a berlin blog
|
a berlin blog |
|
|
Thursday, October 24, 2002 Loopier and LoopierI realize this blog will sound like a conspiracy riff on the D.C. sniper theme, but here we go.The suspects are John Allen Muhammed and his step-son, Lee Malvo. Found in their car was an assault rifle. Muhammed was Nation of Islam; he converted about 17 years ago, before the Gulf War. We don't know yet whether he has links to any terrorist outfit. But Jim Henley raises two excellent questions: How did Muhammed buy the cars he used? Did he have help? And why a ten-million dollar ransom? Was that just blood money, or a kind of fund-raising for some larger organization? In Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Gore Vidal notices that no one took credit for the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh confessed, but only after his trial. "The point to any terrorist act," writes Vidal, "is that credit must be claimed so that fear will spread throughout the land." He builds an argument that the Murrah Building explosion was not real terrorism: The canny Portland Free Press editor, Ace Hayes ... wrote, "If the bombing was not terrorism then what was it? It was pseudo terrorism, perpetrated by compartmentalized covert operators for the purposes of state police power." Maybe not. Terrorism without claims of responsibility is what we got from al Qaeda during the 1990s. Laurie Mylroie argues that this kind of terrorism is basically war, waged by a country (Iraq) with every reason to remain anonymous behind willing, semi-independent fronts. If McVeigh did conspire with a former Republican Guard, then McVeigh was just another front, and we have to look at the Murrah Building explosion, too, as a continuation of the Gulf War. Muhammed may have nothing to do with al Qaeda, but he and McVeigh might have crossed paths during or after their service in the Gulf. In other words: What every unclaimed terrorist attack since ’91 might have in common is, well, Saddam. Lots of people connected to the Oklahoma City bombing are still wandering the country, and that case clearly needs to re-open -- at the expense of a few heads at the FBI? -- if this patchwork of terrorism in the wake of Bush Sr.'s war is to make any sense at all. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:41 PM | |
|
|
 Too Much of Nothing, a novel  Politics and Prose  about our editor 
The Underground Grammarian  current Berlin blog page  |
