If Adolf Eichmann’s “absence of critical thinking” led Hannah
Arendt to her famed conclusions about the “banality of evil,” then
John Muhammad and his sidekick Malvo provide supporting evidence.
Their leisurely death-sweep of America demonstrates a lack of focus
more difficult to deal with than any hard-etched ideology. Barring
some further evidence of deeply rooted intent, some formed
philosophy, their casual commitment to homicide also represents far
more of what has happened to America than the hard-core beliefs of,
say, an al-Qaeda. It may be that they have no hard-core beliefs,
that they are members of a vast militia floating on the social
scene, whose anonymity makes them as dangerous as they are
ubiquitous.
It was this formlessness, plus a generous dose of cupidity on
the part of authorities, that made them so difficult to catch.
Instructive is the swiftness with which the “task force” of federal
state and local officers attached themselves to one eyewitness who
gave them the celebrated “white box truck.” Another witness would
later help them morph the box truck into a “white van.” A growing
class of “profilers” imprinted the belief that the perpetrator was
a white male, acting alone, an angered loser in search of
recognition. This made it simple for two black men to drive
unmolested from slaying scenes in a dark blue sedan, perhaps
inconvenienced only by the long lines of traffic produced by police
roadblocks scanning the public highways for a white-truck-van.
Lord knows they tried to get caught, unconsciously and
otherwise. Time again police observing traffic violations would
“run” the New Jersey license tag on their 1990 car, but the car
wasn’t stolen and no one connected with it was wanted. Blissfully,
they drove on into the murderous night. To stop the car, and search
it, and find the Bushmaster gun, would violate a constitutional
right. To stop it at all would evoke tsk-tsk’s from the racial
profiling watchdogs.
They left messages, tarot cards with scrawls on them and a
hand-written note demanding a large amount of money be deposited in
an offshore account responsive to a stolen credit card. There is
even a police recording now at large in which one, presumed to be
Muhammad, is calling the Rockville police department, giving the
secret code, “God is here…” and trying vainly to deliver a
message to the protesting operator who insists that that department
is not handling sniper business and wouldn’t the caller like the
sniper hotline to call instead? The caller says he has tried
several times to call and has been rebuffed each time and finally
hangs up. The FBI director says he is going to review the training
of the phone bank operators elsewhere who manned and womanned the
tip-line phones.
Sufficient to say, it was a news media leak that caught the
alleged snipers. The night the names and car description were being
ladled out by the task force, it was the media that monitored an
all-points police bulletin, picked up the vital car license tag
number and, without the imprimatur of the task force,
broadcast that information. A trucker heard it, saw the car in a
Maryland rest stop, and that was that.
There followed the unseemly rush to adjudication, the jockeying
between county prosecutors and the federal government to file
charges, murder and attempted murder on the local scene, violation
of the Hobbs Act on the federal level. Hobbs being an obscure
anti-labor-racketeering law forbidding murder involving extortion
to which the death penalty was appended years later. The theory
being that the demand for money, though apparently a sniper
afterthought, would shoehorn the accused pair into that law’s
purview. Critics say no, to pursue this tack would give the
defendants a good double jeopardy defense against the various state
indictments.
Confusion seeps as far south as Montgomery, Alabama, where
police said at first a victim was killed with a handgun of caliber
different from the Bushmaster .223. Now, amend that, Montgomery
says it was the same gun and there must have been a third shooter.
Well, maybe not. Maybe it was just Muhammad and his pal.
Other precincts weigh in, from Baton Rouge to Tacoma, with
plausible cases to tie to the pair. It’s a fair guess that other
departments are reviewing their cold case files.
A wondering public views the “sniper case” with a sense of
unease. It has shown that the childhood belief that police can
protect the law-abiding is a childhood belief. That in a mobile,
stratified, racially-diverse society, this protection is a chimera
bound in yellow crime tape. The loss of neighborhood, of town, and
the multiplicity of jurisdiction, has compounded the difficulty of
a priori enforcement. As written during the height of the
killing, “the elusiveness of the sniper tells a quiet story of
mutual dependence and vulnerability that should be told and
retold…” Instead, however, we are leaning forward into the fray
over prosecution.
Burke had it a little wrong. All that is really necessary for
the triumph of evil is that good men do too many things — and none
of them really well. And Arendt was probably right in her
assessment of the banality of evil; the greatest evildoers are
those who don’t remember because they never gave the matter a
thought.
