Bizarro terrorists, brain-dead reporters

On Sunday I said the Glasgow airport attack made no sense to me and I asked for feedback from readers who know more than I do. I didn’t hear from anyone, and it’s no surprise, since the news media has been drawing a blank. A perusal of cable tv news on Monday came up with nothing but blather. (I don’t know how people can stand the cable news channels.) I bought a bunch of papers, including the New York Times which had a long front page story on the attack, and there was nothing there, just general talk about the investigation, but no facts, and in particular no attempt to make sense of the actual attack on the airport, this Bizarro attack in which the attackers set themselves and their car on fire, and passersby and police put out the fires on the attackers’ bodies. Was their intention to subdue them or to rescue them?

Or how about this, which appeared in all the news stories:

“He had a big smirk on his face. He lifted up what appeared to be a 5-liter drum, which I think had petrol in it, and set himself on fire. His clothes were melting in front of my very eyes,” she told The Times newspaper of London.

“The police tried to pounce on him, but he fought back and was struggling with them. It was only when a member of the public punched him in the face that the police managed to restrain him,” she said.

The terrorist doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire, and he wasn’t instantly engulfed in flames and dead? And the police pounced on him and were struggling with him? How did they do that without getting burned? And he could only be restrained from burning himself to death when someone punched him in the face? This is so surreal that only the surrealism of a Bob Dylan verse is equal to it:

And he just smoked my eyelids
And punched my cigarette.

What I was looking for was a blow-by-blow account of the whole incident that made sense or at least attempted to make sense. Forget about it. There was nothing like that in the media. There was however, one piece of new information in the Times story and it’s so strange: the suggestion that the men put themselves on fire in order to set off the propane gas tank that was in the car as they crashed the car into the airport terminal. But how could this be? What kind of way is that to set off an explosion? No explanation. No attempt at an explanation. News stories today are filled with “facts” that do not stand by themselves, that only raise more questions, and the reporters and editors are insensible to these questions. Journalism is dead. What Dagny Taggart says about her railroad company in Atlas Shrugged is true of today’s news business: “There’s not a single mind left in Taggart Transcontinental.”

- end of initial entry -

Mark J. writes:

I think you’re very right about the lamentable state of reporting these days.

Regarding the Scotland airport terrorist incident, I assume was that this was intended to be a suicide car bomb attack, but that the gas cylinders didn’t explode as the terrorists expected and then they resorted to a sort of ad-hoc “Plan B,” which was to ignite the explosion by lighting themselves on fire. They had planned to die in an explosion, were all jacked up emotionally (perhaps on some sort of drug, too), and when the apparatus didn’t explode as they had been expecting, they pushed ahead with something, anything, to kill some people and themselves.

Apparently the latest thing for these homegrown terrorists is these propane tank bombs. Considering that neither of the two car bombs in London successfully detonated, nor did this bomb in Scotland, it suggests some basic incompetence on the part of these Muslim fanatics.

That is all speculation on my part based on the tidbits I read in the news. As you point out, the news reporters have done little to clarify exactly what happened.

These sorts of events where no innocents are killed but Muslims are caught in the act of trying to murder us are a real strategic win for our side. It demonstrates the danger of having Muslims in the West without costing us any lives. The worst situation would be if they stopped behaving so aggressively and simply quietly focused on outbreeding us in our own nations.

LA replies:

Mark’s theory is promising. However, if the car bomb had failed to explode as planned, where was that planned explosion supposed to have taken place? Did they park the car outside the terminal, perhaps on the departure strip going right past the terminal, and the bomb was supposed to go off and didn’t? And then they conceived of lighting themselves and the car on fire and crashing into the terminal in the hope that the explosion would go off just as they car went into the terminal? But if the car was parked for the initial, failed attempt, why would they have needed to be in the car as suicide bombers? Why not set off the explosion from a distance? Well, maybe that is what they tried. And when that didn’t happen, their plan B was to become suicide bomb igniters.

Mark’s idea starts to make possible sense of the terrorists’ bizarre actions.

LA continues:

Here’s another thing about Mark’s theory that potentially fits. The failed London attack took place the day before the airport attack. So the Glasgow terrorists knew that the cell phone igniters of the car bombs in London didn’t work. The London would-be bombers had had no Plan B. That’s why the car were still sitting outside the Tiger Tiger club when the ambulance crew noticed the fumes. The terrorists in Glasgow figured they needed a Plan B.

So, Plan A was that they would park the car close to the terminal, go some distance away by foot, and attempt to set the explosion off via cell phone. But if that didn’t work, Plan B was that they would return to the car, light themselves and the car on fire, turning themselves into suicide bomb igniters, and crash the car into the terminal.

Mark J. replies:

Yes, I agree. This is my sense of what they planned.

“Snouck Hurgronje” writes from Netherlands:

You wrote a post on the Glasgow terrorist attack expressing your unhappiness with the reporting by the media. You are wondering about the type of attack.

My idea is this. It is getting more difficult to attack airports and other targets such as U.S. embassies, because usually there are obstacles in place that are meant to stop cars and trucks laden with explosives to carry out attacks such as the 1983 Beirut attack on the U.S. Marines.

In fact the vehicle that was used failed to crash the entrance to Glasgow airport due to the placement of obstacles:

Gordon, 53, of nearby Erskine, said:

“The driver revved and revved and revved as he tried to get in through.

“His tyres were spinning around so fast, it started a small fire. The next thing I knew, the driver rolled down his window, took a can of petrol, and poured it on to the ground below, and the car went up in flames.”

The car contained a cargo of liquid fuel containers. The faucets had been turned open creating a gas/fuel cloud. It am guessing that the terrorists were trying to create a thermobaric explosion.

A thermobaric device is an explosive that starts as a cloud of dust and fuel and is then ignited. This kind of explosives were pioneered by the U.S. against Vietcong tunnels in Vietnam. The difficulty with this kind of explosive is the timing and ignition. Possibly the terrorists were trying to use themselves as the igniters of the device.

Despite the high educational level of these terrorists they did not manage to properly set off their improvised thermobaric bomb. Eventually the terrorist organizers will be able to recruit and train terrorists that will be successful. They will then have overcome the barriers that are built to protect likely terrorist targets and do shocking damage.

I am not absolutely sure that this bomb was an attempt to use a thermobaric bomb, but I am sure that the terrorists are working on using it.

LA replies:

That is incredibly complicated. They had to know that they would run into a spot where they would rev and rev and not be able to move, and that this would create enough heat and dust so that when they poured gasoline onto the ground the car would go up in flames, and this would in turn set off a thermbarbic explosion. And this was their plan? What did they think were the chances of this wild idea working? And was this their Plan A or their Plan B?

Snouck replies:

The thing with the thermobaric explosion is that:

1. It is immensely powerful, like a low yield nuclear device.

2. You do not have to put the device ON THE TARGET. The gas/liquid cloud can enter buildings without the vehicle having to penetrate the targeted building.

3. It is indeed difficult to create the cloud and ignite the bomb. This is what seems to have gone wrong. The terrorists did either not manage to create the cloud or they created a gas/liquid cloud but they did not manage to ignite it or both.

The U.S. Army has developed portable devices to create such clouds and ignite them and has used them in Iraq. The Russians, South Africans and Israelis have also developed such bombs. It is a matter of time before the technology (corpus mysticum) or a device (corpus mechanicum) becomes available to the terrorist organisers.

It would have been even better if they had entered the terminal with the vehicle and created the cloud inside the terminal. That was probably their plan A. Bringing the vehicle near the building and exploding it there was their plan B.

Why did they put THEMSELVES on fire if not because they wanted to use their own bodies to ignite a fuel cloud?

If they wanted to explode liquid gas canisters with the gas inside the canisters it would have made sense to use a explosive charge to trigger the liquid gas canisters. That way they would have been much more certain that there would be a weaker explosion, outside the terminal building. But that was not enough for them, is my surmise.

It may be a wild idea, but these people are pretty wild, don’t you think? They DID put themselves on fire and attacked people while their burned skin was falling off them. What do you make of that?

Mark J. writes:

A key to understanding what these men intended would be what role these gas cylinders were supposed to play. Were they intended to be explosives themselves, or simply containers from which the gas is to be released in a cloud which can be detonated? The London car bombs that didn’t go off (at least one of them) had nails packed in the car. It seems to me that a thermobaric explosion as described by Snouck would not be useful in spraying the nails around, since the gas presumably would be intended to spread thickly out in the air around the car for some distance before detonating. That’s my sense of the way these bombs work as used by the military—they saturate an area many yards (perhaps dozens or hundreds) in diameter with explosive gas and then detonate it. It is called a Fuel-Air Explosive (FAE). (See this.)

It must be difficult to get gas cylinders to explode as bombs. I recall that the Columbine killers had brought one or two gas cylinders into the school with the intention of detonating them, but were unable to do so, even by shooting at the cylinders. I don’t recall hearing of an instance where gas cylinders were used successfully as bombs in themselves rather than as containers of an explosive gas that is to be released before detonation.

Maybe it’s no more complicated than that these terrorists figured they could put a bunch of gasoline and gas cylinders into a car, open the spigots on the cylinders, generate a spark (through a cell phone or through a match while in the car themselves) and there would be a tremendous explosion. Perhaps they didn’t understand that (a) it’s harder to spark such fumes into ignition than they thought, and (b) the result is more of an intense fire than an explosion.

Dimitri K. writes:

You wrote: “News stories today are filled with ‘facts’ that do not stand by themselves, that only raise more questions, and the reporters and editors are insensible to these questions.”

Lawrence, the journalists know their job perfectly. When they want it, they can be very specific, but not in this case. What they are doing is trying to reduce the importance of the event by presenting it as absurd. The impression on the readers will be that either the guys are insane, or the event is staged, or that it is not worthy mentioning.

Larry G. writes:

Once when I was a kid, having just read a book on lasers (they were new then), I tried to build one. I bought the components I could afford and that I thought would suffice from a scientific surplus house: a couple of mirrors, a tiny rod of synthetic ruby crystal, and a very powerful and expensive light bulb. I assembled the contraption, plugged it in, and instantly blew a fuse in the house, simultaneously destroying the very expensive light bulb. No death ray. While my idea might have been basically correct, I was missing some major technical details, and would have had to align the components with a precision several orders of magnitude greater than I was capable of doing.

This plan to build a thermobaric bomb seems to be of the same level of sophistication as my plan to build a laser, and proves the old saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A more interesting question is “Why?” Why cobble together some contraption like this when the 7/7 tube bombers already showed how to do it? It could be that British intelligence services have been successful in either rolling up and shutting down the real al Qaeda operations in the country or have been able to prevent the al Qaeda bomb making experts from coming in. They might be making more progress than is evident from their statements to the press. What remain are deluded individuals who think their expertise in one field (medicine) gives them expertise in a totally different field (designing sophisticated weaponry), one where they are in fact totally incompetent, and that incompetence extends to the planning of the operation as a whole. Why did they act in certain ways? They simply hadn’t thought it all out, so when Plan A failed they had no Plan B and were making it up on the spot, possibly while under the influence of strong sedatives.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 03, 2007 12:46 AM | Send