Posted on 11/11/2002 11:05:11 AM PST by Asmodeus
Buried in a Washington Post story about sniper suspect John Muhammad was the revelation that the Reverend Al Archer, the director of a homeless shelter, thought that Muhammad may have been a terrorist and he called the FBI.
Muhammad had been staying at the shelter. The Post reported, "After Sept. 11, 2001, when the newspapers were full of tales of terrorist sleepers, Archer said he began to wonder whether the quiet and super-fit Muhammad was one. In mid-October, Archer did something he had never before done in his three decades of running ministries to the homeless: He phoned the FBI about one of his clients."
Archer was quoted as saying, ""I thought that he was involved in some kind of conspiracy against our country. I thought that he was traveling around and doing things to promote this kind of thing." The paper added, "As far as Archer knew, the FBI didn't follow up."
But it appears the FBI may have followed up and dropped the ball.
Quickly after Muhammad and his associate John Lee Malvo were apprehended, the Seattle Times reported that, "Several federal sources said Muhammad and Malvo may have been motivated by anti-American sentiments in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Both were known to speak sympathetically about the men who attacked the United States, the sources said. But neither man was believed to be associated with the al-Qaida terrorist network, sources said."
Were those federal sources connected to the FBI? Those statements have all the earmarks of FBI officials trying to cover their rear ends by conceding they were aware of Muhammad’s anti-American views but had not determined he was connected to a formal terrorist group such as Al Qaeda.
Archer, however, found it strange that Muhammad stayed at a homeless shelter but was able to travel. Archer said, "He was doing all this flying, three or four trips that we were aware of, and he had to have money to do that. Yet he was living in a homeless shelter. It just didn't all fit together."
The Post confirmed the Seattle Times account that Muhammad was sympathetic to the 9/11 terrorists. It quoted Harjeet Singh, who went to a gym with Muhammad, as saying they shared a critical view of U.S. foreign policy. Muhammad, he said, spoke in favor of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. "He said that it should have happened a long time ago."
Muhammad’s membership in Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam deserves more attention. Farrakhan has tried to stem the controversy by confirming that Muhammad had been officially a member of the group since 1997 and that he would be dropped from the organization if he’s found guilty of the crimes. Lately, Farrakhan has been condemning a possible U.S. military strike on Iraq, and defending the anti-white policies of African dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. The name "Muhammad" is a common one among followers of the Nation of Islam. The group promotes black separatism and the creation of a black nation in the southern United States. However, the victims of the sniper were both white and black. The sniper seemed to hate all Americans.
Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org
Reed Irvine and his Accuracy In Media have been among the leaders of the Conservative cause for decades. However, the following documents a bellyflop that badly tarnished the image of Mr. Irvine, AIM and Conservatives - and dramitizes how conspiracy theories can be a slippery slope for their credibility. Accuracy In Media's Bellyflop
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh it is a surreal secret.
Indeed, the FBI needs to learn from this.
One suposes that the shelter manager did not see a terrorist, and that the sniper bullets were the result of a random electrical malfunction near some unusually hot ammo.
The agent listened, said "Yup, yup," and in the end affirmed (obliquely) that I was not the first person to have told them exactly the same thing.
We weren't entirely wrong: Malvo and Mohammad were stopped at least once in my neighborhood, and probably on the very street I live on.
If they took the guy from the homeless shelter's advice and tracked him down, it's not a crime to be anti-America: just look at all the jackasses in the media. You expect the Feds to keep tabs on all of them? Ain't gonna happen.
Can someone please post a conspiracy theory I can rally behind?
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