More Oddities in V-Tech Shooting

Posted on by

Jihadi and Psyops Speculations:

The blogs, left and right, have their theories about Cho.

The right-wing blogs are concerned about the jihadi aspects of the case – viz., the name Ismail (need to verify exact spelling) Ax in ink on Cho’s arm and on the return address of the video packet sent to NBC; also his high kill rate and the execution-style killing (using a chain purchased at Home Depot to fasten outer doors of Norris Hall) and the use of words like al-qaed and anti-terror in the files on the video sent to NBC.

The left wing blogs are looking at the possibility of a military psy-op of some kind. They are noting that Cho’s sister, who graduated from Princeton, worked for the government. This is the piece that is heading the popular wordpress blog posts on the subject now:

Quote:

“His older sister, Sun-Kyung, graduated from Princeton University in 2004. A source, who asked to be identified as a senior Administration official, said she works for McNeil Technologies, a firm contracted by the State Department to manage reconstruction efforts in Iraq (my emphasis). Woh. Ok. Stop right there.

“What does McNeil Technologies do?

“Oh, the usual black bag intelligence agency cut out kind of stuff… Actually, there’s more here than you can shake a stick at.

“The McNeil Technologies Services page lists the following categories: Language Services, Information Management Services, Program Support Services, Security Services, Intelligence Services.”

End of quote.

My Comment: I honestly don’t know if that’s enough to go on, since DC is filled with people who work for the government in some way or other. I taught at a school in the area for a while, and there were people on the school board, connected to the US government and to the CIA, but the school functioned as any school would. Intelligence is a huge business and recruiters look for people with language skills. Since they pay well, first or second generation immigrants are often attracted to that kind of work – which is mostly not cloak and dagger stuff. So, it’s interesting, certainly, but proves nothing much, IMHO.

However, I did find this rather odd:

“Cho’s high school has produced TWO psychotic young adults who went on gun rampages within one year of each other. Last May, Michael Kennedy, a student at Westfield High School in Chantilly, Virginia, went on a shooting rampage at a police station, killing two police officers before being fatally shot himself (my emphasis). Authorities consider this just a “horrible coincidence”. Adding to the coincidence is that Michael’s father, Brian Kennedy, was just recently released from jail in charges related to that killing. In fact, he was due in court the day after the Cho killings.”

Take a look at this article, cited in the above post, which details the trove of weapons found in Kennedy’s possession:

“The nightmare began May 8, 2006, around 3:40 p.m., when Michael Kennedy carjacked a van and drove into the rear lot of the Sully District Police Station. Unarmed, Garbarino was inside his cruiser after his shift, preparing to leave on vacation. Suddenly, from a few yards away, Kennedy fired more than 20 rounds at him with an AK-47 rifle.

“Garbarino was struck five times; yet though gravely wounded and in pain, he radioed other officers, alerting them to the danger. He provided suspect information, directed responding officers and told the police helicopter where to land.

“Armel went outside to respond to the carjacking and, when she reached her cruiser, Kennedy arrived and began shooting at Garbarino. Drawing Kennedy’s fire away from Garbarino, she and Kennedy exchanged gunfire, and a bullet from his 30.06-caliber rifle pierced her ballistic vest and struck her in the chest.

“ARMED WITH FIVE handguns, an AK-47 assault weapon, a high-powered rifle and more than 300 rounds of ammunition, Kennedy fired 70 rounds-plus before other officers killed him. Later that night, armed with a warrant, Det. Craig Paul and other police officers searched Kennedy’s home at 6200 Prince Way for three hours, seizing a veritable arsenal of weapons and more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition.

“The indictment states that Brian Kennedy illegally possessed 20 firearms, including an AK-47 and several bolt-action and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns. He also owned a large variety of handguns — among them a .38 Special Taurus and a 9 mm Luger Commander semi-automatic pistol.

“Weapons were everywhere in the Kennedy home; the inventory list of items seized is 10 pages long. Under the mattress in the master bedroom were a Colt 9 mm handgun with one round in the chamber and a leather sheath containing a 9-inch knife. On the nightstand were a bayonet plus high-velocity ammunition for a Remington, semi-automatic shotgun.

“A Smith & Wesson knife was under the left, loveseat cushion in the living room, and both a 12-gauge shotgun and a 22-caliber long rifle stood in the corner of the hallway to the basement. An M80 explosive was tucked inside a kitchen cabinet to the right of the stove, and an Atlanta Sharptec knife was stored in the ceiling above the utility-room door.”

My Comment: Whew! My interest is not only in the coincidence of a psychiatric killer with multiple weapons coming out of the same high school, but also in what that suggests about VA Tech police procedures.

Surely, as a state school and with the state already having encountered this classic school shooter incident, they would have had specialized training and a specialized response ready. But they didn’t, despite this shooting and then the Morva shooting, in just the previous year. It would be good to find out why the record of arson and stalking at the school – which they knew about – did not lead them to suspect Cho in the bomb threats – at least to the extent of questioning him.

More on Psyops:

This other thread here strikes me as much more speculative but not unworthy of investigation.

For me right now, though, these are the questions I want to pursue:

Main Questions:

1. What accounts for the failure to enter Cho’s psychiatric condition into the state or federal record (do I have this right)? Or for the university not following up in some way on his treatment?

2. What accounts for the failure of the police to close down the campus after two people were killed and there were two recent bomb threats? Also, the behavior of the police was extremely lax, as this piece by Alexander Cockburn, indicates.

3. Where or how did Cho acquire his expertise in shooting?

4. How does the methodical nature of the killing and the posting of a video in the middle of it all square with the rest of the profile we have of Cho?

5. Cho is said to have had a speech impediment or autism early on, but on the video his voice seems clear enough. Puzzled.

Oddities with regard to possessions and contacts:

I have posted this separately, but felt the contents of his room, emails, and books also warranted classification as oddities, as they may contain clues to his state of mind and his connections:

Contents of Search Warrant

Here is a list of items found in Cho’s room. As you can see there are not video games (so far). I mentioned earlier that the Counterstrike obsession may have been more a rumor set off by accounts from high school classmates that were never fully substantiated, because Karan Grewal, his suite mate said that he never saw evidence of it. But I would still like to learn more.

Results of search of his room, courtesy of gaygamer:

*Chain from top left closet shelf
• Folding knife & combination padlock
• Compaq computer from desktop
• Assorted documents, notepads, writings from desktop
• Combination lock
• Dremel tool and case
• Nine books, two notebooks, envelopes, from top shelf
• Assorted books & pads from lower shelf
• Compact discs from desktops
• Items from desktop & drawers: winchester multi tool, 3 notebooks, mail, checks, credit card
• Items from 2nd door: Kodak digital camera, Citibank statement
• Two cases of compact discs from dresser top
• Drive: Seagate: 80 Gb
• Six sheets of green computer paper
• Mirror with blue plastic housing
• Dremel tool box with receipt
• Dell Latitude service tag

More about those books and CDs from this report:

“Cho, 23, also used the eBay account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.

A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho’s e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are “aware of the eBay activity that mirrors” the Hotmail account.

One question investigators hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.

Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, his computers and cell phone can be a rich source of information. Authorities say Cho had a history of sending menacing text messages and other communications — written and electronic.

On March 22, Cho bought at least two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named “oneclickshooting,” which sells gun accessories and other items. It appears that he bought three Walther P22 clips in that purchase, but the seller could not be reached for comment.

Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year’s Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.

“The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class,” Cho wrote on the site.

He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.

His eBay rating was superb — 98.5 percent. That means he received one negative rating from people he dealt with on eBay, compared with 65 positive.

“great ebayer. very flexible,” the buyer said of his Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets, which went for $182.50.

Andy Koch, Cho’s roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn’t have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.

“We took him to one football game,” he said. “We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game.”

Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include “Men, Women, and Chainsaws” by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include “The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre”; and “The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense” by Joyce Carol Oates — a book in which the publisher writes: “In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.”

End of Quote
My Comment:
I have more on the eBay handle in my post about Cho’s emails/books (see categories, where I have classified the VTech posts into three categories. Obviously, they overlap, but they will help organize the posts into materal that relates to

1. The failure of the police response

(including nature of killings, wounds, crime scene footage, autopsy, victim and witness accounts)
2. The Psychiatric/Legal failure

(centering around the history of pathological or criminal failure, the laws of privacy, the failure to report or follow up on these, lack of information given to the Feds, failure of the background check to find Cho’s history, gun laws and policy, mental illness and civil rights laws, privacy laws).

3. The theories and evidence for some kind of terrorist or intelligence related activity

(centering around Cho, including the Ismail Ax name and related material. Much of the material will overlap with the other categories too).

Final Oddity:

A report on the crime scene has this:
“Crime scene technicians recovered 17 spent magazines of ammunition, the majority of which were for Cho’s 9mm handgun, a law enforcement official said.

“He ended up buying a load of mags from Wal-Mart and Dick’s Sporting Goods,” said an official, who asked not to be identified. “This was a thought-out process. He thought this through.”

Autopsy:
I am adding this quote about the autopsy findings, which show repeated shooting at the victims, as it is also peculiar:

“The reports on the victims, including Cho, show that he caused more than 100 wounds, hitting victims several times,”

This is from an earlier report on the multiple wounds –

” The official said investigators believed that most of the 32 dead were shot a minimum of three times, and that many of the 28 wounded were shot more than once.”

Partly answering one of my questions (how did he get so good at shooting) is this account of his practicing in the week before the killing. Obviously that doesn’t explain the whole thing, but taken together with the account of his getting up early and going to the gym, you can see he practiced for this).

“In the weeks before the violence, the investigator said, Cho went to a shooting range in Blacksburg, not far from campus, spending an hour practicing with the weapons and buying more magazines there.

“Investigators believe, based on interviews with an employee at the range, that Cho recorded part of his video statement in a van in the range parking lot because, they said, the employee described an Asian youth recording himself there.”

On Sunday, state police also indicated that so far they have not definitely been able to tie Cho to the first killing at Ambler Johnston, although his gun was “linked” to it.

(My Comment: Was it used there, found there, or did the bullets match up..more research needed here? Needs clarification).

There is still a possibility, in other words, that there could have been two different killers. The whole scenario of Cho killing two people and then walking a couple of miles to and fro to post his videos (at least, the reports I read did not mention that he drove), in time to massacre 30 more students does seem strange to me, although, you don’t really expect normalcy in this sort of business.

Chris Wallace – Psychiatric/legal issues at V. Tech

Posted on by

Chris Wallace on FOX this morning ( 9 AM) on how universities are ham strung with regard to psychiatric illness and privacy laws.

Lt Gov. Bill Bolling is talking about Va. law and how it conflicts with federal law on guns. Bolling has previously supported concealed weapons on campus and Wallace asks if that would have prevented the V. Tech shooting.

Bolling replies that he is unwilling – probably wisely – to take on the gun debate at this point.

The George Washington University (in Washington, DC) president is on. Notes that GW security police is unarmed (??).

Arlen Specter (Republican Senator from Pennsylvania) suggests that state law should be brought into conformity with federal law and that a national repository of information should exist. He admits there was a definite failure of communication between state and federal agents. He proposed national legislation to this end. (Needs further clarification)

Charles Schumer (Democrat Senator from New York) is on. He has legislation in the works to give money to states to update their registry to fit federal requirements. NRA advocates have teamed up with Democrats on this previously.

Chris Wallace asks why not push for a renewal of the assault weapons ban which expired. Asks if Schumer hasn’t done so because it is a political loser.

Again, here is the review panel appointed to study what happened at V Tech:

Independent review panel (appointed by Governor Timothy Kaine of Virginia)

1.Headed by Retired Virginia State Police Superintendent Col. Gerald Massengill.Massengill, 64, led the state’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the 2002 sniper attacks in the Washington area, says this Washington Post story.

2. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge

3. Gordon Davies, Director for the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia for 20 years.

4. Diane Strickland, who served as a judge of the 23rd Judicial Circuit Court in Roanoke County, Roanoke and Salem between 1989 and 2003 and a victim assistance expert from Fairfax county5. Carroll Ann Ellis, director of the Fairfax County Police Department’s Victim Services Division on the review panel.

6. FBI retiree Roger L. Depue, former administrator of the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.

7. Child and adolescent psychiatrist Aradhana A. “Bela” Sood. 

8. Dr. Marcus L. Martin of the University of Virginia School of Medicine.
http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/breaking/wb/113294

On Friday, Richard Bonnie, chairman of the Virginia Supreme Court’s Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, stated that a special justice’s order in late 2005 that directed Cho to seek outpatient treatment and declared him to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself fits the federal criteria and should have immediately disqualified him.

Currently, only 22 states submit any mental health records to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, the FBI said in a statement on Thursday. Virginia is the leading state in reporting disqualifications based on mental health criteria for the NICS system, the statement said.

But Virginia state law on mental health disqualifications to firearms purchases is worded slightly differently from the federal statute. So the form that Virginia courts use to notify the state police about a mental health disqualification only addresses the state criteria, which lists two potential categories that would warrant notification to the state police – someone who was “involuntarily committed” or ruled mentally “incapacitated.”

My Comment:

So, the problem was that Cho went “voluntarily” and wasn’t ruled incapacitated.

But didn’t anyone realize the potential danger here. OK. the two VTech students didn’t press stalking charges, but what happened to the arson charge? How does that not pose a threat to anyone else? Didn’t any of the teachers, like Nikki Giovanni, who found him so intimidating in class, want to find out where he was with his treatment?

Here’s a comment from one of the students (I think he was in Edward Falco’s class):

“Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.

After hearing about the mass shootings, I sent one of my friends a Facebook message asking him if he knew anything about Seung Cho and if he could have been involved. He replied: “dude that’s EXACTLY what I was thinking! No, I haven’t heard anything, but seriously, that was the first thing I thought when I heard he was Asian.”

While I “knew” Cho, I always wished there was something I could do for him, but I couldn’t think of anything. As far as notifying authorities, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any system set up that lets people say “Hey! This guy has some issues! Maybe you should look into this guy!” If there were, I definitely would have tried to get the kid some help. I think that could have had a good chance of averting yesterday’s tragedy more than anything.”

My Comment:

Cho went voluntarily to police, and they referred him to a mental health agency off campus, Flinchum said. A counselor recommended involuntary commitment, and a judge signed an order saying he “presents an imminent danger to self or others” and sent him to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.


Sounds like bureaucratic confusion and disconnect.

More in this Time article about the responsibility of the University and possible questions with Virginia state law:

“But Virginia Tech is a state institution, and Virginia is a state where the doctrine of sovereign immunity remains quite robust. That doctrine, a relic of English common law, essentially says the state can do no wrong because the state creates the law and thus cannot be subject to it. Many states have relaxed sovereign immunity and made it possible for victims of, say, botched operations to sue state hospitals. But Krauss of George Mason University says the Virginia Tech victims’ families would probably have to seek an exception to sovereign immunity from the Supreme Court of Virginia in order to sue the school. There’s a simpler way: Steger, the university president, should stop withholding documents on how the university mishandled Cho and take responsibility for his school’s lax approach. And then he should resign.”

Virginia Tech – Video Footage and Police Response, 4/16

Posted on by

Here is a link to some video footage shot by Martin Arvebro and Carl Nordin, two Swedish students who were visiting the campus:

http://www.roanoke.com/multimedia/wb/113323

(it’s also in my earlier post profiling Cho)

From Wired Blog comes this cell phone footage of the V-Tech campus with the sound of multiple gun shots in the background. Jamal Albarghouti is the V-Tech student who shot the cellphone video. He mentioned on CNN that he shot the footage on a Nokia N70.

This is also from Wired Blog. It’s the V. Tech websmaster’s account of the police response following the shootings. He talks about the police response after 11 am on the 16th, I presume, by when the massacre had ended. Even while applauding police cooperation, he mentions this (my emphasis):

“This was a multiple-agency response and there is little interoperability — but the police still got the job done.”

Question: Hmm..does that mean that there was no setup allowing these different teams to coordinate readily? More information and explanation needed here.

Here are the teams involved:

Virginia Tech Police Department was (and is) the lead

Blacksburg PD ( not clear whether they had joint jurisdiction)

Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department

Virginia State Police.

This is a map of the area showing the distance between West Ambler Johnston Hall where the first two killings took place at 7:15 AM on 4/16/2007 and Norris Hall where the other 30 victims were shot at between 9: 15 and 9: 30 AM (approximately – needs further verifications) and where the killer eventually shot himself.

Apparently, the police paradigm that was operative was that of the active shooter, which is

“… an armed person who has used deadly physical force on other persons and continues to do so while having unrestricted access to additional victims.”

(This includes snipers, but not usually bombers).

Question: Why would the police not believe they had a bomber around with the previous bomb threats on April 3 and April 13 (only 3 days earlier, that is, on Friday before the Monday on which the shootings took place)?

Why wouldn’t they also have a bomb threat plan in place — in addition to the sniper response?

‘Active shooter’ often entails a specialized response that has been developed in recent years called the Immediate Action Rapid Deployment. Here, the normal tactic of police to delay a confrontation to keep their casualties down is altered to allow the first police responder to get past casualties on the scene, make contact with the shoote and, often, to confront him and take control of the environment.

IARD is appropriate for armed intruders into school areas, attacks with edged weapons, attacks by shooters, attacks or carrying of explosives, and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons attacks. It’s also appropriate in certain locations, where victims are confined while in imminent danger, like schools, day-care centers, high-rise structures, sporting events, hospitals, office complexes.

IARD is said to have been developed in response to the increasing presence of suicide/killer threats, including the proliferation of school shootings.

According to wiki, IARD is only properly used when there’s been appropriate training and ballistic shields and tactical armor are also available, which let the police get into close gun battles with the sniper/shooter. The difference with established police practice is that in the active shooter cases, the usual practice of containment and negotiation do not work, as the shooter is prepared to commit suicide.

As this article, “Patrolling the New Homeland,” Law and Order Magazine, May, 2005″ indicates, IARD allows patrol and/or SWAT personnel to initiate a response after a firearm is fired and the killing spree has begun.

Question: I am not clear from this whether the IARD is the only response to the ‘active shooter’ paradigm or whether it is only one specialized response.

The Columbine High School shooting (April 20, 1999 in Littleton, Colorado) was formative in SWAT tactics and police response, in that street officers were trained to take immediate action without waiting for the SWAT team to arrive.

This Christian Science Monitor article quotes David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, on the “profound shift” nationwide to the new escalated tactics. IARD wasn’t really new – it had been offered in police training during the 1990s, but Columbine created the psychological shock necessary for police everywhere to feel the need for it, says the CSM piece (cf. “The Copy-Cat Effect” – see prior post on this). Could this psychological shock have been created unintentionally (and there is always the possibility, intentionally) by media replaying of the crime?

IARD was controversial not least for its expense ($5000 per police officer) and so was not uniformly adopted.

Question: Was IARD operational at V Tech or not? If so, what caused the delay of two hours, a delay IARD is specifically intended to circumvent?

Here is a student account of police reponse:

9:50 A.M.

We started hearing sirens outside of our building. We took it as nothing, [because] we hear police sirens around campus all the time. It was just slightly strange that we heard them during the day. Soon, the 13 of us heard an ambulance in front of our building. We took it as another bomb threat — we had been getting bomb threats in April that ended up being hoaxes.

We started getting concerned when the sirens increased in volume. The professor looked out the window with us, and we saw police cars and ambulances out on the Drillfield. Students were walking away from our building. Police officers were assembling on the sidewalk. Large black vans appeared.

My Comment:

9:50 is when the sirens went off…after the second shooting (which were apparently nothing out of the ordinary and thus not a very effective tool for alerting the campus )

Apparently, the police also thought the bomb threats were hoaxes although on the 16th obviously something did place. This part seems very odd to me. How could they not have connected the bomb threats with the killing?

Here is the University response:

“Virginia Tech President Charles Steger said authorities believed the shooting at the West Ambler Johnston dorm, first reported about 7:15 a.m., was a domestic dispute and thought the gunman had fled the campus after killing two people. (My note: earlier notes mentioned that they thought that the RA was the boyfriend and had died with the victim and that was why they hadn’t bothered to alert the campus)

“We had no reason to suspect any other incident was going to occur,” he said.

(They took the word of a friend of Emily Hilscher who was the one who sent them off hunting Enily’s gun owning boyfriend, who turned out to be a red herring)

“The dormitory was locked down immediately after the shooting, Steger said, and a phone bank was activated to alert the resident advisers there so they could go door-to-door warning the 900 students in the dorm. Security guards surrounded the dorm, he said, and others began a sweep across campus.”

Door to door alert, when a murder has taken place seems rather neolithic to me! Why not a an announcement over the PA system?

“Asked why he didn’t order a lockdown of the entire campus, Steger noted that thousands of nonresident students were arriving for 8 a.m. classes, fanning out across the sprawling campus from their parking spots.“Where do you lock them down?” Steger asked.”

LR: Why not a siren and a PA announcement (or one over the local radio) telling people to leave?

“He said security on campus will be tightened now, but offered no details.

“We obviously can’t have an armed guard in front of every classroom every day of the year,” he said.

(LR: Again, a strawman. Why not cameras and a security guard who monitors doors from a central location? Done in stores all across the country and in many schools. Or a patrol car that moves around, again done on many campuses. Especially after the Morva episode, how could they not think about that?)

“Overall, Steger defended the university’s response, saying: “You can only make a decision based on the information you know at that moment in time. You don’t have hours to reflect on it.”

(My Comment: That’s why you prepare!!! What is with these people! Not a word of self-recrimination).

“Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said there were no surveillance cameras in place that recorded the gunman entering Norris Hall, the classroom building where 31 people were killed. Among the dead was the gunman, who killed himself before police could break through a chained door and reach the second-floor room where the massacre occurred.

“Some students were upset that the gunman was able to strike a second time, saying the first notification they got of the shootings came in an e-mail at 9:26 a.m. The e-mail mentioned a “shooting incident” at West Ambler Johnston, said police were investigating, and asked students to be cautious and contact police about anything suspicious.”

(LR: the language is very puzzling; sounded like their main concern was NOT to alarm people).

Student Maurice Hiller said he went to a 9 a.m. class two buildings away from the engineering building, and no warnings were coming over the outdoor public address system on campus at the time.

(Unbelievable. They had a PA system and DIDN’T USE IT)

“I was troubled with the fact that two hours elapsed from the first shooting,” said Brant Martel, 23, a junior.

(You’re not the only one, Brant).

The blog Mirror on America makes the same point I make about rapid deployment and the lack of coorindation.

“Even for those places where a rapid response plan is in place, there has not been uniformity regarding procedures. For instance, in St. Louis County Missouri, only patrol Sergeants are allowed to have the assualt rifles….while in other departments, any trained officer can have the extra firepower. In my opinion, the more the merrier, because it’s all about decreasing the response time, so that suspects can be killed or cornered before they are allowed to murder more people. Rapid response plans will not prevent all deaths and are not designed to. The aim of rapid response units is to reduce the number of people killed in these kinds of events.

“I don’t know what the plan was for Virginia Tech or for the Blacksburg Virginia Police Department or Montgomery County Sheriff. But from what I can tell, the response appeared confused and may have been botched. It doesn’t appear that any rapid response plan was effectively used. But the large size of the campus should be taken into account. This kind of confusion is common when you have various police agencies (probably well over half a dozen in this case) attempting to respond to this kind of call, and trying to communicate and plan on the fly as the situation evolves.”

And here is Alexander Cockburn’s article on the same subject in Counterpunch (4/23), which agrees with my assessment:

“When the mass murder session began in the engineering building the police cowered behind their cruisers till Cho Seung-Hui finished off the last batch of his 32 victims, then killed himself. Then the police bravely rushed in, started sticking their guns in the faces of the traumatized students, screaming at them to freeze or be shot. Similar timidity was on display in Columbine, where Harris and Klebold killed students in the library over a period of 15 minutes and then committed suicide. The police finally mustered up the nerve to enter the library over two hours later.”

Ban psychiatric drugs from campus, he says. And bring back the posse.
Agreed.

Virginia Tech – An American Reader in Japan Responds

Posted on by

Robert McKinney, an American who once taught English at Waseda University in Japan, writes in to me (letter is excerpted):

Thank you so much for your common sense essay. My own thoughts too.

What does it take to alarm Americans any more? If the 7:15 am shooting had taken place at an airport, even a small regional airport, the FBI would been covering every inch of the area within a five mile radius of the airport. Same goes for a Federal building or a shopping mall.. …..

But why oh why didn’t the administration or the campus police close down the campus at 7:30 and tell everyone to stay home? That’s why we have local television stations, e-mail and loudspeakers. Didn’t two bloody killings cause any sense of alarm? Sad day for all Americans. Public safety has become a thing of the past..

It is ludicrous for anyone in authority to “cover his or her ass.” These were almost criminal idiots. Medical doctors who display such idiocy are quickly sued and some see their medical careers terminated and their professional and personal lives ruined. Time for heads to roll at VT...

Some years ago I was a full time English instructor at Waseda University, one of Japan’s elite colleges. Ninety percent of the student body is male. Anyway, in 2001 a terrible scandal surfaced after one female student went to the police with a lurid tale of being violently gang raped by a group of male students from Waseda. The police did investigate and discovered that a registered social club on the campus called “The Super Free Club” had been secretly gang-raping women, some as young as 18, for the past four or five years…..Over 100 women fell victim to the Super Free Club rape scheme. Most of the victims were from small towns around Japan and were simply too naive to understand the danger the club posed…..

Despite campus rumors and gossip about what was really happening at the Super Free Club parties, the Waseda U. authorities did nothing to investigate or question the club’s main members. The university was fearful of bad publicity and so just looked the other way while the rapes continued year after year……until the newspapers reported the police investigation in 2001

Although as many as forty or fifty Waseda male students had been involved in the gang rapes over the course of four years, only two or three individuals were convicted.

The university authorities at Waseda simply ignored the crisis. Damage control, “hey boys will be boys,” was their explanation.
Japan too has its share of moral lepers and idiots.

Sincerely,

Robert McKinney.

Virginia Tech – the dangers of the police state

Posted on by

Eugene Plawiuk has this posted on his site, cited at Brad Spangler. It’s something to keep in mind about V. Tech.

I’ve posted it here simply as a response to the mass of emails (to my email address, note, rather than publicly on this blog) that I received. Most of the mail was positive. Some – mostly from fellow immigrant Indians here in the US – was surprisingly venemous.
But seriously, how can any one confuse criticism of state power and laws with attacking a “free society”? Do you really think we live in a free society because we’re allowed to mouth off on blogs? Consider how swaddled in laws and regulations we are today. And it’s the same critics who complain about the litigiousness of this country who want even more laws.

Undoubtedly we have tremendous freedom of expression in certain areas. There are, of course, numbers of societies where even that’s absent, and I’m glad I don’t live in any of them. But must I really mention that as an obligatory preface to any statement I make?

“I am glad I don’t live in Iran, but…”

That’s a thought.

Doesn’t it occur to people that allowing vocal – if impotent- criticism is also a way in which the state diffuses threats to its power?

It bothers me that people can actually call for more gun laws and then tell libertarians that we despise the “free society.” How do you have a free society when the state is armed to the teeth and law-abiding citizens are largely disarmed?

How do you have a free society when every increase in state power is applauded by “law and order” statists who think that their position is “conservative”?

What are they conserving? State power? Big business? You can support a limited government and free markets, while still understanding that the corrupt expansion of either (and I would argue that only corruption allows them to expand beyond a certain limit) is inherently inimical to the healthy functioning of voluntary associations – community organizations, church groups, and families – on which traditional conservativism eventually rests.

Nock’s argument below points in exactly the same direction (emphasis is mine):

“If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, “agricultural adjustment,” and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power. It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power…….

Heretofore in this country sudden crises of misfortune have been met by a mobilization of social power. In fact (except for certain institutional enterprises like the home for the aged, the lunatic-asylum, city-hospital and county-poorhouse) destitution, unemployment, “depression” and similar ills, have been no concern of the State, but have been relieved by the application of social power. Under Mr. Roosevelt, however, the State assumed this function, publicly announcing the doctrine, brand-new in our history, that the State owes its citizens a living. Students of politics, of course, saw in this merely an astute proposal for a prodigious enhancement of State power; merely what, as long ago as 1794, James Madison called “the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government”; and the passage of time has proved that they were right. The effect of this upon the balance between State power and social power is clear, and also its effect of a general indoctrination with the idea that an exercise of social power upon such matters is no longer called for.

It is largely in this way that the progressive conversion of social power into State power becomes acceptable and gets itself accepted.. ”

Read the rest of the chapter here:

Alfred Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State, 1935

VTech – The Copy Cat Effect and the Police State

Posted on by

The media ought to be held to some standards for the way they cover such incidents. There’s a public interest in reporting information, but it’s got to be done analytically, seriously.

Unending sensationalism that pointlessly multiplies electronic imagery is good for ratings, it has a fall-out:

1. It endangers the lives of the survivors and violates their privacy. That’s why I am not posting video footage of people at the scene, unless it’s specifically about the police response.

I that notice photos of university officials have been posted on the net. I’ve avoided that because photos and unnecessary personal information posted publicly could pose a threat to their safety or their family’s. I’ve posted their names – that’s more than enough for public information.

2. It disregards the privacy of the dead and the privacy and feelings of the injured,

3. It unfairly makes a kind of folk anti-hero of the perpetrator, thus further victimizing the dead and injured, which is why I am not posting the Cho video or photographs. Included in this are sensational statements such as those made by Geraldo Rivero, defending the right to publish the Cho video, as necessary to inform the public of his exceptional evil. This is simply disingenuous. The heinousness of the crime is evident, as is Cho’s mental condition. Additional lurid imagery only sensationalizes the story. And knowing, as we do, the violent effect of such media overkill, it’s also reprehensible.

Some experts have spoken up on this, too late, unfortunately.

4. It incites other deranged or attention-seeking individuals to imitate the crime.

5. It obscures or distracts from the larger questions of law and power involved.

6. It blurs the line between entertainment and reality in a very dangerous way. News reporting becomes primarily a commodity rather than a service with professional standards.

7. And most importantly, by presenting often traumatic images of crisis, state power and citizen helplessness, it provokes the terrorized siege mentality that will call for greater state power (protection, it will be termed) AND the nervous exhaustion, bewilderment and compliance that surrenders critical thinking and self-reliance.

The ultimate result is to strengthen the warfare-welfare state.

Traumatic imagery is used by states to manipulate their own and foreign populations during war time or in the run-up to war. That is the rationale behind Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, National Defense University Press, October 1996.

Here is something I wrote in my book on Abu Ghraib about the use of such imagery in the service of the warfare state:

“Instead, it is at the public’s imagination that the new war is directed, with its black psychological operations that erase the boundary between civilian and military, war and peace, state and non-state.” (p. 189, The Tower of BabeAfter the Columbine shootings 8 years ago, there were 450 copycat threats, plots or shootings, according to Loren Coleman, a suicide prevention and school violence consultant, who is also the author of the Copy Cat Effect, a book about the effect of mass media coverage and the replication of violence.

Here is a rough summary of the outbreak of copy cat threats since Tuesday (posting and correcting as I go along):

Washington State University, Vancouver (graffiti threatening V Tech type violence, 4/17)

St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas (nonspecific threat, location not specified, 4/17)

University of Oklahoma, Norman (scare over man later identified, 4/17).

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (telephone bomb threat, no mention of V. Tech, 4/17)

University of California at Hastings, College of Law, San Francisco ( online shooting threat 4/18).

Canyon Middle School, Alameida County (bomb threat on hotline by 13 yr old on 4/18).

Provo High School, Utah (at least one bomb threat, 4/20)

Cranbrook High School, Bloomfield, Michigan (scare over unidentified man)

Central High School in Rapid City, South Dakota (reports of a man with a gun in a parking lot)

North Dakota State University, Fresno, North Dakota (duffel bag found outside bus shelter)

University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota (bomb threat in Smith, specific times and locations, mentions VTech, 4/19)

Bogalusa Middle and High School, Louisiana (man threatening mass killing in a note mentioning V Tech, 4/17)

Schools in Greenbay, Washington.

University of Maine, Bangor, Maine (telephone bomb threat 4/18)

Riverton High School, Riverton, Kansas (5 students held in shooting threat posted on MySpace in commemoration of Columbine, 4/19)

Yuba, California

Kalamazoo Community College, Kalamazoo, Michigan

(online bomb threats, 4/20)

Commerce City, Colorado

San Diego State University

Reno, Nevada

Estrella Mountain Community College, Arizona

(shooting threat, 4/17)

University of Colorado, Denver, Colorado (Student arrest for verbal remark suggesting sypamthy for V Tech killings 4/17)

University of Missouri, Missouri (two shot and hospitalized, 4/19)

Great Falls High School, Great Falls, Montana (phone bomb threats and note threatening shooting worse than VTech, 4/17)

Johnson Space Center, Houston

(Hostage situation, perpetrator and hostage killed, 4/21)
l).

Rush Blames Virginia Tech Killing on English Dept bulletin board

Posted on by

I am not making this stuff up. I just heard him on his April 20 show.

Yesterday, he blamed it on critics of Walmart.

Here’s the link to Limbaugh’s website http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_041907/content/01125113.guest.html
“He’s been in the United States for 14 years. Who is it that made this guy hate the rich? Why, there’s only one answer to this! The Democrat Party, the American left and their willing accomplices in the Drive-By Media, routinely portray the rich as a bunch of evil, rotten SOBs who are out to steal everybody else’s money. Wal-Mart’s an example. Big Oil is another. This guy is genuinely angry. “

Seriously. This guy is a misunderstood humorist. I wish all you lefties out there would stop criticizing him. Nothing you guys say is ever half as funny as this…………………..

Pulp Drama and Punditry: Virginia Tech, the Media and Violence

Posted on by

Yesterday, the mainstream media took up the question that we unwashed Vinnies (I hereby proudly adopt Brian Williams’ contemptuous term for unpaid, solo bloggers) have been asking since Day One: What is the responsibility of the authorities (Virginia Tech and the State of Virginia) in this tragic business?

According to some people that question’s off-limits. How can you be so lacking in compassion, someone asked me.

I guess because I am too busy feeling compassion for the poor kids who got blown to bits — and for their families — to waste too much sympathy on guilt-or-angst-or-litigation-induced pangs among bureaucrats. Had Virginia Tech’s bosses been CEO’s, I doubt whether progressives would be so sympathetic. Bottom line is people at the top of organizations are paid a lot of money to take responsibility to see that things like this don’t take place. And so far, I haven’t see anyone stepping down from their posts – which in the old days would have been de rigeur. One would assume that that would be the first act of individuals prone to taking responsibility for their actions.

So, if Williams & Co. are asking a few pointed questions now, more power to them. We hope we are in for some incisive reporting on how psychiatric illness is treated in this country and what went wrong with security at V. Tech.

We wish, meanwhile, that the media had shown such keen interrogative skills when they were swallowing every lie and distortion handed down to them from the government on other matters……like the run-up to the Iraq war or the prolonged cover-up of the government’s torture policies.

Now it remains to be seen whether the rest of the coverage for the V. Tech shooting will be in the time-honored tradition of a respectable fourth estate, which is to confront and question – as vigorously as possible – the pronunciamentos of those in power. Being “nice” is not part of that job description.

Instead, it looks like we are getting more helpings of the usual pulp drama that reigns supreme on the air.

First, we had a focus on the most sensational aspects of the case – not hard to do in an obviously sensational case, filled with ambulances screeching around a lush campus and sex-and-guts-laden manuscripts. Thus, we had NBC’s re-re-replaying of the Cho video that immediately set off – what a surprise – copy-cat threats all over the country. Scores of serial killings and school shootings haven’t taught the networks that that’s what happens when you give too much prime-time air to pathological killers – it brings out all the wannabe’s in the woodwork. I guess they thought airing Cho’s berserker promo was as harmless as parading Sanjaya on American Idol.

Why not just present us with a detailed factual report/analysis of the material instead of flashing the imagery at us? Would that be too..well.. boringly factual?

Then, we had the human drama of it all, wherein seasoned reporters caught hold of traumatized twenty-year olds and ask them such gravitas-laden questions as, How did you feel when you saw your best friend blown to bits? Ah, thank god for the enhanced sensitivity which lets us be outraged, outraged by what some walking-dead tired-old has-been shock-jock says in his morning mumblings, but allows us to close our eyes to public dissections of other people’s pain. Fortunately, there are reports that that line of questioning is going to be turned off for a while.

Next, the whirring sound of axes (pun intended) of all kinds, from Jihad-opia (the manic condition of seeing jihadis everywhere) to Video-phobia and Gun-control-freakery being sharpened up on the news shows, thus Charles Krauthammer on FOX, letting us know that if Cho wasn’t actually a henchman of Osama-bin-what’s-his-name, he’d missed a hell of a chance.

Sound-bytes and sensations.

We can see monstrosity and evil when a psychotic twenty-three year old lashes out in madness and kills thirty-two of us.

Too bad we can’t recognize it when perfectly sane adults calculatedly kill over half-a-million of them.

Virginia Tech – antidepressants and violence?

Posted on by

I am glad that the media is at last focusing on what, for me, was always at the heart of this story – psychiatric illness. We don’t always recognize it when it’s present, we stigmatize it, we treat it with powerful drugs that we don’t fully understand, and we fail to recognize the side effects.

For a short period I taught at an inner city school for children who are “intensity 5” level – that is, kids with behavioral problems that require a fair level of supervision and restraint.

What I saw first hand is what may have been playing out in the Virginia Tech affair….I say may, because I don’t know right now to what extent Cho’s behavior was influenced – if at all – by drugs….some reports say there were no drugs. I don’t know if they are premature or not.
At the school I saw children between the ages of, say, 6 and 14 plied with a concoction of pills. ostensibly because they had mental problems. Well, in many case, it seemed to me that it was the pill-popping that was the cause of their problems. Ritalin was given routinely to young boys who seemed to be simply bored and restless. Nor was any attention paid to the childrens’ diet, which was very poor – the cheapest white bread, poor-quality grape jelly and ultra sweet soft drinks with coloring agents in them. I was convinced that some of the children were suffering from food addictions and malnutrition, rather than mental illness.

Any signs of hyperactivity, rebelliousness, or lethargy – the normal moods of children – were promptly treated with a range of drugs, from Ritalin to Prozac, this despite the serious side-effects associated with them. Many SSRI drugs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, a class of antidepressants) are linked with side-effects worse than the problems for which they are prescribed, severe facial tics, for one.

I don’t mean that whatever Cho’s medication (if there was any), it wasn’t warranted. We don’t know that his killing rampage was at all induced by mood-altering drugs. We don’t know much of anything about this angle yet.

And, it is the case that Cho behaved very methodically in the days preceding the killing – waiting the requisite period to buy a second gun, preparing the multimedia packet, going to the gym

[– why, I wonder…. to get in physical shape for the day or to look better in the video? Does any one else see the exhibitionistic element here? Too bad the media played into it by replaying that video so many times].

His behavior doesn’t sound obviously like drug-induced mania — to a layman. But again, people can exhibit the effects of drugs – or of mental illness – in very different ways.

So, all sorts of questions need to be raised — and they are being raised, fortunately.

Arianna Huffington at the Huffington Post has done a piece about the role of drugs in a numer of shootings: Kip Kinkel in Oregon in 1998 (Prozac); Red Lake Indian Reservation shooter Jeff Weise (Prozac); James Wilson in Greenwood, S. Carolina (anti-depressants); T J Solomon in Conyers, George (Ritalin); Eric Harris at Columbine (Luvox).

According to the the manufacturer of Luvox, 4% of children and youth taking the drug actually develop mania. According to studies, Prozac causes mania in 6% of cases.

I am adding this excerpt which suggests that Cho was not on antidepressants:

While the Associated Press is reporting Cho “may” have been on prescribed antidepressants, according to ABC news:

“Some news accounts have suggested that Cho had a history of antidepressant use, but senior federal officials tell ABC News that they can find no record of such medication in the government’s files. This does not completely rule out prescription drug use, including samples from a physician, drugs obtained through illegal Internet sources, or a gap in the federal database, but the sources say theirs is a reasonably complete search.”

I am hearing now that Cho suffered from autism.

His relations describe him as being difficult to talk to from childhood, and not communicating even with his parents.

Virginia Tech Killing: Who in the World Is Ismail Ax?

Posted on by

More ethnological and onomatological ruminations from the ever colorful right, cited in Media Matters:

“Responding to the April 16 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel “speculat[ed]” in an April 16 weblog post that the shooter, who had been identified at that point only as a man of Asian descent, might be a “Paki” Muslim and part of “a coordinated terrorist attack.”

“Paki” is a disparaging term for a person of Pakistani descent…” (That’s a comment from Media Matters)
(AN ASIDE: As someone originally from India, I just want to remark that the subcontinent (of India) alone contains as many different distinct languages and cultures as Europe. The equivalent of Europe is India, not Asia. There is really no equivalent to Asia. Europeans share more in common than Asians do. Just another way in which language confuses us with false equivalences).

Relatedly, Jerry Boyer (did I get this name right?) of National Review was just on Neil Cavuto on FOX, talking about the name, Ismail Ax. He was insisting on its jihadi overtones, claiming that Cho was a smart young man who made literary references in his writing. and therefore, the words he used need to be taken seriously.

Well, I think Cho was capable of literary references, too. ‘McBeef’, for example, is a subtle reference to Macbeth, as is the reference in the media package to people not being able to wash blood off their hands. But that’s precisely the reason I think Ismail is probably a general reference to Ishmael, as a symbol of the outcast and possibly a reference to Moby Dick and probably not a specific reference to a jihadi brotherhood.

It’s my belief that Cho’s fevered…and probably quite creative …imagination scrambled together a number of things he had read, like passages from Moby Dick (remember the reiteration of the name “Dick” in Richard McBeef…a name loaded with his obsession with sodomy).

The protagonist of Melville’s novel, Captain Ahab, has been wounded by the white whale — which becomes a symbol to him of the malice of the universe. To Ahab, the renegade Christian (which is how Cho also saw himself apparently), the whale is the “pasteboard mask” worn by the supreme inscrutable evil (ch. 36). Ahab proposes to strike back at all that is wrong everywhere by striking “through the mask.”

Moby Dick opens with the line, “Call me Ishmael,” one of the most famous in all literature.

Then here is another interesting chapter in the book, which even contains all of Cho’s references to idols, paganism, and axes:

CHAPTER 17

The Ramadan

As Queequeg?s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody?s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;?but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all?Presbyterians and Pagans alike?for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I went to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:-all silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don?t you speak? It’s I-Ishmael.” But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg’s harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That?s strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.

“Queequeg!-Queequeg!”-all still. Something must have happened. Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person I met?the chamber-maid. “La! la!” she cried, “I thought something must the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it’s been just so silent ever since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma’am!-Mistress! murder! Mrs. Hussey! apoplexy!”and with these cries she ran towards the kitchen, I following.

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.

“Wood-house!” cried I, ?which way to it? Run for God’s sake, and fetch something to pry open the door-the axe!-the axe! he’s had a stroke; depend upon it!”and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.

“What’s the matter with you, young man?

“Get the axe! For God?s sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open!”

******

Here you find all the references to pagans, Christians, and axes – that were floating around in Cho’s deranged mind…he didn’t have to get any of this from jihadis.

But let’s say Cho saw himself as a kind of Captain Ahab, then what’s the physical injury or handicap he suffered? Ahab, remember, lost his leg to Moby Dick.

A poster at this blog has written in suggesting that Cho had a bad speech impediment, which might account for his introversion and silence.

“Once, in English class, the teacher had the students read aloud, and when it was Cho’s turn, he just looked down in silence“, Davids recalled. Finally, after the teacher threatened him with an F for participation, Cho started to read in a strange, deep voice that sounded “like he had something in his mouth,” Davids said.
“As soon as he started reading, the whole class started laughing and pointing and saying, ‘Go back to China,“‘ Davids said. {FOX News article}

“We were concerned about him being too quiet and encouraged him to talk more.” said an uncle (Cho’s mother’s younger brother), who requested to be identified only by his last name, Kim. Cho “troubled his parents a lot when he was young because he couldn’t speak well, but was well-behaved,” recalled his grandfather, who was also identified by only his last name Kim in an interview with the Dong-a Ilbo daily. In a separate interview with the Hankyoreh newspaper, Kim, 81, said the relatives were worried that (as a child) Cho might even be mute.

Stephanie Roberts, 22, graduated with Cho from Westfield High School. “I just remember he was a shy kid who didn’t really want to talk to anybody,” she said. “I guess a lot of people felt like maybe there was a language barrier.” But she said friends of hers who went to middle school with Cho told her they recalled him getting picked on there. “There were just some people who were really mean to him and they would push him down and laugh at him,” Roberts said Wednesday. “He didn’t speak English really well and they would really make fun of him.“ {FOX News}

And here is a report that he suffered from autism.

So, if you look at it objectively and without an agenda, there really are lots of possible explanations for Cho’s behavior and language. I am not willing to back any of them at this point, but I am pretty certain that what we know so far doesn’t support the jihadi theory.

Bo Dietl, from the (former) Don Imus show, who was also on the same FOX show today, made this point quite well. He pointed out that he too had been struck by the Muslim associations to the name until he saw the video. But the video itself was so deranged and all over the place – with its references to Christ, hedonists and rich people – that he too came to the conclusion that it did not refer specifically to jihadis.

Meanwhile, this is what is worrying the right: some of the file names in that multimedia package that Cho sent to NBC, from an NBC report:


“all of You”, “am al qaeda”, “anti terror”, “as time appr”, “blood of inno”, “congrad”, “could b victim.”

The NBC report goes on: “The rambling comments are those of an angry young man who felt persecuted, who felt that the world is against him, who felt he was a victim of personal terrorism.”

Of course, there are right-wing bloggers who think that NBC is the one rambling here:

“Felt he was a “victim of personal terrorism?” Are they fookin nuts? Who writes this psychobabble? Whoever it is must be sleeping with Geraldo Rivera,” writes one. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/

I will leave it there for now and just say that in my opinion, these bloggers aren’t too convincing.

What about the identification with Jesus Christ in Cho’s video? How does that square with the jihadi theory? And what about the reference to the Columbine school shooting? Or to hedonists and rich people? The reference to al quaed strikes me as something coming to him from the culture at large to be .taken for its oppositional stance in some general way but not indicating a definite allegiance.

People can legitimately pose theories about an event as sensational as this one – that’s natural. But at some point, they need to provide real evidence for their theories, or they begin to look like they are just making political hay from the moment.

Earlier on, I posted a report about a Korean killing spree (in the post about Cho) to remind us that mass shootings are not unique to the US (some of my foreign friends like to rib me about this….and the post is really for them). Killers can get their inspiration from any number of places, maybe even from several places. Now, it turns out that there’s a report that Cho might have been imitating an award winning South Korean movie he’d watched recently,  OldBoy,  which was ultra-violent and contained grotesque images of revenge and obssession.

We also have news of copy cat killings all over the country – like this one threatened by Jeffery(sic) Thomas Carney, who warns that he is going to go on a spree worse than Virginia Tech.

These copy-cat threats are making a lot of people – rightly – question NBC’s decision to go public with that video, which seems to be what is setting them off.

That tells you how diffiicult it is to lay the blame on any one thing – whether it’s videos… or rap music… or violent games – as an explanation of a particular act of violence. You can see that even news stories can set off deranged, attention- seeking sociopaths (I use the term as a layman).

My point is that deranged people will grasp at anything on which to model their behavior. We can’t really immediately infer that Cho was a jihadi just because some of his behavior resembled some things that jihadis might do.

The fact is the creative mind, even the deranged creative mind, travels very far afield for its imagery and then scrambles it in a way that defies daylight logic. If you’ve ever read about the creation of Coleridge’s “Xanadu,” a poem written in an “opium dream.” you’ll know what I mean. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson once wrote a very lengthy book ( I think it’s called In Search of Xanadu) tracking down Coleridge’s readings for many years before he wrote the poem. He showed how images from all sorts of unrelated reading turned up disguised in the famous poem.

Just something to think about: the immense power of the images around us to shape our thoughts……