Know the following: I am a political junkie, and I am also prone to reading jags. Sometimes, I fixate on a subject and exhaust many hours reading as much as I possibly can about it. When I was a kid, for example, I took out every book I could find about astronomy in the space of a month.

The nature of the Internet tacitly condones this kind of behaviour. Two years ago, after seeing parts of “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” on TV, I went on a full-blown Star Wars jag wherein I simply had to understand the scope of the whole Star Wars story, and spent several hours reading the scripts of each movie in the series, including the allegedly leaked scripts for the next two movies. Here’s the thing: I hated, and have pretty much always hated Star Wars. And after I read the final script, I still hate Star Wars.

Anyway, as a regular reader of Tom Tomorrow’s excellent blog, I was alerted to an Atlantic Monthly piece which demonstrated rather effectively that even though Bush publicly swore up and down that he gave serious thought to every one of the 152 death penalty cases in Texas while he was governor, in reality, his deputy Gonzalez had given him extremely brief and biased summaries of the cases (usually on the day of the execution), which Dubya sometimes skimmed. The only case in which Bush intervened on behalf of the inmate was that of one Henry Lee Lucas.

So, of course, I did a Google search for Henry Lee Lucas (I was checking to see if Lucas was white, which he was). I ended up clicking on CourtTV’s profile of the serial killer, which is full of intriguingly disturbing biographic details. Then I was compelled to read just about every other serial killer profile, which I am afraid has warped me in some subtly unknown fashion.

Just as I got finished, I went over to Tom’s blog again, to see what had been going on while I had been reading these gruesome stories of various psychopaths, and scroll down to this entry, which linked to a story in the UK Mirror about the US Army targeting civilians in Iraq. One chilling passage reads,

Sergeant First Class John Meadows summed up the prevailing attitude amongst his colleagues telling the Evening Standard that Iraqi fighters were dressed in civilian clothes.
“You can’t distinguish between who’s trying to kill you and who’s not,” he said.
“Like, the only way to get through s*** like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home.”
And in an admission that directly contrasts with the line coming out from the Pentagon’s spin doctors Specialist Corporal Michael Richardson added: “There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger.
“It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn’t a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren’t.”
Describing the scene during combat Richardson admitted shooting injured soldiers and leaving them to die.
He said: “S***, I didn’t help any of them. I wouldn’t help the f******. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped.”
Making a shooting sign with his hand he went on: “Once you’d reached the objective, and once you’d shot them and you’re moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn’t want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you’re fighting, and you’re so terrified, you can’t really convey the feeling, but you don’t want them to live.”
And despite there being no link between Iraq and the September 11 attacks Richardson admitted that it gave him his motivation to fight Iraqis.
“There’s a picture of the World Trade Centre hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my flak jacket. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, ‘They hit us at home and, now, it’s our turn.’ I don’t want to say payback but, you know, it’s pretty much payback.”

I won’t say that this soldier is a sociopath, because that could easily be construed as libellous. Also, no matter how many books or articles I read about serial killers, they will not turn me into a qualified abnormal psychologist. But the similarity of these statements to those of various serial killers is really frightening.