Matthew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Green Beret from Colorado Springs, Colorado, also wrote in notes he left on his cellphone that he needed to “cleanse” his mind “of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.” Livelsberger served in the Army since 2006 and deployed twice to Afghanistan.
“This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives,” Livelsberger wrote in one letter found by authorities and released Friday.
“Not a terrorist attack” – um detonating a bomb in a public place to get attention for a political purpose is basically the definition of a terror attack. Using fear to stop your opponents from opposing your favored political despots. Not to mention that even if there weren’t many injuries, the people who breathed the fumes from those batteries burning likely will develop cancer including the firefighters. And the cost of cleaning that up falls on the people who live there. Not exactly a beneficial act.
The media treating this as a patriotic act is just going to encourage copycats. And this guy was a bomb expert, but failed to realize that the temperatures he was creating would vaporize the fireworks, not shoot them off. If an expert could make that kind of mistake, just imagine the mistakes that will be made by the copycats. Look forward to many casualties from “patriotic” terrorists.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest that he was a bomb expert. Familiar with IEDs, but that doesn’t mean expert.
OK, expert maybe was the wrong word, but it was part of his job. And that the mistake he made was obvious to anyone with basic understanding of heat and how things like gasoline burns. It’s a simple concept that could have easily have been solved by simply opening the top and using the fireworks to trigger things or lots of other ways to do what he said was going to happen.