Vindication Through Violence: Jimmy Carter and the DC Sniper (Counterpunch)

[Mike Friedman <mikedf@xxxxxxxx>]

CounterPunch

October 12, 2002



American Journal

Vindication Through Violence:
Jimmy Carter and the DC Sniper
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

The FBI is working on a profile of the sniper who, by this Saturday
morning, has killed ten people in the suburban DC area. Here's
CounterPunch's input. He's a He. He was in the military. Probably in
Special Forces. He's white. He's in his 40s or 50s. He lives alone. He's a
psychopath.

In the DC/ Virginia/ Maryland area, surrounded with retired military, this
narrows down the suspect list to several hundred thousand. On the freeway
you're surrounded by them. Cut one off and you risk getting your head blown
open. Watch out when you go to the Mall. Beat the guy in the white van to a
parking space and the next might be YOU. There are a lot of retired,
highly-trained psychopathic killers out there. And some of them aren't even
retired. Ask the relatives of the wives of Fort Bragg, murdered by husbands
back from Afghanistan, so highly trained they killed if the vacuum cleaner
got on their nerves.

Congress votes Aye and gives Bush the go-ahead to bomb Saddam Hussein the
next time Harken hits the headlines. The Delta Force and the Navy SEALS
hone their killing knives, sight their night-scopes, ready for
behind-the-lines action in Iraq. The Special Forces, the Rangers, the 81st
Airborne, and all the other elite units pore over the street maps of
Baghdad and the aerial photos of Saddam's palaces.

In some months or years they'll Come Home from the frontiers and ouposts of
Empire, many of them time bombs. They'll become drunks or drug addicts.
They'll beat their kids or their wives or both. The kids will grow into men
who'll beat their wives or kids or both. A few of them will mature into
killers, like the Sniper. That's part of the price of always being at war.
Mostly the wives and kids pay for it on the Home front for years to come.

Now they've given Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace prize. Who knows? The DC
Sniper may have first started to cook back in Carter time, when Jimmy said
America would not stand idly by while Nicaragua tried to set forth on a
different path after they threw out Anastasio Somoza.

Carter told the Sandinistas they had to retain the National Guard, which
had been Somoza's elite band of US-trained psychopathic killers. The
Sandinistas said No. So Carter ordered the CIA to bring up the officers and
torturers running the Argentinian death squads to train up a force of
Nicaraguan exiles in Honduras, and launch them on terror missions across
the border. They called them the Contras.

Carter was a busy man. Not just content with forming the Contras, he
harkened to the pain of South Korea, where workers and peasants were
demonstrating. His envoy, Richard Holbrooke advised the South Korean
military to hit back hard, and they did, killing around 30,000, the most
horrible massacre since the Korean war. And yes, Carter started the covert
CIA operation in Afghanistan, rallying the mujiddeen to fight the Soviets.
Soon the CIA would bring Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan to lend a Saudi
presence and Saudi cash.

Now he's a peace prize winner. He's been campaigning for it for years. He's
a white male American with the blood of thousands on his hands. So how
could he miss, unless the Peace Prize Committee had decided to abbreviate
the whole process and give it to George Bush. Maybe next year, though Ariel
Sharon is the next in line.



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