidEast country, and his shooting was politically motivated, if not a proven terrorist mission.

If that vague or garbled recitation rings a bell in your mind, then my question is this: I've seen no blog articles that purport even to investigate and dismiss any connection between that older sniping event and the current rampage. Is there any possible connection?

UO's bold answer: Well I don't know. Here's a CNN account of the conviction of the CIA shooter. Different MO: Kasi didn't fire from seclusion. He walked down the line of cars waiting to turn into CIA HQ and shot point blank. Still, the more things stay the same, the more they change, as it were.

Mrs. Offering thinks that the shooter may know Montgomery County very well, but is presently living in Virginia, which is how he was able to disappear. That's a darned interesting take, given that no shootings have taken place in Maryland since the case got "hot" - which I'm saying happened after the thirteen-year-old boy was shot.

Last night on the news, Channel 4 asserted that police say they had two-dozen suspects, with six under constant surveillance, before the Home Depot shooting. Perhaps that list now changes.

Nothing else to report so far.

Let Him BE a Marylander, Please - I could never find my way out of Seven Corners, especially not in the dark. I don't think many people from this side of the river could.

TV news says the victim is a woman. Still no web story to link to.

UPDATE: The woman must be dead. They have live footage on the TV news of the ambulance sitting in the parking garage, lights flashing. It wouldn't be just sitting there for a wounded victim. It would have left for the hospital long since. God damn this son of a bitch to hell.

UPDATE: Here's a link to an NBC4 story, for what it's worth.

UPDATE: Fairfax Police Chief Tom Major's on-scene press conference is, as you might expect, short on hard info. He confirms that there is an official lookout for a cream-colored Astro Van whose right rear taillight is out. He does not confirm that there is also a lookout for a driver described as wearing blue jacket and pants with an olive complexion. (How would anyone have seen the pants? NB terrorism theorists: olive skin might fit your theory. It also fits a good 20% of DC Metro residents. It's also dark. But you never know.) Chief Major does not confirm that police were at one point chasing a van. He also says the van may not be involved.

There is a massive-perimeter roadblock, which makes a great deal of sense. Since the guy is firing from a distance (if it's the sniper), you have to cast the net pretty wide.

I am serious above: if this guy is a Maryland resident he is fucked. At the very least, he's at a significant disadvantage trying to elude a roadblock in suburban Virginia. Seven Corners doesn't have the quick egress that I-95 provided for the Fredericksburg shootings. The one thing he has going for him is the darkness.

Victim is described as an elderly white woman.

Mrs. Offering also says that Virginia Governor Mark Warner needs to shut up. Unlike Official Unqualified Offerings bete noire Parris Glendenning, Governor of Maryland, Warner keeps taking face time to make statements independently of the task force(s), often saying things at variance with them.

UPDATE: RGB Mike Jacobs writes

regarding your web log info about easy getting in and out. 7 corners, especially from across rt 50 from the home depot where it's thought the shot was from, is not far from I66.

if he fled on rt 50 east, which some people are claiming they saw a white van fleeing, (my route to chez nate, btw), it isn't that far to get to an exit which gets to I395.

UO says: Sure. But Mike knows that because he's from Virginia.

Unqualified Offerings will stubbornly keep this sectarian-regional hope in its heart as it goes to sleep. May it awaken to find it has been scooped on the matter of the suspect's capture...

Shooting in Falls Church - No link yet. They just interrupted regular programming with a bulletin. No word on condition of the victim.

If my theory is remotely right, the shooter (or his driver) worked today.

I would be very grateful if other bloggers would link to the "Action Item" post below. It might do some good. Humor me. This is getting real old.

What There is to Say - Warm thoughts and best hopes for Australian, NZ and Indonesian readers and their loved ones.

Tech Support Call - Anyone who can help me fix the stupid extra space problem in the post below, I'd be grateful to hear from you. Thanks.

UPDATE: Reader Mary laCroix comes through with the crucial pointer. I'll fix the vertical alignment problem when I get home. Thanks, Mary!

Action Item - You are a retail manager in suburban Washington, DC, probably Maryland. I use the term "retail" loosely - you run a store or a gas station or any other sort of business that is open on weekends.

One of your employees may have killed eight people.

He hasn't killed anyone on the weekends because you make him work both days. (He may be an assistant manager. He's not you, because you get one weekend day off.) He may actually be a she, in which case she's probably driving her no-good boyfriend with the gun around rather than doing the shooting herself. You probably know which of your female employees have no-good boyfriends, because they talk about it.

Please pull out your time sheets for October, and for September 14, 2001 too.

He or she has had weekdays off that correspond to the Fredericksburg shootings. He or she either had October 2 off or worked a mid-day shift only (e.g. 12-6). I've provided a handy table of sniping incidents below. You want (step one) employees who were not at work during those incidents and had, in your judgment, time to get to them. So if the shooting happened in the next county 15 minutes before someone showed up for work, then it couldn't have been your guy (girl). Of course you are working from time sheets (and your memory) rather than schedules because, you know retail, schedules never survive contact with the work week.

If you find anyone proceed to step two: Ask yourself about this person. Does he or she seem, you know...well, you know.

Oh come on, Jim! I hear you saying, don't you remember when you did this job? You could start your own country with all the retail workers who are young, at loose ends and angry at life.

Yeah, I know. But there's strange and there's scary strange. You're looking for scary strange. Don't have anyone like that whose schedule fits the shooting pattern? I thank you for making the effort to check. You do? Call the consolidated tips line at (888) 324-9800.

One more thing: This person may have asked for this coming weekend off. Because that's how you break the pattern, and breaking patterns is probably a big goal at this point.

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

Note: Hillandale shooting included for argument's sake. It is still not officially linked. Interesting that it happens after most stores close on Saturdays, though. The most detailed Hillandale coverage is this Washington Times article.

UPDATE: Added Seven Corners murder, dammit.

UPDATE: Added Ashland shooting (Oct 19) and, provisionally, the Oct 22 Aspen Hill shooting. It is italicized because not yet confirmed as part of the spree.

Morning Murder Minute - Another quiet weekend, sniper-wise. If someone gets shot today then the "weekends off" pattern starts to look significant. Chief Moose says he's cutting back on his news briefings. This will surely strike psychologist Harvey Goldstein, who wrote in the Post yesterday that saturation news coverage just encourages the sniper.

Could be. But isn't it at least possible that if he got less pub he would feel driven to kill more spectacularly to get more of it? (Note: Unqualified Offerings isn't offended by Goldstein's piece. While this site has done something like saturation coverage at times, it considers it a very low probability that the killer is doing all this to get attention from Unqualified Offerings.)

Curiously, Glenn Reynolds endorses Goldstein's thesis. But Glenn, why would news coverage encourage an Islamist terrorist? Instapundit does, however, have a good list of bad guns.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering asks, "How do you get a banjo player off your front porch?"

A: "Pay for the pizza."

It's So Easy IV - Hawks point out that some of the same people who have been asserting the difficulties of conquering and remaking Iraq also argued that Afghanistan would be, you know, hard. Silly skeptics! So how's Afghanistan going?

The Special Forces soldiers assigned to protect president Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan have learned to trust no one. That lesson was made abundantly clear when a gunman dressed as a soldier in the newly formed Afghan army attempted to assassinate their charge in early September. It’s not hard to imagine how a recent altercation between Special Forces and Afghan government troops nearly erupted into a bloody melee inside the Presidential Palace grounds — a confrontation that says a lot about the future of the American presence in Afghanistan.

That's from Time. Here's the incident itself:

On September 30 just after 8:00 am, one of Kabul’s top generals, Bismillah Khan, commander of the city's garrison and a deputy to the defense minister, arrived at the Presidential Palace to meet one of the former king's advisers. The general and his bodyguard glided past an Afghan army checkpoint at the visitors’ gate only to be stopped forty yards later by U.S. soldiers assigned to protect Karzai. The Americans wanted to search the car and the general, but Khan refused. When the U.S. soldiers attempted to physically remove him from the car, fifteen Kandahari mujahedin (bodyguards for the former king) cocked their weapons and took aim at the Special Forces. The other Afghan government troops followed. "It was one of those times when you realize a minute is actually sixty seconds, and that can be an awfully long time," Hayatullah Diani, a royalist official, told TIME. "I thought they were going to start killing each other."

The upshot of this article and others is that US troops are pretty much all that's keeping Karzai in power and maybe alive. Meanwhile, our buddies in the Northern Alliance are feeling used and discarded. UO's liberal friends would further argue that we haven't broken the power of the warlords and that what's missing is a fullbore commitment, financial and political, to reconstruct Afghanistan and bring its polity and infrastructure into the modern era.

Sorry, liberal friends, but that's the place where we part. Unqualified Offerings suspects that, in its way, the Administration is being a lot smarter about Afghanistan than they're given credit for. Note well: this is not all good news.

UO is saying, basically, that the government understands the Afghan situation better than, well, liberal bloggers and pundits, and hawkish ones too. They know perfectly well that conquering Afghanistan in a matter of weeks is no big deal - the Soviets did it in 1979. Holding it is the hard part. They desperately do not want to be the Soviet Union in 1980 or, god forbid, 1986. Liberals may think that if the US just shows up with bags of money and some drilling equipment for wells, that we'll be loved. Nah. We'd still be an alien force. Our (massive) presence would still be a threat to powerful local actors. As for "disarming the warlords," there's a word for that: war. The warlords owe their power to the fact that they are not disarmed. They will not be inclined to give that up. It beggars belief to think that we have enough qualified personnel to know what the right moves even are, let alone to make them smoothly. "Benevolent hegemony" is something the hegemon is more likely to discern than his "beneficiaries" are. Afghanistan knows from hegemons.

In a sense, the fact that the US actually couldn't do much better in Afghanistan than it has is the bad news. This stuff is not so easy. Trying to hold a couple of stable points (the Palace and Bagram airbase) in the hope that the rest of that fractious country will cohere around the stable points over time may actually be smarter policy than its critics credit. But that doesn't make it a high-percentage operation. It certainly means we have yet to demonstrate our ability to remake a militant Islamic country into a modern, free society.

Meanwhile, as the new owners, the locals will come to see whatever sucks as our fault. The Taliban and al Qaeda are hovering on the fringes, and over time Nostalgia will airbrush the uglier details of their own ascendancy. And Pakistan, the point of the entire exercise (Bin Laden's, I mean) could still go either way.

You can see why our hawks are so eager to do it all again so soon.