Fort Lauderdale Shooter: A Failure of Public Education?

Interesting idea in the article: If only public education wasn't so girl-centric and PC, maybe this guy, and other fatherless boys on the fringe, could have formed an identity that would have been more resistant to radicalization.

American Thinker, Thomas Lipscomb

"As Santiago's story emerges from the usual fog bank of confusion the press and law enforcement conspire to maintain in all these cases, we will see an all too familiar pattern.  A decent enough kid, caught between a background in Puerto Rico and the United States, joins the military but hasn't enough of a sense of self motivation to resist a strong strain of Islamic idealism which appears more attractive than the Army.  At least the Muslims appear not to engage in double-talk, to have clear objectives and a higher purpose in their lives than following orders in a military mission that doesn't make much sense even to those who run it.  Santiago becomes mentally confused and gets kicked out with a general discharge by a smart colonel who senses an opportunity to get rid of a problem in the making before things get worse for the Army.  The colonel sees cases like this all the time these days.

Santiago then gets a security job in Alaska, moves a little over a mile from the only mosque in that state; knocks up a local girl he doesn't marry; and, under the pressure of all this and a new baby and no resources, starts to hear voices in his head he believes are from the U.S. government, trying to get him to look at Islamic terrorist websites.  In a last pathetic call for help, he goes to the FBI, which does its usual CYA look-over and does nothing in this case, as it has done nothing in so many others once it has the paperwork to prove it saw him.  The FBI takes no interest in his access to firearms or perhaps placing him on a watch or no-fly list until some follow-up check on him.

The local police get Santiago a hospital mental checkup, and then he is given some counseling.  Then he drops out of sight of his worried family.  Something is happening

Friday afternoon, we found out what he finally chosen, on Epiphany, as the ultimate meaning in his confused life."

Did Feras Freitekh intentionally crash that plane in Connecticut?

The wreckage of the twin-engine Piper that crashed in East Hartford, CT on October 11, 2016. Can't believe one of the people aboard survived. People really do kill themselves by means of airplanes; it's not just a terrorist thing.

NYT

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken over the investigation into the crash of a small plane in Connecticut on Tuesday afternoon, looking into the possibility that the aircraft was deliberately downed by one of the two people on board, according to the authorities.

Lt. John Litwin of the East Hartford Police told reporters on Wednesday morning that he would not comment on specific details of the investigation, but confirmed that the F.B.I. was leading the inquiry.

“Although you can see the investigation is extremely active, it is still in its infancy,” Lieutenant Litwin said. “Nothing has been ruled out, including an accident.”

He said two people were on board the Piper PA-34 Seneca twin-engine plane at the time of the crash, although it is unclear who was at the controls.

The plane is equipped with two set of controls, so at any given point, either person could have been piloting the aircraft, Lieutenant Litwin said.

One person aboard was killed in the crash; he was identified as Feras M. Freitekh, 28, a Jordanian national. The other person escaped from the burning wreckage and is now at a hospital in Bridgeport being treated for his wounds, which were described as serious but not life-threatening. 

Lieutenant Litwin said that the survivor had been able to speak to investigators but would not comment on what he might have told them.

Four law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation told The New York Times on Tuesday that the survivor had said that the crash was not an accident."

15th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor

I was wondering if the United States was as maudlin about Pearl Harbor on its fifteen anniversary, and I suppose it was. The difference between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 being that Japanese imperialism had been ground into dust 11 years before. For an account of the Pearl Harbor raid, Walter Lord's Day of Infamy can't be beat.

Martin Seligman and CIA torture

"No, I actually don't know where the bodies are buried."

Despite the recent hatchet job in the NY Review of Books, I'd say that the APA's Hoffman report generally clears Martin Seligman, with regard to involvement in U.S. government torture programs.

"APA’s critics have hypothesized that Seligman took a far more active role in supporting the CIA’s interrogation program than the relatively tangential interactions described above.They point to the December 2001 meeting at Seligman’s home and an email from Hubbard in March 2004 expressing gratitude for Seligman’s help “over the past four years” as evidence that Seligman was an active participant in supporting the CIA’s interrogation program. Seligman and Hubbard had similar, though not identical, explanations for Hubbard’s comment. Seligman explained that he had previously asked Hubbard about the email and that Hubbard had explained that he was referring to the pro bono lecture Seligman had given to the Navy SERE school in May 2002. Hubbard said that he was “basically” thanking Seligman for hosting the meetings in his home in 2001. Thus, both Hubbard and Seligman explained that Hubbard was thanking Seligman only for his involvement in the meetings that have become public knowledge.  

Critics also allege that the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, founded by Seligman, received a $31 million sole source contract from DoD in 2010 because of assistance Seligman provided to the government with its counter-terrorism efforts. Seligman said that this contract was awarded because there were no competing entities who had the same experience in training and research on the topic of positive psychology, and there was an urgent need for a program in positive psychology to help returning troops. Seligman clarified that during negotiations on this contract, there was never any mention that the contract related to past work he might have done for DoD or other intelligence  agencies.

Sidley [the independent reviewer responsible for this report] has not uncovered evidence that Seligman had interactions with the CIA beyond the isolated meetings and lectures in the year after 9/11 that are a matter of public record. It is possible that more interactions occurred, particularly given Hubbard’s comment that Seligman had provided assistance over the course of four years, but no evidence suggests that interrogations were ever directly discussed at these meetings, despite the fact that the scientific theories that Mitchell and Jessen later adapted to construct the CIA’s interrogation program clearly were. On balance, it seems difficult to believe that Seligman did not at least suspect that the CIA was interested in his theories, at least in part, to consider how they could be used in interrogations. However, we found no evidence to support the critics’ theory that Seligman was deeply involved in constructing or consulting on the CIA’s interrogation program, and no evidence that such consultation would have involved APA officials even if it had occurred."

Iran was behind the Khobar Towers attack (duh)

Lest we forget...

The Washington Times - Monday, October 5, 2015

"Bill Clinton’s administration gathered enough evidence to send a top-secret communique accusing Iran of facilitating the deadly 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing, but suppressed that information from the American public and some elements of U.S. intelligence for fear it would lead to an outcry for reprisal, according to documents and interviews.

Before Mr. Clinton left office, the intelligence pointing toward Iran’s involvement in the terror attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen and wounded hundreds was deemed both extensive and “credible,” memos show.

 It included FBI interviews with a half-dozen Saudi co-conspirators who revealed they got their passports from the Iranian embassy in Damascus, reported to a top Iranian general and were trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), officials told The Washington Times.

The revelations about what the Clinton administration knew are taking on new significance with the recent capture of the accused mastermind of the 1996 attack, which has occurred in the shadows of the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran.

Ahmed al-Mughassil was arrested in August returning to Lebanon from Iran, and his apprehension has provided fresh evidence of Tehran’s and Hezbollah’s involvement in the attack and their efforts to shield him from justice for two decades, U.S. officials said.

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh told The Times that when he first sought the Clinton White House’s help to gain access to the Saudi suspects, he was repeatedly thwarted. When he succeeded by going around Mr. Clinton and returned with the evidence, it was dismissed as “hearsay,” and he was asked not to spread it around because the administration had made a policy decision to warm relations with Tehran and didn’t want to rock the boat, he said."

Middle-aged college professors from Virginia can be heroes, too!

Prof. Mark Moogalian, 51, from Midlothian, Va. Apparently he teaches English at the Sorbonne.

Telegraph (UK)

"Mr Moogalian, who lives in Paris but is originally from Midlothian, Virginia, US, is the previously unnamed man who came to the aid of “Damien A”, 28, a French banker who confronted El-Khazzani.

The academic acted instinctively to protect his wife Isabella Risacher, who was also aboard the Thalys train.

He tackled the Kalashnikov assault rifle off El-Khazzani, who then drew a sidearm and shot him in the neck before taking back the rifle, his sister has revealed.

Three other US citizens including two military personnel, and Chris Norman, a British businessman then stepped in to disarm and overpower the assailant.

Mr Moogalian’s sister Julia said: “He made sure his wife was hidden behind a seat. She watched the whole thing happen.

“He did manage to get the weapon away from the gunman.

“But the gunman then pulled another gun and shot my brother.

"There's a video of him saying 'help me' - he thought he was losing so much blood he would die.

"He's in extremely good shape - he cycles miles and runs - so we think that stood him well for this.

"The French President has reached out to ask him to come to dinner when he is fit enough."

The academic, a keen musician and cyclist, was shot in the back of the neck and the bullet passed through his body causing nerve damage, his sister said."

Is the Chattanooga shooter just another American mass murderer?

It's worth considering that we are observing in the Chattanooga shooter the same downward spiral that we see in other mass murderers, whether they shoot people in a college lecture hall, or bomb a federal building. Cultural/political factors play a role, but may not be central here. What we have is a young, alienated male, resentful that his life hasn't turned out the way he felt it should, depressed and desirous of self-annihilation, fascinated with firearms, and hoping (delusionally) to make his death more meaningful than his life had been.

Daily Beast

"His family says Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez suffered from depression and fought a drug problem and was let go from his job and was having money difficulties and harbored suicidal thoughts.

All of which could explain why the 24-year-old might do something suicidal.

But it does not explain why he would deliberately target an armed forces recruiting center and then a Navy facility, killing four Marines and a sailor.

The reason for that is almost certainly to be found in the pair of blog posts he posted on July 13, the same date his family says he began “a three-day downward spiral” as a result of his personal problems.

In the posts, Abdulazeez describes the material world as a prison and says liberation comes only in following the example set by the disciples of the Prophet Muhammad. He notes that “every one of them fought Jihad for the sake of Allah.”

“We ask Allah to be pleased with us, reward us with Janna,” he writes at the end of the second post, “Janna” being Paradise.

Here he proves himself to be just another dupe who embraced what Islamic extremists offer as an instant solution to all your problems and disappointments.

“If he’s not a terrorist, they ought to redefine the word terrorist,” a counter-terror law enforcement official said Monday.

Most likely, Abdulazeez’s problems go back to the troubled relationship between his parents, which include allegations the mother made in court papers that she had suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the father.

And surely everybody would have been better off if the family had succeeded in getting Abdulazeez into a drug rehab program, as it seems they had hoped to do.

That makes him no less a jihadi than Dylann Roof’s fractured family and drug use made him any less a white supremacist with fantasies of starting a civil war by massacring a Bible study group in a historic black church in Charleston

Extreme, violent ideologies bent on the murder of innocents are seldom havens for the well-adjusted."

Why are so many terrorists engineers?

Mohammad Abdulazeez, 24, who killed four Marines in Chattanooga, TN on July 16, 2015, reportedly graduated from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2012 with a degree in engineering.

Foreign Policy

"Whiling away his days in a CIA prison in Romania, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had a simple request for his captors: Would they allow the mechanical engineer to design a vacuum cleaner?

According to a fascinating Associated Press account of Mohammed’s detainment published on Thursday, the CIA allowed him to do just that, granting the terrorist access to vacuum schematics available online, which he used to re-engineer the appliance.

Mohammed, who faced brutal interrogation practices, was granted the request because the CIA wanted to prevent him from going insane. But Mohammed’s desire to put his engineering acumen to use also raises a question that has long enticed scholars of terrorism: Why is it that so many terrorists have engineering backgrounds?

It’s a question that’s particularly relevant when it comes to Islamic terrorism. Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 hijacker, was an architectural engineer. Two of the three founders of Lashkar e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist group, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology at Lahore. Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group, is chock full of engineers. Jihad al-Binaa, one of its branches, had more than 2,000 engineers working on reconstruction in Lebanon following the 2006 war with Israel.

But the link isn’t just anecdotal. In a 2009 paper, Diego Gambetta, an Oxford sociologist, and Steffen Hertog, a political scientist at the London School of Economics, found that "among violent Islamists with a degree, individuals with an engineering education are three to four times more frequent than we would expect given the share of engineers among university students in Islamic countries." Of a group of 404 members of violent Islamist groups in the Muslim world, Gambetta and Hertog tracked down the course of study for 178 individuals. Of those 178 violent Islamists, 78 (44 percent) were engineers. Broadening the course of study to engineering, medicine, and science, 56.7 percent of their sample had studied these fields.

According to Gambetta and Hertog’s findings, this is a problem unique to violent Islamist groups in the Muslim world. Among nonviolent Islamist groups, for example, engineers are present — but to a far lesser degree than in violent groups. And among violent Islamist groups in the West, education levels tend to be much lower on the whole. Meanwhile, non-Muslim left-wing groups — Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Red Brigades, and Latin American guerrilla groups — include almost no engineers. Among anarchist groups, engineers are equally absent. Right-wing groups include some engineers, but they are far from overrepresented.

To account for this disparity in occupation among Islamic terrorists in the Muslim world, Gambetta and Hertog sketch out a particular engineering "mindset" in which the profession is "more attractive to individuals seeking cognitive ‘closure’ and clear-cut answers as opposed to more open-ended sciences — a disposition which has been empirically linked to conservative political attitudes." Engineers, the authors find, are far more conservative on the whole than members of other professions. Islamic extremism "rejects Western pluralism and argues for a unified ordered society" — a political worldview that lines up nicely with a profession averse to chaos.

There’s also a societal component. In countries like Egypt, the period after the 1970s was one of massively thwarted expectations, with engineers emerging on the job market only to struggle to find employment. Per the classic explanation of the onset of rebellion — thwarted expectations coupled with relative deprivation — a generation of highly trained students had been made promises (and made subsequent investments in their education) that their societies could not deliver on. Angry, they turned to violence to restore order in society."

Osama bin Laden's Bookshelf

You know what would have been weird? If he had Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom, Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, J.S. Mill's On Liberty, and William F. Buckley's Blackford Oakes series of spy novels.

So the books below are purported to be part of the "treasure trove" of intel collected during the 2011 Geronimo rubout in Abbottabad. The fact that OBL apparently owned a couple of 9/11 "Bush did it" conspiracy books, some Illuminati-type conspiracy books, and a lot of Noam Chomsky-type "the U.S. is an Evil Empire" books is unspeakably hilarious to me. I added some book descriptions from Amazon.com for a few selected titles. (Speaking of conspiracies, did you notice that this list was released just a couple of days after Sy Hersh poo-poohed the existence of a "treasure trove"?)


• “The 2030 Spike” by Colin Mason

"The clock is relentlessly ticking! Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization. Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful 'drivers' will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course with potentially catastrophic consequences."

• “A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam” by I.A. Ibrahim
• “America’s Strategic Blunders” by Willard Matthias
• “America’s War on Terrorism” by Michel Chossudovsky

"In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky's 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by "Islamic terrorists". The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy. According to Chossudovsky, the "war on terrorism" is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The "war on terrorism" is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the "New World Order", dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex. September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington's agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State. Chossudovsky peels back layers of rhetoric to reveal a complex web of deceit aimed at luring the American people and the rest of the world into accepting a military solution which threatens the future of humanity."

• “Al-Qaeda’s Online Media Strategies: From Abu Reuter to Irhabi 007” by Hanna Rogan
• “The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” by Greg Palast
• “The Best Enemy Money Can Buy” by Anthony Sutton

"With mountains of documentation, mostly from government and corporate sources, Sutton shows that Soviet military technology is heavily dependent on U.S. and allied gifts, "peaceful trade" and exchange programs. We've built for, sold or traded, or given outright to the Communists everything from copper wiring and military trucks to tank technology, missile guidance technology, computers - even the Space Shuttle. Peaceful trade is a myth ... to the Soviets all trade is strategic. The paradox is that we spend $300 billion a year on a defense against an enemy we created and continue to keep in business. The deaf mute blindmen, as Lenin called them, are the multi-national businessmen who see no further than the next contract, who have their plants defended by Marxist troops (in Angola); who knowingly sell technology that comes back to kill and maim Americans."

• “Black Box Voting, Ballot Tampering in the 21st Century” by Bev Harris

"Author Bev Harris...learned was that modern-day voting systems are run by private for-profit corporations, rely on a few cronies for oversight, using a certification system so fundamentally flawed that it allows machines to miscount and lose votes, with hidden back doors that enable "end runs" around the voting system. Find out why your vote might not count -- and what to do about it!"

• “Bloodlines of the Illuminati” by Fritz Springmeier

"You've seen pieces of the puzzle, but still you wonder... Bloodlines of the Illuminati is a unique historical genealogical who's-doing-it book, rich in detail, providing a devastating exposé of the people and families who are THE movers and shakers of the United States and the entire world. You will recognize some of the names instantly. Many names have been purposely hidden from mainstream view. From international finance to war, presidents and dictators alike pay heed to these people. "Influence" doesn't even come close to describing their power. They have plans for you. Who are they? Author, Fritz Springmeier provides a wealth of material and inside information based on eyewitnesses. His outstanding research provides facts that are not available elsewhere. When you finish reading this book, the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place and you'll see the fascinating big picture. You will know who actually runs the New World Order conspiracy, and who is in the Illuminati. ... * Hot new information exposing Wolf Head (a group similar to Skull & Bones). * New genealogy charts, one shows how 25 Presidents are related, another how Prince Charles is related to Count Dracula."

• “Bounding the Global War on Terror” by Jeffrey Record
• “Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions” by Henry Sokolski and Patrick Clawson
• “Christianity and Islam in Spain 756-1031 A.D.” by C.R. Haines
• “Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies” by Cheryl Benard
• “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” by John Perkins
• “Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300” by John Coleman

300 people control the United States, arranged the Kennedy assassination, etc.

• “Crossing the Rubicon” by Michael Ruppert

"The attacks of September 11, 2001, were accomplished through an amazing orchestration of logistics and personnel. Crossing the Rubicon discovers and identifies key suspects—finding some of them in the highest echelons of American government—by showing how they acted in concert to guarantee that the attacks produced the desired result."

• “Fortifying Pakistan: The Role of U.S. Internal Security Assistance” (only the book’s introduction) by C. Christine Fair and Peter Chalk
• “Guerrilla Air Defense: Antiaircraft Weapons and Techniques for Guerilla Forces by James Crabtree
• “Handbook of International Law” by Anthony Aust
• “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” by Noam Chomsky
• “Imperial Hubris” by Michael Scheuer
• “In Pursuit of Allah’s Pleasure” by Asim Abdul Maajid, Esaam-ud-Deen and Dr. Naahah Ibrahim
• “International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific” by John Ikenberry and Michael Mastandano
• “Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II” by William Blum
• “Military Intelligence Blunders” by John Hughes-Wilson
• “Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s program of research in behavioral modification.” Joint hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate, 95th Congress, first session, August 3, 1977.
• “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies” by Noam Chomsky
• “New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11” by David Ray Griffin

"Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 - stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves - and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day."

• “New Political Religions, or Analysis of Modern Terrorism” by Barry Cooper
• “Obama’s Wars” by Bob Woodward
• “Oxford History of Modern War” by Charles Townsend
• “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy
• “Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower” by William Blum

"Ever meet a hit man? If not, then consider living in his political equivalent: The United States. In Rogue State: A Guide to the Worlds Only Superpower, find out how the U.S. sentences blasphemers to deaththat is, people and governments blaspheming the holy objectives of American foreign policy.

From incarcerating Nelson Mandela to dropping cluster bombs (which later turn to landmines) on Yugoslavia, from supporting Pol Pot to praising Noriega, the U.S. has been barbaric enough to do it. William Blum shows us how, even though Clinton calls America the worlds greatest force for peace, our Rogue State really needs to be leashed."     

• “The Secret Teachings of All Ages” by Manly Hall (1928)

"In 1928, a 20-something Renaissance man named Manly Hall self-published a vast encyclopedia of the occult, believing that "modern" ideas of progress and materialism were displacing more important and ancient modes of knowledge. Hall's text has become a classic reference, dizzying in its breadth: various chapters explore Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, alchemy, cryptology, Tarot, pyramids, the Zodiac, Pythagorean philosophy, Masonry and gemology, among other topics."

• “Secrets of the Federal Reserve” by Eustace Mullins

"The original book, published under the title "Mullins on the Federal Reserve", was commissioned by the poet Ezra Pound in 1948. Ezra Pound was a political prisoner for thirteen and a half years at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane). His release was accomplished largely through the efforts of Mr. Mullins."

• “The Taking of America 1-2-3” by Richard Sprague

JFK assassination conspiracy

• “Unfinished Business, U.S. Overseas Military Presence in the 21st Century” by Michael O’Hanlon
• “The U.S. and Vietnam 1787-1941” by Robert Hopkins Miller
• “Website Claims Steve Jackson Games Foretold 9/11,” article posted on article posted on ICV2.com (this file contained only a single saved Web page)

Seymour Hersh on the killing of Osama bin Laden

Sy Hersh, aged 78 and still poking his fingers in the eyes of the powers that be. He's the fellow who broke the My Lai massacre story. I wonder if his source for the piece below is Bob Gates?

London Review of Books

"It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. ...[W]ould bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations?...

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha [two senior Pakistani military officials] knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

...‘The compound [in Abbottabad] was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. 

...‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ ... The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

...At the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. ...There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone. ‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold otherwise.)

‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’ Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition, like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the retired official said. ‘Twenty tense minutes. The Black Hawk is still burning. There are no city lights. No electricity. No police. No fire trucks. They have no prisoners.’ Bin Laden’s wives and children were left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate. ‘Despite all the talk,’ the retired official continued, there were ‘no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks. The Seals weren’t there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. And they were not intelligence experts gathering information inside that house.’"

Tim McVeigh, Oklahoma City, and the Branch Davidian siege

Tim McVeigh, a U.S. Army veteran who earned a Bronze Star during the first Gulf War, was present during the Waco siege. He sold bumper stickers that read: "Is your church ATF [Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms] approved?" He set the bomb that destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He planned the attack for April 19, 1995 -- exactly two years after the Waco assault. It is not possible to understand his motivations for the OKC bombing without examining the Waco siege, as Gore Vidal shows in this excellent 2001 article from Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair

"In a week’s time “the Oklahoma City Bomber,” a decorated hero of the Gulf War, one of Nature’s Eagle Scouts, Timothy McVeigh, was due to be executed by lethal injection in Terre Haute, Indiana, for being, as he himself insisted, the sole maker and detonator of a bomb that blew up a federal building in which died 168 men, women, and children. This was the greatest massacre of Americans by an American since two years earlier, when the federal government decided to take out the compound of a Seventh-Day Adventist cult near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians, as the cultists called themselves, were a peaceful group of men, women, and children living and praying together in anticipation of the end of the world, which started to come their way on February 28, 1993. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, exercising its mandate to “regulate” firearms, refused all invitations from cult leader David Koresh to inspect his licensed firearms. The A.T.F. instead opted for fun. More than 100 A.T.F. agents, without proper warrants, attacked the church’s compound while, overhead, at least one A.T.F. helicopter fired at the roof of the main building. Six Branch Davidians were killed that day. Four A.T.F. agents were shot dead, by friendly fire, it was thought.

There was a standoff. Followed by a 51-day siege in which loud music was played 24 hours a day outside the compound. Then electricity was turned off. Food was denied the children. Meanwhile, the Media were briefed regularly on the evils of David Koresh. Apparently, he was making and selling crystal meth; he was also—what else in these sick times?—not a Man of God but a Pedophile. The new attorney general, Janet Reno, then got tough. On April 19 she ordered the F.B.I. to finish up what the A.T.F. had begun. In defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act (a basic bulwark of our fragile liberties that forbids the use of the military against civilians), tanks of the Texas National Guard and the army’s Joint Task Force Six attacked the compound with a gas deadly to children and not too healthy for adults while ramming holes in the building. Some Davidians escaped. Others were shot by F.B.I. snipers. In an investigation six years later, the F.B.I. denied ever shooting off anything much more than a pyrotechnic tear-gas cannister. Finally, during a six-hour assault, the building was set fire to and then bulldozed by Bradley armored vehicles. God saw to it that no F.B.I. man was hurt while more than 80 cult members were killed, of whom 27 were children. It was a great victory for Uncle Sam, as intended by the F.B.I., whose code name for the assault was Show Time."

Why did the Boston Marathon bombers do it?

Boston Globe

"Western commentators sometimes blame harsh economic conditions, dysfunctional family circumstances, confused identity, the generic alienation of young males, a failure to integrate into the larger society, and so on. None of this is convincing, as the Tsarnaev case shows.

Born in the former Soviet Union to a Chechen father who had sought asylum in the United States in 2002, both Dzhokhar and his brother Tamerlan had received the gifts of free education, free housing, and free medical care from various US governmental agencies.

Their paths to becoming US citizens could scarcely have been smoother. So why did the brothers feel compelled to build two explosive devices and detonate them in a crowd of spectators?

Growing up, the Tsarnaevs were typical examples of what I call “Mecca Muslims,” meaning that they were not raised to be zealots. The parents — at least in their early years in the United States — do not seem to have been very devout. The brothers rarely observed Islamic strictures: one had dreams of becoming a boxing champion and spent most of his days training while the other had a busy social life, dated girls, and smoked pot.

Yet when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote a bloodstained note in the final hours before his capture, the first words he used were: “I believe there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His messenger.” That is the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, and it is the most important of the five pillars of Islam. Today it is also the banner of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram.

What he wrote next made it clear that he was no naive dupe but a fully-fledged “Medina Muslim” — that is to say, a committed believer in the literal application of the teachings and practice of the Prophet Mohammed after his move to Medina and adoption of jihad — holy war — as a method.

“I’m jealous of my brother who ha[s] [re]ceived the reward of jannutul Firdaus [the highest level of Paradise] (inshallah) before me. I do not mourn because his soul is very much alive ... I ask Allah to make me a shahied (iA) [a martyr] inshallah to allow me to return to him and be among all the righteous people in the highest levels of heaven. He who Allah guides no one can misguide. A[llah Ak]bar!” He also offered this explicit account of his and his brother’s motivations: “the ummah is beginning to rise/ [unintelligible] has awoken the mujahideen, know you are fighting men who look into the barrel of your gun and see heaven, now how can you compete with that[?]”

When people commit violence in the name of religion, we must consider the possibility that they mean what they say."

King Abdullah of Jordan is going to go all William Munney on ISIS's ass

 

Washington Examiner

"Members of the House Armed Services Committee met with Jordan's King Abdullah Tuesday not long after news broke that ISIS had burned to death a Jordanian pilot captured in the fight against the terrorist group. In a private session with lawmakers, the king showed an extraordinary measure of anger — anger which he expressed by citing American movie icon Clint Eastwood.

"He said there is going to be retribution like ISIS hasn't seen," said Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter Jr., a Marine Corps veteran of two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, who was in the meeting with the king. "He mentioned 'Unforgiven' and he mentioned Clint Eastwood, and he actually quoted a part of the movie."

Hunter would not say which part of "Unforgiven" the king quoted, but noted it was where Eastwood's character describes how he is going to deliver his retribution. There is a scene in the picture in which Eastwood's character, William Munny, says, "Any man I see out there, I'm gonna kill him. Any son of a bitch takes a shot at me, I'm not only going to kill him, I'm going to kill his wife and all his friends and burn his damn house down."

IMDB has it slightly differently:

Will Munny: All right, I'm coming out. Any man I see out there, I'm gonna shoot him. Any sumbitch takes a shot at me, I'm not only gonna kill him, but I'm gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down.

The good King might disagree, but I think the point of the movie was more about these lines:

The Schofield Kid: [after killing a man for the first time] It don't seem real... how he ain't gonna never breathe again, ever... how he's dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger.

Will Munny: It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.

The Schofield Kid: Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.

Will Munny: We all got it coming, kid.

...

Little Bill Daggett: I don't deserve this... to die like this. I was building a house.

Will Munny: Deserve's got nothin' to do with it.

[aims gun]

Little Bill Daggett: I'll see you in hell, William Munny.

Will Munny: Yeah.

[fires]  

Un peuple se leve

This is a communist paper (yes, they have those in France), covering Sunday's mass rallies in France ("Je suis Charlie"). They are probably just referencing Francine de la Gorce's book, "A People Rises: 1963-1968," but I wonder if they caught the other reference (see below). Being atheists, I would think not. The Biblical reference is a hell of a lot more frightening, especially if you are an Islamist living in France.

Numbers 23:24

"C'est un peuple qui se lève comme une lionne, Et qui se dresse comme un lion; Il ne se couche point jusqu'à ce qu'il ait dévoré la proie, Et qu'il ait bu le sang des blessés."



"The people rise like a lioness; they rouse themselves like a lion that does not rest till it devours its prey and drinks the blood of its victims."

 

Psychologists in the CIA torture report

RCP

"In a secret CIA prison in Thailand, codenamed Detention Site Green, Abu Zubaydah sat shackled to a chair, naked except for a hood over his head. The windowless cell was painted white and illuminated by four halogen lights.

The terrorist said to have ranked third in al-Qaeda had been captured in Pakistan five months earlier, in March 2002. He had endured relentless questioning, but this day would be different: an American former military psychologist working as a CIA contractor and identified last week by the pseudonym Grayson Swigert would run the interrogation.

For the first time, Swigert had been authorised to use up to 11 “enhanced interrogation techniques”. According to critics of the Orwellian-sounding “EIT programme”, the US was entering the torture business.

The CIA officers interrogating Abu Zubaydah were directed by Swigert and a fellow PhD in psychology, given the name Hammond Dunbar, to place a rolled towel around his neck. They removed his hood, grabbed his face and forced him to watch a coffin being brought into the cell. He was slapped and slammed against a wall.

Six hours later, Swigert decreed that “waterboarding” would begin. Abu Zubaydah was held down as water was poured on to a cloth over his face, simulating drowning.

According to CIA records, Abu Zubaydah vomited and had “involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities”. He was to be waterboarded at least 83 times over the next 17 days. On one occasion, he “became completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth”.

An incendiary 525-page report summary released by Democrats on the Senate select committee on intelligence last week portrayed Swigert as the architect of a regime of torture. It depicted Swigert and Dunbar as profiteers who had duped the CIA into paying their company $81m (£51m).

“Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialised knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise,” the report stated.

Speaking at his home outside Tampa, Florida, James Mitchell, 62, a veteran of US air force special forces and a former instructor at its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, acknowledged that he was Swigert. He blasted the report, which has been bitterly criticised by the CIA and branded by Republicans as a partisan “hit job”. Dunbar was identified as a one-time Mormon bishop from Idaho called Bruce Jessen.

...

From 2002 to 2009, Feinstein said, 119 terrorist suspects — 26 of whom were innocent — were subjected to “coercive interrogation techniques, in some cases amounting to torture” at CIA “black sites” in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania and Afghanistan."

Just a few points:

1. The fact that one of these guys is a former Mormon bishop should not be surprising. The War on Terror has been in many ways a battle of Our Fundamentalists versus Their Fundamentalists.

2. I tend not to make much out of the fact that both of these guys had Ph.D.s in psychology. They weren't exactly using sophisticated psychological techniques to extract information.

3. A lot of people have made a lot of money off of the War on Terror. That includes psychologists Martin Seligman and Paul Ekman.

4. As I always say, if you condone torture, you must be prepared to torture innocent people. In fact, torturing the innocent child of a suspected terrorist in front of said suspect is one of the most effective means of eliciting information. (Just ask Saddam Hussein.) What? Don't like it? Then don't open that door.

5. People need to remember that the CIA exists to do illegal and immoral things. You don't need a secret intelligence organization to do legal and moral things. In my view, their greatest crime is that anyone found out about these activities -- some secret keepers.

Oprah Winfrey's "The Help" Ignited American Jihadi's Violent Fervor

"It's spelled, M-A-C-A-R-T-H-U-R."

Washington Post

Well, maybe the movie had a little bit to do with setting this fellow off. His empty and meaningless life was probably a lot more of a factor. And I can't understand how someone could write an article on this guy and fail to comment on his ridiculous name.

Douglas McAuthur McCain, tattooed and thin, never stayed in one place long. Born on Jan. 29, 1981, in Illinois, he would spend 33 years hopping from school to school, from business to business, continent to continent — until, finally, he landed in Syria, where he became the first American reported to die fighting for the Islamic State.

Much of the Douglas McAuthur McCain story remains unclear. It’s unclear how he died in a recent Islamic State battle, into which he carried his American passport and $800. It’s unexplained what led him down a path to Islamist radicalization and violence. And it’s unknown whether he traveled alone.

...

It was around that time [i.e., after failing to finish high school] that McCain started getting in trouble. Over the next eight years, he amassed nine misdemeanor convictions, according to Minnesota state court records. Problems began with a 2000 conviction for disorderly conduct. Then, in 2001, he was busted for misdemeanor theft. Two years later came a misdemeanor conviction for marijuana possession — his first of two minor busts for that offense. His driver’s license was eventually revoked, but McCain kept driving and got caught for that, too.

...

But his social media soon suggested [that he was not a "regular American kid"]. His tenure on Twitter began innocuously [sic] with a late 2012 dispatch: “I’m not feelin this Twitter sh– … wallahi I wants fried chicken. … Watching the Help starting to make me hate white people. … Ok its official f— white people.” He spoke of smoking hookah, watching National Geographic, his Somali friends and his growing religious zeal.

But on Facebook, his imprint was substantially darker. In 2010, McCain, who later traveled to Sweden and Canada, uploaded several images of the black Islamist militant flag. His photo spread became a confounding mixture of family life beside militants clutching swords and images of gold-plated firearms. Then there was this message: The “soldiers of Allah” are “coming back.”

"Watching the Help starting to make me hate white people. … Ok its official f— white people.” -- Douglas McAuthur McCain, former jihadi.

Is Boko Haram Leader Insane?

WSJ

ABUJA, Nigeria—When he appeared in a video on Monday boasting of having abducted more than 200 schoolgirls, the leader of terror group Boko Haram took the occasion to egg on the U.S. Army and get in a dig at ancient Egypt.

"We don't fear any American troops," shouted Abubakar Shekau, whose Islamist insurgency has terrorized northern Nigeria and recently drawn search-and-rescue advisers from the U.S. and other countries. "Let even the Pharaoh himself be sent down here! We will deal with him squarely!"

 

...

 

Now, Mr. Shekau, believed to be in his late 30s or early 40s, is finally getting a perverse kind of recognition—even becoming America's most wanted man in Africa. The $7 million bounty offered by the U.S. State Department is the largest ever offered for a single individual on the continent.

Mr. Shekau has achieved this ignominious rank through a willingness to slaughter. Boko Haram has killed more than 7,000 people in the past two years alone, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Most of the group's victims are Muslims deemed too close to the Nigerian state or insufficiently devout. Boko Haram loosely means "Western Education is a Sin" in the local Hausa language.

 

...

 

"Even his mother—his own mother—said he was insane," said the adviser. "They are not on speaking terms." Mr. Shekau's mother couldn't be located for comment.

U.S. officials also see Mr. Shekau as mentally unstable.

"Any impartial observer—especially those who have watched his public statements over the years—would be left wondering about Shekau's mental state, especially after his most recent video appearance," the U.S. counterterrorism official said.

 

...

 

In his latest speech, Mr. Shekau pointed out that in the international outrage over the kidnapped girls, no notice has been paid to his abduction of three times as many boys in the past year. "Why is the world not talking about that?" he asked.

His video diatribes often veer into the absurd. He has shouted threats against Margaret Thatcher, the late British prime minister. In a tape released in April, he called Abraham Lincoln an infidel three times. Queen Elizabeth II also is a recurring target of his harangues.

He also issues instruction to fellow jihadis across Nigeria. "Just pick up your knife, break into homes and kill," he demanded in a message in January. "Slaughter anyone in their sleep you come across."

With the abduction of the schoolgirls, news organizations and social media beyond Nigeria finally gave Mr. Shekau the attention he believes he merits.

 

...

 

"A poor guy from Maiduguri, he never thought that the U.S. president would be calling him [out] by name," said Fatima Akilu, director of behavioral analysis in the office of Nigeria's national security adviser. "He's on the lips of everybody and he can't believe his luck. And he will continue to hit out wherever he can to keep himself relevant."

Mr. Shekau has frequently welcomed efforts to hunt him down. "You can see I'm a radical!" he said in a video last year. "You should kill me!"

 

 

 

 

Boston Globe on the Tsarnaev family

Boston Globe

Tamerlan Tsarnaev first heard the voice when he was a young man.

It came to him at unexpected times, an internal rambling that he alone could hear. Alarmed, he confided to his mother that the voice “felt like two people inside of me.”

As he got older, the voice became more authoritative, its bidding more insistent. Tamerlan confided in a close friend that the voice had begun to issue orders and to require him to perform certain acts, though he never told his friend specifically what those acts were.

“He was torn between those two people,” said Donald Larking, 67, who attended the mosque with Tamerlan for nearly two years. “He said that several times. And he did not like it.”

Federal investigators have suspected that Tamerlan, the 26-year-old boxer from southern Russia who is believed, along with his brother, to have set off the deadly Boston Marathon bombs in April, was motivated, if not deliberately directed, by real life jihadist revolutionaries on the other side of the globe. But an investigation by the Boston Globe suggests that Tamerlan was in the perilous grip of someone far more menacing: himself.

The Globe corroborated with several people who knew him just how plagued Tamerlan felt by the inner voices. Some family acquaintances feared for his mental health, among them a doctor concerned it could be schizophrenia. The Globe’s five-month investigation, with reporting in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, and the United States, also:

■ Fundamentally recasts the conventional public understanding of the brothers, showing them to be much more nearly coequals in failure, in growing desperation, and in conspiracy.

■ Establishes that the brothers were heirs to a pattern of violence and dysfunction running back several generations. Their father, Anzor, scarred by brutal assaults in Russia and later in Boston, often awoke screaming and tearful at night. Both parents sought psychiatric care shortly after arriving in the United States but apparently sought no help for Tamerlan even as his mental condition grew more obvious and worrisome.

■ Casts doubt on the claim by Russian security officials that Tamerlan made contact with or was recruited by Islamist radicals during his visit to his family homeland.

■ Raises questions about the Tsarnaevs’ claim that they came to this country as victims of persecution seeking asylum. More likely, they were on the run from elements of the Russian underworld whom Anzor had fallen afoul of. Or they were simply fleeing economic hardship.

Freud on drone warfare

Perhaps in a whimsical mood, Sigmund Freud cited some unusual evidence for the aggressive impulse he found in mankind. In his essay “Reflections on War and Death,” he writes that French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau “asks the reader what he would do if without leaving Paris he could kill, with great profit to himself, an old mandarin in Peking by a mere act of his will. Rousseau implies that he would not give much for the life of the dignitary.” Imagine if great numbers could so exercise their will. What violence would be unleashed, how many prostrate bodies around the globe who never knew what hit them. Ecstasy!

And so it has come to pass. With the will to do it, the United States—that is, the White House—can now eliminate undesirables anywhere in the world by means of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, with over 2,300 remote executions so far. A case in point was the assassination last September of a U.S. citizen, suspected terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, as he was driving in Yemen. This was accomplished with less oversight than capture and extradition would have required—paperwork and negotiations avoided. Clean.

Attorney General Eric Holder says execution by drone is not assassination if the victim is threatening the state. It may not be due process as provided by the U.S. Constitution, but it’s “judicial process” as decided by the White House. Holder offers only scant details on the targets—classified, you know—but rest assured they have been painstakingly selected, and we are at war, though not, to be sure, in Yemen. That country, we’re told, at least partially approves of these attacks.

Pakistanis have complained that too many civilians are killed in American drone strikes. At a recent meeting with President Obama, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani demanded that drone attacks stop in Pakistan. No way, responded Obama. They’re needed to wipe out terror.

That’s what they all say, notes Freud, a congenital skeptic. Acts of violence are usually given some justification, deserved or not, to relieve the conscience. In this regard, he quotes Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who says that when excuses for any doubtful action are needed, reasons are “as plenty as blackberries.” Pick away. And drones can continue to pick away without impediment.

Read the rest...

Norwegian heavy metal musician arrested for "pre-crime"

 

Wall Street Journal, July 17, 2013

PARIS—French police Tuesday arrested Norwegian heavy metal musician and far-right extremist Kristian "Varg" Vikernes on suspicion he was preparing a mass killing, police said.

Police officers raised a red flag after Mr. Vikernes's wife legally bought four rifles, said Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor's office, whose antiterror division is examining the case.

French police had Mr. Vikernes under surveillance and had identified him as the author of aggressive racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic comments on Internet forums, said Ms. Thibault-Lecuivre. Mr. Vikernes has been living in France since 2010. "He is held on suspicion of preparing acts of terrorism," she said.

Mr. Vikernes's lawyer in Norway John Christian Elden said he was aware that Mr. Vikernes had been apprehended. He said Mr. Vikernes "has expressed extreme views on race mixing for several years, built on Norse teachings."

Mr. Vikernes's French wife, Marie, was also arrested.

French Interior Minister Manuel Valls told reporters the police acted in a preventive way. "The couple undisputedly constituted a danger, now we must wait for the results of the investigation."

French authorities feared that the 40-year-old Mr. Vikernes might have been preparing a killing spree similar to the one carried out in Norway by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik in July 2011, a French police officer said.

Police searched Mr. Vikernes's home and found five guns, including the four rifles bought by his wife, and many boxes of ammunition, the police officer said. Mr. Vikernes is likely to be transferred to Paris later Tuesday from the town Brive-la-Gaillarde in central France where he was held after being arrested in a nearby village.

French police can hold suspects in terrorism cases for up to 96 hours before bringing preliminary charges. Mr. Vikernes and his wife haven't been charged.

A father of three, Mr. Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison in Norway in 1994, the maximum penalty at the time, for stabbing his bandmate Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth to death a year earlier, and for setting several churches on fire. Mr. Vikernes was 21 years old at the time of the sentencing. He was released early from prison, as per usual Norwegian procedure.

Mr. Vikernes was one of many individuals to receive a 1,500-page manuscript from Mr. Breivik in July 2011, though he has railed against him, claiming that the mass killer, knowingly or not, worked for "the Jews."

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it didn't have any information about Mr. Vikernes's arrest. The Norwegian Police Security Service declined to comment.

For more on Mr. Vikernes' "pre-Christian" ideology, see this article from the International Business Times. Excerpt:

Vikernes has dubbed his extreme right-wing views “odalism,” which he describes as fiercely anti-modern, heavily based on pre-Christian pagan values, and openly racist. Vikernes’ ideology is largely based on pre-Christian Nordic and Germanic beliefs of honor and the fatherland, and he sees himself as constantly on the offensive against any beliefs deemed a threat to a pre-industrial European pagan society, including but not limited to Christianity, Islam, Judaism, capitalism and materialism. Several of Vikernes’ writings hint at the possibility of violent conflict with these forces, leading to his terrorism arrest.

For more on pre-crime and the false positive problem in massive data screening programs, see this article from The Atlantic. Excerpt:

The U.S. Department of Homeland security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which is some crazy straight-out-of-sci-fi pre-crime detection and prevention software which may come to an airport security screening checkpoint near you someday soon. Yet again the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the introduction of super-creepy invasions of privacy, and lead us one step closer to a turn-key totalitarian state. This may sound alarmist, but in cases like this a little alarm is warranted. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioral cues, like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyze these cues algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with nefarious intentions. There are several major flaws with a program like this, any one of which should be enough to condemn attempts of this kind to the dustbin. Lets look at them in turn.

First, predictive software of this kind is undermined by a simple statistical problem known as the false-positive paradox. Any system designed to spot terrorists before they commit an act of terrorism is, necessarily, looking for a needle in a haystack. As the adage would suggest, it turns out that this is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Here is why: let's assume for a moment that 1 in 1,000,000 people is a terrorist about to commit a crime. Terrorists are actually probably much much more rare, or we would have a whole lot more acts of terrorism, given the daily throughput of the global transportation system. Now lets imagine the FAST algorithm correctly classifies 99.99 percent of observations -- an incredibly high rate of accuracy for any big data-based predictive model. Even with this unbelievable level of accuracy, the system would still falsely accuse 99 people of being terrorists for every one terrorist it finds. Given that none of these people would have actually committed a terrorist act yet distinguishing the innocent false positives from the guilty might be a non-trivial, and invasive task.