Huge explosion in Oslo

[Project Willow]

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

Glad you stayed.

The fish's use of mockery has cost him plenty lately. One would think he'd pause to reflect, but I guess that's why they say there are different kinds of intelligence.

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.

Please forgive me.

[StarmanSkye]

The MIC and Corporatocracy and Organized Crime Cartels and International Banks and Right Wing Oligarchies/Military Fiefdoms around the world are all intimately linked. Norway was one of the most vibrant anti-Globalists holdouts -- THAT'S why its tempting to think of Breviak as a MK-controlled asset. Perhaps the conditioning is a lot more subtle and effective now, with over 50, er 60 years + of US, Mossad, allied, German Wehrmacht and Japanese research and development having gone into it.

[justdrew]

.

I don't know what for

... but ok

[barracuda]

Willow, if you're trying to make me feel bad, it's working.

[Fresno_Layshaft]

Man just plowed through 55 pages of this. Some really interesting bits weighed down by childish bickering. If Jeff took out the pissy taunts and whining, this thread would be 12 pages long (12 great pages). Its sad that a civil discourse cannot be held here anymore.

[stickdog99]

I'm absolutely positive that the parents were trying their best to get info through.. for sure. I guess I'm not 100% sure what you are alleging probably happened, because it is seeming like you are saying that all the cops chose to stand down, something I find hard to believe.

The only thing I am positive about is that the cops fucked up royally and then fudged the response timeline when people started to go ballistic on them for taking nearly 90 minutes to get there.

As for any putative stand down, if there was one, I can only assume that, like 9/11's, it was on orders.

[stickdog99]

excuse me but I have a question...was there any security at all on the island?....was there someone with a gun, any kind of gun?....wasn't that head of state guy supposed to be there the next day......and no security?....forgive me if this has been covered I haven't kept up very well

The reigning story is that nobody could ever have imagined such a thing as an attempt on a political leader's life. Sound familiar?

[stickdog99]

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 if backup is unavailable while people are getting killed. 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.

OK, point taken. But then again, point not taken. It's like when FEMA did not allow the Red Cross into New Orleans to hand out water and deliver first aid. The island was 600 fucking meters away and kids were dying every second at the hands of a single maniac. Kids were drowning and bleeding to death in the water while other kids were getting shot up on land.

In the US, a team of two cops is deemed as a sufficient force to meet such a threat. You don't sit around waiting for back up when children are getting murdered and you and your partner and the active shooter are the only confirmed armed threats.

Sure, it's possible that the whole thing could have been a big cop ambush. I guess anything's possible. But if so, why weren't the rescuers all getting picked off? After watching the events with binoculars for a few minutes, how could you possibly just keep letting kids die without lifting a finger unless you were under direct orders to do so?

http://forums.officer.com/forums/showth ... procedures

Well i dont have a problem if the public sees my policy on it. Ours in a nut shell states do what you have to do to eliminate the threat. weather one officer goes or 4 do what you need to do to save lives.

Gotta love Texas Sheriffs

[stickdog99]

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.

[stickdog99]

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.)
.

Good point. What is it about males that makes so many of us so damn problematic by nature? IMHO, men (in general) are so fucked up, present company included. I mean, I'm so fucked up that I can even imagine that some super powered lone wolf madman who dresses up in idiotic uniform after uniform and hires some GQ photog to take his picture while thinking its a great idea to murder 50+ helpless children by his own hand to make a stupid fucking point is real.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Man just plowed through 55 pages of this. Some really interesting bits weighed down by childish bickering. If Jeff took out the pissy taunts and whining, this thread would be 12 pages long (12 great pages). Its sad that a civil discourse cannot be held here anymore.

[stickdog99]

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.

Yep. Better to be down 20 kids than 2 cops.

[stickdog99]

Man just plowed through 55 pages of this. Some really interesting bits weighed down by childish bickering. If Jeff took out the pissy taunts and whining, this thread would be 12 pages long (12 great pages). Its sad that a civil discourse cannot be held here anymore.

Sorry. Point taken. I'll come back again when and if I have something solid to offer.

[barracuda]

It's like when FEMA did not allow the Red Cross into New Orleans to hand out water and deliver first aid. The island was 600 fucking meters away and kids were dying every second at the hands of a single maniac. Kids were drowning and bleeding to death in the water while other kids were getting shot up on land.

This seems closer to the truth of the matter. FEMA doesn't really exist to protect the citizens from disasters. Like the National Guard, the Navy SEALs or the Norweigean Beredskapstroppen with their expensive equipment and war toys, it exists to assist The State. Those troops and war toys were created and trained to deal with hostage situations, sniper attacks, and assorted other assymetrical acts of warfare in order to protect stuff like oil platforms and the kind of national infrastructure/services on which doing corporate business depends from guerilla sabotage. They don't really work for or belong to the people. That's just mission-statement rhetoric, designed to throw a thin veil of apparent parliamentary propriety over the military-industrial complex's effective ownership and control of large parts of the apparatus of state.

The lives of children are not worth all that much either to the people who built the system or to the people who run it. And the boots-on-the-ground-level responders aren't really empowered to make their own individual determinations about what's a priority and what isn't. On the contrary, in the case of the special forces in particular, they're not just highly trained but what you might call "heavily indoctrinated" to follow procedure without thinking for themselves at all.

Does anyone really imagine that, for example, the Navy SEALs are trained to respond to the slaughter of innocent civilians with passionate urgency? They wouldn't be able to do their jobs at all if that meant anything whatsoever to them. And that's outrageous. Which is all the more reason it's important to recognize it for what it is.

And it is, in fact, a conspiracy, of course. Just not the kind that requires some kind of stand-down order from on high. It's built into the program.

[Stephen Morgan]

excuse me but I have a question...was there any security at all on the island?....was there someone with a gun, any kind of gun?....wasn't that head of state guy supposed to be there the next day......and no security?....forgive me if this has been covered I haven't kept up very well

The head of government had cancelled, so didn't need security. The only security on the island was one policeman, who was killed in front of his son.