George Tiller, a Wichita physician, was assassinated this morning while attending church serves in Kansas.Josh Marshall: ReactionTiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.
No information has been released about whether a suspect is in custody. Police said they are looking for white male who was driving a 1990s powder blue Ford Taurus with Kansas license plate 225 BAB. [...]
Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5701 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.
Tiller has long been a target for right-wing criticism, and had been shot before. His medical clinic, a constant target, had been vandalized earlier this month.
As Amanda Marcotte recently noted, "[Tiller] is one of the two doctors in the country that specializes in the very small percentage of abortions performed late in pregnancy (but before viability) done for health reasons, usually because the pregnancy is a danger to a woman's health or life, or because the fetus is dead or dying.... He's been shot in both arms, stalked by the attorney general's office under Phill Kline ... and charged with the crime of performing a bunch of illegal abortions, for which he was acquitted."
I emphasize this because it's a point that may go overlooked in much of the media coverage -- Tiller performed therapeutic abortions for women who wanted children.
Tiller, in other words, worked past the constant threats of violence to provide a service to women that few would. Today, he was apparently murdered for his efforts.
from the Colorado Independent ...Hunter (DK): Suspect Identified in Tiller AssassinationHours after the Sunday morning shooting death of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller in Wichita, Kan., a Boulder physician -- who says he could be the only doctor in the world still performing the procedure -- said Tiller's assassination was the "absolutely inevitable consequence" of decades of anti-abortion fanaticism.Read the rest of the article here.
Several news sources are now reporting the name of the suspect in the murder of Dr. George Tiller. According to KWCH-TV:
Deputy Chief Tom Stolz w/ Wichita Police Dept. says Dr. Tiller died of a single gunshot wound. The Associated Press says the man detained in the Kansas City area is 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kansas, according to Law Enforcement authorities in the area. Roeder has not been formally charged with the killing at this time. Police say he was arrested without incident after a traffic stop.
Via diarist FreeStateDem, Militia Watchdog previously reported of Roeder:
July 7, [1997], Kansas: Scott Roeder is sentenced to sixteen months in state prison for parole violations following a 1996 conviction for having bomb components in his car trunk. Roeder, a sovereign citizen and tax protester, violated his parole by not filing tax returns or providing his social security number to his employer.
He was also an active member of Operation Rescue; in 2007 a "Scott Roeder" posted this on the Operation Rescue website (which has been down throughout the day, probably more as a result of increased traffic than any sense of collective shame):
[May 19th, 2007 at 4:34 pm] Bleass everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.
The Lawrence Journal-World and News relays that Kansas City station KMBC reported a post-it note with a phone number for Operation Rescue in his car at the time of his arrest.
So a bombmaker, tax protester, member of the "sovereignity" movement, anti-abortion zealot and Operation Rescue member: the arrested suspect manages to fit every stereotype of right-wing militia teabagger.
No doubt much more information will be forthcoming later; Roeder is not expected to be formally charged until Monday.
There will be a candlelight vigil honoring Dr. George Tiller in Wichita at 8:00pm in Old Town Square.
Al Giordino: Terrorism and the State: A Lesson, Again, for Right and Left
“…those who today, either out of despair or because they are victims of the propaganda the regime propagates in favour of terrorism as the nec plus ultra of subversion, contemplate artificial terrorism with uncritical admiration, even attempting sometimes to practise it, do not know that they are only competing with the State on its own terrain, and do not know that, on its own terrain, not only is the State the strongest but that it will always have the last word.”
- Gianfranco Sanguinetti
On Terrorism and the State
The assassination this morning of Wichita doctor George Tiller, on his way into a Lutheran church service, was the second attempt on his life, this one successful. The first attempt on the doctor who works in a reproductive health clinic that has long been targeted by Operation Rescue and other anti-choice organizations came on August 19, 1993, when a man named Stanley Shannon’s bullets wounded the doctor in both arms. (Shannon served an 11-year sentence for that crime.)
Just two-and-a-half years ago, Dr. Tiller was targeted with the usual vitriol by Fox News talker Bill O’Reilly, who falsely accused the doctor of performing late term abortions – legal to protect the health of the mother – to treat temporary psychological depression of the patient. Tiller denied the charge, and accused the then-attorney general of the state, Phill Kline, as being O’Reilly’s source for the claim. Kline had charged Dr. Tiller, in 2006, with 30 counts of administering abortions to minors and other crimes. The Court dismissed the charges. In 2007, Democratic Attorney General Paul Morrison charged Dr. Tiller on 19 counts. Two months ago, a jury acquitted the doctor on each and every charge.
Just as Situationist Gianfranco Sanguinetti warned the international left, in his 1979 essay, that acts of terrorism always reinforce the powers of the State (his thesis was that State power and terrorism are mutually symbiotic and dependent on each other), the North American religious right is going to suffer great losses as a result of this morning’s terrorist act in Wichita. That, this time, the assassination attempt succeeded, and that it happened in the sanctuary of a church of a mainstream Protestant faith, will provoke a double whammy of shock and revulsion, including among tens of millions of Americans that do not like abortion, but likewise believe that assassination is obviously just as (or more) anti-life.
The original assassination attempt on Dr. Tiller came eight months into the Clinton presidency. The parallel with today’s offense ought to be obvious: a pro-choice president takes office and the violent extremists go all crazy, whipped up by some of the same right wing radio talkers today as sixteen years ago.
The predictable knee-jerk response from some in the pro-choice majority will be to attempt to demonize and link all Americans that define themselves as “pro life” as aiding and abetting this act of terrorism by having a mere opinion, just as George W. Bush and others attempted to link all oppositional dissent to the attacks of September 11, 2001. And while it is an absolute certainty that the Obama Justice Department will investigate and prosecute this latest crime - and criminal - to the maximum extent of the law, those that want to, like Bush, demonize dissent itself are not going to get much rhetorical backing from the President. His May 17 remarks at Notre Dame are now prescient:
A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an email from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life, but that’s not what was preventing him from voting for me.
What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website – an entry that said I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor said that he had assumed I was a reasonable person, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.”
Fair-minded words.
After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn’t change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that – when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do – that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.
That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.
So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”
An assassin in Kansas has just inadvertently strengthened the hand and command of this head of State. A very similar dynamic will come into play as did on April 19, 1995, when a terrorist car-bombing of the Oklahoma Federal Building killed 168 people, and wounded 450 more, including children in a day care center there. That terrorist act - the man convicted for it, Timothy McVeigh, believed he was avenging an act of State terrorism two years prior in Waco, Texas - returned the upper hand to an already embattled President Clinton. His Democratic Party had lost the US House in the 1994 elections to what then-Speaker Newt Gingrich’s called his “revolution” of the right. The Oklahoma City bombing shook public opinion enough to considerably slow what had been, prior, a juggernaut's momentum by the Gingrich revolution, allowing Clinton to again claim the terrain of the political center.
That today’s atrocity occurs not under the helm of an embattled liberal president, but of one that enjoys 67 percent support, still, from the American people, will have even more devastating consequences for the cultural and political right that has placed abortion at the center of its agenda. There is no need to demonize them with a broad brush for it. The first immediate consequence of the assassination of Dr. Tiller will be that it virtually removes the political points to be scored by those who planned to wage an anti-choice argument against US Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.
I would also be very surprised if, in the coming days, some right-wing radio talkers and those from anti-choice organizations like Operation Rescue can’t help but make the sorts of outrageous statements about this act of terrorism that shock and provoke backlash from the American public. As a crew, they have already whipped themselves up into a mental state of frenzied derangement. The countdown now begins to find out which will shovel their own political graves over this one.
Dr. George Tiller spent much of his 68 years on earth working for an ideal – every woman’s right to safe reproductive freedom – for which he was long persecuted and today he paid the ultimate price. I do believe that if the good doctor could watch what happens next, he would not at all feel the sorrow that comes from dying in vain or after a life without meaning. His was a life that did not end in death, but lives on with even greater purpose and reason than it already had deservedly accrued. As we say South of the Border, where we have many martyrs - old and new - for human freedom: George Tiller, presente.
Update: Cue up Randall Terry, head of Operation Rescue, to step right into this tragedy with inflammatory rhetoric. He told Associated Press:
"George Tiller was a mass murderer and we cannot stop saying that," Terry said. "He was an evil man — his hands were covered with blood."
Terry said he was now concerned that the Obama administration "will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions."
Terry was already a very self-marginalized fringe player, but, still, he knows not isolation like that which he has brought upon himself and his organization now.
Marshall: US Marshals to Protect
Statement from Attorney General Holder ...
"The murder of Doctor George Tiller is an abhorrent act of violence, and his family is in our thoughts and prayers at this tragic moment. Federal law enforcement is coordinating with local law enforcement officials in Kansas on the investigation of this crime, and I have directed the United States Marshals Service to offer protection to other appropriate people and facilities around the nation. The Department of Justice will work to bring the perpetrator of this crime to justice. As a precautionary measure, we will also take appropriate steps to help prevent any related acts of violence from occurring."
Sully: Kansas Stories
DougJ: From the commentsA collection of reminiscences by some of the women who went to the Tiller clinic in Kansas. among them:
"Their assessment of the heart defect went from bad to worse: they diagnosed hypoplastic left ventricle (underdevelopment of the left side of the heart) repairable only with a complete heart transplant and/or three open heart surgical procedures. "However, not one doctor would promise us that if we opted not to have surgery and let nature take its course, that our wishes would be abided by. This was disturbing to us. Nor did they tell us that Down syndrome babies don’t get heart transplants. "Our hearts ache with sadness and no words can describe how much we miss him and how deeply we love him. He will always be close to our hearts, mind, body and soul. And if it was not for the Kansas doctor, giving us a little help, we are not sure what we would be writing … Death and life are the same mysteries."
Commenter deekaa6 on his experiences with Dr. George Tiller:
In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.
We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.
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