Terror at Omaha Mall.

OMAHA, Neb. — Omaha police said nine people were dead, including the alleged shooter, after shots were fired inside the Von Maur store at Westroads Mall on Wednesday afternoon.

Sgt. Teresa Negron said there are nine fatalities. She said officers found the suspected shooter dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Negron could not describe the shooter, but said he was a male. Negron said most of the victims were inside Von Maur.

The gunman has been identified:

OMAHA, Neb. — The shooter at Westroads Mall was identified as Robert A. Hawkins of Bellevue, according to the Sarpy County Sheriff’s Department, and a suicide note said he was going to be famous.

Hawkins, 19, had been arrested on a couple of misdemeanors in November and was due in court this month. One charge included minor in possession of alcohol. He was arrested on Nov. 24. He was due in court for an arraignment on Dec. 19.

Sarpy County deputies said they are getting a warrant to search Hawkins’ home in the Quail Creek neighborhood in Bellevue.

The woman who owns that house at 4302 McCartey Drive, who only gave her first name of Debra, said Hawkins had a lot of emotional instability. She said she thought he was turning things around. She said he had just learned that he was fired from McDonald’s.

Debra said Hawkins was coming out of his room Wednesday morning when she last saw him.

“He said he’d gotten fired and was pretty upset and said, ‘This is the only way,’ and we tried to talk to him,” Debra said. “He was just a very troubled — I had no idea that he was this troubled. I don’t know if it was because he got fired from McDonald’s.”

Debra said she saw Hawkins with a gun last night and thought he and her sons were going hunting, which they did quite often.

Shooter was said to be a black male in his 30’s. Possibly wore fatigues. Possible more than one shooter? Fox News is citing a local NBC report that one person has a self-inflicted wound. KETV has a photo of a male matching the description of the shooter in custody. FoxNews radio is reporting that the shooter is in custody dead.

Police radio reports 2 people dead, up to 10 victims. KETV reporting that are multiple fatalities. 9 Dead confirmed, and 5 victims in Omaha hospitals.

Shots said to be random. 35 to 40 shots said to have been fired. Event said to have occurred in a gift-wrap customer service line. Employees and customers were among the victims.

Officers are stilling trying to clear the mall store by store.

Witness: Shooter was a tall man. He was standing in the children’s section. Raising his gun in the hair shooting numerous rounds into the air.

KETV 7:24: Gunman left three notes. One to his family, One to his friends, and One that was titled, “My Will”. He lost his job at McDonalds recently. Landlord took him to give him safe shelter, stability. Her sons grew up with the Gunman. Warrant has been issued for the house.

Flashback:

Police Remove Grenade from Westroads Parking Lot

Posted: Dec 1, 2007 04:26 PM

Omaha, NE - Police removed a grenade from the parking lot outside Westroads Mall late Friday.

Omaha Police say someone found the grenade in the mall parking lot near The Cheesecake Factory. It was still intact - meaning the pin had not been removed. Police say no one was around when they found the grenade. The bomb squad safely removed it from the area.

Police do not have any suspects at this hour.

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- More Known About Westroads Mall Shooter
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For Immediate Release from Fred08.com:

Fred Thompson Statement on the National Intelligence Estimate

McLean, VA - Fred Thompson released the following statement today on the latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding Iran:

“The accuracy of the latest NIE on Iran should be received with a good deal of skepticism. Our intelligence community has often underestimated the intentions of adversaries, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and North Korea. And are all of the CIA detractors now going to take intelligence pronouncements at face value? It’s awfully convenient for a lot of people: the administration gets to say its policies worked; the Democrats get to claim we should have eased up on Iran a long time ago: and Russia and China can claim sanctions on Iran are not necessary. Who benefits from all this? Iran.

“And what if the NIE estimate is accurate? It’s essentially an analysis of Iran’s intentions at a point in time. Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium for allegedly peaceful purposes, but which would allow them to easily transition to a nuclear weapons program at any point in the future. Maybe even now–now that so many seem willing to forget Iran’s past deceptions and ongoing intransigence. After all, a nuclear weapons program is simply an extension of the process by why uranium is enriched for civilian nuclear fuel. To this day Iran has yet to comply with international demands and its Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty requirements for open inspections and other safeguard measures.

“The bottom line is that the United States must continue to improve its human intelligence capabilities and intelligence analysis. We must hope for the best, but not let our guard down for a moment. If something appears to be too good to be true, it very well may be.“

I’ve been pondering the “Postwar Findings About Iraq” Phase II report from the United States Senate. The report states that there was no known link between Saddam Hussein and the terror organization Al Qaeda. I think we were played.

Now here me out on this. I’m not going to be placing blame on President Bush or anyone in our government. They were simply acting on the intelligence that we and other nations had gathered prior to 2003. Since then Bush has repeatedly confirmed that the intelligence was faulty. As White House press secretary Tony Snow said, there is “nothing new” here.

Were we all, including President Bush, played by our enemies? Were we unknowingly duped into ousting Saddam? I’m beginning to believe that this is the likely case. Al Qaeda’s leadership is a ragtag fleet of strategist and war gamers who have a very clear endgame. They want to put an end to the western culture, destroy non-believers, and create a world government based on Islam, known as a caliphate. Is it at all possible that Saddam Hussien was the lesser of two evils in the Middle East?

According to wikipedia Saddam believed in spreading Pan-Arabism, which is a secular movement for unification among the Arab peoples and nations of the Middle East. In other words he wanted to become the person who controlled the entire region. Al Qaeda and Iran have similar ambitions, but they want to spread Pan-islamism, the religious movement of reunification among all muslims in the world. Both movements were opposed to each other because they basically had the same goal.

Did Al Qaeda have the resources to plant false information about its own involvement in Iraq? Is it possible that Al Qaeda, not President Bush tugging at the American people’s emotions when we learned there might have been a possible link between Al Qaeda and Iraq? Isn’t that what a terror organization does?  What better way for someone to lie about Al Qaeda’s involvement if it were coming directly from the mouth of an Al Qaeda informant.

This entire post deals with conspiracy theories and I have no information to back up my claims. Though it surely seems plausible…

Glenn Beck seems to be the only guy on TV who has a highlighter and is taking notes. On tonight’s “Real Story” segment Glenn quoted President Bush’s speech from Tuesday. In the speech the President linked together the war on terror and the war in Iraq using Osama Bin Laden’s own words.

These terrorists hope to drive America and our coalition out of Afghanistan, so they can restore the safe haven they lost when coalition forces drove them out five years ago. But they’ve made clear that the most important front in their struggle against America is Iraq — the nation bin Laden has declared the “capital of the Caliphate.” Hear the words of bin Laden: “I now address… the whole… Islamic nation: Listen and understand… The most… serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War… [that] is raging in [Iraq].” He calls it “a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam.” He says, “The whole world is watching this war,” and that it will end in “victory and glory or misery and humiliation.” For al Qaeda, Iraq is not a distraction from their war on America — it is the central battlefield where the outcome of this struggle will be decided.

The reason we need to stay in Iraq and defeat the enemy from Bin Laden’s mouth. They want to establish a world government based on Islam and Iraq is going to be the caliphate’s Washington.

Drudge Reports:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to attend the summit of Non-Aligned Movement countries in the Cuban capital Havana in mid-September, an official said Wednesday.

“The president will take part in the summit of Non-Aligned countries in Havana,” said the official from the president’s office, who asked not to be named.

The summit of the 116-nation grouping is to take place between September 11-16, and Ahmadinejad is also expected to attend the UN General Assembly in New York that starts on September 12, the official said.

There was no indication as to when Ahmadinejad would be arriving in Havana and New York.

Flashback a few days ago Iran stated that the U.N. should relocate away from NYC.

(Tehran, Iran, Sep. 04)– Iran suggested on Monday that the United Nations headquarters be relocated from New York to a country other than the United States.

“The U.S. tries to pressure Iran in any way possible. We are convinced that considerations should be made regarding the United Nations which is based in this country”, government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham told reporters during his weekly press conference.

“Either the UN must be relocated from the U.S. and set up in a different country or the U.S.’s provisions in this regard must be limited so that the UN plays a more serious role”, Elham said

More from Drudge…

Ahmadinejad said in Tehran Wednesday that his attendance of the UN General Assembly would be a “suitable opportunity” to challenge Bush in a television debate.

“My forthcoming visit to New York for the UN General Assembly would be a suitable opportunity to hold the debate and all world people, especially the Americans, could hear and watch it without censorship,” the news agency ISNA quoted the Iranian president as saying in a cabinet session.

More quotes from President Ahmadinejad

(The Peninsula Online) “I hope that the Americans will not hide from such a debate which is the best way to create peace,” Ahmadinejad said in a statement. “We are ready to make suggestions to help the world better to install justice, calm, wellbeing, peace, friendship and kindness and destroy the climate of violence, threats and bad humour,” he added.

In a fiercely religious speech to a conference in Tehran, Ahmadinejad had earlier said Bush was “nothing” compared to God and was struggling against a current that was inexorably taking the world towards divinity. “I am telling him (Bush) that all the world is threatening you since the general path that the world is taking is towards worshipping God and divinity,” Ahmadinejad said.

China wants the Iran conflict to be solved through dialogue. Nothing new here as it’s something that’s been assumed. As I said before, I believe in the dialogue route, just with the Iranian people and not the current Iranian Regime.

(Beijing) - China said again on Tuesday that it hoped the Iran nuclear standoff with the West could be resolved through dialogue.

“We have consistently stood for the resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue through negotiation and dialogue,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang told a regular news conference.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan shares the same opinion as China.

(Hindustan Times) “The international community should not isolate Iran,” Annan told the Madrid daily El Pais in an interview during his stop in Doha, Qatar, after visiting Iran over the weekend.

Annan has made clear he wants a negotiated solution to the impasse, which deepened after Iran ignored an August 31 UN Security Council deadline to stop its uranium enrichment programme. That set the stage for possible UN economic and political sanctions.

Annan said confrontation with the Security Council “will not be in Iran’s favour or that of the region.”

______

El Presidente of Iran has called for liberal teachers to be removed from their jobs immediately. Earlier this year that was a similar call from conservatives in our own nation. They too wanted the liberalism that is being taught in the school to cease to exist. I’m more realistic on the matter, I don’t believe you can have a yin without a yang. While I might disagree with liberal teachings I believe there is a place for them in our schools. The purpose of college is to take on new ideas and challenge those ideas. If students kept that perspective in mind I doubt this would be an issue in our schools. Too much yang is unhealthy.

(Canoe) “Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities,” the agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying during a meeting with a group of students.

Ahmadinejad complained that changes in the country’s universities were difficult to accomplish and that the country’s educational system had been affected by secularism for the last 150 years, but said “such a change has begun.”

Earlier this year, Iran retired dozens of liberal university professors and teachers. And last November, Ahmadinejad’s administration for the first time named a cleric to head the country’s oldest university in Tehran amid protests by students over the appointment.

They never work, especially when enforced by the U.N. Theres always a way around them (Remember France and Russia’s under the table deals with Iraq?). Sanctions never seem to result in the downfall of leaders, it only isolates them and creates more tension.

Sanctions will effect the people of Iran. When they are enforced they will be used as propaganda against the U.S.

Our President needs to be vocal. He needs to tell the Iranian people that he does not support sanctians against Iran. They need to stand up against the oppressive government and march for a democratic revolution. He needs to get ahead of the spin that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will undoubtly tell the Iranians.

(The Age) The European Union (EU) says it wants to see more dialogue with
Tehran before agreeing to US requests for sanctions to be imposed
against Iran for intransigence over its nuclear program.

Iran faces the threat of UN security council sanctions after the
UN’s atomic watchdog said Tehran had refused to stop work on its
nuclear program by Thursday’s deadline.

Unless, of course, President Bush has lost all hope in the Iranian people…

The War against Islamic Fascism is just as much a PR and media war than anything else. Everytime our President has a glimmer in his eyes about hope in the middle east our beloved media needs to remind us of the meaningless deathtoll number. Don’t get me wrong what our troops, our friends are doing in the middle east is not meaningless. The soldiers who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice should be remembered and honored. I’m numb to the number.

My educated guess: Iran will continue to enrich uranium even after the deadline and they will have nothing to fear because the U.N. won’t impose any type of sanctions.

(Vienna, Austria) Iran has persisted in enriching uranium despite the threat of U.N. sanctions and a looming deadline to freeze such operations, U.N. and European officials said Wednesday.

The officials said Iran had continued to enrich uranium until at least Tuesday.

Its ongoing enrichment could act as a trigger for the U.N. Security Council, which had set Thursday as the final day for Tehran to freeze such activity.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information was confidential, said Iran had also snubbed overtures from world powers for a new meeting on its nuclear program.

Iranian defiance on enrichment will be detailed in a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency due Thursday.

The Iranian President surely seems comfortably while making this statement.

(Associated Press) “Sanctions cannot dissuade the Iranian nation from achieving our
lofty goals of progress. So it’s better for Europe to be independent in
decision-making and to settle problems through negotiations,” hard-line
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, according to state-run television.

He made the comments during a meeting with Felipe Gonzales, Spain’s former premier, the television report said.

Drudge is reporting that the “United States, France, Germany and Britain have agreed to a list of sanctions…“

Glenn Beck’s Questionaire with Senator Rick Santorum. Audio is available on GlennBeck.com.

Question 1: Wiretaps, The Patriot Act, We need to do what we need to do until we win the war at least there is a sunset on those things.

Santorum: Yes

Question 2: Islamic Extremism’s Global War is the biggest threat the West has faced since WWII.

Santorum: Yes, Biggest threat ever.

Question 3: We are in World War 3.

Santorum: Yes, Or WW4 depending if you consider the cold war.

Question 4: If we don’t win against Islamic Extremism it will be the end of the West as we know it.

Santorum: Yes

Question 5: We should build a fence, maybe two on the borders

Santorum: Not on Northern, Yes on South

Question 6: Spending is out of control and politicians need to cut programs, some of them will be good.

Santorum: Yes

Question 7: I will support a Coal-to-Oil Program

Santorum: Yes

Question 8: We must rid ourselves of foreign oil dependence.

Santorum: Yes

Question: 9 I believe a North American Union like the EU is our future.

Santorum: No

Question 10: The UN is a very ineffective organization when it comes to security.

Santorum: Yes

Question 11: The UN is dangerous to our security.

Santorum: Yes

Question 12: Venezuela and Chavez is an enemy.

Santorum: Yes

Question 13: English needs to be our official language.

Santorum: No

Question 14: Do your kids attend public schools?

Santorum: No, home school

Question 15: One of our biggest problems in our country are special interest groups.

Santorum: Yes, generally

Question 16: The Teacher’s Union is a large obstacle in the way of fixing our schools.

Santorum: Yes

Question 17: Companies should receive crippling fines if they repeatedly hire illegal aliens

Santorum: Yes

Question 18: I will vote against what my constituents want if I believe they are wrong.

Santorum: Yes

Question 19: I will vote against my party if I think they are wrong.

Santorum: Yes

Question 20: My party is wrong on _____?

Santorum: Wrong on the issue of poverty in America.

Question 21: The other party is right on _____?

Santorum: Global Aids Pademic

Question 22: The President is most right about ____?

Santorum: The War on Islamic Fascism

Question 23: The President is most wrong about ____?

Santorum: Illegal Immigration