Huge explosion in Oslo

[Plutonia]

Scraped from the Icke forum. This rumour being circulated with it:

But the weirdest thing yet is that both alex jones and assange forecasted or had norwegian information on this before it happened?

[DrVolin]

This is nothing that JR and a few others haven't said, but let me take a stab at it.

The first mistake here is to treat the delay in police response as incompetence or worse. In fact, the delay is called police work. The civilians reacted unthinkingly, as I would have done, and as I have in fact done a number of times in considerably less dramatic circumstances. The police didn't. Their job is to think in these situations when no one else does.

Many years ago, when 14 young women were murdered at our Polytecnic school, the police entered the building more than an hour after their arrival, and the medical services took even longer. There were lots of questions at the time about why. Then there were lots of explanations. The inquest led to modifications in police procedures, some of which we recently saw at Dawson College in a similar situation, but did not result in a much more rapid intervention. It was however, a better one.

Typically, police will establish a staging area and a command center. They will try to determine exactly what assets they have in the area, where they are, and what actions they might be engaged in. Then they will start collecting information on the threat. On the basis of knowledge about the avaiable assets and about the threat, they will formulate a plan and implement it. All this takes time.

There are good reasons for this. One critical difference between the good samaritans and the police is that the latter are armed. There is no sense sending armed men into a situation, pell mell as they arrive, with no plan and no clear knowledge of who might have gone in first, who could come in next, what they might be up to, or where they might be. That is a recipe for an even greater disaster.

There is also no sense in committing your already limited resources in penny packets to be defeated in detail by an enemy of unknown strength and means. If an initial, disorganized police assault on the island had been defeated by gunmen, it might have taken several more hours to bring up an organized force from even farther away and launch a second intervention. Then how many would have been killed?

Based on what I have read so far, I would guess there will be reprimands and changes in procedure resulting from these events. For example, I am left wondering why the local police commander did not use his initial assets to escort and cover the civilian boats without assaulting the island. Simply putting an armed policeman on each civilian craft would have enabled it to return fire at least, and pehaps to get closer to the island and rescue more children. There would have been relatively little risk of accidental engagements between the good guys. Then again, the commander's decision is probably defensible on the grounds that he needed to keep a cohesive force in case of a third event. This was a real possibility.

Shootouts are confusing and very dangerous places to be. The first priority is to reduce the confusion so that effective action can be taken. The time line of these events fits my both my expectations on logical grounds, and my observations, personal and second hand.

[82_28]

Very well said, Dr.

[Laodicean]

Norway police slammed for slow response to rampage
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK, Associated Press – 6 hours ago

OSLO, Norway (AP) — When Anders Behring Breivik launched his assault on the youth campers of Utoya Island, he expected Norway's special forces to swoop down and stop him at any minute.

Instead, Delta Force police officers made the 25-mile journey by car — they have no helicopter — then had to be rescued by a civilian craft when their boat broke down as it tried to navigate a one-minute hop to the island.

It took police more than 90 minutes to reach the gunman, who by then had mortally wounded 68 people. Breivik immediately dropped his guns and surrendered, having exceeded his wildest murderous expectations.

As Oslo's police force sounds an increasingly defensive note, international experts said Tuesday that Norway's government and security forces must learn stark lessons from a massacre made worse by a lackadaisical approach to planning for terror.

"Children were being slaughtered for an hour and a half and the police should have stopped it much sooner," said Mads Andenas, a law professor at the University of Oslo whose niece was on the island and survived by hiding in the bushes. One of his students was killed.
"Even taking all the extenuating circumstances into account, it is unforgivable," he said.

These include the fact that Breivik preceded his one-man assault on the island with a car bomb in the heart of Oslo's government center. Authorities were focused on helping survivors from that blast as the first frantic calls came in from campers hiding from the gunman on Utoya, northwest of Oslo.

Survivors said they struggled to get their panicked pleas heard because operators on emergency lines were rejecting calls not connected to the Oslo bomb. When police finally realized a gunman was shooting teens and 20-somethings attending a youth retreat on the island, Breivik had already been hunting them down for half an hour.

In a final act of bungling, police on Monday revised the island death toll down to 68, after initially miscounting the corpses at 86.
Breivik's lawyer, Geir Lippestad, said Tuesday his client was surprised he even made it onto the island without being stopped by police, never mind that he was left to fire his assault rifle and handgun for so long.

The island's lone part-time security guard was among the first people he killed.

Police spokesman Johan Fredriksen rebuffed criticism Tuesday of the planning and equipment failures, calling such comments "unworthy."

"We can take a lot, we're professional, but we are also human beings," he said.

International experts said Norway must take a hard look at a response system apparently premised on the assumption that the country didn't face a credible risk of terrorist attack, much less a back-to-back bombing and gun rampage.

That could be difficult in a country renowned for a culture of openness that has led to jaw-dropping security lapses in the past.
Norway's most infamous crimes before Friday involved the 1994 and 2004 thefts of artworks by its best-known painter, Edvard Munch. In the first theft, the robbers left their ladder propped up against an unlocked National Gallery window — and replaced Munch's "The Scream" with a mocking note: "Thanks for the poor security."

Fernando Reinares, former senior anti-terrorism adviser to the Spanish government, said Friday's attacks point to "an astonishing failure in police intelligence." He said a competent anti-terrorist agency would have identified Breivik before he struck because of his purchases of bomb-making ingredients and specialist weaponry.

"Norway is behind other Western European countries in adapting internal security structures and procedures to face terrorist challenges," Reinares said. "But there was also an amazing failure in police preparedness and reaction, both in terms of human resources and technical capabilities."

Andrew Silke, director of terrorism studies at the University of East London, called the police response "a bit Keystone Kops" because Norway's police were "just not used to dealing with something like this. The system was swamped."

Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, said Norway has been victimized in the same way as all countries caught off guard by terror.

"Their planners suffered a major failure of imagination, to foresee that the adversary could go that far," he said. "But this is exactly what every counter-terror policy must do to be effective: to plan and train for worst-case scenarios. Because if you haven't done that before the bomb goes off or the shooting starts, then you're just improvising, and that just increases the dangers."
In Norway's case, the Delta Force squad — whose Norwegian name, "Beredskapstroppen," means "emergency unit" — is equipped only to travel to crises on Norway's largely two-lane road network. It took about a half-hour to cover the roughly 25-mile (40-kilometer) journey.

Police spokesman Sturla Henriksbo said Norway — a country spanning some 1,100 miles (1,750 kilometers) in length, with about 50,000 islands — has only one police helicopter, based at an airport north of Oslo. The helicopter has only four seats, including two for the pilots and one for an equipment manager.

"That helicopter is never assigned for the transportation of anyone, never mind Delta Force," he said.
Still, it could have been used as a rapid-response platform for a police sniper, said Finn Abrahamsen, a former Oslo policeman who directed the force's violent crimes unit.

But even that wasn't possible on Friday: All police helicopter pilots were away on summer holidays.
Delta Force could have used an army helicopter, but decided it would take too long to scramble one from the nearest base in Rygge, some 40 miles (60 kilometers) to the south.

So they drove, then waited for the local police department to scramble its lone boat, a small rigid inflatable craft. All the while, shooting and screams could be heard from Utoya, just 600 yards (meters) away.
Within seconds of jumping on board, officers found themselves having to bail out the overloaded vessel. Then the engine became waterlogged and died.

"Too many policeman wanted to go too quickly to the island," said Kgell Tvenge, commander of the police base in the nearby town of Honefoss where the boat is docked.

"But the boat didn't sink. They got a new boat from a tourist," he said.

Authorities say that within five minutes after the police reached the island, Breivik was disarmed and in custody.

In a 1,500-page manifesto published online before the attack, the killer said he planned to surrender as soon as police arrived, so that he could publicize his extreme nationalist and anti-Muslim views in court and inspire copycat attacks elsewhere.
Andenas, the law professor, said he would have expected Norway's special forces to have trained to reach a popular retreat like Utoya within 15 minutes.

"Many people feel this was a very difficult situation, that one should take account of that and not be too critical of people who certainly tried to do their best," Andenas said.

"But it was just not good enough. The police action was too little and too slow," he said. "The cold truth is that many children who died out there should not have died."

Associated Press writers Raphael Satter in London, Alan Clendenning in Madrid and Ian MacDougall in Oslo contributed to this report.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art ... 6cd34a2be9

[Nordic]

stickdog is being badgered? hardly. stickdog is hysterical and accusing everyone who doesn't jump with him to his "conclusions" to be "police apologists" which is just infuriating, and he won't shut up about it. he's badgering the entire thread with his wailing and gnashing of teeth. it's quite tiresome and annoying especially in a thread of such heavy and hard-to-take subject matter.

[MacCruiskeen]

Jack, I'm certainly not getting at you personally, believe me, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. I've been trying for 52 pages to avoid foolish speculation and to look as calmly as possible at the news at it comes in. I know what I do think is clear and what I don't think is clear, although of course (it goes without saying) I may be wrong. I think it's pretty clear that whoever controls Norway's Elite Anti-Terror Delta Force did not really give a damn about stopping a violent extreme-right Islamophobe quickly, although at least some members of that team may well have been taken aback by the sheer scale of the massacre, not to mention the skin-colour of most of the victims.

It's past 2 am here, though, and I've been on this thread for too long yesterday and today, and I am just too sick & tired for any more of it tonight. It was a fucking horrible mass murder, and I am worried about the consequences for all of us, both immediately and in the longer term. Not least because lines are hardening so quickly, even on this almost uniquely flexible board. There is a dismally male dynamic at work in the world, and even in the microcosm of this thread, and I don't want to add to it with any more sarcasm or swearing or insistence on being right at the cost of any escalation. (I really wish more women would contribute to this discussion, and I also want to see what Stan Goff and Klaus Theweleit have to say about this latest Male Fantasist and this particular massacre of the innocents.)

Anyway, goodnight.

[wordspeak2]

Noted. Though I don't agree; to me the length of time seemed incredulous, what with kids dying. An hour plus to respond? Really???
And who has the explanation for how Breivek got on the ferry so easily with guns and ammo?

"Why in this case do you think a Nazi was used (and for various reasons I do think Nazi is the proper term for Brevik)? Won't the effect be to taint the right and strengthen the left?"

No, Jack! It's terrorism on the "Left." The quasi-left, the "multi-culturalist" social democracy. It's a direct hit- could it be more direct? It's not about vague public opinion, which is already against non-governmental neo-Nazism..

This I agree with:

"This was not a mere psychotic outbreak or the result of some generic "extremism." The targeting was unmistakable: kill the open society, kill liberals, kill the weak and defenseless, kill the tolerant and idealistic, kill the Other, kill modernity."

"Okay, let's speculate: Gladio. Why is this new incarnation fingering Nazis?"

Fingering? As in using? Cause who the hell else besides a Nazi would do such a thing? And even that I have a hard time believing. Knowing the history of these things I'd give it good odds he's an MK-type killer. I think intelligence agencies are extremely interested in far right-wing movements and people like Breivik. They're useful scapegoats in every respect. Just look at the Southern Poverty Law Center (which loves to associate white supremacists with conspiracy theorists).

[DrVolin]

And who has the explanation for how Breivek got on the ferry so easily with guns and ammo?

Prepositioning.

[8bitagent]

.

Okay, let's speculate: Gladio. Why is this new incarnation fingering Nazis?

.

Because after ten years, the Moozlums thang' has run it's viral course. Even Leon Penetta said "al Qaeda is pretty much finished", Obama's Osama killing in people's minds was the last hurrah of monolithic Islamist terror. It's as the kids say, "meh". But...for several years in Ameria(Tea Party, fringe right) and Europe(anti Islamic sentiment, groups, politicians) has been increasingly cultivated and stoked. A huge paranoia of "creeping socialism and Islamification". I haphazardly made that "top ten things I fear may happen during the Obama era" list in 2008, one of which was the advent of violent event after violent event involving white far right paramilitary or lone wolf groups...what I call the "Beslan factor", bomb and shooting attacks(as well as out of left field creative) against civilians. I also speculated Los Zetas cartels may be used for such events, but even MSNBC's Chris Matthews has been pushing the idea of "far right violent" attacks to rise.

This has the desired effect of making even not so fringe right wingers feel like they are being targeted by the government, further isolation and radicalization. You may see provocateured action of individuals or groups toward shocking events that would undoubtably provoke an LA riots like response of which would stoke the right even more.

[justdrew]

There are good reasons for this. One critical difference between the good samaritans and the police is that the latter are armed.

the primary description of the shooter was: "dressed as police"

now the local cops don't know for sure how the Delta's are going to show up, but... any local cop who had gone to that island, would have looked like the shooter. in swoops a helicopter sharpshooter, and bang, we're down a cop or two. It could have seriously caused more confusion and possibly deaths. But anyway. even if they'd teleported to the island, there still would have been way to many dead. It's unfortunate, a few things could have been done differently, but I'm not sure I see any intentional delay. Maybe. time will tell.

Beyond that, I have to agree with nordic, that stick is a little overboard on harping on this. Just because someone posts a counter-argument to his points, doesn't require endless back-and-forth. Everyone wishes they'd gotten there sooner. If there was more to it than is now apparent, it might yet come out.

At any rate, I think the majority of attention should be focused on the shooter and his plans and schemes. and most important on everyone elses plan on how this is NOT going to go like this next time.

[barracuda]

You are not worth my time, barracuda. You really aren't. Have fun with your continued baiting of posters here with your so called "mild sarcasm". You can go fuck yourself.

So you quit the forum and then reconsidered. How very laodicean of you. But as long as you seem to be staying, I'm going to gently remind you to kindly refrain from directing obscenities towards other board members.

[justdrew]

You are not worth my time, barracuda. You really aren't. Have fun with your continued baiting of posters here with your so called "mild sarcasm". You can go fuck yourself.

So you quit the forum and then reconsidered. How very laodicean of you. But as long as you seem to be staying, I'm going to gently remind you to kindly refrain from directing obscenities towards other board members.

and this is exactly why I called for "chill" those pages ago. ya'all please don't make me go find a finger-wag emoticon.

[Laodicean]

You are not worth my time, barracuda. You really aren't. Have fun with your continued baiting of posters here with your so called "mild sarcasm". You can go fuck yourself.

So you quit the forum and then reconsidered. How very laodicean of you. But as long as you seem to be staying, I'm going to gently remind you to kindly refrain from directing obscenities towards other board members.

Noted, moderator.

Yes, I reconsidered due to the outpouring of support from the members here to stay. Thank you, you know who you are. Of course, your silence on the matter is all I need to know about you. And Jeff didn't want me to go either, so there's that.

Got to give respect in order to earn it, B. You should try it sometime.

Done.

[JackRiddler]

Omar coming!

[lupercal]

Don't know offhand, but...

I certainly don't take Webster Tarpley at face value, but one interesting tidbit from his article:

"In early November 2010, the Oslo television channel TV2 exposed the existence of an extensive network of paid assets and informants of US intelligence recruited from the ranks of retired police and other officials. The ostensible goal of this program was the surveillance of Norwegians who were taking part in demonstrations and other activities critical of the United States and its policies. One of the Norwegians recruited was the former chief of the anti-terror section of the Oslo police.7" http://tarpley.net/2011/07/24/norway-te ... alse-flag/

Right. So- not only did Norway just opt out of the failing NATO mission in Libya, but Norway is the prime embodiment of a model democratic socialism that imo is being viewed favorably across the world. It has innocence, charm, universal health care, and only 40 murders a year. What better way to send a blow- both direct and psychological- to progressive socialism than mass-murdering the children of its leadership. What could possibly be more evil? Cui Bono? The entire global fascist capitalist apparatus. Neo-nazis are used as patsies.

those revelations are covered elsewhere too, I remember hearing about it.

So now the most likely puppetmaster points right back where expected, good ol' fascist USA.

Good article, agree fully. The word that comes to mind is shakedown: buy our bombs or we'll f*ck up your shit, and if you don't believe it, just watch. Would 'we' do something so horrible? Does shit stink?