Norway attacks: Utøya gunman boasted of links to UK far right

[oldironside]

Anders Brehing Breivik, the man accused of the murder of at least 91 Norwegians in a bomb and gun massacre, boasted online about his discussions with the far-right English Defence League and other anti-Islamic European organisations.

The Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, said Norwegian officials were working with foreign intelligence agencies to see if there was any international involvement in the slaughter. "We have running contact with other countries' intelligence services," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/23/norway-attacks-utoya-gunman

So, all those big, BIIIIGGGG men in the EDL are now shitting themselves that the Plod are going to come knocking at their door, investigating a real crime. I wish them well with their frantic backpedaling.

Oh, and he is a Christian. Like Bachman. Like Palin. Like O'Reilly. Like Bush. Makes me glad I'm an atheistic leftie.

http://youtu.be/SohMW2aa9IQ

'Nuff said.

[non sociopath skin]

1. Much like I suggested here, then ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=191x34112

... and not just a lone crazy man at all?

The Skin

[fedsron2us]

2. As Muriel has pointed out quite correctly on LBN

he may have expressed admiration of the EDL or shared some of their ideas but that does not mean he was actively cooperating with them or that they had knowledge of this attack or any role in its execution. The only political organisation we know for sure to which he belonged was the Conservative Fremskrittspartiet or Progress party but that connection ended in 2004. They are a right wing low tax anti immigration party but to tag them as fascist is pushing the envelop a bit.

It is too easy to fall into the same trap as those in the MSM who flog the idea all Islamic terrorism is centrally controlled. The reality is more likely that the body of ideas circulating on the far right helped trigger the deed. Just as with early 19th and 20th century anarchists assasins there does not have to be a command and control structure between those who formulate the concepts of direct action and those who carry out the physical acts of violence. In fact the intellectual structures do not even have to specify killing at all to trigger that result

I suspect the Norwegian involved in this atrocity was a tad too intellectual for the average EDL member which is also why he was much more dangerous. Trying to shoe horn him into typical fascist stereotype is missing the point and the real threat here. There are a lot of Anders Behring Breiviks sitting in front of their computers all over Europe waiting to go off. How are you going to stop that happening particularly as their view that established governments, the law enforcement agencies, the financial systems are frequently rotten and corrupt is largely true. Indeed Anders Behring Breiviks and his ilk share the same loathing for the western establishment as their radical Islamic counterparts. They just come from a different part of the political spectrum and blame different people. Both are under the delusion that they can bomb and kill their way to a more perfect world.

I fear we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing as the economic situation in Europe and elsewhere detriorates and I dont know the solution. I fear that the rush of some on the left to demonize Anders Behring Breivik and his associates will actually backfire amd make him into some sort of Horst Wessel for our age. Of course, you could ban the EDL and try to limit the outlet for its views on the internet and elsewhere but that would be hard to police and be a body blow to liberty itself. Nor could you be certain that the instruments that you construct to control the far right could not then be turned on the rest of society at a later date. Better to fix the root cause of what made Anders Behring Breiviks into a mass murderer which means some major alterations in the way our seriously dysfunctional world operates.

[non sociopath skin]

3. Fair points, Feds, and well put.

But the fact remains that Breiviks's ideas are shared by a number of organised groups and my hope is that the authorities take them as seriously and monitor them as least as thoroughly as any organisations built upon hatred of "the other".

And might we hope that "respectable" politicians may now be a little more mindful of the possible unwanted consequences of playing the race and immigration card.

The Skin

[fedsron2us]

4. Conventional Fascist parties and their Trotskyist and Marxist left wing counterparts

have always been heavily infiltrated by the security services. I think that Anders Behring Breivik history is likely to prove a little more complex to unravel and wont fit the normal fascist profile. He is clearly both intelligent enough to plan mass murder in meticulous detail and unhinged enough to carry it out but what drove him over the edge is another matter. I grabbed a copy of his Facebook page and his Twitter page before they inevitably got taken down by the authorities (I am bound to end up on the Police National Computer after linking to that site from DU). The quote on his Twitter page about 'One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interest' is from John Stuart Mill the author of On Liberty not from Hitler's Mein Kampf. If he had been ranting about the digging up of Rudolph Hess grave then he would be easier to tag.

In his alleged 'manifesto' published before the attack he claims to have come to a secret London, in April 2002, to reconstitute the "Knights Templar", a Crusader military order. This may be significant but equally could just represent the fantasies of a deranged mind. Either way it is going to give conspiracists an absolute field day.

By the way my worry about his becoming some sort of pin up boy for the right is already happening as even a cursory glance at the comments here reveals

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/8657141/Norway-attacks-London-link-exposed-as-Anders-Behring-Breivik-publishes-manifesto.html#disqus_thread

I am very worried that this is not going to be a one off event and that others will inevitably use him as a perverse sort of role model

[oldironside]

6. Wow!

I've just read the comments on the Telegraph site. Unbelievable. And the one who calls himself Lightf00t really needs to get out more. Peddling the old "Hitler was a socialist" line, describing Norway as a left wing hell hole, hoping Breivik is out in 10 years to found a political party. Either this guy is a troll par excellence, or he is in serious need of a girlfriend.

[fedsron2us]

5. My paranoia must be kicking in

because I don't find any of the explanations I am reading (including my own earlier thoughts) really fit in with the picture of events that occurred during this horrific attack in Norway.

The bombing and the following shootings seems to have been planned and carried out with clinical precision and timing but the supporting scenario makes little sense. In particular I don't understand why Breivik created a Twitter and Facebook account on 17 July 2011 and then failed to use them for anything but a few entries on music and videos. The Facebook profile lists interests such as body building, hunting, fire arms, World of Warcraft and the soap opera, Dexter, about the serial killers serial killer. These appear almost a cliche of the sort of things normally associated with a lone nutter who goes on a shooting rampage. By comparison the political references on the site look almost like after thoughts. Neither Twitter or Facebook was used to express any true political ideas apart from the single quote from John Stuart Mill. My immediate question is why were these things set up so late and what purpose did they serve rather than to satisfy the observers preconceived ideas about what a deranged killer would like ?

I am also a little puzzled about Breiviks issuing a personal manifesto which appears to be plagiarised in large part almost word for word from that written by the Una bomber. Having spent years on the internet I know that many of the nut-cases who populate it love the sound of their own words. Even when retreading others ideas they usually put their own spin on the matter. Why did a man who engineered such a complex attack use such a banal and derivative justification. Moreover, the pictures of Breivik in Freemason garb and his quotes about initiation into a new Knights Templar organisation almost seem intended to kick a thousand internet conspiracy hares up and running. Nor does his supposed anti Islamic and anti immigration stance tie in with the terrorist outrage which was aimed specifically at the Norwegian Prime Minister, the Norwegian government, the Norwegian ruling Labour party and its members children. If he hated Muslims and foreigners you might have expected that they would have been his prime targets.

Over the years there have been many terrorist attacks in Britain. The largest 'spectaculars' carried out by the IRA were the Baltic Exchange Bishopsgate bombing which devastated part of the City of London in the early 1990s. Both used explosives identical to that detonated in Oslo. One thing that is immediately clear from looking at the IRA attacks is how much time and effort went into planning and executing them. The Provisionals set up a dedicated away team of at least three people to carry out each attack. Yet in the Oslo incident we are being presented with a single individual who has supposedly not only set up the bomb attack alone but then gone on to drive 20 miles and carry out a shooting massacre specifically timed to coincide with the confusion in the aftermath of the first atrocity. This is an oganisational achievement which would have stretched even most accomplished terror groups. I think there is much more than a lone nutcase at work here.

[non sociopath skin]

7. I can understand how your thinking has changed ...

... as this has played out.

We may have many more chilling facts to come.

The Skin

[oldironside]

8. It really doesn't add up.

As the death toll was rising I started to wonder how one man had done this. On a logistical level it seems almost impossible.

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. It's worth keeping an open mind about the stuff on the web, certainly

And the planning of the massacre seems so precise that we should assume the Facebook and Twitter postings were part of that plan too. But the attack on the island does fit in with the anti-Islamic and immigration stuff; a major theme of the camp was fighting xenophobia and islamophobia and support for a Palestinian state (another thing he hated). The 1500 page 'mainfesto' and video are against any institution that calls for tolerance (eg the BBC, of the Norwegian government), and I think the bomb was designed as the diversion. Whether or not he hoped to kill the PM, he clearly wanted to kill as many children as possible.

The camp was apparently well known; at some stage, he could have worked out that he might be the only armed person on the island, and, with a diversion to tie up the Oslo police, could kill scores. The questions now being asked about how he got to the island without a serious challenge will need good answers. A question is whether he could have built a powerful bomb on his own. Something (part of the 1500 pages?) says he did a test explosion. If McVeigh could do it with, I think, 1 accomplice, without previous bombing experience, I suppose he could too.

The IRA used teams with careful planning; but by the 1980s they were working in a country that was looking for terrorists. And they wanted to get away. This guy doesn't seem to have tried to do that.

[fedsron2us]

10. I am not sure that I believe much of what Breivik says in his statements

The claim that the bomb was intended to be a diversion to draw off the police so he could carry out the subsequent massacre does not explain why the device was so massive. He could have achieved the same end with something much smaller. Indeed, the level of security at Utoeya island appears normally to have been quite low at the annual Labour party camp so he would have stood just as good chance of executing his killing spree without blowing the centre of Oslo sky high. Of course as an egotistical madman it is quite likely that he wanted to generate as much shock publicty as he could from his crimes. Nonetheless I cant help thinking he might have had the specific aim of killing the Norwegian PM.

Initially I thought Breivik he was someone who had been driven to acts of violence by his background, personality and the intellectual milieu of the right wing blogosphere in which he mixed. Indeed if he had just carried out the gun massacre I would have felt all the parts of the picture fitted together. It is just the scale and sophistication of the bomb attack which does not fit, particularly as it was carried out by someone who dodged National Service and had no military training. I just hope the Norwegian police do a proper investigation into the lead up to this crime and make sure they examine all Breiviks movements, contacts, financial affairs etc with a a fine toothcomb to cross check everything he says. In particular they need to get anti terrorism experts from the US, UK and elsewhere to reconstruct the precise details of how the bomb was made and detonated.

As someone who knew Breivik said today it is quite possible that this cold and calculating individual is still toying with the authorities, the Norwegian people and the rest of the world.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. The larger the bomb, the more likely both Oslo and local police are tied up

There does seem to have been a problem getting hold of a helicopter that could have gone straight to the island, but I'm not clear if that was caused by the bomb or not. But even if it didn't, it could have been his thinking that the larger the bomb, the bigger the diversion; and it's not as if he'd have a problem with the effects a large explosion rather than a small one. The length of time he had on the island, which the lack of a helicopter may have contributed to, allowed him to kill more people; and he did so, rather than trying to get away after he must have known the PM wasn't there. I think it still looks like a general massacre was his primary aim.

From what I've read, he did do his military national service, eg http://www.vancouversun.com/news/country+mourns+loss+many+youth/5153632/story.html . I agree that what he claims, through his lawyer of what he put on the web, cannot be trusted; but if he did take years to plan this, and had some farm land where he could test things unobserved, I think it's possible he could build a car bomb on his own.

[fedsron2us]

12. Wikipedia says he dodged National service

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik

Their link is to a Norwegian article which needless to say I can not translate.

I think a lot of the English speaking press just assume that he was in the army because most Norwegians are drafted

Breiviks claimed to have avoided the call up in his 'manifesto' but it may be that he is simply lying.