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Shooting Up on Insanity in Washington, DCby
Richard Wall
Lawyers are better placed than I am to comment, but these charges seem novel to me. "In the commission of an act of terrorism" has an air of PATRIOT act about it, while "use of a firearm during a murder" seems curious, implying that he was a very naughty boy to be even carrying a gun: I wonder idly how this charge would have been different had he used, let’s say, a box-cutter or a knife. As I recall (it happens I was in the United States at the time), the sniper episode lasted about three weeks: unless there’s a mistake in the reporting, the phrase "within a three-year period" presumably has to do with earlier unexplained shootings in other locations that the prosecutors seek to attribute to the sniper pair. Insane? Premeditated? Take your pick. Or maybe it’s both. Investigative follow-up on sniper affair has been swept under the rug by numerous mass media diversions, not least the pious concerns about the nature, timing and proceeds of the literary endeavours of the policeman in charge of the manhunt, Charles Moose – endeavours for which he has apparently given up his job. These developments, naturally, had nothing whatsoever to do with any alleged ineptitude on his part. John Allen Muhammad (prior to 1985, John Allen Williams), the older accused sniper, is a Gulf War veteran who claims, with a strong semblance of plausibility, that he worked for one or more federal government intelligence agencies. It is reported that he will plead not guilty to the charges made against him. It is common to attribute episodes such as these to the phenomenon of blowback, when government – in this case the military and ‘intelligence’ arms of government – have their own covert operations machinations blow up in their faces. But, as William Norman Grigg points out in an excellent 1997 article on the 1993 WTC bombings entitled "Enemies and Assets," in which he quotes Frédéric Bastiat: government "concocts the antidote and the poison in the same laboratory, and then devotes half of its resources to destroying the evil it has done with the other half." As so often when government is involved, there is a raft of coincidences, contradictions, and unanswered questions surrounding this man and his many journeys. They are too numerous for me to go into here, and are well documented on the Internet. Numerous postings in the Liberty Forum cover this topic, and California radio presenter Dave Emory has speculated at length on the possible connections between John Allen Muhammad, the intelligence agencies, and the Muslim organizations targeted in the US Customs’ Operation Green Quest, based largely in the same Virginia and Maryland beltway area where the snipers killed. However, in my opinion the best summary of the strange connections and unanswered sniper-related questions is to be found at a website called "Center for an Informed America" (geddit?) where webmaster Dave McGowan issued a special bulletin dated October 31, 2002 entitled "The DC Snipers." Recommended reading for everyone who wishes to pierce the media fog surrounding this story, not just for ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The insanity defense is controversial. The most celebrated instance in recent times is the case of John W. Hinckley, Jr., the man who shot President Reagan on March 30, 1981 and who continues to this day to be detained in a mental hospital, St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C. After his acquittal, many states reviewed the scope of the insanity defense: some abolished it altogether while others defined it much more restrictively. Hinckley’s case won’t go away. It gets regular periodic airings in the press whenever judicial hearings take place at which he tries to obtain greater freedom on the basis that he is no longer insane (the next hearing is scheduled for November 3, 2003).
A forum thread at FreeRepublic (yes, I know) contains many of the newspaper articles from the time, and one post there describes this story as an ‘interesting set of symptoms from a Freudian standpoint, as it more or less recreates the basis of the Oedipus complex (kill Dad and marry Mom),’ going on to note ‘one other tidbit for the skeptics – Joanne Hinckley's nickname was Jody.’ Much of the material relating to the background of his case has been ruled inadmissible (effectively suppressed), including some of Hinckley’s ‘letters to Jodie’ (which Jodie?, one might well ask). There is little doubt that Hinckley did fire six shots, but there are doubts in relation to events immediately after the shooting, such as the possible evidence of the presence of a second gunman located above street level, first noticed by reporter-on-the-scene Judy Woodruff, then of NBC. (If you’re going to assassinate, ‘triangulation’ – shooting from three different angles – is always a better bet than relying on the ‘one shot, one kill’ technique, in which John Allen Muhammad was supposedly trained by the US Army at Ft. Lewis). There is more: for example, the fact that Reagan was most likely saved from death by an ordinary policeman (not one of his secret service agents) who jumped in front of Hinckley's gun just as he opened fire; and the remarkable dilatoriness of the secret service agents in getting the president to hospital – they later said they ‘got lost’ (in Washington, their very own patch??, on what should have been a 5-minute journey by ambulance?). This too is a story where coincidences, contradictions and unanswered questions have been swept under the rug, but here there has been a much greater willingness of the part of the media to tar any doubters with the ‘conspiracy theorist’ brush and dismiss this story as ‘old news’ – also a favourite tactic of ‘lap-dog Republicans,’ as some of the abusive posts at the above-mentioned forum at FreeRepublic demonstrate. Given the zeal with which all this debunking is done, one is naturally led to ask the key questions: why, and to whose benefit? I have argued in earlier articles that we should not rush to dismiss conspiracy theories. ‘A "conspiracy theory" can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State's ideological propaganda,’ wrote Murray Rothbard. As with the snipers, there is a great deal of information circulating on the Internet to back up every kind of theory in relation to the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt, but it is harder to find. Here is a useful summary, thanks to the information on Dave Emory’s ‘For The Record’ website (FTR#244):
Consider the pattern of events and explanations surrounding March 30, 1981: a fanatic with a lot of guns, the planting in the public mind of an idea of obsession (fascist connections transformed into love/hate), magic bullets, and the unaccountable stand-off on the part of those who are supposed to protect. Consider the pattern of events and explanations surrounding September 11, 2001: fanatics with a lot of box-cutters, the planting in the public mind of the idea of an obsession (‘they hate our freedoms’), magic pilots, and the unaccountable stand-off on the part of those who are supposed to protect. Consider finally that much of the relevant information on the JFK assassination has been hidden away and cannot be released until 75 years after the event – in the year 2038, when it is fairly certain that most of the participants in that drama will be dead, and that we shall probably never get answers to the many irregularities and inconsistencies in the official version of events on September 11, 2001. Is it any surprise that so many reach the conclusion that somebody, somewhere has plenty to hide? Welcome to the world of Washington, DC, where shooters have insanity in their veins. Asked to comment, one temporary resident on a 4-year assignment there said, "I’m keeping quiet. There are too many leaks in this town. I’ve tried to get plumbers in to fix them, but ever since a previous occupant of my house gave those guys a bad name, all you can find here are fixers and pushers. It’s insane! I can’t wait to get back to the ranch." Links and Further Reading 1) D.C. SNIPERS
2) HINCKLEY
3) THE INSANITY DEFENSE
4) MISCELLANEOUS
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
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Attorneys
for 18 year-old Lee Malvo, the accomplice in last year’s Washington,
D.C. area sniper shootings, have indicated that they will use an
The
official story, which is as implausible as any other, centres on
a supposed delusional obsession of this ‘lone nut’ with the actress
Jodie Foster. The assassination was to be performed as final proof
of his love for her, leading to triumphant conquest, marriage and
life in the White House for ever after. Prior to this, she had signally
failed to respond to his charms, let alone show any sign of interest.
When asked in court what her relationship with John Hinckley was,
her reply was "I have no relationship with John Hinckley."
October
21, 2003
