The Murder of George Tiller: First Info On Suspect

[lisasmall]

There will be time to grieve Dr. George Tiller, a good and brave man, later.

Tonight, in haste, here is what is being said about Scott Philip Roeder, the man arrested for his murder - and a concluding note on John McCain's encounter with (and obedience to?) supporters of the previous person who made an attempt on Dr. Tiller's life.

• Kansas State Official Criminal Record regarding his 1996 conviction for having bomb materials. Full name, birthdate, physical description, disciplinary report, release date. No photo. FreeStateDem posted this info on the DailyKos, which is where I got it; thank you, FSD.
• The Anti-Defamation League has a report about Scott Roeder here describing his 1997 parole violation after his 1996 conviction. Thanks to kckc at Democratic Underground for the link.
• CNN began their 10 pm report today saying his name had not been released, but concluded their report by stating "the suspect" had been described by the FBI as a member of the Freemen. The conviction was overturned due to a Fourth Amendment violation in the search of his vehicle. CNN concluded the first part of their 10 pm report by wondering aloud if this would affect the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor. When they began the second part of the report, CNN anchor Don Lemon speculated that Tiller's assassination might create a pro-choice backlash, and quoted Randall Terry's maunderings about how he fears Obama's reaction. Terry said nothing about Roeder's possible connection to the organization Terry started, the so-called "Operation Rescue," nor did Terry condemn the assassination.
• "OR" was always called "Operation Oppress-You" by feminists when we'd have competing picket lines and demonstrations. Terry has asserted that he legally "owns" the name OR. He founded the group in 1986. There have been organizational paroxysms of re-definition and re-naming since he left the group, and his original group has been known since 1999 as "Operation Save America" (and they really hate his guts, apparently; they published Terry's church's letter censuring him for adultery in 2000.) Managed by Flip Benham since 1991, OSA has expanded its anti-choice mission to include activism against Islam, pornography, and homosexuality.


• When mainstream press sources quote "Operation Rescue," they mean a splinter group which was formerly the western division of Terry's original organization, managed from California in the 1990s and from Kansas now. This group, once called "Operation Rescue West," is using the name "Operation Rescue" in Kansas and has feuded with "Operation Save America" over the question of who should be named what, and what their agenda should be. The current OR is run by Troy Newman, who dropped the "West" from the group's name and moved it to Kansas in 2002 specifically to concentrate on Dr. Tiller. Because the site is down, it's hard to say how the website www.operationrescue.org fits into all this. Since Roeder, a Kansas local, was posting on their boards, it is probably the website for the Kansas group rather than for the original OR, now OSA.
WEBSITE ACTIVITY:


• Roeder left at least one message on a board run by operationrescue.org. In his 2007 post, he suggests that Dr. Tiller should be stalked at his church, and that church members and officials should be harassed about him. See it here at Democratic Underground, because the OR site has been down since the murder first hit the news.
• OR has been running a Tiller Watch page for years. It also has been down since the murder was reported.


• Here is Google's cache copy of OR's page outlining their May, 2007 protest harassing Tiller. Thanks to PGHBaldy for their comment at Free Republic providing the cache link.


• Abortion-related terrorism was something the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations pretty much just winked at in the 1980s and early 90s. Feminist organizations begged the DOJ - unsuccessfully - during those years to do serious investigations, instead of making empty gestures of window-dressing. The terrorist support structure was permitted to flourish while Republican administrations wasted time sending Red Squads after environmentalists and peace groups - who haven't ever killed anybody.
• This history of neglect is part of why the Clinton Administration bungled the Richard Jewell scandal, in which law enforcement accused a heroic security guard of bombing the 1996 Olympics because he was chubby, which was proof he must have been maladjusted... finally naming the guilty party as a person of interest in 1998, after Jewell's life had been ruined. Anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph used those two years to bomb a gay bar and two abortion clinics, altogether killing two people and injuring about 150.
• During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama was being drubbed hourly for being on the same charitable board as a man - a man with no arrests or convictions - who had been a violent activist in the 1960s, when Obama was nine years old. Other than Keith Olbermann, almost no major cable, network, or print reports focused on John McCain's August, 1993 appearance at a meeting of the Oregon Citizens' Alliance, a notorious anti-gay, anti-choice group. (McCain was 57 at the time - not a child.) McCain had been warned in advance about the purpose of the gathering, but chose to attend regardless and sat silently while speaker Marylin Shannon praised long-time clinic vandal Shelley Shannon for her attempt,only eleven days earlier, to murder...Dr. George Tiller. Shelley Shannon tried to kill Tiller and succeeded in shooting him in both arms. She will be in federal prison until 2018. Marylin Shannon, Shelley's groupie but otherwise no relation, was a Bush delegate in 2004... and a McCain delegate in 2008. The year after listening to would-be murderess Shelley Shannon be praised for her attempt on Tiller's life, McCain voted with extreme-right senators against the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which made a federal crime to bomb or blockade abortion clinics or to attack abortion doctors. Will some mainstream reporter kindly ask John McCain on the record how he feels about this now?

The Republican administrations of the past have shown much more enthusiasm for raging against terrorists from other nations and cultures than they have for tracking down the domestic terrorists who come from their own extremist fringe. Clinton's FBI was hapless in the Jewell matter. Here's hoping Obama can do better.

And here, without haste, is the start of the long slow mourning for Dr. George Tiller, that good and brave and irreplaceable man.