Breivik Unchanged, Seeks Parole

 

Now age 42, Anders Behring Breivik seeks release from prison after serving half of his 21-year sentence. He spends his days in a three-room cell, playing video games, exercising, watching TV, and taking university-level courses in mathematics and business.

A prosecutor in Norway said on 20 January (2022) that Breivik is "a very dangerous man" and therefore a poor candidate for release after 10 years in prison, as Norwegian law permits.

On the final day of a three-day parole hearing, prosecutor Hulda Karlsdottir said in her closing argument that Anders Behring Breivik "has not shown any genuine remorse in court" and his behavior there is part of a "PR stunt."

"In the clear view of the prosecution, Breivik's request for parole should not be granted," Karlsdottir said.

Breivik is being treated leniently though his sprees of violence remain unprecedented in Norway. He killed eight in an Oslo bombing in 2011, and then stalked and gunned down 69 people, mostly teens, at a political summer camp on the island of Utoya.

During a three-day parole hearing this week, Breivik renounced violence, but also flashed a Nazi salute and espoused white supremacy, echoing ideas in a manifesto he released at the time of his killing spree. The outburst was familiar to Norwegians who had watched him deliver rambling diatribes during his partially televised criminal trial.

A psychiatrist who has observed Breivik since 2012 testified Wednesday that he can't be trusted. A prison official told the judges hearing the parole request "there is an imminent danger" that, if released, Breivik would again commit serious crimes.

Breivik is a mentally ill person who believes he has done nothing wrong and doubtless would continue his acts of terror against perceived enemies. He lives by his own Nietzschean logic.

Breivik once said, "As for the Church and science, it is essential that science takes an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings. Europe has always been the cradle of science, and it must always continue to be that way. Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I'm not an excessively religious man. I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe."

Related reading: Breivik is a Darwinian Terrorist; Norway's Mass Murderer Tests Limits of Lenient Justice System

USA's Role in Japanese Vivisection Atrocities

US scientists were “accomplices after the fact” in Japanese doctors’ war crimes
by Michael Cook

All of contemporary bioethics springs from the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1947. Seven Nazi doctors and officials were hanged and nine received severe prison sentences for performing experiments on an estimated 25,000 prisoners in concentration camps without their consent. Only about 1,200 died but many were maimed and psychologically scarred.

So did the US do to the hundreds of Japanese medical personnel who experimented on Chinese civilians and prisoners of war of many nationalities, including Chinese, Koreans, Russians, Australians, and Americans? They killed an estimated 3,000 people in the infamous Unit 731 in Harbin, in northeastern China before and during World War II – plus tens of thousands of civilians when they field-tested germ warfare. Many of the doctors were academics from Japan's leading medical schools.

Nothing.

Well, almost nothing. Twelve doctors were tried and found guilty by the Soviets in the Khabarovsk War Crime Trials in 1949, but they were all repatriated in 1956. American authorities dismissed the trials as Soviet propaganda. Many of the doctors in Unit 731 went on to successful careers in Japan after the War. The commander of the unit, Shirō Ishii, lived in relative obscurity but his successor late in the war, Kitano Masaji, became head of one of Japan’s leading pharmaceutical companies.

How did the Japanese doctors escape justice?

A fascinating answer appears in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. The broad outline of the story has been well documented, even if it is not widely known. To cut a long story short, the Americans struck a deal with the doctors. They traded immunity from prosecution for access to scientific information from the ghastly Japanese experiments – many of which are too grim to detail here. (If you have the stomach for it, a remorseful doctor describes, at the age of 90, some of his vivisection experiments in an article in the Japan Times.)

Read it all here.