The absurd nature of yesterday’s terror warning news about surgically implanted bombs led me to think there must be at least one unit in the US threat assessment apparatus that spends its time thinking of such things.
Have they come up with the dead body bomb?
Here’s how it would work.
Al Qaeda rounds up all the enthusiastic young boys that have come from America or Pakistan to Yemen. All twenty of them.
Now, here’s where the planning gets tricky. They boys have to keep in touch with their parents at home, not letting on what they’re really into.
After the parents are truly upset and in a frenzy to get the offspring home, al Qaeda sacrifices them to the dead body bomb office.
They’re killed and a bomb is sewn into the corpse in hope the parents will do anything to get the body back into America for the family plot.
You see where this is going. The operation then follows the general procedure of the failed toner cartridge bomb plot, getting the package onto a transport, to be detonated at some time in flight.
DD is sure this has been considered by our threat analysis centers.
Again, this only underscores the problem the terror agency has in recruiting effective jihadis after a decade of attrition.
This video illustrates the severe problem facing al Qaeda.
It’s Adam Gadahn’s exhortation to buy firearms at gun shows. Which worried some people.
However, Gadahn is inarguably lame looking and in delivery, scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, a terrible example for recruitment.
At a time when you can see Muslims rising up in the street all through the Middle East, people who look a lot more savvy than Gadahn, this was another of al Qaeda’s terrible ideas momentarily dressed up as something to worry about by the mainstream media.
And, as you can see, the video has been turned into a joke — a sales pitch for a book called “Jihad Joe.”
This is not to say that al Qaeda can’t recruit at all, anymore. It’s just that the time when a Mohammed Atta walked into the local office is long gone.
So what other desperation bombs are there to devise?
U.S. authorities have warned their counterparts abroad as well as air carriers about … new information and were taking steps to boost security.
“The Department of Homeland Security has identified a potential threat from terrorists who may be considering surgically implanting explosives or explosive components in humans to conduct terrorist attacks,” the advisory to foreign counterparts said, according to the U.S. security official.
Such a threat is likely to come from overseas rather than domestically, but precautions were being taken on both sides, the official said on condition of anonymity.
I wrote of this back in 2009, at the time of the failed underwear bombing plot, as being the next thing people would get worked up over.
Even then it was old. A New York newspaper — not the Times — had made a big joke out of stories about an alleged al Qaeda “butt bomber” who supposedly carried a bomb in his rectum
This turned out to be untrue. A discussion of the matter ishere.
The problem that’s easy to grasp with surgically implanted bombs is one of disability. It was even seen in the Batman movie, you know — where the henchman behind bars was doubled over in pain.
It’s real hard, almost impossible, to carry toxic chemicals — which is what explosives are — in your body. For any length of time. Without giving yourself away, being rendered immobile, or dieing.
Can you imagine all the al Qaeda volunteers lining up, now that bin Laden’s dead, to test what kind of packaging and surgical implantation will work best for these kinds of things? In Yemen.
Me neither.
Al Qaeda is demonstrably an enfeebled organization after ten years of being leaned on by the US security apparatus. And it has a real problem in finding capable operatives. Which is why its underwear bomber failed. And why it went to failed bombs placed in printer cartridges.
It’s a question of reliability.
When you can’t find anyone capable to carry out plots with reasonable chance of success, you think about taking the human element out of the equation. And when even that fails, you go to … whatever.
Realistically, it’s hard to know exactly where this warning came from. Is it actually based on reasonable intelligence?
That would seem not to be so — if one uses any common sense.
Did it come from some out-of-control threat assessment unit within the US government, one casting around for something to warn about now that bin Laden is dead?
That would seem more likely than the former, although it is not a given either.
In any case, I’d bet against seeing anything come of this in the near future. With only a slight chance that some young man from Pakistan or Yemen, very mentally ill or extremely crippled in some way, being netted at a checkpoint with a failed bomb wedged into him in some very painfully odd way.
The structural thing, at Newsweek, increasingly used as a rationalization to stop worrying about massive unemployment. It’s all the fault of stupid workers with atrophied, obsolete skills.
There are plenty of jobs and employers can’t fill them fast enough:
[One] survey for the National Association of Manufacturers in 2009, near the recession’s nadir, found that a third of companies still faced shortages. These were largest for engineers and scientists and among aerospace, defense and biotechnology firms.
Arms manufacturing and bombing others in our detached wars is bully.
Newsweek allows a little doubt to creep in at the end. Won’t corporate America take a chance? Brother, could you spare a dollar?
There is no instant cure for today’s job mismatch, but it might ease if America’s largest companies were a little bolder. Surely many of them — enjoying strong profits — could make a small gamble that, by providing more training for workers, they might actually do themselves and the country some good.
We know the answer to that.
Readers will remember that last week Jeff Immelt of GE, he of the Prez’s job council, recommended pushing tourism — America’s a great place to visit (!) — and community college.
Anyway, where are the dependable jobs of good wage?
Obvious, really, if you read the New York Times. Border patrol and building more robots to bomb the have-nots of the world.
The US government and Pentagon successfully removed the citizenry for the equation for war. That has made the market stable.
Now the national security apparatus is involved, practically speaking, mostly in money-making and plinking off a wide variety of paupers it finds around the globe. And only very stupid people believe that killing scruffs in AfPak or Yemen or Libya, no matter how bad some of the individuals may be, does anything to defend basic freedoms and promote American value. (Yes, dronifying the pantywaists really has done the trick.)
The mightiest military in the world is for wealth-generation as well as plutocracy and toady protection schemes, from which no fruits are generally shared. While it’s out picking off bad guys and civilians too close to the action, the stuff at home worth defending blows slowly away in the wind.
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones …
There’s the official designated expert cheerleader on drones, Peter W. Singer — Brookings man, to vouchsafe something meant to sound clever and wonderful:
The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies??? equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,??? a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.???
Had to throw the “victims in rubble” part in to make the technology sound a little like it’s making the world a better place.
If you’re structurally unemployed and not able to get into arms manufacturing, perhaps you aren’t leveraging your iKit and cyberpersona enough.
At Mashable, no link, a consultant tells what you must do:
1. Leverage Your Social Graph
2. Use Augmented Reality and Job Search Apps
And don’t don’t don’t be short on Klout —
In today’s world, not only do you need strong hard and soft skills, but you need to develop online influence.
Online influence is measured in how many connections you have, who those connections are (and how influential they are), who and how many people are sharing your content and backlinking to your website and more. Klout.com, a site that measures online influence and gives you a “Klout score??? … [Klout, incidentally, seems to be nothing more than an elaborate parasite economy app for digging into your life on Facebook or Twitter. If you don’t consent to logging onto it through these accounts, you can’t use it.]
5. Turn Yourself Into an Advertisement
Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0 and the founder of Millennial Branding, a full-service personal branding agency. He’s spoken about personal branding at Google …
Eleventy-thousand three hundred six and a buck two eighty “like” it on Facebook.
And there’s the DARPA balloon hunt, won by MIT using social networking, to develop a way to find terrorist networks.
That [really did great things.]
Ten thousand nine hundred followers of Spencer Ackerman on Twitter, says the banner. That’s more than four times the people that live in my old hometown.
A mock “ricin” emergency drill in Taos, outside of the general procedural rules adopted for these kinds of white powder incidents, gets it all wrong on the nature of the hazard. For example, ricin intoxication, is not contagious so there is no need for quarantine.
If one cannot assume anything on the nature of the powder, then the only procedure to follow is to quarantine everyone. Which is obviously not done in these types of drills or in the many actual hoax white powder incidents around the country.
Ricin is a toxic protein present in the castor seed and you simply can’t purify enough of it to fashion into any even remotely effective WMD. DD put a stake through it back in 2004 at Globalsecurity.Org, a time when people seriously thought the procedure in the patent worked and complained that public access to it on the web was a serious threat.
Since then there have been no successful cases of ricin use as a WMD despite much wishful thinking on the subject. That’s in over a decade.
Therefore, blowing a small amount of castor seed powder out of an envelope is, practically speaking, no hazard although, since the war on terror, everyone must act like it’s so. The fear factor now associated with it, although virtually groundless, is real.
Continual exposure to castor seed powder — which never happens in the US anymore because there are no longer any castor mills — can result in allergy.
This is briefly described here at a network for physicians in the business of treating asthma and allergy.
Years ago it became pointless trying to explain any matter having to do with this to anyone in the government or national security industry.
Fact free hazard drills are now often simply the only way to do things.
For a chortle, watch it on YouTube for a moment. Look at the title, put up by the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy which believes so highly in him. So highly, they couldn’t spell his name right, delivering instead the Freudian-slip, “Newt Gingrinch.”
Sadly, his campaign staff finally realized what everyone else knows instinctively. Gingrich is too much a laughingstock.
Military operations in Afghanistan rely too much on intelligence gathered by unmanned drones, often exclude important publicly available data and do not focus enough on the recruitment of human agents, a Pentagon report says.
The report by the Defense Science Board, a panel that advises the Pentagon, says that the defense budget does not properly direct funding for open-source intelligence collection – information available to the public and gathered from a wide variety of sources, including academic papers and newspapers.
With its overwhelming emphasis on technical collection, U.S. military intelligence is poorly equipped to meet the requirements of the counterinsurgency mission, according to a recent study (pdf) by the Defense Science Board.
A copy of the report is archived at the Secrecy blog.
It is worth a look, if only for the paradoxical list of Defense Science Board members, many of them from the drones and gadgets technical collections agencies, industry and lobby.
Good news, lads! Good news! Smaller flying androids and freedom bombs for everyone worldwide, courtesy of Douchebag Engineering Applications, Inc Raytheon.
In yet another sign the US is an intellectually bankrupt nation, the front page of the LA Times today featured a story on “mini-weapons” development.
Passing off the mutton of crap inventions that, on balance, make people’s lives demonstrably worse worldwide as the lamb of innovation in the service of saving taxpayer dollars, the Times story reads:
Under mounting pressure to keep its massive budget in check, the Pentagon is looking to cheaper, smaller weapons to wage war in the 21st century.
A new generation of weaponry is being readied in clandestine laboratories across the nation that puts a priority on pintsized technology that would be more precise in warfare and less likely to cause civilian casualties. Increasingly, the Pentagon is being forced to discard expensive, hulking, Cold War-era armaments that exact a heavy toll on property and human lives …
Engineers in Simi Valley at AeroVironment Inc. are developing a mini-cruise missile designed to fit into a soldier’s rucksack, be fired from a mortar and scour the battlefield for enemy targets.
And in suburban Portland, Ore. Voxtel Inc. is concocting an invisible mist to be sprayed on enemy fighters and make them shine brightly in night-vision goggles.
These miniature weapons have one thing in common: They will be delivered with the help of small robotic planes …
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll note that this story is probably going to be the worst you’ll read all week.
Most people might find difficult to swallow the raft of rationalizations and falsehoods used to sell the Pentagon’s private sector welfare arms development wing.
Will reduce civilian casualties!
Cheaper!
Science!
Revolutionary!
“Raytheon does not yet have a contract for [the 13-lb smart bomb] and is building it entirely with its own money, it reads’
” ‘We’re proactively anticipating the military’s need,’ said [a Raytheon man] who is testing the technology at the Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.”
If you needed proof that there will never be a dividend from the killing of Osama bin Laden or even a slight diminution in war footing, that’s it.
Sure there’s talk about trimming the Pentagon budget.
All of it pretty much bullshit.
When a company like Raytheon is running off weapons development on its own dime, it’s counting on the taxpayer being very likely to foot the entire bill retroactively.
And that means war for as long as you’re alive.
“In a similar fashion, drone-maker AeroVironment in Simi Valley didn’t wait for the government when it started to build its Switchblade mini-cruise missile to seek and destroy nearby targets,” the story continues.
AeroVironment has featured in this blog before. It is a company that would cease to exist if it weren’t for government arms development welfare.
In a very measurable way O’Hanlon is owed a bit of favor from America’s arms developers. Since he was one of the purveyors of philosophical cover justifying war in Iraq, his work has certainly been helpful in expanding the amount of money spent on weapons development and manufacturing.
“Collateral damage is unacceptable in modern warfare,” the quack informs the Times.
That readership which gets erections over unlimited military tech will be thrilled.
Housing prices fell in March to their lowest point since the downturn began, erasing the last little bit of recovery from the depths achieved two years ago, according to data released Tuesday … Housing is in persistent trouble, industry analysts say, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because even those who are solvent are opting out.
Electromagnetic pulse is now the official plot device for most invasion science-fiction or any drama the requires the nullification of the US military.
Paradoxically, the US military is hardened against EMP — the old Cold War thing, remember. Hadda be able to continue mutual assured destruction even if everything else had fallen down.
Anyway, the trailer is from Falling Skies, a new alien invasion series for television.
I made the point when reviewed Battle: LA that any “alien invasion” that has weaponry that relies on the same things we know — explosives, projectiles, with some directed energy thrown in on the side — is doomed.
No invading force with that level of technology can bring enough with it in supply to prevail.
Plus, there’s the mixing of the incompatible. If you have levels of armament only superior to western might by matters of degree, not orders of magnitude, than you can’t travel faster than light, either, and you’d never have been able to get here.
But if you have some miraculous faster-than-light travel then any civilization you encounter that doesn’t is like ants beneath the feet.
The Stargate franchise got around this by having found wormhole gates.
And Battlestar Galactica‘s science never impressed me. And Sanctuary,Eureka and V were and are just ridiculous.
But that doesn’t mean you still can’t have a good show. The trailer to Falling Skies doesn’t provide many clues to its dramatic quality.
