Huge explosion in Oslo

[Joe Hillshoist]

One more thing that has been disturbing me about all this.

Since ABB's image first appeared I've wondered how damn familiar he looks.

I swear I have seen that guy before. Either in real life or in a photo somewhere.

[MacCruiskeen]

I should say that I'm sure most of the Norwegian police officers were probably straining at the bit to get there and help the kids. I'm not suggesting "a vast conspiracy", from top to bottom. I'm saying it looks as though certain people in a position to make decisions were in no hurry to stop that guy before he'd had time to do what he set out to do.

How else would you (or anyone else) explain that unconscionable delay, vk? "Sleepy Old Norway" just doesn't really cut it for me.

I've wondered about that. Still wondering. The aftermath of the Victorian fires and the witch hunt that followed ... its easy to blame people afterward for failing to act when quite often command and control structures go to shit when faced by "unthinkable" scenarios.

No they don't, Joe. That's the popular but deeply implausible Whoopsie Theory, hauled out only by commanders and controllers (and their apologists in the media) when they don't do what they're well-trained, well-prepared and well-paid to do.

Nor was the scenario "unthinkable" (nor even a "scenario"): it was actually happening, and it was blatantly obvious (thanks to the wonder of 700 cellphones) WHAT was actually happening. No unclarity whatsoever: someone was strolling around on a tiny island called Utroya, massacring a bunch of terrified kids.

Nor was it "chaos" or especially difficult to deal with. It would be more accurate to say it was exceptionally easy to deal with, considering the fact that the killer was trapped on a tiny island (along with his victims, past, current and future).

It wasn't just a massacre - there was a bombing as well.

The bombing had been over for a couple of hours by then. And let's not exaggerate the difficulties for the police and emergency services. No buildings had collapsed and the total death toll in Oslo was seven. I'm sure there have been deadlier fires and traffic accidents in Norway.

Imagine what you'd be thinking if you were not in on a conspiracy and operating some sort of emergency response in Norway when all this started? It'd be wtf???

No, I'm sorry, I certainly wouldn't respond by saying wtf?. Nor would anyone who's not a movie character. I'd do whatever I was trained to do in an emergency situation, whether it was putting on a helmet and rushing to a helicopter, or making the phone calls necessary to acquire or requisition a fucking helicopter, and I'd do it double-quick, as would everyone. (As did that remarkably competent Norwegian TV helicopter crew, for instance.)

Not to put too fine a point on it, the world is not Hollywood, and Norway is not so fucking sleepy. It is a highly-developed and extremely (oil-)rich and well-equipped modern 21st-century nation state. It is not Walton Farm or Hobbitland or Tellytubby Land or Shangri-fucking-la. There is only one reason for police and emergency services to exist, and that is to respond quickly and efficiently in case of emergency. Which is precisely what they normally do.

And if every kid on the island is texting or calling emergency services, and the "neighbours" (on the mainland) are as well

.

-thereby making it doubly, triply, quadruply, sevenhundredly, ballsachingly crystal-clear exactly what was going, exactly where it was going on, and exactly how urgently it needed to be responded to. Absolutely nothing "chaotic" about it.

Note: The (untrained, unprepared, unpaid) civilians on the mainland didn't say wtf? and run around like headless chickens. They responded efficiently, competently and bravely while waiting for the fucking police and ambulances to finally turn up.

The situation would be chaos

.

Precisely not. It would be crystal fucking clear. I repeat: about a thousand phone-calls had made it CLEAR that the killer was stuck on a tiny island (an island with a name), making him considerably easier to locate and deal with very quickly indeed than almost any spree killer in history.

Maybe no one made the right decisions because there was no one who was actually capable of making the right decisions of actually dealing with it.

"Er, Lars, I think you're in charge here." "Er, no, Svein, I think it's Margrit. She's got the car keys ." "Let's have a cup of tea and take a vote on it." "No, let's ask King Harald, he's the boss. Where's the phone?" "I think Mats is using it."
- Nonsense. That's not the way it works, anywhere in the world.

Then again, its situations like that that are easiest to manipulate, especially if you are somewhere important (a systempunkt) in the chain of command/communication. And usually its a fair bet that there's an element of corrupt fascism in every police force and many police forces are notorious for the relationship between corruption and freemasonry and come then there's P2, and Italy.

Now you're starting to make sense.

[8bitagent]

I've written about the power of sheer will...while Phillpe Petit did have co-conspirators in his WTC stunt, only he alone with unbelievable determination and will could do this.



I know I'm using the same arguments magic bullet/anti conspiracy people use with JFK, 9/11, etc. And Im not dismissing the possibly this is part of some neo Gladio thing...just saying its not impossible for a single human to foment this master plan, and focus on it every day and pull it off without a hitch like John Doe in Se7en.

[MacCruiskeen]

Norwegian Air Ambulance

The Norwegian Air Ambulance is the air ambulance service in Norway organised through the government owned limited company Luftambulansetjenesten (Air Ambulance Service). The service provides helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) and fixed wing air ambulance operations.

Dedicated planes are provided at six airports, and helicopters at 11 hospitals. In addition the service depends on the state Search and rescue helicopters for a full national coverage. The fixed-wing aircraft and HEMS helicopters are operated by the private companies Lufttransport and Norsk Luftambulanse on contract for the Air Ambulance Service. The rescue helicopters are operated by the Royal Norwegian Air Force 330 squadron

(...)

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

[lupercal]

^ I think you're on the right track Mac. The incompetence defense won't wash at this late date. It also wouldn't surprise me to learn, in the course of some future procedural, that there was a terror response rehearsal, scheduled long ago and supervised by the US-UK intel apparatus, under way. Nor would it surprise me if Anders thought he was playing a role in it, if he thought anything at all. But that's a detail that won't be officially revealed anytime soon.

[Joe Hillshoist]

No they don't, Joe. That's the popular but deeply implausible Whoopsie Theory, hauled out only by commanders and controllers (and their apologists in the media) when they don't do what they're well-trained, well-prepared and well-paid to do.

I've been in situations where exactly that as happened. Fuck ... the only reason the valley's round here haven't burnt in a way that you would hear about in the news was the effort of the first responders and luck.

The bombing had been over for a couple of hours by then. And let's not exaggerate the difficulties for the police and emergency services. No buildings had collapsed and the total death toll in Oslo was seven. I'm sure there have been deadlier fires and traffic accidents in Norway.

Yeah but there were huge bombings in the centre of Oslo. People don't suddenly to default to "everythings ok then" cos no buildings collapsed.

No, I'm sorry, I certainly wouldn't respond by saying wtf?. Nor would anyone who's not a movie character. I'd do whatever I was trained to do in an emergency situation, whether it was putting on a helmet and rushing to a helicopter, or making the phone calls necessary to acquire or requisition a fucking helicopter, and I'd do it double-quick, as would everyone. (As did that remarkably competent Norwegian TV helicopter crew, for instance.)

You can't just make a phone call and requisition some private company's helicopter, even if you know its available, which is unlikely. You assume there is one available to transport armed police at a moments notice, but is there in Norway? Thats the first question that needs to be answered. As of yet no one has answered that.

That's the popular but deeply implausible Whoopsie Theory,

er what was this?

One of the boats carrying police was too small and began to sink, further hampering the mission.

Erik Berga, police operations chief in northern Buskerud County, said: "The boat was way too small and way too poor. When so many people and equipment were put into it, the boat started to take on water, so that the motor stopped."

Not to put too fine a point on it, the world is not Hollywood, and Norway is not so fucking sleepy. It is a highly-developed and extremely (oil-)rich and well-equipped modern 21st-century nation state. It is not Walton Farm or Hobbitland or Tellytubby Land or Shangri-fucking-la. There is only one reason for police and emergency services to exist, and that is to respond quickly and efficiently in case of emergency. Which is precisely what they normally do.

So is Australia but this sort of shit still happens here.

-thereby making it doubly, triply, quadruply, sevenhundredly, ballsachingly crystal-clear exactly what was going, exactly where it was going on, and exactly how urgently it needed to be responded to. Absolutely nothing "chaotic" about it.

Cept in the minds of people responding. I'm not saying this definitely happened, but you're just assuming it didn't when it can and does happen that people don't react the way they should and the way they were trained to. That needs to be established, not assumed

Note: The (untrained, unprepared, unpaid) civilians on the mainland didn't say wtf? and run around like headless chickens. They responded efficiently, competently and bravely while waiting for the fucking police and ambulances to finally turn up.

Yes this happens, often cos civillians can just act off their own initiative.

Precisely not. It would be crystal fucking clear. I repeat: about a thousand phone-calls had made it CLEAR that the killer was stuck on a tiny island (an island with a name), making him considerably easier to locate and deal with very quickly indeed than almost any spree killer in history.

1000 phone calls to emergency services. But no chaos. See to me even if its the one event, this is still a chaotic situation.

"Er, Lars, I think you're in charge here." "Er, no, Svein, I think it's Margrit. She's got the car keys ." "Let's have a cup of tea and take a vote on it." "No, let's ask King Harald, he's the boss. Where's the phone?" "I think Mats is using it."
- Nonsense. That's not the way it works, anywhere in the world.

Well thats sposed to happen in theory. Again look at the RC into the Black saturday Fires of 2009 that cost the Police Commissioner her career - cos she actually followed correct lines of command. Its exactly whats happened.

Then again, its situations like that that are easiest to manipulate, especially if you are somewhere important (a systempunkt) in the chain of command/communication. And usually its a fair bet that there's an element of corrupt fascism in every police force and many police forces are notorious for the relationship between corruption and freemasonry and come then there's P2, and Italy.

Now you're starting to make sense.

Look I don't have a cast iron opinion on this. My gut feeling is this guy is acting on his "own".

But that doesn't mean anything.

You're assumption is things always go well in disaster responses, but mine is that they, by definition, don't. In emergencies little flaws can create huge feedback loops that send everything to shit.

But ... assuming you're right where did this systempunkt attack happen? The cops response time and the decision to drive instead of flying? Thats a pretty important thing. How long did it take to make that decision?

Honestly the more I think about the more it seems that the slow response is a typical thing based on fuckups. But if I had to nominate a point to start looking I'd want to know how long it took to make that decision to drive to the island.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Norwegian Air Ambulance

The Norwegian Air Ambulance is the air ambulance service in Norway organised through the government owned limited company Luftambulansetjenesten (Air Ambulance Service). The service provides helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) and fixed wing air ambulance operations.

Dedicated planes are provided at six airports, and helicopters at 11 hospitals. In addition the service depends on the state Search and rescue helicopters for a full national coverage. The fixed-wing aircraft and HEMS helicopters are operated by the private companies Lufttransport and Norsk Luftambulanse on contract for the Air Ambulance Service. The rescue helicopters are operated by the Royal Norwegian Air Force 330 squadron

(...)

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

Ever seen the inside of a rescue chopper?

I don't imagine it'd be appropriate for the transport of paramilitary cops.

[lupercal]

Ever seen the inside of a rescue chopper?

I don't imagine it'd be appropriate for the transport of paramilitary cops.

So you know your way around paramilitary transport vehicles, do you? That doesn't surprise me.

[MacCruiskeen]

Andreas Hauss (Mathias Bröckers' co-author) briefly sums up the various ways in which this whole story stinks. - The police in the world's richest country had no boats and no helicopters, they claim to have received the first phone-call 30 minutes after the shooting started, and they then required another full hour to get there ( a hop and a skip from the capital) and arrest the killer?

Who can believe this?

Meanwhile the head of government was spirited away "to safety", and thus incommunicado.

There's something wrong with this picture, and the whole MO is wearisomely familiar.

(The link's in German, I'll translate the whole thing later if I can find the time.)

[Joe Hillshoist]

Ever seen the inside of a rescue chopper?

I don't imagine it'd be appropriate for the transport of paramilitary cops.

So you know your way around paramilitary transport vehicles, do you? That doesn't surprise me.

No but I've seen the inside of 2 different rescue choppers.

Once I was waiting for one to come get my wife. It arrived quickly, and really the whole thing, considering where we were and what actually happened. She was in the chopper and at hospital within and hour to and hour and a half, and we were at the bottom of a gully in the jungle behind the Gold Coast. Still from when the call was made till when she was in the chopper was at least an hour.

Possibly have squeezed 5 or 6 guys into there. How big is a SWAT team, what confirmed info did they have about who was doing what on the Island? Would you send 6 cops against what could be a Mumbai like scenario of 20 angry Muslims with machine guns?

Other times there have been accidents round here where we have needed ambos and the local rescue chopper and I've helped load people onto it. Its bigger, but it'd still be a struggle to squeeze 10 armed men into it.

Honestly to me it'd seem to make sense that the air ambos would be needed on the island anyway, along with armed cops so why not load em up and fly the cops in on rescue choppers.

Makes sense until you wonder if the guy has an rpg or something. But also ... fully equipped and ready to go emergency rescue chopper would also seem to be the sort of place you wouldn't want 10 massive aggro blokes with all sorts of weapons, cos there's all that equipment you need to keep people alive.

[barracuda]

The police in the world's richest country had no boats and no helicopters,

I don't think anyone is saying they had no boats or helicopters. The Royal Norwegian Air Force has eighteen military Bell 412 helicopters, six coast guard Westland Lynx helicopters, and twelve Westland Sea King helicopters co-owned by the Royal Airforce and the police. That's a grand total of 36 helicopters for use by the entire country's military and police force in a country of 385,252 square miles. As far as I can tell, the Westland Sea King even in a search-and-rescue setup probably could carry at least 8 or 9 outfitted commandos along with the pilot and co-pilot.

Regarding those search-and-rescue 'copters from your link, Mac:

Search and rescue helicopters
The Air Force 330 squadron has its headquarters at Sola Air Station outside Stavanger. The squadron operates out of four military airports: Sola Air Station, Ørland Main Air Station, Bodø Main Air Station, Banak Air Station and Rygge Air Station. A detachment is located at the civilian airport in Florø.

The squadron operates 12 Sea King helicopters and had 1 038 operations in 2005. At any given time the 330 squadron has six helicopters on 15 minutes readiness, one at each station. The helicopters are under command of the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre of Southern Norway located at Sola which is responsible for Southern Norway (Rygge, Sola, Florø and Ørland) and the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre of Northern Norway located at Bodø which is responsible for Northern Norway (Bodø and Banak). The primary function is search and rescue (SAR) but several hundred air ambulance missions are undertaken each year.

So, "At any given time the 330 squadron has six helicopters on 15 minutes readiness, one at each station." Now if you look at the Wiki article you linked to, you can trace the actual locations of the six municipalities which have rescue-ready helicopters sitting at helipads (Sola Air Station, Ørland Main Air Station, Bodø Main Air Station, Banak Air Station, Rygge Air Station, and Florø) and judge for yourself in a general sense just how long, with the fifteen minute readiness factored in, it would take one of these copters to lift off, fly to Oslo, pick up the anti-terrorist squad and head to Utoya, which was about twenty-five minutes away by car.

[MacCruiskeen]

Oh ffs, Joe.

1. Australia is not Norway.

2. Utroya is 23 miles from Oslo.

3. The Norwegian police, medical services and army are extremely well-equipped, including with various kinds of helicopter, demonstrably so. (I've already posted one link.) Not to mention the Norwegian armed forces, which are currently engaged efficiently in at least two wars and not constantly tripping over their own shoelaces and spilling their drinks.

4. A thousand voices all screaming exactly the same thing is not chaos, it's extreme simplicity and clarity. And urgency.

5. "Would you send 6 cops against what could be a Mumbai like scenario of 20 angry Muslims with machine guns?"

It would make as much sense to ask me whether a Great White Shark could beat Godzilla. In any case: it was not a "Mumbai like scenario of 20 angry Muslims with machine guns", as 700 young people with cellphones had just made crystal-clear to the police.

[Nordic]

.just saying its not impossible for a single human to foment this master plan, and focus on it every day and pull it off without a hitch like John Doe in Se7en.

Dude, that was a fucking MOVIE.

[8bitagent]

^ I think you're on the right track Mac. The incompetence defense won't wash at this late date. It also wouldn't surprise me to learn, in the course of some future procedural, that there was a terror response rehearsal, scheduled long ago and supervised by the US-UK intel apparatus, under way. Nor would it surprise me if Anders thought he was playing a role in it, if he thought anything at all. But that's a detail that won't be officially revealed anytime soon.

Oh, but it is revealed



oslo police ran bombing exercise with live explosives two days before
http://translate.google.com/translate?j ... %3D3569108

survivor from oslo blast says he saw masked men near government buildings night before

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-BhqrBiix0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akbjlbwwAZ8

[Nordic]

One more thing that has been disturbing me about all this.

Since ABB's image first appeared I've wondered how damn familiar he looks.

I swear I have seen that guy before. Either in real life or in a photo somewhere.

I felt the exact same way, Joe. Glad it's not just me.

Two possibilities. As Hugh pointed out, he resembles Julian Assange.

For me, he also looks a lot like a guy I used to know, twenty years ago now, who sorta glommed onto me and turned out to be a bit of a psycho with a criminal streak.

But .... I dunno, those "headshot" photos really give me the creeps. I guess for good reason.

There's definitely some weird resonance there. I'd be curious who else feels this way.