Salman Ramadan Abedi: the Manchester Arena Bomber

This short post follows up on arguments put forward in an earlier post on Adrian Elms, the Westminster Bridge Killer. 

Gleaning from different reports across several newspapers: Mr Abedi's former schoolfriends say that he was a good footballer, but very short tempered and very gullible. His classmates were able to manipulate him into believing improbable things and even carrying out foolish actions, for their amusement. Short temper and gullibility can be subtle signs of brain damage, in fact. Minor brain damage is now known to be a distinct possibility when heading footballs, especially when intercepting a hard kick at goal, and there are those who would like to see deliberate headers eliminated from the game.

His more recent friends and acquaintances seem to differ on whether or not he attended the mosque frequently, but the Iman of his local mosque says that he did come, but then gave the Iman a "look of hate" when he preached against ISIS, and attended much less frequently after that. His neighbours say that Mr Abedi had taken to praying very loudly in the street in the weeks prior to the attack on the Manchester Arena. 

The friends also say he was a cannabis user: this seems to be a non-negotiable requirement before one can become a jihadee. Cannabis not only makes people paranoid: frequent use, and even the casual use of strong cannabis (skunk), seems to break down the natural barriers in the human mind against killing a fellow human being. This isn't exactly news: the "Assassins" from Persia in the middle ages, were fed strong hashish on the orders of the Sultan who controlled them. The link between cannabis and lethal violence is well established on the basis of centuries of evidence, and foolishly ignored by those, such as Liberal Democrats and the American "Alt. Right", who want to legalize its abuse.

Unlike driving a car into a crowd, making a bomb that works requires some technical skill, especially if the explosives have to be made from basic raw materials. (Welsh Nationalist terrorists, for example, used, exclusively, gelignite stolen from mines and quarries, and it took a few years for Irish Nationalists to fully master the art of making explosives from ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Even then, they generally used commercially-manufactured Semtex explosive to initiate their "co-op mix".) ISIS would want any member who actually had that explosive-making skill, to carry out more than one attack before becoming a martyr, so it is very unlikely that Mr Abedi actually made the bomb that he carried into the foyer of the Manchester Arena. At least, not alone.

If Mr Abedi was selected by a less expendable jihadee, to carry the bomb, then it seems reasonable to suppose that he wasn't picked at random, over the internet, but instead nominated and recruited by somebody who knew him quite well, perhaps a former classmate who remembered how unusually gullible and easily manipulated he had been at school. 

There are probably two or three bomb-makers/organizers, and perhaps several mentally-ill and drug-addicted "bomb mules," still to find. The experience from Palestine, is that suicide bombers can be heavily manipulated, or coerced, into carrying out attacks, but it's always going to be the mentally or socially susceptible ones who will be chosen for this purpose. Coerced suicide bombers frequently surrender to Israeli forces at the last moment, rather than kill innocent people.

It has just emerged that Mr Abedi had expressed pro-terrorist views at college, and that at least two people had telephoned the anti-terrorist hotline about him a few years ago.

Update: 25/5/2017  It is becoming apparent that if anyone was manipulating Salman Abedi into adopting terrorist ideology and carrying out a terrorist act, it was his father and brothers, who are now all in custody in Tripoli and Manchester. There's probably not the slightest chance that they would have carried out a suicide attack themselves.

Update: 4/5/2017  The bomb that Salman Abedi used, was the same design as that used by the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up outside the Stade De France in Paris many months earlier, it is not true to say that he acted completely alone.

Slingshot Channel: Reuploaded

The video which caused the Mail on Sunday to (somewhat foolishly and with gross misrepresentation) attack the Slingshot Channel, has been lightly re-edited on the advice of You Tube officials and re-uploaded. See this link for this blog's original article on that subject.

The main body of the video hasn't been changed, however, and it is clear from watching it, that it was always intended to be a consumer test of a "stab vest" that was being sold via Amazon to the general public, and that actual police stab vests are probably an order of magnitude tougher. It is also obvious that the aluminium plates which are the vest's main form of protection, are not hardened in any way. The vest is priced at around e70 and very cheaply made.

It was an outright and deliberate lie that "it was the same type of vest that PC Palmer wore when he was murdered." It is also the case that Adrian Elms made no attempt to penetrate the vest that PC Palmer wore: he stabbed PC Palmer in places where the vest offered no protection in the first place. It is further worth noting that a lot of bladed weapon murders have been carried out with a stab to the groin to sever the femoral artery (one such was the murder of someone the blog author knew) and almost no police or civilian body armour in widespread use protects against that.

About the only body armour that does protect the femoral artery to some extent is the sort that the late Princess Diana wore in the famous "minefield" photographs taken in Angola. It has a separate plate hanging down to protect the groin area. (From landmine shrapnel in this instance, but the hardened plate would deflect a blade.)

Picture Credit: Reuters

This kind of protection is essential where anti-personnel mines are concerned, because many of them are designed to direct shrapnel at the groin area precisely in order to attack the femoral artery, but there's very little point in "stab-proof" armour that doesn't protect against the sort of wound that killed, for example: Stephen Lawrence, Frank Cox and Damilola Taylor. (In both the Cox and Taylor cases, defendants were able to successfully argue that the directly fatal wound was "accidental", something which simply isn't believed by either victim's families. Vocational criminals, even teenage ones, generally do know to stab for the femoral artery in order to kill. It was a move well known to 18th century duelists.)

The Slingshot Channel Isn't Terrorism

On Sunday 2/4/2017, The Mail on Sunday Newspaper (editorially independent from the Daily Mail) published a very lurid front page article using emotive terms like "blood money", complaining about a video by Joerg Sprave on You Tube's "Slingshot Channel" in which Mr Sprave demonstrated the weaknesses of a kind of stab vest which is being sold to private citizens in Germany who are concerned about being attacked, whether by muggers or terrorists.

The article also appeared on the "Daily Mail" website, which is a third editorially independent entity, which publishes material from both Mail newspapers as well as many unique articles which are biased towards American readers. When the author of this blog searched the site this afternoon, it produced a list of several articles mentioning Mr Sprave in a non-defamatory way, but Sunday's article was not on the list.

The text of the article was highly biased and defamatory and accused Mr Sprave of deliberately helping terrorists. It claimed that the stab proof vest he tested was the same type as worn by the late PC Palmer, who was murdered at the Palace of Westminster by Adrian Elms. Mr Sprave was astonished by this claim, as his object in making the video had been to establish whether the stab vest being sold to the general public, actually offered any protection against being stabbed, and his findings were that it was useless. He refused to believe "that Her Majesty issues this crap to policemen." The claim does not, in fact, appear to be true: the two stab vests are different. Someone at the Home Office would deserve to be sacked if they proved to be the same! It is obvious from PC Palmer's death, however, that the stab vest he was actually wearing was equally ineffective, but in a different way, and that hard questions do indeed need to be asked of Home Office officials and very senior police officers. The Mail on Sunday's article could fairly be seen as an attempt to divert the public's attention from asking such questions.

The Mail on Sunday also filed a "Community Standards Strike" against Mr Sprave, which resulted in You Tube taking down his video and threatening his right to post any more. You Tube did this without apparently examining the video in any depth at all, or they would have realized that the Mail on Sunday were lying.

Mr Sprave tested the stab vest by stabbing it, not at a weak point, but in the middle of the chest, where the protection includes a flat aluminium plate, using a dagger which he had made himself. Making an effort, as if he were a terrorist seriously trying to hurt somebody, he was able to pierce the aluminium plate three times. A previous video had shown Mr Sprave testing various weapons against a polycarbonate riot shield and visor, as used by the German police, and he found that these successfully resisted all the weapons, including a very powerful Russian crossbow, that he had been able to buy without a firearms licence in Germany. He was able to pierce the riot shield and visor only by using an improvised airgun of ridiculous power which he had built himself. He concluded that German police riot gear was pretty good and would protect officers from any distance weapon that rioters could readily lay their hands on. 

His speculation about the stab vest, was that perhaps it could be improved by using a polycarbonate plate rather than an aluminium one. On this point it is important to note that when polycarbonate is used in armour type applications, it is specially toughened, using a process first devised by ICI during the troubles in Ulster. The sheets of stock polycarbonate sold by industrial suppliers like RS Components have not been toughened: partly to keep them cheap, but mainly to make it possible for users to actually bend and form the sheet into whatever it is they are trying to make. For everyday uses, the virtue of polycarbonate is that it bends.

The same may kind of thing may be true of the aluminium plate in the stab vest that Mr Sprave consumer tested: stock aluminium plate is often supplied in an untreated or even annealed form, to make it easier to shape it into a product. Heat treating it for hardness is best done when all the cutting and shaping is finished. The plate in the stab vest was very shiny and betrayed no obvious signs of heat treatment. The toughness of aluminium can be roughly doubled by a pressure treatment process, where shaped and otherwise finished objects are placed in an argon-filled pressure vessel and heated to near the melting point of aluminium whilst being subjected to very high pressure. This is how aluminium turbofan-engine fan-blades are made tough enough to actually work! 

The US Army's new Advanced Combat Helmet Generation II is made of a toughened form of high density polyethylene, which is lighter than Kevlar but just as strong, and which can be moulded into fairly complex shapes, as in the helmet. This material might enable a new generation of stab vests to be made, which offer protection to body joints and other places where flat aluminium plates offer no protection at all. The key question about the Advanced Combat Helmet is "what happens when troops come under artillery fire using white phosphorus ammunition?" which could be very pertinent in combat with with the forces of North Korea or even Russia, which are likely to bombard US Army rear areas with white phosphorus shells by the trainload. Chunks of burning phosphorus are likely to burn through any helmet made of toughened polyethylene; indeed, they can burn through car roofs, so they might even burn through old fashioned steel helmets.  

What should Mr Sprave do now? 

Firstly, he should use the You Tube appeal process, such as it is, to challenge the Community Standards Strike, which threatens his right to make and post videos on subjects which will entertain, inform and in some cases protect, his viewers.

He should resist well meant advice to sue for libel, as this is an expensive and unwieldy instrument. Success in a libel court doesn't actually prove that the defamatory material was untrue, either, and it is therefore completely useless for clearing your name in the public eye. "Reform" of the libel laws means that a libel claim can now only be heard at the High Court, where costs are astronomical.

A claim of "Malicious Falsehood", while being harder to prove (though perhaps not in this case!) would, if successful, establish for the record that the Mail on Sunday article was actually untrue and designed to harm Mr Sprave. The Sun newspaper was successfully sued for Malicious Falsehood a few years ago: it can be done. (The Plaintiff couldn't afford the cost of a libel claim.) The blog author believes that this kind of claim can still be dealt with in the County Court, where costs are more reasonable and cases dealt with faster. It is worth taking legal advice on this, though, because the Cameron government tampered, heavily, with this area of the law, mainly to please the billionaire Max Mosley.

Perhaps the best course of action would be a complaint, which does not need expensive legal representation, to the press standards body which the Mail group newspapers have agreed to be bound by, which is the Independent Press Standards Organisation or IPSO.

IPSO only accepts complaints from the injured party, not third parties, but the process is designed to be reasonably swift and fair. Pertinently, its rulings, unlike a libel ruling, will generally say whether an offending article was true or untrue! They can fine the offending newspaper up to a million pounds, which should sting adequately.

There is another press regulator extant, "Impress" which is solely funded by Max Mosley and which is boycotted by nearly all British newspapers. There is no point whatsoever in complaining to Impress, when there is an independent regulator that the newspapers all recognize and have signed up to and have agreed to be bound by. Impress will probably be wound up soon.

Update:
While this article was being written, You Tube agreed to remove the Community Standards Strike against Mr Sprave and he is going to lightly edit and re-upload the video which The Mail on Sunday objected to. That leaves the matter of the false and defamatory Mail on Sunday article to be resolved.

Just Looking For An Excuse: Adrian Elms aka Khalid Masood, The Westminster Killer.

The most revealing things that have been published about Adrian Elms, so far, are that his former friends say that he expressed a strong desire to kill people at about age nineteen, years before he became a Muslim under the name Khalid Masood, and that his behavioural pattern centred on massive drugs binges. The latter fits the pattern of nearly all known Jihadee killers in the West: massive drugs use (usually but not exclusively skunk, sometimes amphetamine or cocaine) is always found: actual religious observance much less so. 

People who are pre-disposed to kill and who use massive amounts of drugs before going out to kill someone largely at random, are not exclusively or even mainly Jihadees: the majority of them are simply mentally ill: their drug-aggravated psychosis either not diagnosed or inadequately treated, and they are usually given hospital orders and quietly put away indefinitely, without ever making national front page headlines. Because they are entitled to privacy, as patients rather than suspects, there is rarely much public examination of evidence, and the inevitable "safeguarding" inquiry always says the same things and never leads to any reduction in the likelihood of a similar event occurring in the future. None of them is labelled as a Jihadee, because they aren't, but they were only ever a website click away from potentially becoming one.

Most human beings, even highly trained soldiers, find it very difficult to kill another human being, and statistics from World War Two show that only a minority of soldiers ever aimed their weapons to intentionally kill in combat. Not even when fighting the evil SS! Psychopaths, however, often have no difficulty killing and even find it difficult to understand how others would have a problem with it. The US Army, not wishing to rely on psychopaths for its combat efficiency, has spent billions of dollars devising elaborate training programmes to make ordinary non-psychopathic recruits into instinctive killers when they are presented with a clear-cut combat situation. (It's less effective when things are more muddled.) The policeman who unhesitatingly shot Adrian Elms dead last week probably benefited from a variant of this training.

The leaders of ISIS, like the leaders of the ALF before them, have less money, less time and fewer behavioural psychologists with which to break down the natural barriers against killing in the minds of their supporters, than the US Army had. The erstwhile leaders of the ALF used to urge their supporters to "knife researchers to death on their own doorsteps" but it never actually happened for them. None of their supporters was ill enough, though some of them were quite unwell by any normal standard. The leaders of ISIS, however, had the advice of at least one competent but unethical psychiatrist, who devised a recruitment strategy and materials that circumvented the problem by targeting and attracting those who were already disposed to kill. This is why their supposedly "Islamic" doctrine makes no attempt to discourage the use of strong mind altering drugs by their "soldiers", because heavy drug abusers are probably the best bet for ruthless killing.

ISIS are not, actually, guilty of a plot to radicalise Western or even Muslim youth in general. They are only really interested in the psychopaths, because they are the only ones where the investment of time and money pays off. ISIS have internet access to thousands of young people in the United Kingdom and many of these will express extreme opinions, when asked. But only a handful of them will actually go out and kill someone as an act of Jihad. Only the ones who already have a drug aggravated psychosis, in fact.

The appearance of "brainwashing" is simply because it is fairly difficult to make a very disturbed mind accept a new obsession, and repetition is required. The aim is to select, exploit, guide and "empower" the disturbed person, firstly to commit violence as an act of Jihad rather than simply at random, and secondly to make some sort of effort at targeting victims who fit the ISIS demonology. Thousands of non-psychopaths dabble with the material intended to do this, without actually leaving their computer screens and doing anything in the real world. They form extreme opinions, but take no action. Because they would find it very hard to do. What ISIS are after, are the tiny minority who cannot see what the problem is. 

To actually deal with Jihadeeism, it is necessary to reduce the pool of drug-aggravated psychopaths available to terrorist groups. That means much better mental healthcare, and in particular much better follow-up when somebody's Mum or Dad goes to the doctor and says that their offspring is in a dangerous state of mind. Hardly ever does the medical profession react as if relatives of an emerging psychopath know what they are talking about! When the relatives are always the first ones to know! And people who do have a relative who is showing signs of emerging as a psychopath, need to persist, even if nobody listens at first.

Secondly, the psychosis is practically always aggravated by drugs, at a time when many top policemen are surrendering in the war on drugs and campaigning for legalization. Make no mistake: legal Skunk, for that's what it will be, and legal Cocaine, because that's what the Luvvies will lobby for, will make many more killers for ISIS or something like it to recruit. We need to actually fight the war on drugs, and this has never actually been done before. It has all been a pretence by politicians who had something to gain (either directly or indirectly) from the trade in dangerous drugs.