Explosions in Oslo, Norway - 7 Dead

[mariab]

Speaking of capital punishment:

Crime & Punishment: Homegrown terrorist case challenges Norway’s faith in prisoner rehabilitation



By Laura Rozen | The Envoy – 6 hrs ago

Anders Behring Breivik, left, sits in an armored police vehicle after leaving the courthouse …

The Norwegian justice system delivered the first legal setback to the confessed perpetrator of last week's devastating attacks that killed 76 people, when the presiding judge ruled his arraignment hearing closed to the media today. Anders Behring Breivik 32, had apparently been hoping for a broad media platform to promote his white supremacist, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant views. He had already drafted a 1,500-page manifesto laying out his rationale for the bombing and shootings that devastated Norway last Friday. (It turns out, however, that at least a chunk of Breivik's manifesto, entitled "2083: A European Declaration of Independence," and compiled over three years, was plagiarized from an earlier treatise by the Unabomber.)
"Mr. Breivik started reading from his manifesto in court but was asked to stop," police told reporters, the BBC reported. "When he asked why the hearing was closed, the judge gave him the reasons."
Since police apprehended Breivik on the island of Utoya Friday, he has freely acknowledged that he carried out the bombing of central Oslo that killed eight people and the shooting massacre that took the lives of 68 young people attending a camp at Utoya. However, he does not accept criminal responsibility for his acts, judge Kim Hager told journalists in a brief press conference after the hearing Monday. The defendant "argu[ed] the killings had been necessary to prevent Europe being taken over by Muslims," the BBC reported.
Judge Kim Hager ordered Breivik held for eight weeks, four of them in total isolation, pending trial on charges of terrorism.
But the question remains: How will the Scandinavian nation's traditionally lenient legal system deal with what it has never faced before--a homegrown terrorist who proudly owns up to committing the worst acts of violence Norway has suffered since World War II?
Norway has no death penalty, and a maximum 21-year prison sentence. However, if convicted, Breivik's sentence could be extended for up to five years at a time if he's deemed a continuing threat, explained Carol Sandby, a lawyer with the Norway Office of Public Prosecutions, in an article by MediaPost's Peter O'Neill published Sunday in the Montreal Gazette.
Sandby said Norway's "General Civil Penal Code gives the state prosecutor the right to seek an extension of sentences beyond the 21-year maximum for up to five years at a time, on the condition that the inmate is deemed to be a 'high risk' of repeating serious offenses," O'Neill writes.
But while it's "technically possible" to serially extend the five-year prison sentences beyond the 21 years, Sandby said that the Norwegian justice system generally does not exercise that option.
"You can, but it's highly unlikely," Sandby told O'Neill. "That would mean that person is going to spend his entire life in jail."
What's wrong with that? Norwegians strongly believe in the rehabilitation of prisoners to prepare them for a successful reintegration into society after their incarceration.
Norway "takes the mantra of rehabilitation to an extreme," Foreign Policy's Robert Zeliger explains. "The Norwegian prison system takes seriously the philosophy that inmates should be treated as humanely as possible and that jail sentences should be seen less as punishment than as an opportunity to reintegrate troubled people back into society."
Norwegians tend to see "acts of extreme violence ... as aberrant events, not symptoms of national decay," Time Magazine's William Lee Adams reported last year. Norwegian prison guards undergo two years of training, "don't carry guns ... and call prisoners by their first names and play sports and eat meals with them," Adams reported.
That approach -- and its underlying premise that people who commit crimes are troubled who should be given a second chance and prepared to live again amongst society -- can perhaps be credited with Norway's extremely low prison-recidivism rate—only about 20 percent of those imprisoned in Norway commit a repeat crime that sends them back to prison. Recidivism figures in the United States and the United Kingdom, by contrast, are much higher-- 50 to 60 percent, Time reported.
Indeed, Norway, a country of 5 million people, only has about 3,300 prison inmates, according to Time. That gives Norway a ratio of prison inmates to the country's overall population roughly ten times lower than that of the United States.
"That's what the world needs to understand about Norway," Sandby told PostMedia. "This incident represents our loss of innocence, because we've been a very safe country to live in until now. There's been no reason to keep people in prison for life."
Whether Breivik will test Norway's ideas about crime and punishment -- and whether the likes of Breivik deserves a chance to live in freedom among them again -- remains to be seen.
For his part, Breivik indicated to court officials today he's prepared to spend the rest of his life in prison. And his father, a former Norwegian diplomat from whom Breivik is estranged, told the UK Telegraph he thinks his son "should have taken his own life, too" for his heinous acts. "That's what he should have done."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/envoy/no...192223814.html

[ZippyTheChimp]

But in the end does it matter if someone wasn’t inherently evil, as is argued by opponents of capital punishment? Does it matter what happened to them along the way to make them what they were? Not after they committed their crimes, it doesn’t. They’re all part of the same sludge as raging maniacs in prison with a mile-long rap sheet that ended up spraying a liquor store with gunfire. Whether it’s death row, prison, or an asylum, he’ll never see freedom again, & whatever he was trying to achieve was for nothing.

I think you're missing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about a legal defense for responsibility for his actions.

Go back to this:

This guy is not crazy at all. His goal was to dismantle & destroy the political future of Norway. At the same time he hoped to engender suspicion and hatred of Muslims, forcing a revolution against them. He was incredibly systematic in what he planned and how he pulled it off.

His name should not be spoken.

I don't toss around the word evil, but here it fits.

The implication is that he had some rational political agenda, rational in the sense that it could achieve a goal other than mass murder.

OBL is a good counterpoint. Not only was he not insane, but his actions were completely rational, well thought out. OBL was evil and diabolical, as were his actions; but they achieved the results he wanted beyond the mass murder.

BTW:

Psychologists would certify any human (for lack of a better term) who tries to justify taking a life – or lives – to achieve their own end as (technically) insane

What psychologist ever stated such a thing? Even technically.

[ZippyTheChimp]

and compiled over three years, was plagiarized from an earlier treatise by the Unabomber.)

Good read, Stache.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Glenn Beck hits 'new low'; compares Norway victims to Hitler Youth

July 25, 2011 | 3:41 pm

Glenn Beck, who in June aired his final cable tv show on Fox News, is still on the radio and has found a new way to get his name into the headlines around the globe.

Instead of calling the president of the United States a racist, Beck focused on the scores of young people gunned down at a camp in Norway. Beck said the camp reminded him of Adolf Hitler's infamous Hitler Youth.

"There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing," Beck stated in the first minute of his syndicated radio show Monday.

Torbjørn Eriksen, the former press secretary to Norway's prime minister, was not amused.

"Young political activists have gathered at Utoya for over 60 years to learn about and be part of democracy, the very opposite of what the Hitler Youth was about," Eriksen told The Daily Telegraph. "Glenn Beck's comments are ignorant, incorrect and extremely hurtful," he added.

To answer Beck's question of "who does a camp for kids that's all about politics?": Caroline Shinkle does. The recent high school grad founded Camp USA two years ago. The free, nonprofit, nonpartisan political camp in Cape Cod, Mass., is designed for middle-schoolers.

According to its website, Camp USA aspires to have kids leave the camp "with knowledge, confidence, and eagerness to be politically involved."

Conservative columnist Jeff Lukens created a political camp in Tampa, Fla., which aligns itself closer to "tea party" values. One of the games described by the St. Petersburg Times would surely make presidential hopeful Ron Paul smile.

"Children will win hard, wrapped candies to use as currency for a store, symbolizing the gold standard. On the second day, the 'banker' will issue paper money instead. Over time, students will realize their paper money buys less and less, while the candies retain their value," the newspaper explained.

Los Angeles Times

[mariab]

^ I read that too. Douche.

I think you're missing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about a legal defense for responsibility for his actions.

Go back to this:The implication is that he had some rational political agenda, rational in the sense that it could achieve a goal other than mass murder.

OBL is a good counterpoint. Not only was he not insane, but his actions were completely rational, well thought out. OBL was evil and diabolical, as were his actions; but they achieved the results he wanted beyond the mass murder.

BTW:
What psychologist ever stated such a thing? Even technically.

I did bring up the legality of it, but only to use an example of his thinking & sometimes the way to understand it is to put it in a legal perspective, because then you have to dissect this person & their history step by step.

How can any of these people's political agendas be rational? Even without mass murder? Do I think he's crazy? Yes, as are the others even though in their minds they achieved their goals beyond mass murder. How were obl's actions rational? What achievement did he really make? With the exception of the people who supported him, he damned his cause.

No, I've never first-hand heard a psychologist determine every single murderer insane, but how wouldn't they? You don't have to be a stark raving maniac to be crazy. Van der sloot was cool as a cucumber & very methodical but he was GONE. No sane person could do any of the things these people did. Their achievements couldn't have come to be were it not for mass murder & they are very aware of that when they make their plans. And that in itself is not rational thinking.

[lofter1]

Looking at the more positive side of humanity ...

A Tale of Heroism During the Norwegian Massacre

Marcel Gleffe and his family had been hoping for a week of relaxation at a Norwegian campground. But when gunfire started on an island across the water, he and several others jumped into their boats and began rescuing distraught teenagers swimming for their lives. "It goes without saying," he says.

Der Spiegel
By Anna Reimann and Gerald Traufetter in Utvika, Norway
July 14, 2011

The man who had suddenly become a hero pours himself a beer and lights a cigarette. He only managed one or two hours of sleep the night before and he looks tired. It is the day after the massacre at the Norwegian youth camp on Utøya Island. The suspected perpetrator, Anders Behring B. cold-bloodedly shot down 85 people on the previous day -- but dozens were able to flee by jumping into the water and swimming towards the mainland.

It is 24 hours since Marcel Gleffe became a key figure in pulling many of these young camp goers out of the water. Thirty-two years old, Gleffe is a roofer from Germany who has worked in Norway for the past two-and-a-half years. Currently, he is vacationing at a campground in Utvika together with his parents Walter and Heidrun. The campground is directly across from the island where the massacre took place.

He takes a deep drag on his cigarette and begins to tell his story. It was a chilly late afternoon on Friday and the Gleffe family had just sat down for coffee at the table in front of their RV. They were talking about the attack that had just taken place in Oslo , about the bomb and the several people it had killed. A neighbor at the campground had told them of the shocking attack.

Suddenly, they heard a hollow bang. First just one or two, "but then it was an entire salvo," says Heidrun, 53. They saw dark smoke rise up from the island. "I said to my husband, 'come on, lets go down to the jetty, we have to see what happened." Maybe it was some fireworks, they thought, or some sort of exercise.

Bobbing in the Water

The jetty is just 200 meters from where their RV was parked. Several boats are tied up there and the island is just 600 meters across the water. It's easy to see the rocks on the island's shore and the ferry bobbing in the water.

When they arrived at the jetty, the Gleffes could see a man fishing a girl out of the water, she must have been 16 or 17 years old, and she was clad only in her underwear. Immediately behind her was another girl, screaming as she swam. "She was yelling 'help, help,' she screamed 'shooting!' and that we should call the police, Heidrun says.

It was the moment when the Gleffes realized that something terrible must have happened on the island. "We saw several heads bobbing in the water," Heidrun says.

The heads they saw were several teenagers who had jumped into the water in an attempt to escape. By the time the Gleffes saw them, dozens had likely already been killed by the gunman rampaging across Utøya.

The family immediately jumped into action, as if by remote control, not wanting to lose a second. Heidrun wrapped the girl who had reached the shore into a blanket and brought her to their RV. She was freezing and in shock.

Helping Each Other

"In such a situation, you don't think at all," her son Marcel says. He took off and grabbed the key for the small red boat that they had rented for the week and quickly got the motor running. "I immediately suspected that there was a connection to the attack in Oslo," he says.

The teenagers who were swimming in the water called out: "Don't come closer! Don't come closer."

But Marcel did. "I just acted," he says. He saw more and more people jumping into the water from the rocks on the shore and looked through a telescope at the island. Suddenly, he saw the attacker, squatting on a rock with his weapon raised. Eyewitnesses later said that he also shot at those who had already managed to jump into the water.

"There were people swimming everywhere in the water," Marcel says. "I threw them lifejackets and pulled those into the boat who were having the most trouble. Everyone was screaming, but they were also helping each other." They screamed, they cried, but they also hugged each other for courage. "It was unbelievable to see how strong they were," Marcel says.

The 32-year-old took his boat out into the water again and again, collecting more people and bringing them back to the jetty. There, additional helpers were waiting, and several other campers with their boats were also pulling teenagers out of the water. Marcel guesses that he alone was able to bring about 20 of them to the shore, he doesn't know exactly how many anymore ...

FULL STORY

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2011
All Rights Reserved

[lofter1]

Andrew Sullivan makes a very good argument that this Christianist killer is "extremely sane" ...

Notice how unlike other crazed madmen, he does not end his killing spree by killing himself. Notice how he has not pled insanity; but has pled not guilty even though he concedes the horror of his actions. This man is extremely sane. Notice the justification:

Speaking at a televised news conference, [Breivik's lawyer] Mr. Heger said that Mr. Breivik had acknowledged carrying out the attacks but had pleaded not guilty, because he “believes that he needed to carry out these acts to save Norway” and western Europe from “cultural Marxism and Muslim domination."

He did what he did, knowing it was evil, because of a passionate commitment to a political cause, which has become fused with a politicized parody of one religion, and with a passionate paranoid hatred of another one.

[ZippyTheChimp]

I did bring up the legality of it, but only to use an example of his thinking & sometimes the way to understand it is to put it in a legal perspective, because then you have to dissect this person & their history step by step.

In legal terms, insanity absolves the person from responsibility for their actions. Again, that's not what I'm saying at all.

How can any of these people's political agendas be rational?

You're confusing rationality with morality.

No, I've never first-hand heard a psychologist determine every single murderer insane, but how wouldn't they? You don't have to be a stark raving maniac to be crazy.

So everyone who's committed pre-meditated murder should be in a mental hospital instead of prison?

No sane person could do any of the things these people did.

The dark side of humanity that makes us uncomfortable. The Banality of Evil.

[hbcat]

Zippy, but why do think he is crazy then? He is rational and cognizant of the consequences of his actions. His rational goal, other than mass murder, is to instill fear in his fellow Europeans and angst into thinking over immigration policy. He hopes to escalate fear and anger against Muslims living in Europe. This strategy may in fact backfire on him, but it is still a wider goal. In terms of planning and motive, he isn't at all like the Virginia Tech gunman, for example.

He clearly hopes other "Christian conservatives" (his language) will follow his example. Are you saying that if no one else carries out a terror attack of this kind, he's crazy, but if someone or more do, then he is?

[ZippyTheChimp]

His rational goal, other than mass murder, is to instill fear in his fellow Europeans and angst into thinking over immigration policy. He hopes to escalate fear and anger against Muslims living in Europe. This strategy may in fact backfire on him, but it is still a wider goal. In terms of planning and motive, he isn't at all like the Virginia Tech gunman, for example.

Have you read any part of his manifesto?

His profile may not turn out to be like the Virginia Tech gunman, but he was living in a world of fantasy, which continued after his arrest. His self-interview paints a picture of extreme narcissism. I don't think changing Norway's immigration policy was his goal; more like becoming a Knight in shining armor.

Andrew Sullivan: Notice how unlike other crazed madmen, he does not end his killing spree by killing himself.

Or maybe an "extremely sane" person would have planned an escape.

[mariab]

You're confusing rationality with morality.

In the Norway case, that line has definitely been blurred. How could he hatch up a plan like this, even without the murders, in a rational way? And how would he think that his plan would come to fruition without the immorality of murder?

So everyone who's committed pre-meditated murder should be in a mental hospital instead of prison?

No. This guy is insane, but it was premeditated & he should rot in prison if there's no death penalty. He should not, however - nor should anyone - be absolved of responsibility because he may very well be certified insane. I don't think that just because someone is insane doesn't mean they didn't realize right from wrong. I also don't think that's the way it is 100% of the time. Some really don't know. He was one of the ones who knew.

The dark side of humanity that makes us uncomfortable. The Banality of Evil

I've read in a few places that we are all capable of evil and/or killing. Thinking evil thoughts? Guilty. All of us. Capable of carrying out murder for for selfish purposes? Not me. Think I would have picked up on that by now. Capable of killing for self-defense, defense of family (tribe/offspring)? Yes, we're all capable of that. Crimes of passion; finding husband/wife in bed with another woman/man? Some of us are, I hope I'm not, although I understand the rage behind what turns Miss Hand into Miss Knife.
The dictionary definition of evil is interesting: Noun- a:The fact of suffering, misfortune, wrongdoing b: a cosmic evil force.
Or Something that brings distress, sorrow, or calamity. Doesn't seem as malevolent as I always thought of it: Of the devil, or satan.

[GordonGecko]

Comes down to your definition of insane. To me he was clearly in full mental control before & during the act, he knew exactly what he was doing

[ZippyTheChimp]

In the Norway case, that line has definitely been blurred. How could he hatch up a plan like this, even without the murders, in a rational way? And how would he think that his plan would come to fruition without the immorality of murder?

I wasn't talking about the Norway act, which I regard as immoral and irrational. I was referring to OBL. His actions were immoral, but within the context of what he wanted to do, he acted rationally. He didn't sacrifice himself, but sent out others. He avoided capture. His purpose was to draw the US into a war in the Middle East.

No. This guy is insane, but it was premeditated & he should rot in prison if there's no death penalty.

I wasn't talking about this guy. It started with your statement:

Psychologists would certify any human (for lack of a better term) who tries to justify taking a life – or lives – to achieve their own end as (technically) insane

False.

The dictionary definition of evil is interesting: Noun- a:The fact of suffering, misfortune, wrongdoing b: a cosmic evil force.
Or Something that brings distress, sorrow, or calamity. Doesn't seem as malevolent as I always thought of it: Of the devil, or satan.

Not everyone believes in Satan. Evil is usually what people do, so it's the adjective that's first described in the dictionary:

adjective- 1. Morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.

What you should be looking up is the definition of insanity.

[mariab]

I wasn't talking about the Norway act, which I regard as immoral and irrational. I was referring to OBL. His actions were immoral, but within the context of what he wanted to do, he acted rationally. He didn't sacrifice himself, but sent out others. He avoided capture. His purpose was to draw the US into a war in the Middle East.

As far as obl, the war wasn't his ultimate objective. His ultimate objective was to destroy the US & he failed. That objective in itself is irrational to me, the same irrationality that wants to nuke the entire middle-east because of a few douchebags. As far as military/war strategy, fine. I'll throw the rational tag in there although if he wanted us destroyed he should've started with our military bases.

False.

What would you call someone who would kill someone or many for their own selfish purpose, no matter the purpose? Normal? Psychologists know far more about the psyche than I ever will, but I don't see how they cannot call anyone like that sane. Calculating, methodical, can also be insane.

What you should be looking up is the definition of insanity.

I know the definition of insanity, & it's not always going to look like jared loughtner or charles manson. They're not always going to have the look in their eyes & speaking in tongues. I think you get the feeling I'm trying to shield brievik from the pre-meditated murderer tag. If that's the case, not so. It was premeditated, calculated, & very methodical, & I still believe he's insane.

[eddhead]

How about crazy yet pragmatic?

Odd as that sounds, I agree with it. I believe one can be both both crazy and mind skilled in certain twisted sort ways. He certainly fits the bill