THE WORLD TRADE Center and Pentagon horrors drove from America’s news headlines a political scandal of particularly sinister proportions. Democrat Californian congressman, Garry Condit, was suspected of being involved in the disappearance of his aide Chandra Levy, with whom the married politician had been having a relationship.
Though he denied any knowledge of the 24-year-old woman’s whereabouts, Condit’s evasive behavior when confronted by police deepened suspicions against him. The result was that the congressman lost a primary for his safe seat and his political career lies in ruins.
Now a year on, after police had allegedly combed all public spaces in Washington, the young woman’s skeleton has been found, not far from a jogging track in a park. Forensic tests may produce evidence that shifts the blame from Condit but that is no longer really the issue. The story now centers on how the police in the US capital could have failed so spectacularly to find Levy Chandra’s body.
Allegations of incompetence are heightened by the extraordinary fact that when the skeleton was discovered by a member of the public, walking his dog, the police commissioner used police cadets to secure the area. In any subsequent legal proceedings, this unusual procedure will probably form part of any defense, which will claim that key evidence will have been destroyed by inexperienced youngsters.
It also seems now that it is no longer just fallen congressman Condit who is in the frame for the murder. Police are speaking of a serial killer who may have been preying on female joggers. This could however simply be evidence of police bafflement and embarrassment at their complete inability to find a body that had lain, albeit hidden, in a public place for over a year. Even if a suspect is one day brought to trial, the great length of time between the slaying and the discovery of the corpse must surely make a conviction doubtful.
The American legal system prides itself on the dictum “Justice delayed is justice denied”. There can be few more startling examples of this than the 38-year search for the man who bombed an Alabama church killing four black school girls.
The racist Klu Klux Klan was from the outset suspected of being behind the outrage, at a time when the civil rights movement was struggling to emancipate southern blacks from the enormity of almost total segregation. From the start however, the police in Birmingham, the state capital where the crime took place, were unenthusiastic in their pursuit of the perpetrators. Local politicians too, regularly obstructed the search for the truth.
Even after the civil rights movement had triumphed comprehensively, a seemingly impenetrable cloud hung over the identity of the killer or killers. This was the more surprising, since though the Klu Klux Klan was supposed to be a secret organization, the local white community was often aware of the identity of the hoodlums and bigots who comprised its membership.
The final conviction last week of the man who pepetrated this evil crime, way back in 1963 is therefore long overdue. Defenders of the US legal system and indeed of the law enforcement agencies that serve it will of course seek to depict this deplorable incident as triumph. But it is not.
The bigotry that underpinned the long failure to find the Birmingham bomber and the inefficiency that left the body of Chandra Levy undiscovered in a Washington park for a year, demonstrate that America is still not a society that has earned the right to preach to the rest of the world. America’s reaction to its own terrible bombing wounds was an hysterical and bigoted attack upon anyone in the country of Arab origin. America’s onslaught against international terrorism, continues to focus exclusively upon the Muslim world, while ignoring the terrorism visited on the Palestinians by the Israelis.
In 1963, it was four little black girls who perished by a white bigot’s bomb. Had they been Arab children and the bomber a US Zionist, would their killer have been brought to justice, even by now, or indeed ever ?
