Gulf war blowback: John Allen Muhammad

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Written By Joe Blow

As the circus comes to town with several jurisdictions salivating over prosecuting the accused D.C. “snipers” many pundits are now backpedaling away from their oh-so-wrong shooter profiles. A week ago they were all “experts” sought out by clueless media types, but today their shortcomings are evident.

Their contorted efforts to make terrorist attacks fit a statistical criminal profile were tempting, but utterly useless and totally inappropriate. No matter how hard you try you can’t force a square peg into a round hole. Several responsible profilers acknowledged their limitations up front, but the majority of them were certain of their profiles and a gullible public believed them.

The profilers trusted their historical criminal data more than the evidence that pointed elsewhere, as I indicated in my column “The Beltway Sniper” before the shooters were taken into custody, thanks to civilians with cell phones and the media types who monitored police radio frequencies and then leaked the identities of the shooters and the description of their vehicle. As I had told a sheriff’s deputy several days earlier, there was no white van, it was mass hysteria induced by tunnel vision of the police, with media assistance.

As I predicted, this was terrorism, not crime being committed by an angry white male. Once again the oh-so-obvious truth took a back seat to political correctness. How is it that someone without a law enforcement background could accurately make the call from 2000 miles away with nothing more than a DSL connection to work with, but the police were stumped?

None of this could have had any political ramifications, could it? Certainly the current regime was not about to admit the truth regarding a suspected American terrorist so close to the election, notwithstanding the retired FBI honcho who admitted earlier that there was a 50% chance that this was terrorism not crime.

Not Paying Attention

How did so many people get it so wrong? They were not paying attention and they were easily led by “experts” and piles of statistical data. Their first mistake was to assume that this was crime, not terrorism. Their second mistake was to believe the “experts” who “knew” all there was to know. So much for trusting the “experts” instead of your own senses after looking at the evidence and stepping back to see the big picture.

As we now know, the shooters’ vehicle-a blue 1990 Chevy Caprice-was seen at several of the shootings and was even caught on videotape as the police swooped down on two illegal aliens sitting in a white van at a phone booth. Tunnel vision is an amazing thing to behold, especially on videotape.

Gulf War Syndrome

You will now hear all kinds of theories and explanations for the shooters’ behavior, but once again the vast majority will be wrong, and for the same reasons as before. There’s only one theory that makes sense to me. It was not widely reported, but Gulf War Syndrome is a very good bet for the older of the two shooters.

David Wood writes, The alleged Washington sniper, John Allen Muhammad, may have been exposed to chemical weapons that have been linked to Gulf War Syndrome, an illness which experts said can result in unexplained bouts of intense violence.

Muhammad, arrested early Thursday as a prime suspect in the Washington area shootings, served with the Army’s 84th Engineer Company during the Persian Gulf War, military officers said.

That unit, attached to the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, helped inspect, catalog and destroy extensive stockpiles of Iraqi chemical weapons at a depot near Khamisiyah, Iraq, in March 1991 following the cease-fire March 3, Pentagon records show.

According to Defense Department and CIA documents, the 84th Engineers worked handled the Iraqi chemical weapons stored in bunkers at the Tall al Lahm Storage Depot South and Tall al Lahm Ammo Storage Facility near Khamisiyah.

The 84th Engineers also helped demolish Iraqi rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent Sarin during March 10-13, 1991, Pentagon documents show. The process of blowing up the rockets may have vaporized dangerous amounts of the nerve agent, Pentagon investigators later concluded.

“Once it came out that he had a military background, I said this must be a Gulf War veteran,” said Dr. William E. Baumzweiger, a Los Angeles neurologist and psychiatrist who specializes in treating Gulf War Syndrome patients.

“There is no doubt that a small but significant number of Gulf War veterans become homicidal” because of Gulf War Syndrome, said Baumzweiger, until recently a staff psychiatrist and neurologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He is a leading expert on Gulf War Syndrome.

He said in such cases “there was always a bizarre strangeness about the violence in that it seemed to come out of nowhere, there were no personal problems or longstanding history” to explain it. The violence, he said, “appears to just come out of thin air.”

Experts on Gulf War Syndrome said Muhammad’s behavior fits precisely the patterns exhibited by some other Gulf War veterans.

“This kind of bizarre story, where he is on the one hand killing people and on the other hand writing notes to the government basically pleading for help, that’s a typical story you see in Gulf War veterans,” Baumzweiger said.

Forget about all of the other politically correct theories regarding the motivation of the shooters, this is the only one that makes sense today. In addition, the shootings at the University of Arizona today were also the work of another Gulf War vet.

Here’s the rest of the story: Out of the roughly 540,000 American troops who served in Desert Storm, some 175,000 are thought to have some form of the neurological and neuro-immune illnesses that have been documented so far. [Emphasis mine.]

Remember that as you head to the polls on November 5th to provide legitimacy for the State to send your sons and daughters back to Iraq in the near future.

Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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