This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: "How could our society have let this happen?" This question is posed in the opening paragraph of the official inquiry report following the terrorist attacks at Utøya and the government complex in Oslo on July 22, 2011. The phrasing has haunted criminology professor Heidi Mork Lomell for nearly 15 years.
"It implies that someone let it happen. Not just that the terrorist attack could have been prevented, but that someone failed to do what was necessary to avert it," she says. According to Lomell's research, this premise is not unique to the 22 July Commission.
The work is published in the Nordic Journal of Criminology. Over the course of a little more than a decade, from 2011 to 2022, Norway was struck by three terrorist attacks. Following each attack, an inquiry committee was appointed to review the events and identify shortcomings and lessons.
Lomell has analyzed the committees' approaches to whether the attacks could have been prevented or averted. She has also examined how the belief that terrorism can be prevented influences society's understanding of prevention. The 22 July Commission's nearly 500-page official report became—unusually for a government report—a best-seller when it was published in 2012.
The report received widespread praise and was regarded as an authoritative account, the "definitive answer" to what had happened, Lomell explains. She herself reacted immediately to the tone of the rhetorical question in the introduction. "I could not reconcile myself to the idea that this was a good way to frame an evaluation of a terrorist incident," she says.
The commissions that investigated the terrorist attacks all had an advantage that the police and the Police Security Service (PST) lacked: They knew the time, the place and the perpetrator. After the attacks, they could search for the terrorists' names in various registries, trace the threads backward and identify points where someone might have acted differently and perhaps prevented the attack. There were entries for all three terrorists: Breivik had ordered chemicals from Poland for NOK 121, Manshaus had been reported in a concern notification the previous year, and Matapour and Bhatti were also on the radar of PST and the Intelligence Service.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
