Cho Seung-Hui: The face of a killer

MSNBC has released this photo of Cho Seung-Hui, which he sent to them:

NBC Nightly News will be revealing more photos he is reported to have sent (and perhaps video, too?) tonight on their 6:30 broadcast.

Chris Matthews, believe it or not, had some good questions about the package, which can be seen/heard here – the best question, I think, was the one where he was asking whether or not authorities knew for sure that Cho was the one who mailed the package. Right now, authorities are checking for any type of surveillance video they can find to see if it was indeed Cho who mailed the package to NBC.

— As if your heart couldn’t break anymore: Here’s video of one of the victims – Reema Samaha – taken the day before she was murdered.

Allah makes a good point in noting that there’s nothing written on Cho’s inner arm, as has been reported, which would mean that either he wrote it on his arm after the photo was taken, or that reports of the words “Ismail Ax” being written in red ink on his inner arm are erroneous.

— Am watching NBC Nightly News now. Brian Williams was interviewing Pete Williams who said that what was sent to NBC encompassed six days of material, video, etc by Cho.

— Williams just said that Cho’s manifesto mentioned the Columbine killers (Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris) as “martyrs.” Speaking of Klebold and Harris, I think this piece on ‘why’ they did it is worth examining in light of what happened this week:

School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as “collateral damage.”

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting “the most deaths in U.S. history.” Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn’t just “fame” they were afterβ€”[FBI Supervisory Special] Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing termβ€”they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Read the whole thing. You’ll see a lot of parallels in the Columbine murderers and the VTech killer.

—- Thank you.

—- Here in Charlotte, NC, several high schools were on lockdown for about an hour this afternoon after a 16 y/o, upset with a former girlfriend, allegedly came onto the campus of North Meck High and pointed it at two people, before driving off later and killing himself at a nearby gas station.

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