Something wicked this way comes

Even before Saturday's shooting in Arizona I was going to comment on the disturbing direction of the political discourse in the country in recent years. I'd seen that a woman was removed from the House chambers when she shouted negative comments about Barack Obama while the Constitution was being read. As Rep. Frank Pellone read Article II, Section 1 of the document -- the part that says the president must be a "natural-born citizen" -- Teresa Cao yelled out, "Except Obama! Except Obama! Save us, Jesus!"

It turns out that Ms. Cao is a well-known "birther" crackpot who isn't dissuaded by legal documents from the state of Hawaii and, therefore, is never going to be convinced of Obama's legitimacy, and so my first reaction was that her outburst was disrespectful and reprehensible. However, I had to admit that if someone shouted out comments that criticized Republicans for their theatrical embracing of the Constitution while they seek to trample on it legislatively, or even if there was your basic chanting that the wars should be ended and the troops brought home, I would have applauded the actions.

While her ignorance is disturbing, it's not Teresa Cao's actions that give me concern. It is the fact that there are some people who want to go farther than she did. Whatever TV she watches (presumably Fox), radio she listens to, blogs she reads, and whatever other media she consumes -- and believes -- if, in the end, it only inspired her to yell out some foolishness, then so be it. There is, however, a certain percentage of the population that listen to, watch and read similar rants and diatribes, and who then decide that violence is the proper course. Those people are being incited by Beck, Palin, Rush, Coulter, O'Reilly and the rest of the moronic right-wing instigators, and some of them are bound to be dangerous.

That's what I was thinking Saturday morning, and then came the news that Jared Loughner, 22, walked up to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords with a gun and shot her in the head. Six others were killed, a dozen wounded and Giffords clings to life. In a press conference hours after the shooting the Pima County sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, looking exasperated at the day's events, said that he believes the political bitterness has gone too far. Calling Arizona "a mecca for racism and bigotry," Dupnik added:

...people tend to pooh-pooh this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech, but it’s not without consequences.

We can live with Teresa Cao. Heck, she's even a little entertaining, but somewhere out there are delusional souls filled with ignorance and rage, and they are willing to take things into their own hands.

Photo of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and House Speaker John Boehner courtesy of the Associated Press.

Moving forward with an eye to the past

Those who would commit mass murder on American soil don't all live in faraway failed states. Sometimes they are closer than we want to believe.

Fifteen years ago today, Timothy McVeigh -- born in upstate New York and decorated with a Bronze Star for his actions in the US Army during the Gulf War -- killed 168 people and wounded more than 600 when he exploded a truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001.

America's political atmosphere today is increasingly hostile. The Secret Service is fielding threats like never before, and in February Andrew Joseph Stack flew his single-engine plane into an IRS office building in Texas, killing himself and one federal employee. Conservative talk radio and Fox News bear some of the responsibility for this explosion in anger across the country. They've gone too far and this is the result.

When I see people on TV saying, "I want my country back," I want to tell them to look down at the ground. It's still there. Barack Obama -- unlike George W. Bush in 2000 -- was elected by an undisputed majority of electoral and popular votes. I wish that Obama was as radical a president as those on the right complain that he is. He is a pragmatic incremental moderate and closer to the previous administration on a number of national security, presidential powers and privacy issues than I imagined. He is not a socialist or a fascist -- and most of the people I see using those terms have no idea what they mean. He is, however, the legally elected chief executive of this country.

So, let's have a spirited debate on issues -- one with facts and opinions, but without hysterics and violence.

AP photo via Boston.com

Video of US attack on civilians leaked

Am extremely disturbing video of an American military helicopter shooting up Iraqi civilians, including journalists and children, has been posted on the site WikiLeaks.org and its authenticity has been confirmed, according to The New York Times, by sources inside the American military.

Among the approximately eight people killed in the July 2007 attack were Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, both employees of Reuters, an international news agency based in London. Two children appear to have been wounded in the shooting as well.

Many of those targeted in the attack appear to be unarmed, including the journalists, who have what look like cameras slung over their shoulders. The audio of US military personnel is sickening, with one soldier hoping that a desperately wounded journalist picks up a weapon so the Apache helicopter can "engage" again. When a pilot is informed that children were wounded he is overheard saying, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

But there was no battle -- at least not in the square where the firing takes place. There were a number of men walking unhurriedly, and then when a van pulls up to collect the bodies of those killed in the initial attack the soldiers call excitedly for permission to shoot up the van, where two children were sitting in the front seat.

This video, which Reuters has been trying to get hold of and which was leaked to the WikiLeaks site, should be the subject of an investigation by Congress. It alone should make each of us question the use of American military power in Iraq as well as elsewhere.

Taking aim at no-brainers

When John Patrick Bedell walked up to a security checkpoint at the Pentagon subway stop on March 4, he carried with him a pair of semi-automatic pistols. He possessed these weapons, which he used to shoot and injure two police officers, despite "a history of mental health problems" that resulted in his being institutionalized several times.

One of the guns, a 9 mm Ruger, was seized from a felon at a traffic stop by the Memphis Police five years ago. Amazingly, an Associated Press story today recounts how the pistol was later sold by the department and passed among gun dealers until Bedell bought it at a gun show in Nevada a little more than a month before using it in the Pentagon attack.

The fact that he was legally prohibited from purchasing such a weapon made no difference because of the ludicrous "gun show loophole," whereby no background check of any kind is required when purchasing from an unlicensed individual. Astoundingly, the shotgun used in the early January shooting at a Las Vegas courthouse that killed one police officer was also sold by the Memphis Police. Apparently a number of police departments around the country follow this practice, putting more weapons out on the street.

We've all seen the horrific numbers on gun violence in the US -- 30,000 deaths a year from firearms and another 200,000 injuries -- but again our elected officials lack the political will to stand up and do something substantive on the issue. At the least, laws should be changed to make it more difficult to procure deadly weapons at gun shows and to stop the return of confiscated firearms to the streets.

Woman's body found on Princeton Street (Update: Body ID'd)

A sad Christmas Eve story at Boston.com: the body of a woman, her hands bound, was found last night in a blue plastic bag in an alley just off Princeton Street. Police said the woman appeared to be in her 30s with a tattoo of a dragon on her neck. Autopsy results are expected today.

Update (12/26): The body was identified by police as 39-year-old Julienne Corrao.

Another bloody day

We're greeted by another gruesome mass killing this morning: this one the murder of five children by their dad, who then killed himself, in Washington state. This awful, shocking crime comes hard on the heels of a gunman "lying in wait" and killing three Pittsburgh police officers; a crazed man walking into a community center in New York state and killing 13; the shooting of four Oakland police officers; and, locally, the savage attack of a brother who killed two of his sisters and wounded another with a kitchen knife.

Are there reasons for this spate of deadly violence? The Christian Science Monitor considers whether the economic downturn might be a factor. Of course, those on my side of the political spectrum consider the proliferation and easy access to guns to be a significant factor. All of the crimes above, except the Milton tragedy, were carried out with firearms. It is far too easy in the United States to arm oneself like a small army.

While the disturbed young man in Milton was able to kill two of his siblings without a gun, it's unlikely that the third would have avoided death if the killer had a firearm, and it's likely he would have then opened up on others, including the responding police. Meanwhile, the man who opened fire on immigrants in Binghamton would not have ended as many lives had he been armed with just a kitchen knife.

Further, the recent violence pales in comparison to what is happening every day just over the border in Mexico. In the battle to reap the riches of America's narcotic addiction, the members of drug cartels are battling it out with law enforcement and each other with firearms made -- you guessed it -- in this country.

The US Constitution, laudable in many respects, has come up short with the Second Amendment. Or, should I say, America's leaders have consistently failed to galvanize the courage to adapt to the modern world on the issue of firearms.

Here I go again...

I'm not sure what the point might be of the editorial in the Sept. 10 edition of The East Boston Times other than to attempt to sound a solemn tone regarding the horrific events of seven years ago that we commemorate tomorrow. While that may be justification enough, when the author of the piece veers into comments on the American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, speaking of the two as if they are equally necessary operations, I cannot help but quibble with the premise.

The terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks did so with the support of Al Qaeda, which was given sanctuary by the Taliban in Afghanistan. No investigation, including those by the US government, has found a link between the terrorist attacks and Iraq. Most honest assessments of the events between 9/11 and the spring of 2003 have concluded that the Bush Administration trumped up intelligence to win public support for invading Iraq. To say, as the editorial does, "The world may dislike us for our incursion into Iraq and for our presence in Afghanistan, but at least we are going after the bad guys," is a simplistic rendering of the facts, and to dismiss the civilian casualties at the hands of all parties (estimated to be around 90,000) since the invasion began -- the editorial says that "much fuss is made," but "how could it be any different" -- is callous and ignorant.

Saddam Hussein was certainly a ruthless dictator, but there is no shortage of those in the world. With America's decision to launch a military invasion without provocation and over the objections of most of our allies, the landscape has been irrevocably altered for the worse. The US has ignited Islamic fundamentalist terrorism rather than contained it, and George W. Bush has made the entire world a less safe place.

I also can't help but take issue with the way parts of the editorial are written. The opening sentence says, "Nowhere is the legacy of the tragic 9/11 attacks more prescient than it is here in East Boston." Huh? "Prescience" means "foresight." I'm not sure what this sentence means. Also, after reading "...we once again look back," "We have no idea exactly what the future holds," "Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words," and about others "wanting to destroy our way of life," I'd like to suggest that, next time, we leave the cliches behind.

Sacrificing humanity

On March 12 of last year four young American soldiers -- Steven Green, James Barker, Jesse Spielman and Paul Cortez -- raped 14-year-old Abeer Qassim Hamza in a village southeast of Baghdad. While they took turns on the girl, one of them shot and killed her parents and younger sister in the next room. When they were done, they killed the teen with shots to the head and then tried to burn her body.

In wartime, horrible things happen every day. Many are part of the accepted rituals of fighting and killing, but some are so far beyond anyone's idea of what is justifiable that soldiers are court-martialed, imprisoned and sometimes executed. When someone does what these four guys did, they must be held responsible and they must be punished.

But there is a bigger picture here and it is this: When you train people to become killers and when you put them in a place where they see so much violence that it desensitizes them, then they become desensitized killers. For some, it is impossible to recalibrate from one day or one setting to the next, even after they come home. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube.

Today I saw In the Valley of Elah at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge. Tommy Lee Jones gives a masterful performance as the father of a soldier who comes back from the Iraq War a different person and then goes missing. The film is partly a meditation on how cruelty and violence are planted in people and how they spread and grow.

Atrocities have always occurred in wartime and they always will. Soldiers get messed up mentally as well as physically in war zones, and some return to take out their fears and frustrations on their spouses and children. Because of such consequences, the civilian leadership of the military must be extremely careful about sending troops into battle and we, as voters, have to be extremely careful about who we install in the White House and hand the levers of power to.

In 2000 and 2004 -- collectively -- we failed.