Tax Day, Oklahama City, the Atlanta Olympics and the Return of the Ricin Letters

The Lone Wolf has long been a literary and movie character type.  I always think of the old spaghetti westerns–like High Plains Drifter–and Clinton Eastwood.  The Lone Wolf is a popular Manga character in Japan too.  He’s a samurai that has a lot in common with Eastwood’s scruffy cowboy in poncho persona. The Lone Wolf in the criminal justice system has come to represent more of a pathetic, extremely disturbed man that kills people in an attempt to make some kind of statement.  You can think Eric Rudolph–the Clinic and Olympics bomber–when you think of this profile. The last big Lone Wolf killer who did serious damage was the Sikh Mosque shooter.

Wade Michael Page, the alleged killer, according to multiple news sources was a 40 year old Army veteran with a hate symbol tattoo who received a demotion and a less than honorable discharge from the military in 1998 for “patterns of misconduct” according to CNN after six years of service, finishing up at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Disgruntled military veteran killers like Nidal Hassan (who was in the Army), Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn, Olympic and clinic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph as well as executed Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh and D.C. Sniper John Allen Muhammad (the latter two had accomplices), have led many to mechanistically conclude that military service is part of a profile of loner extremists.

The real story is far more complex, as it is more likely that a first responder or victim to a mass shooting will be a military veteran than the shooter. Irrespective of their military status, these kind of killers are often depressed, socially and psychologically itinerant adult males whose significant and defining life setbacks in career or relationships create a festering anger that explodes into violence against a symbolic target. These targeted locations and innocent people are the sincere focus of aggression in the contorted thinking of someone whose anger and belief system leads them to settle a score and reaffirm their self worth by achieving notoriety through violence. A violent act transforms them from losers to warriors for a cause that is bigger than they are, and they are hitting back, not only on behalf of themselves, but for others who faced similar unfairness from an uncaring society.

The three main categories of extremist aggressors are listed below, and usually one is the primary element with an offender, with at least one other playing a secondary supporting role:

. The Ideologically Motivated (Religious, Political or Hybrid)
. The Psychologically Dangerous (Sociopath or Cognitively Impaired)
. Personal Benefit or Revenge

Two significant stories are developing this afternoon.  The first is that the bomb types used by the Boston Bomber are thought to be of the type most used by a lone wolf killer.

The devices used in the Boston Marathon attack Monday are typical of the “lone wolf:” the solo terrorist who builds a bomb on his own by following a widely available formula.

In this case, the formula seems very similar to one that al Qaeda has recommended to its supporters around the world as both crudely effective and difficult to trace. But it is also a recipe that has been adopted by extreme right-wing individuals in the United States.

The threat of the “lone wolf” alarms the intelligence community.

“This is what you worry about the most,” a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN’s Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger. “No trail, no intelligence.”

Officials have told CNN that among the materials used in the attack on the marathon were some sort of timing device, a basic mixture of explosives and some sort of metal container containing nails and other projectiles. The FBI said late Tuesday that what appeared to be fragments of ball bearings, or BBs, and nails had been recovered and had possibly been contained in a pressure cooker.

One federal law enforcement source told CNN’s Deborah Feyerick the devices contained “low-velocity improvised explosive mixture — perhaps flash-powder or sugar chlorate mixture likely packed with nails or shrapnel.”

An explosives expert told CNN the yellowness of the flame probably came from carbon or some organic fuel such as sugar that contains it. The expert, who is frequently consulted by the FBI and other government agencies, said the white smoke made it “unlikely that a military-grade high explosive, such as those used in shells and bombs, which is usually grey or black, was used.”

U.S. Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said “most likely gun powder” was used in the devices.

The breaking news this morning is that President Obama has received a Ricin-laced letter.  Two other Washington Congressional members also received letters.  The Senate Building is being evacuated because of a number of suspicious packages.

Authorities said Wednesday they had intercepted a letter to the White House that tested positive for ricin poison.

The Secret Service acknowledged the letter addressed to President Obama contained a suspicious substance, and the FBI later said tests showed it was ricin, the same deadly poison sent in a letter addressed to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.). The Wicker letter was made public on Tuesday.

The Secret Service said the letter was sent to Obama on April 16 and was discovered at an remote White House mail screening facility.”This facility routinely identifies letters or parcels that require secondary screening or scientific testing before delivery,” the Secret Service said in a statement. “The Secret Service White House mail screening facility is a remote facility, not located near the White House complex, that all White House mail goes through.”

The agency said it is working closely with the U.S. Capitol Police and the FBI in the investigation.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama had been briefed twice on the investigation. “He was briefed last night and again this morning,” Carney said.

They may have a man in mind for these letters.

(UPDATE 12:00 p.m. ET)
Capitol Hill Police are questioning a man with a backpack in the area of the Hart Senate Office Building. He raised suspicions with the contents of his backpack and the way he responded to police questions, two Capitol Hill police officers told CNN. The man’s backpack contained sealed envelopes, one of the officers said. The backpack is being X-rayed, one of the officers said.

(POSTED 11:43 a.m. ET)
U.S. Capitol Police are evacuating the first floor of the Hart Senate Office Building due to a suspicious package. People on other floors of the building are being told to go into their offices. Separately, there is a suspicious envelope at the office of Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, in the Russell Senate Office Building. Security has cleared the hall but is not officially evacuating.

It drives me nuts that so many whacked political right wingers immediately jump on the islamic conspiracy bandwagon for events like these.  It’s so bad that some poor Saudi who was a victim of the Boston Bomber was tackled while he was injured.  Right Wing paranoia blogs began to publish the poor guys name as a possible suspect when he was being questioned by the FBI as a witness.  All you have to do is read the ratfucker blogs and the crazy go nutters like Geller to see how some of these lone wolves get their paranoia juiced.

A twenty-year-old man who had been watching the Boston Marathon had his body torn into by the force of a bomb. He wasn’t alone; a hundred and seventy-six people were injured and three were killed. But he was the only one who, while in the hospital being treated for his wounds, had his apartment searched in “a startling show of force,” as his fellow-tenants described it to the Boston Herald, with a “phalanx” of officers and agents and two K9 units. He was the one whose belongings were carried out in paper bags as his neighbors watched; whose roommate, also a student, was questioned for five hours (“I was scared”) before coming out to say that he didn’t think his friend was someone who’d plant a bomb—that he was a nice guy who liked sports. “Let me go to school, dude,” the roommate said later in the day, covering his face with his hands and almost crying, as a Fox News producer followed him and asked him, again and again, if he was sure he hadn’t been living with a killer.

Why the search, the interrogation, the dogs, the bomb squad, and the injured man’s name tweeted out, attached to the word “suspect”? After the bombs went off, people were running in every direction—so was the young man. Many, like him, were hurt badly; many of them were saved by the unflinching kindness of strangers, who carried them or stopped the bleeding with their own hands and improvised tourniquets. “Exhausted runners who kept running to the nearest hospital to give blood,” President Obama said. “They helped one another, consoled one another,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, said. In the midst of that, according to a CBS News report, a bystander saw the young man running, badly hurt, rushed to him, and then “tackled” him, bringing him down. People thought he looked suspicious.

What made them suspect him? He was running—so was everyone. The police reportedly thought he smelled like explosives; his wounds might have suggested why. He said something about thinking there would be a second bomb—as there was, and often is, to target responders. If that was the reason he gave for running, it was a sensible one. He asked if anyone was dead—a question people were screaming. And he was from Saudi Arabia, which is around where the logic stops. Was it just the way he looked, or did he, in the chaos, maybe call for God with a name that someone found strange?

We simply cannot deal with the idea that we have a culture that seems to breed these very angry and disturbed men.  Most of them appear to be heavily anti-government and focused on stockpiling weapons of all kinds.  They bear many grudges.  Of course, Norway just had its own Lone Wolf that shot up a bunch of teenagers at a summer camp but the US gets more than its share and they have easy access to horrible weapons here.  The most scary things about the Lone Wolf Killer is that there is usually no way to unmask him until he has done a hell of a lot of damage.

There are some good sources to read about this phenomenon.

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