Chief Moose cost lives
Paul Sperry

November 8, 2002

It was almost as if Moose and his investigators hoped the shootings were the work of a racist white guy – even though it defied logic, as whites were among his victims.

And the patternless shootings appeared designed only to spread terror in the nation's capital, which just a year earlier was attacked by Islamic terrorists.

Yet no one on Moose's task force put two-and-two together.

FBI Special Agent Larry Foust, a task force member borrowed from the bureau's Baltimore field office, criminal division, expressed surprise when I asked him if the task force had canvassed the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., which is nine-tenths of a mile from the Home Depot. Astonishingly, he didn't know that one of the Washington area's largest mosques, one attended by many black Muslims, was so close to the shooting. Nor did he know that the same mosque was attended by two of the al-Qaida hijackers who slammed the jumbo jet into the Pentagon.

More, it took police three weeks to reach out to the immigrant community, even though it was clear the snipers were new to the area, having not left a local imprint with neighbors and co-workers, judging from all the bum leads, as FBI veteran I.C. Smith pointed out to me.

It was as if Sept. 11 never happened. It just had to be Timothy McVeigh's long lost cousin. Had to be.

Such tunnel vision is odd. Investigators usually adjust to facts and abandon early hunches that don't pan out.

Not in this case.

Why? Moose's background offers clues.

Chip on shoulder

Four times as a Portland, Ore., cop, Moose had to be disciplined for losing his temper in dust-ups with average citizens, most of them triggered by what he perceived to be racial slights by whites.

He was ordered to take an anger-management course (ironically, Moose's wife, Sandy, has taught an anger-management course at Montgomery College in Maryland). But he got into more racial confrontations.

Still, he was promoted to chief of the Portland Police Bureau.

Even at that level, he couldn't shake the chip from his shoulder. In another controversy, he had to apologize for making racial slurs against whites. Even the liberal Portland Oregonian lamented his "explosive temper."

Some white Portland cops complain that Moose discriminated against them.

"I tried to be very open-minded and extend myself to him on many occasions while working with him, but he made it very apparent he has some very strong bias against white males, especially ones with blond hair and blue eyes," said a former Portland officer who served under Moose in the 1990s.

Moose has what some say is an annoying habit, as a public official, of putting his race in your face.

His corner office at police headquarters is a shrine to the black movement. Figurines of wild African elephants line a credenza. There's a plaque about black "pride." Pictures of black leaders line the walls. A poster reads: "Hatred thrives when bigotry is tolerated."

Moose came to Maryland vowing to end black criminal profiling as he had in Portland. Before taking the job in 1999, he met with the local NAACP.

When he arrived, he said he had reservations about moving to the area because he claimed the Ku Klux Klan was active there, and that it might be a "difficult" place for an interracial couple to live.

Huh? Montgomery County is one of the most liberal enclaves in the Beltway.

He quickly ended black profiling there – apparently only to replace it with white profiling.

A big fan of race-sensitive "community policing," Moose made Portland cops working the gang beat – during the crack wars, no less – carry blue pocketbooks filled with information about the city's social-service agencies.

Attorney General Janet Reno liked what she saw, and flew out to recognize him.

As her husband started his new job as Portland police chief in 1993, Sandra Herman Moose began law school in Tacoma, Wash., commuting home on weekends.

Her best pal at law school was a North African man, according to a classmate at University of Puget Sound School of Law.

She and Moose found time a couple of years later to teach a course on "multicultural communications" at Portland Community College.

Sandy Moose's ideas on race issues are downright scary.

She told CNN's Connie Chung the other night that she hit the roof when she heard a female newsie call her husband "hostile" after one of his hostile press conferences.

Sandy explained that whole discrimination law is built around that word, which she claims is racially charged and should never be used to describe a black man.

So, apparently we can't say Muhammad and Malvo are "hostile," either. Will she defend them if they sue?

If Moose's blond wife considers "hostile" to be a racial epithet, imagine what Moose considers discriminatory.

This isn't a chip, folks. This is a boulder.

Anti-gun bias

Moose also has it in for gun owners.

"We need to stand up as a community and attack the supply of guns," he told the citizens of Portland in 1995.

When Muhammad and Malvo were arrested, Moose said the task force got the "gun" off the street, not the sniper.

And, in an unsettling plea to the public at one press conference, he said, "You need to ask yourself: Who do you know that owns guns, and why?"

Sure enough, the ATF and other task force agencies went around confiscating guns.

Gun-rights groups in Maryland were flooded with calls from worried law-abiding residents.

"We got very interested when folks started reporting attempts to confiscate rifles for ballistic testing," said Robert D. Culver, co-chairman of Montgomery Citizens for a Safer Maryland.

"I have several reports from men who have had contacts with law-enforcement officers, some of whom rolled over and submitted their firearms," Culver told me.

Carter of Vienna, Va., says task-force detectives also came to his house on the previous Saturday morning asking to see his firearms.

"They not only wanted to see my rifles, they copied the serial numbers down, as well," he said. "And then they told me that the ATF may want to test one of my rifles for ballistics."

Carter, who complied, added: "I now wonder who retains the records of my firearms and for what purpose."

This was pure insanity.

As Moose and his task force futilely chased "gun-crazed" white ghosts instead of the dark-skinned real killers, they deprived residents of Maryland and Virginia of firearms to possibly protect themselves from those killers.

"How much quicker and how many lives would have been spared in the recent sniper case if Moose had not allowed his prejudices to rule?" asked one law-enforcement veteran in the Washington area.

It's painfully obvious that Moose - who is a big fan of Head Start, and is fond of quoting Hillary Clinton's pro-welfare pal Marian Wright Edelman - is no hero. In fact, his personal prejudices may have cost several lives.

Even so, don't be surprised if his star rises. Hillary is no doubt eying Moose right now for FBI director in her administration.