A Weaponized Madman

This is from our Portuguese-American correspondent João, who lives in a major city on the West Coast. As Dymphna reported last month, he has educated himself in terrorism-related matters, and learned Arabic so that he could frequent a mosque and discover what was really going on inside.

His latest report concerns yesterday’s bombing and massacre in Norway, and what may possibly be gleaned from the available information:

Baron, this is truly a tragic event. My prayers go out to the Norwegian people. This man is obviously a monster.

Since yesterday I have been putting my analytical thinking cap on overdrive, and here are my personal thoughts.

1.		Nativist violence of this type is extremely rare — .01% if we look at the events of the past twenty years. Violent groups in my estimation may be arranged in the following in order of importance — Islamic, independence movements (Palestinians, ETA, Kurds, Tamil Tigers), leftist (Bader Meinhof, Red Brigades), and very rarely a Nativist. Norway has no violent groups of Native Norwegians. This recent event in Norway will fall into the rare one-off McVeigh category. There are no violent “anti-Muslim” groups in Norway. At the moment we cannot assign Anders Behring Breivik to any part of the counter-jihad. He is truly a “Lone Wolf”!
2.		From the open source material it appears that this man bought six tons of fertilizer to make the explosive vehicles he used in downtown Oslo. Ever since Oklahoma, merchants have been vigilant about reporting such purchases to the authorities immediately. Did this happen? And what did the security forces do with this info? With this kind of purchase he should never have left the store without someone asking him some questions. What did the Norwegian authorities know and how quickly did they act?
3.		My private observations about the level of sophistication in this plot are as follows: This would require sophisticated bomb-making training to pull off this kind of precision. Where was he trained? In a training camp, over the internet? This kind of knowledge requires hands-on training, not a correspondence course. Someone trained him, and why didn’t the authorities know about this? Did someone drop the ball and let a “Lone Wolf” develop under their nose? It’s hard to believe!

My overall view is that Anders Behring Breivik is what we might call a “weaponized madman.”

A weaponized madman is what happens when you take your run-of-the-mill homicidal man and weaponize him by giving him the ability and support to scale up his mayhem.

How and by who whom was he weaponized? These details should consume our energies till we expose the truth.

Since 9-11 we have seen 10,000 Islamic acts of terror, and now we have one mad white guy. Logic dictates that we put our resources into the greater threat.

Where is the greater threat? In a once-every-sixteen-years phenomenon, or the recurring act?

Good security professionals should use this logic.