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Columns

Alexander Cockburn

Vindication through violence. Jimmy Carter and the D.C. sniper
October 16, 2002

An entire nation is trying to figure out a profile of the sniper who, at time of writing, has killed nine people in the suburban Washington, D.C. area. My portrait: A guy, of course. Ex-military, possibly in Special Forces or like Timothy McVeigh, a Special Forces wannabe. White, in his 40s or 50s. Lives alone.

In the D.C./Virginia/Maryland area, surrounded with retired military, this narrows down the suspect list to many, many thousands. 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 kill if the vacuum cleaner gets on their nerves.

Congress votes Aye and gives Bush the go-ahead to bomb Saddam Hussein the next time Harken Energy 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. Ari Fleischer said a few weeks ago that just one bullet in Saddam would solve the problem. That set the sniper off. I hope Fleischer feels a stab of responsibility, though I doubt it. These people have armor-plated psyches.

So the warriors come home from the frontiers and outposts of Empire, some of them time bombs. Drunks or drug addicts. They'll beat their wives or kids 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. The War is always coming home.

Now, they've given Jimmy Carter the Nobel Peace prize. Who knows? The D.C. Sniper may have first started to cook back in Carter time, when Jimmy said America would not stand by idly 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 U.S.-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 thousands, the most horrible massacre since the Korean war. And yes, Carter started the covert CIA operation in Afghanistan, rallying the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. Soon, the CIA would bring Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan to lend a Saudi presence and Saudi cash.

As Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, a Bay Area attorney who's just finished a history of the first years of the Nicaraguan revolution, put it to me after the news of Carter's Nobel, "'Benign' Carter was the source of so many bad things, including the rise of the Christian right (his endless public pronouncements of his faith and his sister's leadership in the actual Christian right gave the movement a new legitimacy), the erosion of the UN, the destruction of the New International Economic (and Information) Order, etc. And no one seems to recall that he led a campaign to free (Lt. William) Calley when he was governor of Georgia."

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 compress the whole process and give it to George Bush? Maybe Bush will get it next year, perhaps in partnership with Ariel Sharon.

Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2002 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

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