I’m sure happy about the capture of Eric Rudolph.

I don’t know if I’ve told the story here before, but my friend David Walsh and I narrowly escaped being wounded, or even killed, by that bomb in Centennial Olympic Park. Less than five minutes before it went off, we were within about 20-30 feet of it. We walked away, entered the Swatch pavillion, and were stunned to the floor by the shock of the explosion (it was VERY loud). We exited the building to chaos. A man, motionless on the sidewalk and bleeding from his head, was blocking the doorway and I stepped over him. I thought he’d been shot and was dead. Obviously he wasn’t, since the only fatality from the bomb was a women, but I soon realized the extent of the horror when I began to see person after person clutching a bleeding wound, or spawled on the lawn crying. A woman was sitting on a bench in front of me, the back of her white t-shirt completely wet with red blood. I quickly realized that this was no act of urban violence, such as a shooting, but a bombing. Of course, what really made my Budweiser-hazed mind realize that was a volunteer security guard stepping to me and saying “get the fuck out of here, that was a bomb!”

I wrote articles about the Olympics and an additional set of thoughts on the bombing for Wilamette Week (one of Portland’s main alternative weeky papers) that appears to be missing from the archives, but I’ll see if I can dig up an electronic copy and post it here. It contains some more immediate reaction I had to experiencing my first (and hopefully last) terrorist attack.

I don’t know if Rudolph can be tried under the new Federal terrorism laws or not, but regardless, he’s going to pay a heavy price. His insane fundamentalism has no place in the world. It’s just a well-equipped and english-speaking version of the Taliban. If you want to see something truly frightening and get a feel of the culture from which he comes, watch the documentary “Soldiers in the Army of God.”

We’ll soon see if the Christian-right leaning Bush world we live in can prosecute this guy properly. I’m sure that had he only done the abortion clinics, there would be more of a chance he’d get off lighter than had he not commited the terrorism in Centennial Park.