Think Progress contributor Alex Seitz-Wald gives a run down on Pentagon shooter, John Bedell, and the increase in right-wing domestic terror.
Last night, a California man armed with two semiautomatic weapons and “many magazines” of ammunition opened fire on police officers at the entrance to the Pentagon, wounding two before being killed by police. The shooter, 36-year-old John Patrick Bedell, was “well dressed in a suit” and “very calm,” walking “very directly to the officers” before engaging them, a police spokesman said.
Bedell “appears to have been a right-wing extremist with virulent antigovernment feelings,” the Christian Science Monitor reports, who traveled from California specifically to attack the Pentagon. While police were hesitant to assign a motive, “writings by someone with his same name and birth date, posted on the Internet, express ill will toward the government and the armed forces and question whether Washington itself might have been behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”
In one posting, Bedell ranted against “big government.” In another, he wrote, “I am determined to see that justice is served in the death of Colonel James Sabow” — a Marine whose suicide has been the subject of conspiracy theories — because it would be a “step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”
Read the entire article at http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/05/pentagon-shooter/.