08.30.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:54 am by George Smith
In from Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger notes a Taliban ‘gas’ attack on a school for girls, by way of the Guardian.
He writes:
This hasn’t been the first gas attack on a school, and it’s unclear what kind of non-persistent industrial chemical was pumped into the schools. But it’s a far cry from the feared terrorist use of chemical warfare agents that most DHS scenarios warn about.
In another way of looking at it, one could draw a good conclusion that the Taliban have absolutely zero capability with poison gas. And this kind of attack is a benchmark in pathetic lows.
Anyway, DD’s educated guess is this is fumigant use, of which there is plenty in Afghanistan, for purposes of pest control.
Here’s a link to a UN job posting for a pest controller in Kandahar.
While it’s a small item, US forces could benefit from a press campaign in area making the point that it’s the cruelest and lamest of things to spray insecticides at girls. However, treatment of women is abominable there, under any circumstance.
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08.27.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror, Why the World Doesn't Need US at 6:51 am by George Smith
Predictably, Raytheon’s pain ray has generated quite a bit of bad publicity along with the usual brief corporate news pieces in which a local TV station or paper sends a reporter to be a trial gimp.
The reporter invariably giggles and jumps out of the way as Raytheon technicians or jailers look impishly on. See the wonder that’s taken a decade for the US military, in conjunction with an arms developer, to come up with! It’s a revolution.
From Associated Press:
A device designed to control unruly inmates by blasting them with a beam of intense energy that causes a burning sensation is drawing heat from civil rights groups who fear it could cause serious injury and is “tantamount to torture.”
The mechanism, known as an “Assault Intervention Device,” (or AID) is a stripped-down version of a military gadget that sends highly focused beams of energy at people and makes them feel as though they are burning. The Los Angeles County sheriff’s department plans to install the device by Labor Day, making it the first time in the world the technology has been deployed in such a capacity.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California criticized Sheriff Lee Baca’s decision in a letter sent Thursday, saying that the technology amounts to a ray gun at a county jail. The 4-feet-tall weapon, which looks like a cross between a robot and a satellite radar, will be mounted on the ceiling and can swivel.
It is remotely controlled by an operator in a separate room who lines up targets with a joystick.
The ACLU said the weapon was “tantamount to torture,” noting that early military versions resulted in five airmen suffering lasting burns. It requested a meeting with Baca, who declined the invitation.
What much of the news has missed is that Raytheon has been trying to peddle the pain ray into prisons for years. And it has long had a big influence in the LA Sheriff’s Department, where Sid Heal presided over a long career as the local point man for bringing stupid applications in cutting edge technology, rays and various gadgets, into the force.
Mostly unsuccessfully.
For instance:
The folks who keep planes from crashing into one another over at the FAA were none too pleased to read about that little UAV demo conducted by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department this weekend, with the agency telling Sheriff Lee Baca and company to keep their drone grounded pending the result of an investigation. What’s more, the department could actually face disciplinary action for the SkySeer’s inaugural flight — FAA spokesperson Laura Brown commented that although the agency wasn’t “peeved,” they were “definitely surprised” that authorization had not been requested for the trial. Commander Sid Heal, point man for this program tasked with spying on Angelinos locating criminal suspects …
In 2008, Heal retired but not before indicating to New Yorker magazine that he was interested in a Raytheon consulting offer, based on peddling the pain ray. Here, from earlier this week.
Those who’ve followed the ADS story know that Heal and, by extension — the Sheriff’s Department, have longed for the pain ray for some time.
If you read the AP piece to its conclusion, you see the now standard assertions — built up over the years — that the pain ray can’t possibly hurt anybody. Plus it will only be used by people who are trained to exquisite fineness in its use, never afflicted with the cloudy or bad judgment which is usually part of the human condition.
Sure they’re intelligence-insulting, but it’s the way of the p.r. campaign for the thing.
Many authoritarian Americans are always keen to believe whatever rubbish is presented to them, as long as its couched in magical terms which assure that breakthroughs in technology have made a burning weapon something that doesn’t physically burn. It’s all in your mind. Or your nerve endings. Or the top layer of your skin.
Whatever, who cares, its prisoners we’re talking about and if you’re in jail in the US, you deserve everything bad that comes your way. And this is a good flavor of bad, its chief scientists/engineers at Raytheon — all of them — say so.
The pain ray is a weapon for using in cases where people can’t shoot back or launch any kind of counterattack. It’s critical the target be helpless. Like many reporters sent by news agencies for testing.
The ADS — or AID — is not a survivable piece of gear and it’s why it was peddled to the US military for use against unarmed crowds. The US military brought it back from Afghanistan without firing a shot, for logical reasons.
Winning hearts and minds is not the pain ray’s strong suit.
Paradoxically, when the Active Denial System was first marketed it was called the Sheriff and part of the idea was that it was great because it wouldn’t actually kill people, thus pissing off victims and civilians less.
“Sell the Sheriff to the sheriffs!” was probably on a Raytheon sales memo somewhere.
All you need to know about the delirious history of the pain ray – at Globalsecurity.
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08.24.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 10:57 am by George Smith
In watching Fox News this morning, DD caught a Megyn Kelly segment on the latest whereabouts of the Active Denial System, or pain ray.
I last wrote of it in July when the US military withdrew the thing from Afghanistan without ever having used it.
Summing up:
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
However, the ADS redeployment to a Los Angeles jail, where it can be used on prisoners who can’t launch a counterattack against it, is an industry thing.
Specifically, Ratheon’s, which has long wanted to peddle a commercial version of the ADS into US prisons and police forces. Where, presumably, it can argue behind closed doors that the American public won’t care if prisoners are burned with it. And so they won’t step up suicide attacks and miscellaneous bombings in retaliation for employing it.
Although the Fox News segments on the thing — renamed the AID (you just have to laugh at the cartoonish evil of it) for Assault Intervention Device — participated in the usual stunt, sending a reporter out to be burned, the bloom is well off the weed.
Even Megyn Kelly had to admit the pain ray was a publicity disaster for the US military. And now only a moron, or someone paid to stand still and get burned, thinks getting shot by the pain ray while Raytheon’s technicians perform the test, is great stuff.
So what’s the connection with the Los Angeles jail?
Probably Sid Heal, although the stories didn’t mention him.
For longer than DD can remember, Sid Heal — who retired from the LA County’s Sheriff Department in 2008, has been trying to pitch the pain ray in Los Angeles.
An article from the New Yorker that year reads:
In January, Heal gave notice that he would retire from the Sheriff’s Dept. on March 31st. At that point, he had received at least sixteen job offers. The offer he finds most interesting involves consulting with Raytheon on the Active Denial System — the pain ray.
Raytheon desperately wants to peddle the pain ray into the US correctional system, a task they’ve been at for at least half a decade.
And while the US can’t use the blighted thing overseas for obvious reasons — the reputation for torturing the unarmed being one, the corporation presumably feels there is no such squeamishness in prisons. Where shooting penned up out-of-sight undesirables means out-of-mind undesirables.
Just picture it: Prison guards — big guys, often obese and/or hyper-muscular from a mixed regimen of weight-lifting and steroids, working in a jail — Pitchess — notorious for its bad conditions, and the pain ray.
I just can’t think of a more humane and reasonable combination, can you?
Well, hold that, maybe you can in 2010 America.
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07.27.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 4:39 pm by George Smith
Americans are used to helplessness when a corporation goes rogue. But what if you were actually helpless — inert flesh tied to a table in a business plan run amok? Toay’s post takes us to a small firm, one from the heart of the bioterror defense research industry.
Its name: List Biological Laboratories in Campbell, CA.
To set the stage it is necessary to take readers back to a small newspaper article from November 2004.
From the Palm Beach Post:
Two weeks after four Floridians were paralyzed with knockoff Botox, the laboratory that manufactured the botulinum toxin unhesitatingly sold its poisonous product to a federal undercover agent over the phone.
Campbell, Calif.-based List Biological Laboratories didn’t verify the buyer’s identity or his made-up statements that the botulinum would be resold to research institutions, according to a federal search warrant affidavit obtained Thursday.
The FBI raided List, effectively halting the company’s sale of botulinum toxin, apparently to anyone with a good story.
“Agents … seized ‘growing procedures,’ computer records, customer lists and all List documents relating to Toxin Research International,” reported the Post. Toxin Research International — or TRI — would turn out to be two scammers with a plan to resell botulinum toxin produced by List Biological Laboratories. Reused illegally as the popular Botox, it would poach into Allergan’s effective monopoly on the drug in the United States and net a hefty profit.
The plan exploded when another Florida man named Bach McComb bought botulinum toxin from List. He then put himself and three patients in the hospital with botulism, a condition which would have killed all four had they not been sustained on ventilators.
Botulinum toxin, nature’s deadliest poison, eats part of a key protein in human nerve endings. When this happens in very small doses, it removes frown lines.
When it happens in full blown botulism, the victim loses the ability to move, to smile, to even speak. Eyelids droop, become flaccid. Speech is slurred as the toxin eats at the synapses.
The body, turned to unresponsive meat, must be sustained by artificial means until the damaged nerve endings are slowly healed.
The four suffering from botulism were slabbed, kept alive in hospital by machines. The made-in-America product took them right to the edge of the abyss and gave them a good look down.
McComb, a doctor in Florida whose medical license had been suspended for overprescription of painkillers, had bought a 100 microgram vial of highly purified botulinum toxin — a dangerous amount if incompetently used — from List Biological Laboratories.
He injected himself and three others with aliquots taken from it in treatment for wrinkles. Three to four days later, he and his patients were on hospital ventilators for survival. McComb’s girlfriend took the worst of it, needing six months on life support, saying in a videotaped statement for a criminal trial that her body wasted away until it was unrecognizable.
A scholarly paper subsequently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association described the poisonings as equivalent to “21 to 43 times the estimated human lethal dose by injection.” The vial from which McComb took his injections was thought to contain enough material for 14,286 fatal doses.
But how did this get started?
The simplest of all motivations. Greed.
In 2003, two con-artists in Arizona in pursuit of profit in the anti-aging industry began ordering the most poisonous substance known fresh from List Biological, then a dedicated purifier of biochemicals and toxins used in counter-terror research.
Chad Livdahl and Zahra Karim had set up a series of shell companies in Tucson with the aim of acquiring botulinum toxin cheaply and repackaging it as “Mimic Botox.”
The “Mimic Botox” would be shilled to cosmetic surgeons, fraudulently misrepresented as Botox, competing with Allergan’s property, the only company that could sell Botox in the US as a trademarked and licensed drug. With more profit in the equation than purchase of Allergan’s product allowed.
The scam worked.
Using the front company Toxin Research International, Livdahl and Karim ordered thousands of 5 nanogram vials of botulinum toxin from List Biological Laboratories sight unseen and promptly diverted it for resale to a collection of websites, as well as through anti-aging seminars.
Through this effective bit salesmanship, TRI established demand in the US’s first botulinum toxin black market.
According to the US government’s indictment (full text here), Livdahl and Karim paid List about $30,000 for the botulinum toxin shipment, subsequently making about one and a half million dollars in profit through the operation.
The plan came apart when McComb and his patients landed in the hospital. The FBI raided List. Livdahl and Kahrim were arrested, tried and convicted, getting nine and six years respectively, for fraud and misbranding a drug.
McComb pled guilty in 2005 to charges of administering unapproved drugs. He entered a Florida court using a walker, seemingly crippled from the side effects of botulism, according to a newspaper report. He was given three years in prison.
But although the government was looking to file charges against List Biological Laboratories, the company escaped the formal grasp of justice.
“Toxin Research International obtained the botulinum toxin from Campbell-based List Biological Laboratories, but investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration could not establish that List had done anything illegal,” reads a San Jose Mercury News article from 2006.
“List sells products designed to be used in scientific and medical research, and no charges were filed against the company.”
The article outlined the US government’s continued roll-up of clients and associates in the Toxin Research International network, revealing the hot demand for American black market Botox.
“In June, a New Mexico doctor was indicted on federal charges of fraud after giving the fake Botox to 120 patients,” informed the newspaper. “Earlier this month, an Oregon doctor was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for using two kinds of fake Botox, from Toxin Research International and a Chinese company, on more than 800 patients. An Idaho doctor also was sentenced to six months in prison in mid-December for using botulinum toxin from Toxin Research International.”
Technically, List Biological Laboratories was part of the US government’s select agent control regime. It is a program designed to prevent select agents — like botulinum toxin or anthrax — from getting into the hands of bad people.
However, there are no obvious laws preventing professional malfeasance
and escape from oversight with regards to the select agent program.
In all the news on the black market Botox incident, no employees from List Biological Laboratories appeared in the press. The person (or persons) at List who sold botulinum toxin to Livdahl, Karim and McComb were never identified. The corporate culture when the company turned rogue and its product escaped from prudence, propriety, good sense and oversight have never been elucidated or described. No firings were announced.
What happened to the people who made the botox that put four people in hospital, severe enough poisonings to have killed the victims without intervention? Where did these parties go, if anywhere? Are they still scientists and lab assistants in good standing?
Mum’s always been the word. List ran for cover.
If the four poisoned by List Biological’s botulinum toxin had died, that would have made one less fatality than the number killed in the anthrax mailings.
Both incidents had to do with select agent misuse. The anthrax mailings led to a spectacular explosion in US bioterror defense spending.
List Biological Laboratories, like many other small firms in the bioterror defense industry, benefited and grew during this go-go period, a time when the US government was spending money like there was no tomorrow on bioterror defense research.
It was apparently a giddy time for List Biological Laboratories, a history to be discussed in a moment.
For two of those poisoned by List’s misused research botulinum toxin, there was only the civil court.
In June of 2007, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reported:
A South Florida couple that suffered debilitating injuries from deadly anti-wrinkle shots has settled a civil lawsuit against the supplier of the lethal toxin.
Eric and Bonnie Kaplan, of Palm Beach Gardens, were among four people who almost died of botulism poisoning in 2004 after they were injected with a toxin more than 2,850 times the lethal dose at an Oakland Park clinic …
The terms of the settlement, finalized on the eve of a trial that was scheduled to begin Monday in Broward Circuit Court, include a confidentiality clause, said attorneys for both sides. The settlement is between the Kaplans and List Biological Laboratories of California, which supplied the raw botulinum toxin …
While neither side would discuss the amount of the settlement, the Kaplans revealed last year that they had previously rejected a $1 million settlement offer from List.
It’s the by now typical corporate remedy.You can have the blood money under the condition you never speak of this again.
List had been badly damaged by the FBI raid and botox case publicity. The extent of the damage would not become visible until the company filed for bankruptcy late last year.
“Campbell, Calif.-based List Biological, a biotechnology company which produces and researches bacterial toxins, files for Chapter 11 with $1 million to $10 million in both total assets and liabilities,” read a small item on December 11, published in the Daily Deal.
Throughout the year, List’s bankruptcy case has been proceeding through a San Jose court.
Paradoxically, List’s bankruptcy filing put an end to another civil suit brought against it, one by one of its infamous clients, Bach McComb. That legal stay — in pdf form — is here.
The List bankruptcy case is an argument by the company that it should be allowed to continue business as it reorganizes.
Part of it, for example, is a stay to keep its utilities — gas, electric, garbage and Internet — plugged in. That request is here.
List Biological’s creditors list, which has been furnished to the court a couple times, includes not only the many businesses it is in debt to but also the names of those convicted in the botox case.
These include Toxin Research International and Bach McComb, as well as Gayle Rothenberg and Saul Gower.
Rothenberg and Gower were a wife and husband team operating a big cosmetic surgery operation in Houston, tried and convicted in yet another complicated chapter in this case.
List lays out an initial argument for its survival in a request for a cash collateral loan so that it may continue operation during the bankruptcy proceedings.
That request is here.
Part of the justification for it is stated in a part entitled “History and Events Leading to the Debtor’s Bankruptcy Case.”
“In 1988, botulinum toxin became of great interest to List Bio Labs and the Company developed the technology to produce commercial sale botulinum toxin for the research reagent business,” it explains.
“As a result of its acknowledged expertise in this area, List Bio Labs was engaged by Allergan, Inc., in the early 1990’s to provide assistance … and to produce clinical grade botulinum toxin. The relationship ensued that led, ultimately to the licensure of the manufacturing facility as well as to the active ingredient in Botox being produced at the facility.”
By 2004, greatly increased government spending on bioterror defense research had led to ballooning demand for select agents.
List moved to a new location and expanded its laboratory production facility.
“With this new expanded facility, List Bio Labs is prepared to exploit its biological product expertise and expand the contract manufacturing part of the business,” attests the company.
“List Bio Labs is known for providing resources to biological and medical scientists and to the biodefense community. The Company success has been based on the List Bio Labs name recognition and our focus on quality products.”
If the reader grimaces while noticing weasel-wording, it only means that you’re still sane.
List’s arguments get much better. They imply the company’s value lies in things like its production of Botox and its strict adherence to safety and the select control regime.
Without mentioning that the reason List is in bankruptcy is because it turned bad with regards to these matters.
The above snapshot has List arguing there was an upgrade in the protocols of the select agent program in 2003. And the company’s infrastructure for agent handling was or is in national compliance. This at the time when List was either selling or about to sell botulinum toxin, a select agent, to Toxin Research International. By 2004, it had sold to Bach McComb and the resulting botulism cases brought the FBI down upon it.
While some bankruptcy court readers may be impressed by List’s various claims about its employees being approved by the select agent program there’s nary a mention the company is in this mess precisely because it sold select agent to bad people.
Who is behind List Biological Laboratories? Their names and faces have never been shown in newspaper stories.
For the purposes of this article, the company president is Karen R. Crawford, one of the five equity holders in List. One of the other holders is List scientist Linda Eaton. Along with List’s director of research and development, Nancy Shine, the three appear to be the principals in the company’s sales push for its botulinum toxin research preparations and related products over the past few years and during the period when the company’s troubles started.
Their accumulated poster sessions on select agent materials, on-line here at List, go from 2003 to 2009 — just before the company filed for bankruptcy.
And here is a patent filing by all three from 2003 for a substrate used in testing for the activity of botulinum toxin.
The value of this to the company becomes clear when one realizes the counter-bioterror research boom is partly aimed at finding quick detection for materials which the US thinks could be used by terrorists.
In fact, this List special product — called Snaptide — was cited as a possible answer for rapid detection of botulinum toxin in foods, milk specifically, in a theoretical bioterror attack scenario published in the prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
In this paper, published in November 2004, the author posited 100,000 poisoned individuals through the purposeful contamination of milk with botox — a near Biblical catastrophe, of sorts. It was an overcooked thought experiment in terror theatre and received great publicity.
Nevertheless, the timing of the paper’s reception at PNAS — in one of those very strange twists of fate — dovetailed with List’s sale of botox to Bach McComb and the four near fatal botulism cases the same month.
In financial statements about List delivered regularly to the court, Crawford, Shine and Eaton are List’s highest earners.
For example, during the weekly pay period beginning March 22 and ending April 2, they earned $4348.08, $3957.12, 3840.71 — respectively. List has a little under thirty employees with salaries ranging from Crawford’s high down to somewhat less than a quarter of that for an office assistant.
With address listed in court documents, Crawford lives in a relatively posh abode worth about $2.2 million, according to Zillow. It would seem to feature a nice-looking swimming pool and attached Jacuzzi.
These things, as limited as they are, limn aspects of List and its brain trust.
And while legitimized botox production is a proven money maker, in the final analysis, there is no compelling argument to be made for List’s survival. If it were broken up and its physical and intellectual assets sold off in a firesale with the remains going to creditors, it would be no big loss to science or the biodefense research effort in the US.
There will always be others to take such a company’s place, to develop purified or custom biochemical preparations for research purposes. List is only unique with regards to the trouble it has been embroiled in.
On the other hand, there would be a symbolic balancing if the firm was brought to an end.
Perhaps they apologized in private.
Perhaps it has been sworn, cross the hearts and hope to die, that this will never happen again. Never! Our bad. But now the company is good again. Really!
But just because there wasn’t something with which to charge people isn’t much of a reason for List not going down with the rest of those in this illness-inducing and disgraceful case, anyway.
Post note: The US government — specifically the Defense Threat Reduction Agency — paid to find out the level of threat that might be posed by overseas black market botox production being suborned by terrorists. And it was all over the news recently.
It’s worth noting the inspiration for analyzing such a problem — the diversion of botox to bad people — was minted here in the US, courtesy of the biodefense research industry. First.
In fact, mundane reality may reproduce the American model — the incidental poisoning of a few people here or there, lining up for black market de-wrinklings, overdosed by the careless and incompetent greedy wanting their piece of the beauty industry action.
List fights to save its laboratory equipment from Wells Fargo bank.
List’s Vice President and another one of the firm’s five equity holders, Debra Dye, writes the bankruptcy court, in attempt to defend the company against the Wells Fargo move on its equipment here.
Much of the argument on the firm’s value and history is exactly the same as the information first logged in the company’s petition for a cash collateral operating loan. A cut-and-paste job.
A section once again implies the firm is an important part of the US bioterror defense effort:
Many of the List Bio Labs products support the national bio-defense effort and for that purpose the Company has provided reagents to an NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- ed] funded reagent repository as a subcontractor.
The arguments are to minimize the market value of List’s lab equipment, bought on a business loan from Wells Fargo. So as to apparently lessen the debt load upon reorganization.
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07.26.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:49 am by George Smith
Over at Armchair Generalist, J notes the US military has withdrawn the Active Denial System, formerly known as the Sheriff, aka the Hummer mounted millimeter wave pain ray — from Afghanistan.
He writes:
[The] US military is pulling its “less-than-lethal” Active Denial System out of Afghanistan after just deploying it there a short while ago. This is due more to policy and perception issues than technical issues.
He’s not entirely pleased with the decision for reasons made perfectly clear if you go to AG. It’s supposed to be a non-lethal weapon, after all.
Be that as it may, I’ve written about the pain ray off and on for a long time, starting at the Village Voice in the old Weapon of the Week column. And the tale of the ADS escaped DoD’s very stage-managed publicity. In observing how this story unfolded, the reasons for the weapon’s withdrawal become clear.
This from 2002, when DoD was just beginning to tout it as a wonder weapon:
The Department of Defense’s bland name for this electronic heat ray is the Vehicle-Mounted Active Denial (VMAD) system, a mouthful of jargon that yields few clues about the weapon’s nature. Allegedly designed for an Orwellian task—”humanitarian missions”—the VMAD is a giant version of your microwave oven, without the safety box surrounding it. The generals want to move it around on a humvee.
Official propaganda on the device is that it makes one’s skin only lightbulb hot, enough to force a person to run but not enough to cook him. Of course, there is no proof this can be achieved, because the results of tests on people are classified. It’s safe, insist the inventors, the air force’s Directed Energy Directorate in Albuquerque.
But anyone with first-hand experience broiling hot dogs and other non-robust meats in their tabletop microwave might be chary of such an assertion. Struck by the heat ray, “Sssss,” went the eyeball.
What is the microwaver’s target? It must be unarmed civilians, because as described, the VMAD wouldn’t seem to offer much against terrorists or regular soldiers ready to fire back with conventional weapons. What is certain is that the Pentagon’s microwave projects lack oversight and common sense. In one manic, grandiose claim, the Defense Department calls VMAD “the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb.”
The lust for military microwaving has also been a sinkhole for tax dollars. While much of the work remains deep in the shadows, the Directed Energy Directorate (DED) does allow that $40 million went out the door for the VMAD over the last decade. An additional $15 million was awarded to ITT Industries for research on high-power microwaving applications in bombs and other types of ray guns.
Microwaving facilities pictured as part of the Directorate also look to have cost a small fortune. One 27,000-square-foot concrete monolith is worth $9 million, resulting in a “cost-effective and timely capability.”
Vendors capitalizing on the VMAD include Raytheon, CPI (Communications and Power Industries), and Veridian Engineering—a tech firm menacingly cited for its part in researching “biological effects.”
The hype on the Sheriff, as it was called then, was so thick a German television crew asked me just before the outbreak of war in Iraq if the Pentagon would use the “death ray.” This was the perception overseas. Back in 2002.
Over the years, DoD’s publicity campaign for the ADS was always the same.
Noxious and intelligence-insulting, it boiled down to:
Recruit some journalist to be the gimp in a strapped down chicken test, the piece of meat to be left out standing in the field as a target.
In return the reporter got to visit wherever the pain ray was stationed — in the past couple years, Moody AFB in Georgia — to write a story about how great the thing was.
The pain ray was always said to be a revolution in military less-than-lethal technology. It was something needed by our boys, pronto!
Richard Machowicz of Futureweapons was one strapped down chicken a couple years ago. Even 60 Minutes was recruited.
In 2008, on the 60 Minutes advertisement for the ADS, from el Reg:
The omega in our story is another weapon that’s never done anything but win the hearts and minds of its handlers and the journalists commissioned to write about it after it had shot them. Just prior to the war, the Vehicle Mounted Active Denial System, since shortened to just Active Denial System, was ridiculously hailed by people in the Department of Defense as the biggest breakthrough in weapons technology since the atomic bomb. From there, it’s been almost all downhill for the Hummer-mounted pain gun that heats the top layer of skin with millimeter waves.
It had been hoped that the ADS, nicknamed The Sheriff, would arrive in Iraq in time to aid pacification and occupation operations. But a peculiar thing happened.
In their quest for publicity, the weapon’s minders worked out a system whereby reporters would be given the opportunity to be burned and awed by it in return for cheerleading notices. The practice worked but not in the way ADS pushers had hoped. Many stories, all glowing, were generated. But at the same time, the US gained a world reputation as a nation that tortures prisoners. This cognitive dissonance erased the value of the ADS publicity scheme. A Hummer-mounted ray gun that agonizes people, even if only non-lethally, is seen as a potential instrument of America-style torture, one aimed at unarmed foreigners.
Since the beginning of the Iraq war, the ADS has been regularly promised and every year it has failed to show, left to languish by Pentagon men who probably don’t want to see their careers go down in flames over it. Moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, the ADS has had progressively less money devoted to it, a sign that at least a part of the DoD wishes it would go away. Its liabilities include factors ranging from possible foreign public relations nightmare to its being recently described on “60 Minutes” as against the ingrained culture of a military that wants weapons which kill people as fast as possible.
The Air Force resorted to something of a Hail Mary pass for it earlier this month, farming the ADS out to “60 Minutes” where, as usual, it was described as a wonder weapon, one that could have solved a multitude of big woes that are now water under the bridge, like the blasting of Fallujah. “Pentagon officials call it a major breakthrough which could change the rules of war and save huge numbers of lives in Iraq,” claimed CBS News’ David Martin. Like many who had so bravely gone before him, Martin allowed himself to be shot by the ADS in return for a puff piece explaining that the reason it wasn’t already in Iraq saving lives was because of lack of proper backbone among Pentagon leaders.
In five years of war, the ADS became politically untenable. “You don’t ever, ever, ever want a system like this to be thought of as a torture weapon,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Sue Payton told “60 Minutes.” Payton also told the news operation she “loved” the ADS and “started giggling” after being shot by it, adding another negative – a whiff of craziness – to the stigma of the pain ray.
Since the war began, few ADS stories have been complete without indication that it was going to Iraq soon. This time it’s for summer fun. The bright side is that if it continues true to form, it’s just another in a five year-long list of assorted threats and promises never quite delivered as billed.
The ADS program was also contaminated by the Pentagon’s reliance on kooks. And its inability to control them once they’ve been released from active duty.
From 2008, also at el Reg:
The US military’s pain ray, aka the Active Denial System, is a certified excrement magnet. In March Reg readers learned that the US Air Force wonder weapon is still being pitched as a game changer in Iraq, a prediction that’s never even been close to being tested.
ADS defenders claim the Pentagon, afraid that using it would be a public relations disaster, won’t give the non-lethal pain ray, a gun that shoots millimeter waves, the green light. It’s something the US would use to torture foreigners, preferably smaller and not as well-armed as our boys.
Ah, but maybe it’s not just a pain ray – maybe it’s a death ray, too! And it’s been hiding in plain sight under cover of a non-lethal weapons program.
The deliverer of the death ray claim was Dave Gaubatz, a former Air Force man who had done security for the ADS. Unfortunately for the military, Gaubatz also became a public relations liability as a civilian.
Seeing undercover Muslim subversion everywhere in the US, Gaubatz via TPM:
[Said] in September 2008 on a now scrubbed blog post at www.jihadishere.blogspot.com that: “We are now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his finger on every nuclear weapon in America.”
But back to the ADS and what was written at el Reg:
[The] interesting [death ray] allegation comes by way of a man named Dave Gaubatz, and FrontPage magazine.
Gaubatz, described as a former veteran of the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, informed FrontPage that 60 Minutes, as well as everyone else, had been fed a crock on the pain ray. It was originally designed, he said, as a straight lethal ray gun and it’s been operational for years. It was ready for use in Iraq where it could have slain the enemy and saved American lives. And 60 Minutes made a big mistake by not getting the truth of this and “putting our soldier’s lives in danger everyday.”
“Each day that goes by and another soldier dies should weigh heavily on every member of 60 Minutes,” said Gaubatz.
Well into the weird, Gaubatz explained that journalists have all been fed a story about the non-lethal weapon. This is true, but only to a point – one not yet in crazy world. Then the narrative jumps the cliff. The journalists are culpable because they’re “liberals who know less about the Ray Gun [yep, that's in caps] than they do basic fundamentals of war.”
And readers now see what happened to the Active Denial System.
Although the Pentagon’s careful publicity campaign for it spanned many years and many journalists, it backfired badly.
While various big name reporters were consenting to be shot by the ADS, in order to transmit stories on the great new non-lethal wonder weapon, the rest of the world — not being stupid — perceived it much differently.
That message: The US had invented a nefarious device to be sent to the Muslim world for the agonizing of civilians. Just another instrument of torture.
One imagines very few sane US military leaders would want to see their careers incinerated upon publicized or leaked news on use of the wonderful pain ray on civilians in Afghanistan.
So the ADS — while sent there for a brief period — never fired a shot, according to reports. And has now been shipped home for obvious reasons.
There’s a book in this story. One on how really stupid ideas, packaged in futurism, whizz-bang technology, the hype of sycophants and the belief in American exceptionalism in all things, blow up when the rest of the world doesn’t agree to drink the Kool-Aid.
Or, more simply: Just because you can make such a thing doesn’t mean you should.
The Department of Defense also commissioned the programming of a war game to model use of the pain ray. I had a copy of the game, played it and reported on the technical aspects of it here.
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07.15.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 2:36 pm by George Smith
One of the best examples of terror defense research as the equivalent of welfare for scientists is the ricin vaccine.
To be sure, the slow development of a vaccine for ricin is built upon the foundation of good science. However, once you get past the rigor involved, its practical value dissolves into the equivalent of science welfare.
The history of ricin and intended use in poisoning has been well-described many times by this author, here and elsewhere.
It’s a “weapon” of choice for kooks and incompetents. White neo-Nazis in the US, England and Canada are regularly banged up and sent over for a long time for the crime of turning castor seeds into a mush.
The recipe for turning castor seeds into mush containing a bit of ricin is widespread. And occasionally it is even found in the hands of Islamic terrorists, as in one very famous case here.
But there is no way to make ricin into an effective weapon of mass destruction. Despite its toxicity, it’s not quite poisonous enough and not found in quite high enough quantity in the castor seed. And turning castor seeds into powder is not an effective way of purifying it.
And there is no public record anywhere of ricin being made into a WMD, ever — despite the existence of a questionable patent on using ricin as a toxic weapon, one developed by the US government too long ago to be interesting anymore.
As with so many things imagined to be of easy use to terrorists, it is actually easier and more reliable to shoot people, or blow them up, or even strangle them — than to poison with ricin.
Before 9/11 there was no interest in a vaccine for ricin. Man has worked with castor seeds as a renewable agricultural resource for centuries and been no worse the wear for it.
After 9/11 that changed.
And a small number of people have been working on a ricin vaccine ever since. Despite the fact that the only people who might every actually need a ricin vaccine are those who do research with ricin and the occasional nuisance who sickens himself with castor powder.
So, as fruit of the war on terror, one reads — today — of a research paper on a vaccine for ricin:
“Since it is likely that a ricin vaccine would be used in an emergency setting or by the military, the ease of [intradermal] vaccination with jet injectors or similar devices with lower doses of vaccine is rather important,” stated Robert N. Brey, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Soligenix. “It should also be noted that ID vaccination was highly effective at protecting the lungs of the mice from ricin aerosols, a likely route of delivery in the setting of bioterrorism.”
It is not a likely setting. The people making the ricin vaccine know it. The only things killed with ricin aerosols are in the labs working toward a finished ricin vaccine.
However, Soligenix is another small biotech company with virtually no product line, one attached to the teat of funding for bioterror defense. It used to be called DOR Biopharma, changing its name a year or so ago, perhaps in a clumsy attempt to snooker potential investors. Like many of the companies mentioned on this blog it is a member of the Alliance for Biosecurity.
Concludes the article on the ricin vaccine:
“There have been many attempts to develop a prophylactic ricin vaccine, using different preparations of the ricin holotoxin with and without various adjuvants,” stated Dr. Ellen Vitetta, Director of the Cancer Immunobiology Center at UT Southwestern and senior author of the study. “But none of these have been as extensively studied as RiVax™ and none have looked at the ID vaccination route.”
Whoopie! A vaccine of benefit only to the company making it. It’s science welfare, kids!
Another small form of science welfare, one also supported since 9/11, is the attempt to make castor plants ricin free through molecular genetics. Like this charity case waste of time at Mississippi State.
The rest of the world — particularly the big producers of castor products, India and China, couldn’t care less about ricin-free castor beans.
It’s just not an issue. The world doesn’t need a ricin-free castor plant. The castor plant is not a menace.
And it wasn’t even an issue in US castor production, although a couple scientist involved in this work now will try to insinuate it was, when castor seed cultivation was stopped in this country because it simply wasn’t profitable enough.
Previously, excerpted from here:
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,” Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.”
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
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07.02.10
Posted in Extremism, War On Terror at 9:34 am by George Smith
The alleged ‘publication’ of al Qaeda’s English-language Inspire .pdf brought on a media convulsion notable for its collective amnesia.
The publication itself was, outside from the first three pages, a negligible download.
The contents page continues an established tradition of clumsy and/or unintentionally funny bits re the much repeated article (which does not exist in the publication): “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
I’ve spent years looking at various al Qaeda and attributed-to-al Qaeda documents devoted to terror, specifically recipes for making chemical and biological weapons in the home, as well as explosives.
Sophistication and slickness are not in their character. In this, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” as a usage, is typical.
Rachel Maddow devoted a few minutes of clowning to Inspire yesterday, drawing out the “bomb” bit out for comic effect.
In this she and her staffers missed the point that for the greater duration of the war on terror, such documents, whether they are silly-looking or not, have been portrayed in the western press as very serious business.
And even when they don’t confer any capability — the bomb-making formulations and poisoning advisories being much less than adequate, they have been written of as if they convey great ability to anyone who downloads them around the world.
And in the United Kingdom, no matter how absurd they appear, they have been used as evidence — materials deemed likely to be useful to terrorists — to send over people who downloaded them onto their hard drives for very long prison terms.
See here in “Art Shown Here Can Get You Jailed.”
Snapshots of various .pdfs from the war on terror show the new al Qaeda publication is not especially out of the ordinary. But it does, in fact, look a bit better than the usual fare.
Here is one bit from an old terror document, actually published by the Washington Post a few years ago, of an infamous poisoner’s handbook, one purporting to give you the ability to make botulism toxin from a few handfuls of garbage and dung. It’s no more or less absurd than a title like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
And another, the work of a now long-jailed al Qaeda man.
However, al Qaeda men and jihadists have never had much trouble compiling and distributing .pdf files. Which makes the less-than-compelling quality of Inspire — which has apparently purposely been obfuscated past the first three pages, a bit of an embarrassment.
If the purpose is to get the maximum number of readers, the insertion of digital gobble into the .pdf as padding — as this commenter details here – is astonishingly counterproductive.
It essentially creates impressions that the publication is either unfinished, a fake or that its creator greatly overestimated his own cleverness.
“[I] have no idea why it would occur to anyone to try it in the first place,” commented one of DD’s colleagues in e-mail. [Hat tip to SA.]
And the publication’s relatively small number of downloads, in proportion to the news of it, would seem to be proof of fail.
“The language of the magazine, such as ‘Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom,’ reflects either a poor command of English or a light-hearted sense of self-parody,” writes someone — not very perceptively — at the Atlantic.
“Since I am not completely certain that the clean PDF doesn’t contain a hidden virus, I’ve elected not to post it just yet,” adds Marc Ambinder.
Armbinder’s presumption is silly. The file is harmless.
And it is here.
Nevertheless, even if one makes a joke of Inspire, terrorists have been inspired by similarly feeble work. It often doesn’t take much to motivate a few in the rather small global fan club for these things.
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05.27.10
Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 6:42 am by George Smith
Beggaring common sense, one reads of a high school teacher in New Mexico going over the top in his zeal to be involved in war on terror readiness:
It was supposed to be a lesson on how to respond to a bioterrorism attack but it quickly turned into a lesson on what happens when not everyone is informed about what’s going on.
During a passing period on April 26 in the courtyard of Rio Rancho High School, as students of teacher Justin Baiardo’s epidemiology class thought they were leaving for a field trip, seven students seemingly started to hemorrhage, convulse and dropped to the ground with what looked like blood spewing from their mouths. A young girl screamed. Emergency and first responders came to the scene. At least one coach tried to perform CPR on one of the non-responsive students. Calls to 911 were made and students sent panicked text messages.
Unknowingly to many students and some teachers, the entire scene was an “exercise.”
The students who collapsed to the ground — and one who “fell’ down some stairs — were actors coached by Baiardo to simulate a bioterrorism attack.
Baiardo said he wanted his students to experience an attack and use the lessons learned in his class. In order to achieve some realism, Baiardo kept not only his students in the dark but also the vast majority of the student body.
“I tried to cause a little panic,” Baiardo said. “It had to be spontaneous. The reaction from my kids would not have been there if we told the parents beforehand. I wanted them to respond to a situation like we have been talking about it. [Being] spontaneous was necessary.”
Baiardo described the exercise as a way for his students to study how disease can be transferred through populations. He said the school’s principal was informed of the exercise and it had been in the works for weeks.
Predictably, there was some disagreement on its value, the teacher arguing that a bit of panic now and then is good as a learning exercise, others in emergency services arguing — not so much.
“[The chaos] that morning was intentional so as to mimic a true panic situation, a concept foreign to most individuals in this day and age,” wrote the teacher in a letter to the newspaper. “Controlled panic (fire drills, etc.) fails to instill the reality that a true panic situation might hold and judging by the apathetic reactions of many students during the simulation, I am concerned by the desensitization that I witnessed first-hand within the student population. Such is the pampered environment that we create for our youth in which they are never really exposed to true tests of resolve.”
Added the newspaper:
But Rio Rancho Battalion Chief Paul Bearce said he voiced reservations about the exercise. A week prior, a student approached Bearce about participating in the mock event.
“I knew it was going to be a situation where people were going to panic … When we found out the scenario, I voiced concerns. Students didn’t realize it was a scenario. My concerns of what I anticipated would happen — happened.”
Fire Rescue sent a rescue company to the school for an hour.
Anticipating people panicking and calling 911, Bearce contacted the dispatch center and told them to route reports of an attack at Rio Rancho High to him.
“We had concerns — we wanted to make sure no one got hurt and there was no mass panic,” he said.
“A little panic can be healthy,” countered the teacher.
And, by the way, what disease actually causes people to fall down simultaneously with blood spurting from their noses and mouths? Something from a made-for-TV movie about Ebola virus horror? The Masque of the Red Death?
[N.B., folks: This is different from when you were a kid in grade school and someone vomited in the back of the classroom. And then one or two others followed suit from the stench and hysteria.]
Next week: Rigging a simultaneous white powder hoax and fake gunfire breaking out in the school commons as terrorists attack.
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05.17.10
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:39 pm by George Smith
“The amount of ricin Ian Davison produced could have killed thousands,” wrote someone for the BBC over the weekend.
A picture is worth a thousand words in this case.
Accompanying the piece here was a photo, reproduced above, of neo-Nazi Davison’s castor powder mess in a jar.
General common sense would tell most people that a mess in a jar isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. However, when reporters write from a script – one in which they’ve looked up the theoretical lethality of ricin on the Internet, common sense gets tossed out the window.
A good time ago, the US had mills which processed castor seeds for their oil. In fact, Castrol, originally marketed as a fine racing engine oil was castor oil.
“For many decades the fine-scented castor oil flavoured the racing paddocks everywhere from Assen to the Isle of Man, from Brooklands to Monza,” reads the official history of Castrol at the company site here.
The byproduct of castor oil production is castor mash, or powder. It is obviously not a weapon of mass destruction, although it contains ricin.
In the United States, use of castor was also widespread.
A newspaper article from late last year reads:
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,” Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.”
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
Bayonne, N.J.-based Baker Castor Oil Company already was a major importer and processor when it embarked on a plant breeding program in the late 1950s centered in Plainview in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Baker needed a dependable domestic supply of castor beans since the government was building up its strategic reserve,” Anderson explained. “Baker at the time was having to primarily rely on what was being harvested by hand in Brazil and India from plants growing wild.”
Not only were there concerns about production and price volatility, the imported oil had a tendency to turn rancid during transport, Anderson said. A domestic source would reduce transportation costs while substantially improving quality. And, Plainview was a logical choice since the harvested crop could be shipped to crushing facilities on both East and West Coasts.
One observes from the history of castor seed milling in the US and elsewhere, that the product is not particularly hazardous to workers. These companies did not produce large quantities of dangerous waste. Quite the contrary, they were very green industries.
But somehow this history has been long forgotten. In its place — a nonsensical one in which a toxic protein in the castor plant is always alleged to easily furnish white survivalist neo-Nazi kooks and others with a weapon of mass destruction.
Only theoretically.
What the nuts who grind castor seeds to a mush can’t get through their heads (and — by extension — the news media which reports on them) is that castor powder containing ricin is not a practical weapon. It degrades, becomes rancid. It might poison a dog if they put it in the pet food. Or it even might accidentally sicken the maker, if he somehow mysteriously consumes it.
The grinding of castor seeds into powder is neither a refinement nor a purification of ricin.
Another discussion of ricin as a threat is here.
Sampling its most relevant part:
On the world wide web page of an American animal feed and fertilizer company, it said, “In 1857, “H.J. Baker & Bro., Inc., [built] the Baker Castor Oil Company in Jersey City, New Jersey.” “… Of great importance [was castor seed oilcake] … This material [was] the first fertilizer product offered …”
This being the case, castor seed oilcake and seeds containing ricin would have had to travel the roads of the country. If one searches further, reference to it can be found in municipal codes for the transporting of “hazardous materials” via trucking. Castor seed oilcake is a material that does not require a 24-hour emergency phone hotline listed on the shipping manifest. In the Texas city of Laredo’s municipal code, the materials, referred to as “castor bean,” “castor meal,” “castor flake,” and “castor pomace” are things deemed of the same hazard, or lack of it, as “dry ice,” “fish meal,” “fish scrap,” “battery powered equipment,” “battery powered vehicle,” “electric wheelchair” and “refrigerating machine.”
Castor seed powder was frequently used as fertilizer in this country. In the periodical called Timely Turf Topics, the publication of United States Golf Association Green Section, an issue from November 1942 reported that the country was using over 80,000 tons of castor seed mash as fertilizer annually. The Golf Association Green Section periodical was devoted to providing information to golf green managers on the maintenance of beautiful grass turf. During World War II, nitrates were diverted for the war effort, necessitating use of alternative fertilizers, of which castor seed mash was one.
In the November 1941 issue of Timely Turf Topics, the association grapples with the problem of controlling mole crickets in southern golf courses.
“It is reported that turf in some sections of Georgia and Florida has just experienced the worst infestation of mole crickets in a number of years,” reads the issue. “Attempts to eradicate them from turf by the use of well-known poison bait as well as by treatments with arsenate of lead, ground tobacco stems and castor meal have not been successful in several localities this fall.”
The point to be made is that people once worked with large quantities of the grind of castor seeds in this country without dropping like flies. Castor beans were considered a renewable resource, used as a source of lubricant and fertilizer. Even golf course gardeners worked with castor mash, noting that it wasn’t so hot as an insecticide, being ineffective against mole crickets.
There has been a collective loss of memory of such practical information in this country. In its place, emergency news erupts a couple of times of year in which ricin and castor seeds are discovered in someone’s possession, with everyone near it having to be decontaminated and their clothes thrown into a bag for disposal. Photos of hazmart workers in plastic isolation suits multiply. The real-time imagery is of the kind one sees in sci-fi movies devoted to various biological end-of-the-world themes.
But back to the BBC article on neo-Nazi Ian Davison:
The discovery of ricin at the home of Ian Davison convinced detectives that the white supremacist was a “serious terrorist”.
Found in a jam jar, the cloudy liquid had been extracted from castor beans.
An amount roughly equivalent to a grain of salt is enough to kill an adult, making it 1,000 times more poisonous than cyanide.
Experts admit the toxin is relatively easy to produce, but police are unsure exactly how Davison intended to use it.
The ricin discovered at his house in Burnopfield, County Durham, could theoretically have been used to kill thousands.
Common sense thinking left town for good years ago. And nothing seems capable of bringing it back.
Davison and his father were given ten year sentences.
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05.02.10
Posted in War On Terror at 11:08 am by George Smith
Updated
News of the New York propane cylinder car bomb immediately made DD think of Dhiren Barot’s Gas Limos Project in 2006.
Barot, who was in no way a successful al Qaeda terrorist, was nevertheless sent over permanently in England, convicted on the evidence found in his files in a UK anti-terror sweep named Operation Rhyme.
I wrote here:
Barot, locked up for life as a terrorist after pleading guilty in British courts in 2006, has been regularly portrayed as an al Qaeda “General” who concocted what became known as the Gas Limos Project, an outline for bombings using limousines packed with gas cylinders.
Barot’s files were put on the Internet by the London Met. They were removed after a year or so but copies saved by DD were archived at the Federation of American Scientists.
They are heavily redacted but Barot, who never made one of his car bombs, describes them in general terms.
One of Bharot’s difficulties in planning, one which his writing implies he was unable to solve, was how to achieve reliable detonation. At one point, he mused about using hand grenades.
Making sure your ad hoc jerry-bilt collection of materials explode is one of the problems apparently always faced by potential improvised car bombers. It’s not as simple as the movies make it look every day of the week.
“In the event of fire around the [gas cylinder], a dangerous event that can take place is termed as the BLEVE, this is an acronym, which stands for Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion,” reads one of Barot’s files.
London newspaper’s made a similar connection today, writing about the Times Square incident in relation to an unsuccessful car bomb attack in the UK attributed to al Qaeda three years ago.
In the Telegraph, one reads:
The Times Square car bomb in New York bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack on central London three years ago.
This article described a spectacularly inept but literally flamboyant attack in England. It was remarkable for one of the attackers setting himself on fire as he attemtped to ram his car bomb into the Glasgow airport.
It is described here in Jeep Man on Fire.
Wrote the Telegraph correspondent today:
The men left cars packed with gas canisters and petrol outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub on the Haymarket, between Leicester Square and Trafalgar Square, in London’s busy West End.
The first car, a green Mercedes, was parked with the headlights on in a bus lane outside the front entrance to the nightclub.
The device failed to fully ignite, and the fume-filled vehicle was spotted by a doorman at the nightclub.
A second car bomb, in a blue Mercedes, had been parked at the back entrance to the club but was towed away by parking wardens and found several hours later at a car pound in Hyde Park.
The general ideas behind gas cylinder packed cars have been with al Qaeda for some time. However, the concept of putting gas cylinders into cars is not unique to that group.
Dhiren Barot discussed several methods for putting ‘add-ons’ to his notional car bombs in the Operation Rhyme files.
One of these had to do with fireworks. (As well as fertilizer, inspired because it was used by — according to Bharot, “Timothy McVee.”)
Fireworks, Bharot tried to explain, could — by dint of the explosions and popping noises they make — heighten terror.
In the Times Square incident, the smouldering fireworks drew attention to the bomb.
At this point in time, officials have said they have no evidence the Times Square incident was associated with al Qaeda or more than a lone wolf incident.
However, the existence of a ‘gun locker’ in the car bomb, along with a sizable number of M-88 firecrackers — and potentially an amount of fertilizer — argues strongly for a domestic origin.
Large amount of fertilizer component, video — domestic white guy (?) How unexpected.
Nope. Indeed was shades of Gas Limos project.
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