It's open season on Americans - Attacks these days also come from within

ROCKVILLE, Md. - Sometimes, we miss the obvious. Or shrink from it. Even conspire to obscure it.

In retrospect, there is one thing that all the victims of a roving sniper had in common: They were Americans. And this is not so trivial a common denominator.

In these merciless times, it's always open season on Americans — whether from without, by international terrorists who loathe all that the United States stands for; or from within, by home-grown misanthropes who've suckled on rage and bitterness, nursing their personal grievances, identifying symbolic adversaries.

By extension, such a person must hate himself, too, because he can't re-invent the accident of his birth. And someone who hates himself will surely have no empathy for others. No pity.

It is staggering, almost farcical, all the taboo elements and iconographic lodestones that have converged in the persons of John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, father and pseudo-son, believed to be responsible for a petrifying crime spree in the Washington, D.C., area over the last three weeks.

A convert to Islam who professed sympathy for the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; an ex-army man and Persian Gulf War veteran thoroughly inculcated in the culture of guns; a black devotee of the aggressively racist Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; a sweet-faced Jamaican teenager who arrived in the U.S. when he was a boy, purportedly quoting from patois lyrics in those mystifying messages left for investigators at various crime scenes; abducted children, custody battles, terrorized ex-wives and restraining orders, paramilitary camps, gun shows, greed.

Little wonder the professional profilers and shrinks could get no handle on these crimes or the perpetrators, were in endless disagreement, could discern no pattern or probabilities.

Some predators break new and fetid ground, because evil has no parameters and malice never rests.

But the mind turns immediately now, and reasonably, to the prospect of another American Taliban or fundamentalist mutant thereof: John Lindh crossed with Timothy McVeigh.

Add to this, a folksy Cherokee parable about a duck and a hare: The boastful hare tries to catch a duck in a noose. The duck appears to be caught but then he flies off, dragging the hare. The hare stumbles into a tree stump, where he is stranded.

It is a related phrase from this allegory that the sniper, or the sniper and accomplice, demanded be included in a communiqué by Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose.

This the chief did, late Wednesday, in his statement aimed at suspects who'd yet to be captured, although the noose was indeed closing as he spoke: "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."

As Moose was obeying his instructions, a literal tree stump was being carved from the backyard of a house in Tacoma, Washington — clear across country — previously used, according to neighbours, for target practice by a former resident firing a high-powered rifle.

Muhammad once lived in that house, in the days when he was still John Allen Williams, the name change occurring only in the past year. As a soldier, Williams/Muhammad had been stationed at nearby Fort Lewis, just outside Tacoma, in the '80s — the period of his religious conversion — later transferred to Fort Ord in California. The youth, Malvo, is known to have briefly attended high school in Bellingham, north of Tacoma, with police having been called in by education officials to investigate the boy's background — he'd shown up with no school records.

Investigators with the sniper task force, centred at Montgomery County police headquarters here, had glommed on to the Tacoma house, after connecting a fingerprint to Malvo and Muhammad. Malvo was betrayed by his juvenile record, and the fingerprint contained therein, obtained after the youth and his mother were picked up as undocumented residents in Washington state. The boy was to appear for an Immigration and Naturalization Services hearing on Nov. 20.

Malvo's print may match one found at the scene of an unsolved Sept. 21 liquor store handgun shooting in Montgomery, Ala. One woman was killed in that senseless ambush; another, shot in the back of the neck, survived. A local constable gave chase and was able to provide a physical description of the black male fleeing the scene — the composite produced bears a reasonable resemblance to photographs of Malvo, including one where Muhammad has his arm draped around the smiling teen's shoulder. But their relationship might have been more sinister than that happy photo suggests.

It was a tipster — believed to be either Malvo or Muhammad — who'd led investigators to the Montgomery, Ala., connection, and for unfathomable reasons. Maybe hubris, perhaps to underscore they meant business in their demands for $10 million, perchance even in a sub-conscious desire for capture, or — and this is sheer speculation — a conflicted attempt by one of the tandem suspects, yoked now in a diabolical killing spree, to get away from the other, bring all this bloodshed to an end.

Malvo, the youth, would surely have little knowledge of guns. But Muhammad, as military officials revealed yesterday afternoon, had been an engineer-trained sergeant in the army who'd once earned an M-16 marksmanship badge. The M-16 is a military version of the Bushmaster .223. Such a civilian long-range rifle, scope and tripod were found in the 1990 Chevy Caprice in which the duo had been travelling, the description and New Jersey licence plate circulated late Wednesday.

And, in the end, the arrest of these two suspects was just as banal in its circumstances as the mundane activities in which 13 victims had been involved when they were brought down by single sniper shots: mowing grass, placing parcels in the trunk of a car, sitting on a mall bench; the very randomness of victim and circumstance rendered each crime more chilling, made everyone in this suburban tract of America a potential target.

Man and youth were spotted by a trucker around 1 a.m., fast asleep inside their car — a vehicle customized with a hunter's blind in the trunk — which had been parked at a rest stop along the highway some 80 kilometres north of Washington D.C.

Countless questions, precious few answers. And then there's this one: Do Americans really want to go there, to the self-examination such gaining of wisdom might entail?

And how much pleasure will America-haters derive from all this misery, tracked — it would seem — to a perverse made-in-the-U.S.A. killer, one arguably created in part by the military apparatus? In tow, perhaps a hapless youth craftily moulded into a wheelman and accomplice.

While the relief in this area was palpable after news of yesterday's arrests — so many had been held hostage to that non-discriminating threat, despite the minute statistical likelihood of becoming a victim — the bigger picture is not a reassuring one.

The kids will get to trick or treat on Halloween (no doubt, some in sniper costume, because such is macabre humour) but many adults will be discomfited about the trials to come and the loaded significance of these particular suspects (as of last night, not yet charged with any of the actual shootings).

The strongest nation in the world, in this past year, has been exposed for all its worrisome vulnerabilities. Its freedoms, its pluralism, its tolerance and cultural quirks: these are the qualities that make America despised in the eyes of religious extremists, most especially, although that doesn't explain the enmity of, say, Western academics and Canadian newspaper columnists.

The whole world has gone mad, quite mad, of course — horrific nightclub bombings in Bali, relentless suicide bombings in Israel, the mass hostage-taking of an entire Moscow theatre audience.

Each new terrorist grotesquery feels just a bit less shocking, just that much less irrational — if one accepts both a central rational component to terrorism and the inevitability of more horrors.

A lone American gunman or an international network of terrorists that sends commercial planes hurtling into the World Trade Center: What's the difference?

If moral relativism and political accommodation can so misguidedly rationalize one — and never has there been such a concerted global exercise of victim-blaming — then a blame-America chorus will predictably rush in to explain the other.

Colossal carnage, anthrax scares, blown-up marines, attacked embassies, roving snipers, and the derisive judgment of smug critics.

The author has a lot of her biases showing.

A convert to Islam who professed sympathy for the perpetrators of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; an ex-army man and Persian Gulf War veteran thoroughly inculcated in the culture of guns

What evidence is there of this? He owned a gun, illegally. Period!

... a black devotee of the aggressively racist Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; a sweet-faced Jamaican teenager

This "sweet-faced Jamaican teenager" is probably a stone-cold killer in his own right (Alabama slayings). And, where is the part about Malvo being an illegal alien, whom the INS screwed up with and didn't deport last year?

... abducted children, custody battles, terrorized ex-wives and restraining orders, paramilitary camps, gun shows, greed.

OK. Were is the evidence for being in "paramilitary camps, gun shows"? He may have been, but where is the evidence, other than the author's bias?

I don't know, but I heard on the news this morning he had the highest achievement for marksmanship in his branch of military. I also heard that he attended some paramilitary camp in sweet home Alabama. I think those might be facts, but with the dang media, who knows.

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