Breivik: Being found insane worse than death

Anders Behring Breivik took the stand in the first of five days of his testimony in his trial for last summer's shooting and bombing rampage, costing 77 people their lives.

"I have carried out the most sophisticated and spectacular political attack committed in Europe since the Second World War," Breivik told the court in a monotonous, unemotional voice, seated with one hand on his papers and another on his leg.
"The July 22 attacks were preemptive attacks to defend the Norwegian people and the Norwegian ethnicity."
"Yes, I would have done it again, because offences against my people ... are many times as bad," he said.
His attacks were "based on goodness, not evil," he added, saying that teenagers he murdered in cold blood on the island retreat were not innocent but political activists promoting multi-culturalism.
While he will probably be kept behind bars for the rest of his life, Breivik's main objective is to prove he is sane, a court judgment that he sees as vindicating his anti-Muslim and anti-immigration cause.
He has said being labeled insane would be a "fate worse than death".

After he read his statement, the prosecutor began cross examination.

As Mr. Breivik was being cross-examined by the prosecutor, Inga Bejer Engh, his self-control seemed to slip. On Monday he had seemed impassive or defiant, only rarely betraying emotion. But on Tuesday he seemed rattled when asked about the Knights Templar, saying he had presented the group as “a pompous image and I presented it in a pompous manner.”

While he had previously described the group as a pan-European network, he said Tuesday that “there are only a few” — an apparent reversal of his earlier contention that he had acted as part of a much broader conspiracy.

Asked whether he was “at war,” he referred to what he called “no-go zones,” defining them as European cities with large immigrant populations. In such places, he said, “you might say” there was war.

“But we are not at war yet,” he said. “Even among militant nationalists, what I have done is controversial. Half of the militant nationalists in Europe thought that what I did on Utoya, this was extreme.”

In his remarks, is he trying to goad the court into finding him insane? It would be very tempting to give him that "fate worse than death". I don't envy the two professional and three lay judges hearing this case.