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wintler2 wrote:I agree, cptmarginal. What exaclty links the island shooter and the bomb? It seems very improbable to me that perpetrator would plant/set off bomb and then leave the scene, drive for an hour, jump into a boat, all in order to shoot at kids. Why not stick around and shoot at the cops & medics coming to bomb site?

If perpetrator was organised enough to source the bomb ingredients and build & plant it, and know that the political party camp was on, they would have also known that nobody much was going to be home/around in central Oslo. Why not set it off on a day earlier, kill many more? It doesn't add up.

No worries, I'm not a frothing Mason-hunter, I'm only interested in it in the same way you are, and because it points to a confused fraternal-egalitarian-outgoing-social mindset competing against a hierachical-authoritarian-structured-interaction one, which must cause frictions. Plus the whole P2 thing, obviously.

JackRiddler wrote:.

Harvey, neither link works.

Eighty children murdered in cold blood on that island. Absolutely horrible.

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norton ash wrote:God, the damage to a small society like Norway is going to be staggering. All the parents, families, friends, neighbours, classrooms sharing the same wound of a murdered child, and that's only ground zero of where the psychic fallout begins.

Norwegian police are investigating the possibility there might have been a second gunman involved in Friday's deadly assault on a summer youth camp.

Police already are questioning one suspected gunman, a native Norwegian, but the country's national news agency NTB said Saturday that witnesses on Utoeya Island where the attack occurred have told police two people were involved. The man already in custody was disguised as a policeman, wearing a sweater with a police emblem on it, but the witnesses said the second man was not.

Norway reeled with horror at Friday's twin attacks that left at least 91 dead - seven in a massive bomb blast attack on the government headquarters in Oslo and at least 84 in the subsequent gun attacks on the youth camp, where several hundred teenagers had gathered as part of a summer program sponsored by the country's ruling Labour Party.

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg called the assaults - the worst in Norway since World War II - "a national tragedy. It is a nightmare." He called the assaults "bloody and cowardly attacks" and said the island has been turned from "a paradise into hell."

Police are searching the lake surrounding the island about 30 kilometers north of Oslo for more bodies. Police say the suspect, identified by news agencies as Anders Behring Breivik, 32, also is suspected of carrying out the bombing that targeted the government headquarters.

Stoltenberg said the "brutal" attack on "innocent youths" would not take away Norwegians' feeling of safety. He said safety was a pillar of society that Norwegians had taken for granted, and he stressed that the main focus is on saving the lives of those hurt in the attacks.

Authorities have not determined a motive for the attacks.

...snip...

The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of "Terrorism"

By Glenn Greenwald

For much of the day yesterday, the featured headline on The New York Times online front page strongly suggested that Muslims were responsible for the attacks on Oslo; that led to definitive statements on the BBC and elsewhere that Muslims were the culprits. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin wrote a whole column based on the assertion that Muslims were responsible, one that, as James Fallows notes, remains at the Post with no corrections or updates. The morning statement issued by President Obama -- "It's a reminder that the entire international community holds a stake in preventing this kind of terror from occurring" and "we have to work cooperatively together both on intelligence and in terms of prevention of these kinds of horrible attacks" -- appeared to assume, though (to its credit) without overtly stating, that the perpetrator was an international terrorist group.

But now it turns out that the alleged perpetrator wasn't from an international Muslim extremist group at all, but was rather a right-wing Norwegian nationalist with a history of anti-Muslim commentary and an affection for Muslim-hating blogs such as Pam Geller's Atlas Shrugged, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch. Despite that, The New York Times is still working hard to pin some form of blame, even ultimate blame, on Muslim radicals (h/t sysprog):

Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out Islamic terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking Al Qaeda's brutality and multiple attacks.

"If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from Al Qaeda," said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington.

Al Qaeda is always to blame, even when it isn't, even when it's allegedly the work of a Nordic, Muslim-hating, right-wing European nationalist....

...

Then there's this extraordinarily revealing passage from the NYT -- first noticed by Richard Silverstein -- explaining why the paper originally reported what it did:

Initial reports focused on the possibility of Islamic militants, in particular Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami, or Helpers of the Global Jihad, cited by some analysts as claiming responsibility for the attacks. American officials said the group was previously unknown and might not even exist.

There was ample reason for concern that terrorists might be responsible.

In other words, now that we know the alleged perpetrator is not Muslim, we know -- by definition -- that Terrorists are not responsible; conversely, when we thought Muslims were responsible, that meant -- also by definition -- that it was an act of Terrorism.

...