'Like A Duck In A Noose' - CBS News
The Rise and Fall of Charles Moose
He was riding the crest of a tidal wave of favorable publicity. He was a much sought after speaker and honored guest at function after function. His name was mentioned as the first black Director of the FBI. A book deal had been signed and Hollywood was considering a movie and his face graced the covers of national magazines. His name is Charles A. Moose and it was the best time of his life. It all stemmed from his command of the task force that finally arrested two suspects in the D.C. area sniper attacks. Now it all has started to crumble.
As new information comes to light and glossed over facts are recalled, the question now becomes not “how many lives were saved by the arrest of the sniper suspects?” but “how many lives were unnecessarily lost because of Chief Moose?”
It now appears the official story on the identification of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo as the D.C. area snipers and their arrest on October 24, 2002 is nothing but a contrived cover story for what really happened.
First, let’s review the “official” story. Pay attention to the dates, they are meaningful in exposing the deception and outright lies to mislead the public.
We pick up the story on Thursday, Oct 17, 2002 (after the ninth killing in the D.C. area) when the task force claims it got a phone call from the sniper telling them to check out a murder/robbery at a liquor store in Montgomery.
On Friday, the 18th, a Catholic priest at St. Anne’s church in Ashland, Virginia received an anonymous phone call from someone claiming to be the sniper directing him to notify the task force that the murder/robbery on Sept. 14th took place in Montgomery, Alabama, not in Maryland.
Moose then said the priest called the FBI and that was what set the end game in motion identifying Malvo from a fingerprint left on a gun catalogue at the scene in Montgomery, Alabama.
When the priest denied he had called the FBI because he thought the phone call was a hoax, the story was changed. Moose then said the clue to the Ashland priest was gotten from the note left at the shooting on Saturday, the 19th. This was the note that demanded the payment of $10,000,000. It also listed a series of calls the sniper had made to the task force and to the priest. When the note was released to the public, all of the dates of the contacts were redacted.
The official story now, as corroborated by the priest, is that an FBI agent interviewed the priest on Sunday October 20 when the Alabama location was first mentioned. An agent traveled to Alabama and returned with the (Malvo) fingerprint, which was then run through the FBI national database. Malvo’s print was found in the INS database, which led the FBI to the State of Washington where the connection between Malvo and Mohammad was made through local police records of Malvo’s arrest and detention by the INS for his illegal immigration status.
The FBI was said to have located an old army buddy of Mohammad’s named Robert Holmes who had been visited by Mohammad a month or so before the shooting started. Holmes owned the duplex where he lived and Mohammad and Malvo had stayed for several months. He also confirmed Mohammad had a Bushmaster rifle at that time. The interview was reported, by Moose, to have taken place on Oct 22nd.
In the span of about a day and a half, beginning on Thursday, October 22nd, the FBI found where Mohammad had bought the 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, where he had lived temporarily in Tacoma, Washington and that he had illegally possessed a Bushmaster rifle in early 2001. On Wed. Oct 23rd we were treated on national TV to FBI agents searching a back yard and sawing down a tree stump (said to have been used for target practice by Mohammad) for shipment to the ATF lab in Maryland.
Moose would later claim that Mohammad and Malvo became “potential suspects of interest” at the 4pm briefing on Oct. 23rd and investigators began the process of obtaining warrants. Information on the two was released to the news media and the two were arrested in the early morning hours of Oct. 24th while sleeping in the Caprice at a rest stop, based on a phone tip from a truck driver.
That’s the official story. Now, as newscaster Paul Harvey says, here is the rest of the story.
We would probably be stuck with most of the official story had not leaks come from the task force and particularly from the Montgomery Police Department. Moose had managed to break the “code of silence” said to exist among police officers when he “double-crossed” the patrol officers and their union leaders in contract negotiations after the arrests.
The union claimed that Moose had the information on Mohammad and Malvo earlier than acknowledged which he withheld thus endangering the safety of police officers on the case. It tried to include a clause in the new contract requiring such information be furnished as soon as available. A watered down provision was ultimately included.
Moose further antagonized his police when, according to union president Walt Bader he opposed raises for the rank and file while himself getting a huge raise to over $160,000 per year making him the highest paid chief in the area. The rank and file got a 2% raise.
An ATF agent member of the task force revealed that Moose had ordered that officers who checked cars following each shooting were to wave cars by if the drivers were minorities or females and to search only cars with white male drivers behind the wheel. This despite several eyewitness accounts (never made public) of suspects in a dark sedan who were either black or Hispanic in appearance. Moose “tossed” those reports implying they were bad witnesses.
One Montgomery officer (who understandably wishes to remain nameless) says he knows that Moose personally was aware of the descriptions of Muhammad and Malvo as early as Oct. 21st the day before the last victim was killed.
It was also disclosed that Moose secretly dispatched a team of undercover agents to stake out Muhammad’s ex-wife’s house two days before he was captured, according to journalist Paul Sperry. That would have been on Oct. 22nd, the day of the last killing and one day before Moose claims the two became suspects. The stakeout team was sworn to secrecy.
In the late evening of Oct. 23rd (about 6:30PM) Moose authorized the information on the two to be posted on bulletin boards at the various police stations. However he ordered no radio traffic to keep the media from finding out. Nevertheless a reporter somehow got the information and it was made public on radio and TV, resulting in the tip that culminated in the arrests.
The stakeout of Mildred Williams/Muhammad’s house raises some troubling questions. Mildred’s name was still Williams when she divorced Muhammad. It wasn’t until after the divorce she petitioned to have her name changed to Muhammad. When she moved to the Washington, D.C. area, her first job was at the Department of Justice. We do not know in what capacity.
Why would Moose expect Muhammad to show up at Mildred’s house? Had she been in contact with Muhammad during the shooting spree and invited him to the house, possibly to visit the children?
In view of the secrecy of the stakeout, even within the task force, was Muhammad not expected to survive his arrest? Even later Moose was adamant about keeping any information from the media.
Was it just a coincidence that the publicized spate of shootings began in Moose’s jurisdiction?
Moose and Muhammad had served in the Oregon National Guard at the same time but in different units in Portland. Moose claims they never met. Can we take that at face value, now that we have proof Moose lied about several important aspects of the case? ...
http://www.strike-the-root.com/3/rarey/rarey1.html
Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 5:59 pm