Free Republic

The death of Malachi Ritscher was reported by a local television station as just another frustration for commuters driving into Chicago one morning when police were told that a statue was burning and slowing-up traffic along the Kennedy expressway.This was not how the anti-war activist had envisaged media coverage when on November 3, he set up a video-camera and a small sign reading “thou shalt not kill” next to Chicago’s Flame of the Millennium sculpture. He then doused his body in petrol and set himself on fire. Mr Ritscher, 52, had even written a lengthy “mission-statement” on one of his...

In their story today about Malachi Ritscher, an antiwar protester who killed himself in Chicago earlier this month by setting himself on fire in public to protest the Iraq war, the Associated Press failed to report that he claimed in his self-written obituary that had walked right by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2002, knife in hand, intending to murder him but that he decided against it--a decision he expressed shame over.Rumsfeld's brush with a potential assassin was mentioned, but buried, in opinion articles published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Harper's Magazine.Ritscher's self-penned obituary can be...