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From Los Angeles Times

Seeds of terror in Norway

Anders Behring Breivik has a lot in common with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

by Andrew Gumbel

July 28, 2011

America's violent far right would have no difficulty recognizing the tell-tale signatures of Friday's killing spree in Norway — and not just because they would see the confessed perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, as an ideological soul mate who, like their own heroes, thought he could trigger a white-supremacist revolution with bombs and bullets.

Breivik appears to have been more than simply inspired by American predecessors such as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber: The materials he used, the way he planned and carried out his attacks, and his own writings all suggest he was deeply familiar with the actions of some notorious political killers on this side of the Atlantic.

Breivik possessed a Glock semiautomatic, the same weapon McVeigh was carrying when he was arrested by a hawk-eyed Highway Patrol officer 90 minutes after the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma. Breivik also possessed a .223-caliber Ruger assault rifle, just like McVeigh.

The Ruger, in fact, has a long history of use by violent extremists because it is dependable, easy to load and fire, and cheaper than an AR-15 or M-16. It is also convertible, without much difficulty, to a fully automatic weapon.

Gordon Kahl, an iconic white-supremacist tax protester, was armed with a Ruger Mini-14 — the same model as Breivik's — when he led the FBI on a multi-state shooting spree from North Dakota to Arkansas in 1983. Richard Wayne Snell, a protege of Kahl's, was carrying a Mini-14 when he killed the only black trooper in southwestern Arkansas in 1984 and then battled it out with police across the state line in Oklahoma.

Snell, who was part of a violent revolutionary group known as the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, was a hero of McVeigh's who was executed in Arkansas on the very day of the Oklahoma City bombing: April 19, 1995.

Breivik acquired about 12,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and, according to the Norwegian police, appears to have used some of it to make the bomb that detonated in Oslo. That's the same farm fertilizer compound McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols acquired to build their bomb. They mixed about 4,000 pounds of the fertilizer with nitromethane and diesel fuel to construct a device powerful enough to rip the guts out of the Oklahoma City federal building and kill 168 people.

Such similarities of weaponry and methods are common among hard-right revolutionaries who tend to read the same pamphlets and books and frequent the same websites. The literature they share tends to fetishize military hardware and to speak reverently of the history of each piece of weaponry.

Perpetrators are often fairly explicit about their inspirations, which they draw both from real life and from pop culture. McVeigh, for example, likened the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City to the destruction of the Death Star in "Star Wars."

The far-right extremist world is replete with paranoia and fear of government informants, leading to a philosophy of action that Breivik and McVeigh appear to have shared. In America in the 1990s, the approach was known as "leaderless resistance" — the notion that everyone shares a common ideological goal but that individual warriors make their own plans in secret to minimize the broader movement's risk of exposure. People might work in cells or alone, but the idea — not always observed in practice — is to keep action plans strictly under wraps.

Breivik's lawyer says his client has told him about other cells in Norway and elsewhere in Europe that are devoted to fighting back against what he sees as a Muslim invasion of the continent. But he also claims to have carried out Friday's attacks alone, suggesting that he too embraced a leaderless resistance model, real or imagined.

Norway in 2011 might bear some superficial similarities to Oklahoma in 1995. Both were regarded as peaceful, safe places that were unlikely targets for terrorist attacks. But there were also differences. Breivik discusses in his 1,500-page Unabomber-style manifesto how much more difficult it was for him to assemble bomb materials than it was in the America of the mid-1990s. "Times are changing and the possibilities which were available to us during the time of Mr. Timothy McVeigh are no longer present," he wrote.

Norway also has much stricter gun control laws than the United States, and part of the reason Breivik settled on the Ruger Mini-14 was because, as he wrote, it was "the most army-like rifle allowed in Norway."

The Oklahoma City bombing was ultimately viewed as an operational disaster by the radical far right in this country because the death toll of innocents — including 19 children under age 5 — caused only revulsion and effectively squashed the American militia movement. Breivik's grand murderous folly is likely to generate that same kind of disgust.

Andrew Gumbel, a Los Angeles-based journalist, is writing a book about the Oklahoma City bombing, due out from William Morrow next April.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gumbel-breivik-mcveigh-20110728,0,6247708,print.story

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From Google News

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Norway police face questions over attacks response

(CNN) -- Norway's police are facing tough questions over their response to last Friday's terror attacks, in which 76 people died.

First, Oslo was rocked by a huge blast outside government buildings, which left eight people dead. Less than two hours later, a gunman reached Utoya island, some 20 miles away, and proceeded to fire on the mostly teenage participants of a political summer camp for well over an hour.

Reporters, particularly from the foreign press, have asked why it took an hour from the police first being alerted for armed officers to arrest the suspect, 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik.

Among their questions have been why a helicopter was not used to take elite officers to the scene, rather than them travelling by road, and whether problems with a police boat -- which meant civilian vessels had to be commandeered -- delayed the response.

Some have also asked whether the response to the bombing in the Norwegian capital took priority over the Utoya alert, with emergency phone operators and resources already tied up as frantic calls started to come in from young people under fire on the island.

Sissel Hammer, chief of police for the Nordre Buskerud district, which covers Utoya, told reporters Wednesday that her officers and members of an elite police unit had done their best to get to the island quickly.

"I don't think we had any chance to be there faster than we made it," she said.

Responding to the situation in Utoya was "the highest priority" for local police, and was not affected by events in Oslo, she said.

Her staff had done a "very demanding job" both during and after the event, she added.

At the same press conference, Haavard Gaasbakk, who was a commander on the scene, described how he grabbed his equipment and raced to the embarkation point for Utoya when the alarm was raised.

A problem with the engine of the police boat meant the 10 or so emergency personnel who had met there had to take two privately owned motor boats instead, he said.

However, these made the 700-meter crossing of the deep Tyrifjorden lake faster than the police boat would have done, he said.

As they approached, the police heard "a lot of shooting" from the southern part of the wooded island, with gunshots "coming fast and thick," Gaasbakk said.

Officers ran toward the shooting and were about 350 meters away, in very difficult terrain, when they started to shout to the suspect, he said. Suddenly they saw him in front of them with his hands above his head and his weapons -- a rifle and an automatic pistol -- on the ground.

The gunman was arrested by one officer as the others sought to find out of whether he was working alone and started to give first aid to a "conveyor belt" of the injured, Gaasbakk said. He spoke of his pride in the way police and local citizens rallied to help the injured.

Hammer said an evaluation of the police response would be carried out later this year.

A day earlier, police spokesman Johan Fredriksen rejected criticism of the police response to the massacre in Utoya.

"I don't think this could have gone faster," he said. "I don't see how that would be possible with the distance and with these conditions. We always try to be better but I don't see how we could have done this faster."

He said the police had only one helicopter, which is kept at an airfield north of Oslo, and that it would not have been suitable to transport a team of counter-terror officers from the capital to the scene.

"It took time to get the staff in. It was filled with irrelevant equipment for the purpose and has never been used for such operations," he said of the helicopter.

"I am of the opinion it would not have been any quicker to use it."

Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg announced an independent commission of inquiry Wednesday, which he said would take an exhaustive look at what had happened and report back within a year on what lessons could be learned.

But he rejected the suggestion that his country was naive and unready for potential attacks, saying Norway's security forces were aware of the danger of violent attacks and were prepared for them.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/07/28/norway.attacks.response/

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Massachusetts

Our View: Community policing philosophy still runs through department

No one can fault the City Council's call last week to explore the restoration of community policing in New Bedford.

The program puts police officers in intimate contact with neighborhoods, engaging youths, getting a feel for social trends, becoming active, engaged members of the community who happen to have authority to take action the average citizen can't.

Police Chief David Provencher has been invited by the council to a meeting of the Committee on Public Safety and Neighborhoods to discuss the program, but we anticipate that issues about the number of officers on the force will throw cold water on the council's hopes for restoring the program.

Provencher and Mayor Scott Lang agree the department would need about 285 officers (the force stands at about 250 today) to put community police back into neighborhoods without siphoning resources from other department units, such as anti-gang, narcotics, sex assault, violent crime, school resource, canine and more.

It was a cut in the state budget that led to a loss of 31 officers in March 2009. Contractual obligations to staff patrols at certain levels forced the reassignments.

In 2009, Lang and former Chief Ronald Teachman expressed the hope that all the department's reassigned officers would bring the community policing philosophy to their patrol assignments.

Provencher said this week that philosophy is based on three tenets:partnership, prevention and problem solving. And despite the absence of bicycle-mounted community police officers, the department's neighborhood presence continues, according to both the chief and the mayor.

Lang says every neighborhood meeting is still covered, and every one he's attended has had a police captain present. Provencher says he has instructed his leaders in the decentralized command structure to engage at every level of their command with every level of the community.

"Neighborhood leaders shouldn't be telling me anything I haven't already heard from the cops," he said.

Besides an approach that encourages all 250 officers to think like community police, Provencher says the decentralized command allows "force multipliers," or on-the-spot overtime shifts that put extra resources where they're needed, another result of intimate contact with the neighborhoods.

When the cuts came in 2009, the decisions were difficult, the chief said. One of those was to maintain the school resource officers, who function as community police during the summer, maintaining contact with the students they see the other three seasons of the year.

While the department is making things work with what they have, both Lang and Provencher would prefer to see the community police back in the neighborhoods. The dozen or so who were reassigned in 2009 were already down from 28 because of previous cuts. Nineteen new hires are expected to be added, but that's still short of the level needed. Provencher says a force of 310 "is absolutely necessary to do the things we need to do and do them well."

Lang and Provencher say the department loses some of the flexibility to shape a cadre around specific events, and sacrifices some of its ability to focus on quality-of-life issues, such as dealing with trash and litter, code violations, graffiti, panhandlers and the homeless, not to mention better suppression of crime.

But the mayor is also grateful for the improvements he's seen in community cooperation in reporting crime. The best ShotSpotter, he says, is witnesses who feel safe enough to say, "That's the guy I saw pull the trigger."

There's no doubt the City Council and the neighborhoods would like to see 310 officers on the department, as well. Until the budget gets an infusion of cash or other departments sacrifice more than they already have, the police will have to make do. At least those at the top appear to be inculcating their officers with the right attitude, and carrying it into New Bedford's neighborhoods.

http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110727/OPINION/107270345

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Wisconsin

Waukesha Night Out is Tuesday

Free event in Frame Park “to show support for community crime prevention,” said Sgt. John Konkol of the Waukesha Police Department.

by Sarah Millard

Tuesday night will be a busy one at Frame Park, where there will be police cars, fire trucks, live DJ music, karate demonstrations and even a special appearance from Bango the Buck.

Waukesha Night Out, the annual event that promotes community policing and safety, is being held from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday. The event is held “to show support for community crime prevention,” said Sgt. John Konkol of the Waukesha Police Department.

“It expands the partnership with the law enforcement and all the other agencies that are involved in the community,” Konkol said. “These are good people coming out to experience all these things.”

The free event has many major sponsors and supporters, including GE volunteers, We Energies, Waukesha Parks, Recreation & Forestry, Roundy's Corporation, Pick n' Save, Golden Guernsey Dairy, Target, La Estacion, Waukesha Citizen's Police Academy Alumni Association, the Waukesha Fire and Police Departments and Waukesha State Bank.

“The city's not paying for this,” explained Konkol. “It is all funded by donations.”

The event will have free games with prizes for children. Other attractions include meeting the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department's K-9 Unit and martial art demonstrations. Members of the Waukesha Common Council and Mayor Jeff Scrima also are expected to be in attendance. The Milwaukee Admirals will be giving demonstrations, Konkol said, and while the Racing Sausages are at the Milwaukee Brewers game that night, Bango the Buck will be there as well.

The fun night has free refreshments, including corn and hot dogs.

“I hope the corn is big enough to be picking,” said Konkol with a laugh.

Bike helmets from ProHealth Care will be for sale for $10.

“They are going to be professionally fitted,” Konkol said.

About 2,500 people have attended the event each year during the past several years, Konkol estimated. The crime prevention event has been at Frame Park for about 15 years, but officers previously would visit neighborhoods and block parties to encourage community safety.

“We couldn't really reach out to everybody,” Konkol said, which is why the event is now at Frame Park.

So what does Konkol like about the event?

“All the people that are smiling and happy,” he said. “It is a really great atmosphere. … It makes it worth it. There is a lot of volunteer work that goes into this.”

http://waukesha.patch.com/articles/waukesha-night-out-is-tuesday

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