Miriam Carey: Collateral Damage in the War on Terror

Dear Mr. President,

Miriam Carey was the 34-year-old dental hygienist from Connecticut who thought you were stalking her. She was certainly acting irrational, driving from Stamford, Conn. to D.C., ramming her car into a barrier at the White House, running down a guard in the process, then driving 80 mph down Pennsylvania Ave to ram another barrier at the Capitol. But she was also clearly unarmed, had her one-year old daughter in the back seat, and at the end of the car chase was surrounded by at least 5 Capitol Police officers with guns drawn and no way to escape. All the news reports are about her ramming the barriers, the high-speed car chase, her post-partum depression, her psychiatric treatments and her refusal to stop when ordered to do so by the police. But none of the reports ask why those 5 officers shot her to death while she was apparently still seated in her car. (An initial report suggested she may have gotten out of the car although pictures on the internet show her still in the car.) And not only did they shoot her dead in front of her child, but according to today’s NYT (“Car Chase, White House to Capitol, Has Fatal End” p. A20), “they had trouble identifying her because of the extent of her injuries.”  Her injuries were gunshot wounds by those 5 cops, not the result of a car crash—in the photos her car is intact and shows no sign of damage. What in the world is happening to our country, Mr. President? We seem to have descended into some nightmare state of national hysteria where everyone is a terrorist, guilty until proven innocent, where deadly force is accepted as the norm in our towns and cities, and where citizens wrongfully killed by law enforcement officers are collateral damage just as they are in any war zone. We have lost all semblance of reason, all sense of compassion and all standards of justice. We are a nation under siege, victims of our fear and prejudices and the insanity of 12 years of unjust wars. We have traded our freedoms and our democracy for the illusion of security and it is clear we have neither. Our every move is monitored, we are subject to arrest and incarceration for speaking out in dissent, for whistleblowing, for almost anything the “authorities” don’t like. And sometimes, if we act irrational and don’t obey the orders of “law enforcement” we are subject to extrajudicial execution on the spot like Miriam Carey, a young woman who needed help but got butchered instead, more collateral damage in the War on Terror.