The snipers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Although the media is falling over itself to link the snipers to the 
Nation of Islam, al-Queda, etc., there has been zero effort directed to 
making the real link, namely with Timothy McVeigh, who like John Allen 
Muhammad, was a disgruntled Gulf War veteran who never managed to cope 
with the exigencies of economic survival in capitalist America. While 
Muhammad is African-American and McVeigh was white, everything else 
about them was the same. They were typical military types with 
deep-seated resentments, who never found a proper target for their 
hostility. They both were loners and both remained steeped in the gun 
culture after rejoining civilian life.

John Lee Malvo is a 17 year old Jamaican immigrant who had lived in 
homeless shelters up until a year ago. The media reports that he and his 
mother had eluded INS officials, which will surely give impetus to 
xenophobic tendencies already boiling in American society, just as John 
Allen Muhammad's Muslim convictions will feed into the buildup for a war 
against Iraq.

What has not been prominently featured in the media is the snipers' de 
facto bid to turn themselves in. Muhammad called a hotline and demanded 
to be taken seriously. If the authorities wanted to know who they were 
dealing with, they should just look at what went down in Alabama, a 
reference to a homicide-robbery that the two had participated in advance 
of the Washington area shooting spree. The NY Times reports:

>>WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 — The first real break — the one that sent 
investigators scurrying from an Alabama liquor store to a backyard in 
Tacoma, Wash., and finally to a blue Chevrolet Caprice at a highway rest 
stop in Maryland — came on Oct. 17 in an angry telephone call from a man 
claiming to be the sniper.

Law enforcement officials say the man on the phone furiously insisted to 
a startled employee of the Montgomery County, Md., police, "I am God!" 
Then, according to notes that officials made of the three-minute call, 
he shouted: "Don't you know who you're dealing with? Just check out the 
murder-robbery in Montgomery if you don't believe me!"

The next night, last Friday, the man made at least two phone calls to 
priests — one in Ashland, Va., and the other in Bellingham, Wash. — in 
an effort to enlist a messenger to establish his credibility with the 
police, the officials say.

They say the caller told the priest in Ashland that investigators should 
check for a crime in Montgomery, this time specifying that he meant 
Montgomery, Ala. The priest thought the caller a crank, but 
investigators showed up on Sunday at his parish, where he recounted the 
odd conversation.

The authorities were baffled. After nine murders in two weeks, they 
certainly took the sniper seriously. But "why was he telling us this?" 
an F.B.I. official said today. "Did he want to get caught?"<<

The murder of hundreds of office workers in the Oklahoma City bombing 
and now the murder of 10 people in the Washington area is just 
collateral damage from the first Gulf War. More is surely to come as 
American imperialism seeks a new war in the area to help it overcome 
intractable contradictions of an economic system in terminal decay.

--

www.marxmail.org



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.