Well, was just throwing that out there. Plus I didn’t mention motive, I said speculate on who might have done it (for whatever reason…though I suppose that who dunnit will make the motive for doing it clearer). And the guy MIGHT get picked up soon…or, might not. Personally, I think you are right…he will be. He seems like a lone nutter who didn’t know what he was doing (thankfully), and left an extended set of clues behind as to who he was.
In any case, the mods are free to move or shut down the thread. I wasn’t really expecting any replies (let alone an extended ‘debate’ about why I shouldn’t have put this in GD). Perhaps another thread will get started after we know more.
An individual phoned 911, told the operator to shut up while he gave the pertinent details and then hung up. Had it been of mid eastern persuasion, the device would have worked as planned, but as the cops say, this looked amateurish.
The fertilizer was apparently non-explosive and the Pakistani group that claimed responsibility apparently has a history of claiming responsibilty for attacks that they aren’t really involved in (which makes me feel kinda sad for them, in a way, its like the guy in HS who claims to have a girlfriend in Canada that nobodies ever met). The ignition device was apparently a bunch of wires and fireworks stuffed in a pressure cooker.
So, nutbags cry for help is looking more and more likely.
Eh, its NYC. All of the 9-11 phone calls are like that.
MSNBC is reporting that the Obama administration is saying there are some clues linking this to “international terrorists”, although it doesn’t say Islamic terrorists. No details on that, so I don’t know how credible it is.
Not necessarily. The setup looks quite a similar “device” to the ones that failed to detonate in London a few years ago, which were at least al Qaeda inspired (the perps, from Iraq and India, finally met their fiery end driving a burning car full of propane gas canisters into Glasgow airport, where one of them was famously beaten up while he was on fire by a disgruntled Glaswegian).
I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to call this an attempted act of terrorism. The question is whether or not the guy had links to some international terror group. The link could be rather weak-- it could be something like the Fort Hood guy, who didn’t actually travel to Pakistan or Yemen or anything, but did have some correspondence w/ at least one guy considered to be an international terrorist.
It’s nearly as bad as the plan to hijack multiple air craft using box cutters and then fly them into various buildings except that this time it didn’t work. Whether this was some lone nutter (which I still think it was) or an international terrorist group, the fact that it was crude doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have gotten lucky.
Yeah…pretty stupid plan, all things considered. It still worked though.
Even if he had put the Roman candle in the gas tank, it could still have blown up the car and killed people, considering where it was located. And what he did have in the SUV was much more explosive, if the ignition system was lame. Here’s the thing…international terrorists aren’t exactly more professional in setting these things up usually either. A lot of the IED’s in Iraq can be fairly crude, though they still manage to go off and kill civilians and soldiers.
Everything looks good (when it works) in hindsight. Looked at without the benefit of hindsight, however, their plan was laughable, and had a pretty low probability of actually coming off as it did. So many things could have gone wrong (and many of them almost did), but it was the golden BB of terrorist actions…it all broke right for them.
Looked at from a probability standpoint, I’m pretty sure that the car bomb actually had a higher chance of working than 9/11 did.
Yeah…both of which are harder to find in America than they are in Iraq. Basically, you use what you can find (and that will keep you off the radar of such groups as the FBI and NSA). It’s harder to build things like IED’s in the US than it is in Iraq, weird as that may seem.
But the key point here is that it COULD have worked…and if it had worked, people would have died. Perhaps only a couple dozen, but it would have been an incident that would have gone far beyond the mere body count if it had worked.
A probability of doing something? Yes. A probability of doing something major? I’m not so sure.
No, that makes perfect sense. But you were comparing what was done here to the IEDs in Iraq. Yes, it’s harder to get a hold of an anti-tank shell or whatever to detonate in the US. But that doesn’t make a propane tank with a firework any more dangerous. Have the authorities elaborated on the potential scale of any explosion (besides that it likely wouldn’t have exploded at all) it might have caused? If it really had a significant chance of killing dozens then I’d agree with you that this asshat isn’t made of fail. Well, even then, maybe not. The 9/11 hijackers succeeded.
Depends on how one defines ‘major’. I’d say there was a higher probability of the car bomb going off and killing some non-zero number of bystanders than there was that the 9/11 terrorists would succeed in hijacking even one of the planes and flying it successfully into a building.
Sure they did, but that’s hindsight talking. They got lucky.
The initial report I read said that it had the potential of killing dozens. How accurate that is, I’m not sure. I think there was more to it then just some fire crackers and a single tank of propane, though.
Well, it’s pretty clear that it was inexpertly done. My point, though, is that most terrorist groups don’t really have anything that’s a hell of a lot better. They aren’t super men bristling with explosive experts, and they often come up with comical plans and devices…until they get lucky, then it’s not so funny. I think that this LOOKS comical because no one was hurt, but that it could have had a different outcome if either this idiot had gotten lucky or if he’d have known a bit more about what he was doing.
Under the right circumstances, a propane tank is absolutely dangerous. Hell, the car itself is a potential bomb, seeing as how the gas tank could explode.
I still think it was a lone nutter, and that he basically didn’t have a clue what he was doing. I suppose it’s a good thing that most nutballs are too stupid to do anything really dangerous…but it’s a bit scary that they are out there, and that there is always the possibility that they could get lucky.
The way we thought about hijackers what wholly different back then - we were weighing the life of a person or two with a certain amount of non-fatal inconvenience. All in all, a much more casual situation. Only in hindsight does their plan seem moronic - because it relies on nobody considering it to be a probable course of action for it to be viable. Which was the case at the time.
Keeping that in mind and keeping the hindsight out of it, I’d give it, oh, a 3 in 4 chance or so of succeeding under the circumstances and ‘rules of engagement’ of the time.