For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incendiary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.
The fact that "officers courageously disabled the trigger by hand" coupled with the report of the smoke in the car leads me to believe that the mad London "bomber" tried to construct a Molotov cocktail of sorts and lit a cloth fuze. Fortunately he left the windows in the car up and there was not enough oxygen to really get the fire going. Looks like the brave British police reached in and snuffed the flame.
Judging from the overreaction to this non-incident I think we can safely conclude that Osama Bin Laden will remain holed up in Pakistan and let the fear mongers at CNN, MSNBC, and FOX do the dirty business of scaring the shit out of people.
While they had the potential to some light damage, it is clear that raw anger and desperation, not professional calculation and terrorist training fueled these attempts at terror.
It should also be clear that these attacks are not being driven so much by the ideology of Bin Laden and radical Islam, but anger at the ideology of Tony Blair (and George Bush). Their incredible stupid and fouled up attempts at reducing terror has only grown it, both abroad, and at home.
My only real concern about these type of terrorist (and calling them terrorist is an insult to terrorist {if you can insult a terrorist}) is one day, a group like these idiots in Scotland, or the foolish saps who dreamed of attacking Ft. Dix, or the lost souls who formed their own religion and army in Miami (or the JFK crew), may get 'lucky' and do damage far beyond what they are actually capable of.
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I am actually wondering if a few terrorits attacks on U.S. soil might be enough to get the final 26% of Americans who want us in a Iraq to finally realize "Geez, maybe it is not 'over there' or 'over here'" and possibly, just possibly there is no correlation whatsoever to our being in Iraq and whether or not we are attacked in the U.S. Well, except for the fact that stirring up the horrnets nest of Iraq is perhaps making us more likely to get attacked. This attack, while it would likely have killed people would not have been the "hundreds and hundres" that I saw Fox News reporting about while eating at a Deli yesterday. Not only were the reports over blown, but strangely the Fox News anchors seemed down right giddy to report it? The extra show of force in New York was an absolute waste of money, good job Phili, Bost, LA and every other major U.S. city in the country that did not start blowing millions in overtime payemnts to police due to a small scale threat in another country. If anything start cracking down on inspecting cars not putting cops in the street with automatic rifels based on this very small scale non-professional threat just mere few thousand miles away. This did not show me that N.Y. responds better to terrorism, but rather that N.Y. previous tragic exposure to terrorism has left them hypersensitive to the threats and imprudent in their response to even the slightest hint of terrorist action anywhere in the Anglo-American world. Maybe George Bush could run for Mayor of N.Y.? Damn, I am rambling, sorry. Thanks for that post.
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