TIDBITS: This story has a couple of interesting items:

Remarkably, law-enforcement sources tell NEWSWEEK, some investigators continued to cling to the belief that the sniper or snipers were driving a white van or truck. Like the talking heads on TV, they had convinced themselves that the snipers must be white men driving a white truck. They had trouble accepting that they should have been looking for two black men driving a blue car. They were fixated on cars fleeing the scene. It does not seem to have really occurred to them that the shooters would hang around—as they almost surely did. As it turned out, a witness had reported seeing a Caprice driving slowly with its lights off near the scene of the Oct. 3 shooting in northeast D.C. But in the dark, the witness remembered the car’s color as burgundy, not blue, and the lead was lost in the chatter over white vehicles. A witness outside the Fredericksburg, Va., Michaels craft store, scene of a shooting on Oct. 4, reported a “dark-colored vehicle with New Jersey tags” leaving the scene. A woman calling the tip line on Oct. 7 said she had spotted a black man crouching beneath the dashboard in a dark Chevy Caprice. The woman was struck by the intensity of the man’s stare. The agent on the tip line brushed her off. “We’re looking for a white truck,” she said.

(Emphasis added). And it turns out that Muhammad seems to have attacked the U.S. Army in wartime:

His sergeant, however, says he was “trouble from day one. You’d give him an order and you’d get a certain glare,” retired Sgt. Kip Berentson told NEWSWEEK. “He loved being in charge and he had a warped sense of humor.” Williams’s unit was sent to Operation Desert Storm to clear mines and bulldoze holes in enemy lines. A few nights before the invasion of Iraq, Sergeant Berentson awoke in the early hours to find his tent, with 16 sleeping men inside, on fire. Someone had tossed in a thermite grenade. Berentson, who was fed up with Williams’s insubordination, immediately suspected Williams and told the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division. Berentson says he last saw Williams being led away in handcuffs. Williams’s military records make no mention of the incident; indeed, they suggest Williams had a distinguished gulf-war stint. But Berentson always kept Williams’s name and dog-tag number in his wallet. He says he was not surprised to see Williams’s face on television.

Hmm. Thanks to reader Chris Regan for spotting these items. Meanwhile, Robin Goodfellow writes that people misconceive Al Qaeda, but that Muhammad’s actions are consistent with its actual organization: basically, more like a grant-making institution than a centralized hierarchy. And another reader says that Muhammad reminds him of someone else who seemed like a well-traveled ne’er-do-well: Richard Reid.

We’ll see. It appears that the definition of “terrorism” favored by many in the government is a narrow one, requiring a decoder ring and an autographed picture of Osama bin Laden. The model here may be more akin to that in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, where ideology and propaganda were used to direct whatever susceptible individuals were available toward a chosen target.