05.19.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 9:00 am by George Smith
“Less than a minute after we’ve met, William Saxton has launched into an explanation of how easy it would be for terrorists to detonate a nuclear bomb 10,000 feet above ground,” reports a Palm Beach newspaper today.
“The electromagnetic pulse generated could knock out computers and electronic communication for ten square miles,” he tells the newspaper.
“He has conducted a site survey of a local Cinemaplex, where he documented how simply someone could detonate a bomb at the refreshment center and take out 2,000 moviegoers.” continues the newspaper.
“He believes that the recent Wall Street computer glitch that sent the Dow plummeting 1,000 points was ‘a test’ by terrorist organizations …”
Surf out to the story. The picture speaks thousands of words.
What do you do in your wealthy Florida retirement, granddad?
Why sonny, I warn about the perfidious menace of Islam in public schools sapping and impurifying the precious bodily fluids of our children.
Oh.
Writes the newspaper:
Dr. William Saxton is sitting at a Starbucks in West Boca Raton, clutching a bulging black briefcase. But he’s having trouble concentrating on our conversation. He keeps looking around for a better table. “I’d prefer to have more privacy,” he says.
Saxton is the founder and chairman of Citizens for National Security, a nonprofit think tank based in Boca Raton whose mission is to educate and activate U.S. citizens concerning the dangers of “homegrown” fundamentalist Islam, particularly the long tentacles of the Islamic Brotherhood. Saxton has a Harvard PhD in physics and a degree from MIT, and he’s worked as a consultant for NASA. Now he’s devoting himself full time, and without pay, to documenting what he sees as the pernicious effects of Islam in the U.S.
But we’re meeting to talk about how fundamentalist Islam has infiltrated the social studies textbooks of Florida schoolkids. Saxton headed the CFNS task force that spent months collecting examples of fundamentalist Islamic influence on the gullible “hearts and minds of Florida’s young people.”
He furtively pulls a black spiral-bound notebook from his briefcase — the 60-page report compiled on 67 Florida school districts. Saxton believes that the Council for Islamic Education, which he calls an arm of the Islamic Brotherhood, exerts influence on U.S. textbooks from both ends. The “bad guys” act as go-betweens, lobbying publishers on behalf of school boards and school boards on behalf of publishers. They sit on the committees that choose the textbooks and act as editors and advisers to the textbook industry.
“I can’t show you this report,” he says. “This is very valuable research, and we have to be careful with the way we reveal our information.”
========
Saxton says he first realized the extent of the problem when he was in California, looking at his grandchildren’s textbooks. The problem isn’t limited to Florida. “This is an epidemic,” Saxton says.
Sad are the ignored Paul Reveres of our time.
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05.03.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism, Ricin Kooks at 8:00 am by George Smith
DD’s artist’s conception of how ricin is recommended for use in the Poor Man’s James Bond.
England has neo-Nazis, too.
And one in the news now, Ian Davison, is an average example of a similar genus found in the US: A white supremacist who trolls the net for mayhem manuals, cobbling together home-made weapons based on notes from old US neo-Nazi/survivalist literature.
The Northern Echo newspaper reports in ‘Keyboard warriors or threat to the republic’:
IAN and Nicky Davison posted offensive racist material on their website over a long period of time, but it was when they showed footage of a homemade bomb being detonated that police moved in to arrest them.
It was only then that the potentially deadly store of ricin was found in Ian Davison’s home.
The trial at Newcastle Crown Court heard much debate about whether the pair were simply “keyboard warriors??? or whether they posed a genuine threat to the public.
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In public, Ian Davison was an unemployed lorry driver and part-time pub DJ.
In private, he was the founder and leader of the Aryan Strike Force, described in court by Matthew Feldman, of the University of Northampton, as believing itself to be: “The pinnacle and most uncompromising of the neo- Nazi groups in the UK.???
Police believe the pair were in touch with about 300 neo- Nazis across the globe, as far afield as Canada and Australia.
Davison posted racist messages on his website and also placed several videos on You Tube, including a four-and-ahalf minute tribute to Adolf Hitler, who he described as “a true hero of the white race???.
But the posts on the Aryan Strike Force website were becoming more sinister.
One showed footage of what appeared to be a paramilitarystyle training camp in a forest in Cumbria, which featured men wearing balaclavas and combat fatigues, parading through the woods carrying swastikas.
=========
When police raided Nicky Davison’s home in Annfield Plain, County Durham, they discovered a number of terrorist manuals on his computer, including the Anarchists’ Cookbook, which detailed how to make bombs, and the Poor Man’s James Bond, which included details on how to make incendiary devices, poisons and even napalm.
There was also evidence the pair had researched the creation of an electromagnetic pulse bomb, which disables computer systems
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THE ricin discovered in Ian Davison’s home was an unrefined sludge [the grind of castor seeds] but, say police, was still capable of killing up to 15 people.
Traces of the deadly toxin were discovered in a sealed jam jar inside Davison’s Myrtle Grove home in June last year – the only time the poison has been discovered in the UK.
It is thought the ricin had been produced in 2006 and had remained undisturbed in Davison’s kitchen ever since.
Although it was fairly crude and had not undergone the purification necessary to turn it into an effective weapon [and so on]…
Ian and his father face a long time in prison.
Definitive posts on this subject, published in the past on DD blog include:
From the Poisoner’s Handbook to the Botox Shoe of Death
The Jailbird Bookshelf
The A-to-Z of ricin crackpots
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05.01.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism, Extremism at 2:50 pm by George Smith
As an appendix to today’s earlier Cult of Cyberwar piece, DD brings you an editorial writer at a Dallas newspaper who can’t help but conflate it with electromagnetic pulse doom, or the Cult of EMP Crazy. After recommending Richard Clarke, he goes on an electromagnetic pulse weapon jag.
It’s not uncommon but always surprising to see what rubbish people will publish, just for the sake of convincing you that something very dangerous out there is about to hurl us back to the Stone Age.
[Forget about BP’s oil spill, dangit, that’s just nothing compared to EMP and cyberwar.]
Opines an editor at the Dallas Morning News:
[Retired Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege Jr.] spent most of his 35-year military career studying the effects of electromagnetic pulses. The good news, he said, is that the fiber-optic cable that makes up much of our ground-based communication network would survive an EMP attack. But anything that uses micro-circuitry would be “tremendously impacted,” he explained; the pulse would “literally fry” such components.
A single electromagnetic pulse weapon, he says, “can kill electronic systems in an area the size of a tennis court or throughout the entire United States.”
We know this because our country has developed and tested such weapons, clearly with plans to deploy them in the event of war against another technologically advanced country. But it would be naive to think we’re the only ones with this weaponry.
More chilling is the fact that an electromagnetic pulse bomb would be relatively easy for terrorists to build and deploy. In 2001, Popular Mechanics magazine described an electromagnetic-pulse bomb that it said could be built for $400 and would be capable of sending out a pulse that “makes a lightning bolt seem like a flashbulb by comparison.” It wouldn’t harm humans but would fry all the microcircuits we rely on, including in our cars. Imagine real disaster scenes like those depicted in ABC’s hit show Flash Forward.
Over the last decade, a constant feature in talks on notional electromagnetic pulse bombs and/or rays is that they can do just about anything. In this case, a single weapon could fry electronics in a tennis court, or in the entire nation. And they’re so easy to make anyone can have them for a paltry few hundred dollars.
For instance, from Congressional testimony ten years ago:
During [a] June [Congressional] hearing, [retired Army general Robert Schweitzer] made seemingly contradictory claims during the course of his presentation. At different times, Schweitzer claimed that electromagnetic pulse guns could be made for $800, that they could be made for $35, that they had been used against London banks although he was informed this was a hoax, and such weapons were now capable of disrupting Wall Street.
??? . . . the cost is about $800 to do this,??? Schweitzer said at one point.
As for knocking out Wall Street, Schweitzer later commented to Congressman Saxton, “[It] can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components . . . And the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components and do a number on Wall Street.??? Schweitzer also alluded to, but did not mention by name, a generic hacker tech catalog that claimed to sell parts and schematics for such a weapon.
Further, Schweitzer testified that London banks were attacked by radio-frequency weapons, a myth that has been touched on in Crypt Newsletter.
“I was told that was a hoax,??? Schweitzer said to Saxton. “. . . and it’s disputed in the Intel community and elsewhere but I think, frankly, and having gone into this in great detail, the dispute is to protect the fact it happened.???
Schweitzer added later: “I validated [this]. It isn’t just taking rumors or drivel off of the tabloids. These are solid facts that I’m giving you.???
As a matter of fact, it was rumors and drivel. And Schweitzer died a few years later, never having seen his electromagnetic pulse weapons.
And from April of last year, on the old blog:
The second category of crazy associated with electromagnetic pulse doom lobby is filled with ‘experts’ who believe electromagnetic pulse weapons can be easily made from stuff cadged at Radio Shack. (Well, not quite, but for the sake of this post, the demographic extends into this domain of consumer electronic store junk.)
“Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts,” reads a very recent piece of EMP crazy emission at the New Scientist. (If you saw it originally, readers will note the other ‘most read’ story on the site — how masturbation might protect one from hay fever, certainly puts the entire matter in proper perspective.)
Written for decades — the original electromagnetic pulse gun stories date from at least as early as 1994 — this flavor always has one thing of note: EMP rayguns are easy to make from plans found on the web and materials available in every town.
The New Scientist story obfuscates this cliche only slightly. Instead of using the word ‘easy,’ practical synonyms are employed.
“[An ‘expert’] told delegates at the annual Directed Energy Weapons conference in London last month that … basic EMP generators can be built from descriptions available online, using components found in devices such as digital cameras,” reads New Scientist. “These are technologically unchallenging to build and most of the information necessary is available,” she said.
And DD wrote a syndicated news piece from just before the war, from which I will now draw:
“Talk of the secret electromagnetic pulse bomb was mythology as news, taking on a uniquely American demented quality,” wrote Crypt News in a syndicated feature published around the beginning of the second war in Iraq, the one we’re still in.
“No other single weapon — real or imagined — rivaled its power for sensation. In fact, in a nation where photographs of all weapons, no matter how trivial, are either officially distributed by the Department of Defense or leaked to the public, it was simply astonishing that absolutely none existed of the e-bomb.
“Bubbling over with excitement at something they’d never seen, the media mused openly on a wondrous capacity to destroy the Iraqi military without harming people. How the bomb would stop soldiers with old-fashioned artillery, automatic weapons, or tanks was nowhere to be seen. And guerrilla warfare was completely off the radar.
“Instead, the U.S. media furnished hyperventilated comment on the wonder bomb, exclamations suitable for Hollywood script.
“‘ Kabammy! A huge electronic wave comes along and sends out a few thousand volts,” blared one newspaper. ‘. . . like man-made lightning bolts!’ crowed another. Weeeee! Watch out Iraq, said the American buffoon corps, it’s the e-bomb.
“Reporters certainly believed this copy. As non-embedded journalists moved into Baghdad in the days prior to hostilities, editors contacted military analysts asking for advice on how to e-bomb-proof the electronic tools of the profession. Would cell phones survive? Could a microwave oven be used as an improvised microwave-proof carrier?”
Yes, the invisible e-bombs certainly took care of Iraq.
If DD goes back even further, to the time of the old Crypt Newsletter, we read that home-made or guvmint electromagnetic pulse weapons have always been arriving but never quite appearing. Or they are said to already be here though no one has seen them.
Or because someone has seen them in a computer game or on a TV show like 24 they must exist. Just like the bioweapon that caused rapid onset Alzheimer’s disease in Jack Bauer curable just in time for the next season.
From Crypt News:
A collection of comment and blurt from various EMP weapon kooks was originally [published under the title] “Calling Victor von Doom.”
That piece, from the Crypt Newsletter, cites an original electromagnetic pulse gun story from 1994 in Forbes magazine, one in which hackers are interviewed for their expertise in such things.
The EMP-weapon-used-against-Iraq (this time in the first war) myth was deployed:
“Forbes writer: Have you ever heard of a device that directs magnetic signals at hard disks and can scramble the data?
“Dangerous ex-hackers, in unison: Yes! A HERF [high energy radio frequency] gun.
“Dangerous ex-hacker A: This is my nightmare. $300: a rucksack full of car batteries, a microcapacitor and a directional antenna and I could point it at Oracle . . .
“Dangerous ex-hacker B: We could cook the fourth floor.
“Dangerous ex-hacker A: . . . You could park it in a car and walk away. It’s a $300 poor man’s nuke . . .
“Dangerous ex-hacker A, on a roll: They were talking about giving these guns to border patrol guards so they can zap Mexican cars as they drive across the border and fry their fuel injection . . .
“Dangerous ex-hacker A, really piling it on: There are only three or four people who know how to build them, and they’re really tight lipped . . . We used these in the Persian Gulf. We cooked the radar installation.
“In other parts of the article the “dangerous ex-hackers” discuss the ease of building what purports to be a $300 death ray out of Radio Shack parts and car batteries. In a rare moment of intellectual honesty and self-scrutiny the ‘dangerous ex-hackers’ admit there are a lot of ‘snake oil salesmen’ in the computer security business.”
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04.28.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 8:29 pm by George Smith
One of the more dubious ‘gifts’ of the Cult of EMP Crazy — a richly manipulative group, if there ever was one — is the cruel brain haircut it imposes on its lessers. Think of it as a cynical tax on the IQ reserve for the sake of the missile defense/Bomb Iran lobby.
It’s quite the accomplishment. Thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s press machine, GOP voters in a placid place like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, think they have to worry about national collapse.
Put this notch in your belt, cynical Heritage boys:
You’ve frightened a middle-aged woman into preparing for something that has almost zero chance of ever influencing life in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, with your EMP doom promotional campaign. Job well done!
From Lancaster news services:
Recent stories about solar flares and electromagnetic pulse bombs that could supposedly destroy communications networks have put her more [one Lancaster woman] on edge, she said.
—
But what if some catastrophe undermines law and order?
[One woman] said she has no intention of taking up arms, “Mad Max” style: “I’m the first person in the stew pot, I know that. I can’t fend off a gang of mutant zombie bikers.”
She won’t have to, she added, because her neighbors are already on the same self-reliant page.
Whether this ethic is infinitely adaptable to the nation’s neighborhoods is an open question.
Markman lauds backyard chicken raising. And he says personal fitness and health care awareness are especially sensible.
“I think that recognizing that things can go wrong … is a good thing,” he said.
However, he added, “I think that, in general, people underestimate the complexity of really doing everything yourself.”
Martin said he has no warm, fuzzy illusions about what would happen if political and economic systems should fail.
“I doubt if you’d get a Utopian society out of it.” On the other hand, he said, “if a disaster comes through and nobody’s prepared, your instinct cuts in and it’s a fight for survival.”
That’s just the kind of scenerio Giffin wants to avoid, especially for her children.
Previously, on Survivalism USA at Dick Destiny:
“[Some white Americans, all Republicans] think an electromagnetic pulse — EMP for short — set off by a hostile nation exploding a nuclear device in space could fry computer chips — shutting down everything from toasters and cell phones to trucks moving food, medicine and other essentials around the nation,” reports the Oregonian.
[A precious metals] dealer, said some of his customers ‘are actually making sure they have a vehicle that’s not going to be impacted by an EMP.'”
“Failure of the power grid is a common theme — say if huge federal deficits trigger inflation and workers abandon their jobs, or if solar flares damage the grid the way they fused telegraph lines in 1859.”
“[Some fellow in the countryside] has factored predatory gangs into his plans to flee to his Snake River hideout with his wife … and their supplies.”
Keep up the great work, asshats.
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04.21.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism, Extremism at 7:39 am by George Smith
Why are you not surprised?
Completely shut out — except on opinion pages and in press releases from the Heritage Foundation — that nugget of the GOP far right known as the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy resorted to lobbying Rush Limbaugh.
Birther Frank Gaffney spoke with Limbaugh who told it this way:
People are utterly unprepared to live and to deal with circumstances that were the norm for humanity up to a hundred years ago. Stop and think about that. I interviewed Frank Gaffney, defense policy expert during the Reagan years, for the next issue of the Limbaugh Letter. I talked to him on Friday. One of his big concerns is that the Iranians could load up a small little nuclear device on a boat and start trolling the East Coast of the United States, there are some 2,000 ships a day out there, how do you know which one is the mullahs cruise ship? They launch a little nuke and detonate it in the atmosphere and cause an EMP, electromagnetic pulse. He said if they took out our electric grid, if they took out our ability for electricity, do you realize the number of mass deaths that would happen very quickly? So dependent are we on all these — What got me to thinking about this is that we live at a time where we’ve had all this modernization, all of these terrific advancements that have enhanced life, improved the quality of life, and lengthened the span of life.
We are being pestered by a bunch of people who have friends in this regime who want to roll all of that back and take us back to the times where life was much more primitive. Now, people did not die en masse because there wasn’t electricity. Life was harder. Nighttime was really dark. You had to have your torches out there or what have you, and that was, you know, only after somebody figured out how to create fire, about which they made a movie. Imagine if that guy had been able to patent it. Can you imagine if that guy had a family, they’d be the richest people in the world, the guy that invented fire, had the patent on it. Every time a fire happened, this guy got the royalty. But they didn’t think about things like that back then. You have all these scions out there like the Sulzberger guy at the New York Times, you’ve got the people from the old Firestone Tire and Rubber, you got the Ford, GM, the Mellons and so forth, and now you’ve got all these fourth and fifth generation offspring that have no idea what their families did to create it living off of it.
Hmmm. So let’s see if DD understands this. Iran could take US back to the time of the movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and the Obama administration also wants to take us back to a time “when life was much more primitive.”
Also, the people who control fire at such a time get all the royalties. And the Sulzbergers, “old Firestone Tire and Rubber … the Mellons and so forth,” plus the New York Times, they’re sort of the firemakers now, so they’d benefit. Or something like that.
Therefore, the mullahs and the current US “regime” are somehow connected in this desire.
“All of liberalism is a giant hoax,” Limbaugh concludes.
There’s also some jabber about the volcano and airplanes.
Cult of EMP Crazy is the best sobriquet, don’t you think?
DD was once popular with Rush Limbaugh because I had written something he found convenient.
It would be remiss of me not to mention one of the chieftains of the Cult of Cyberwar in this post. That’d be Richard Clarke, who is currently flogging his newest book on … cyberwar … at least the second on the topic, the last one being fiction.
Here one observes stiff competition for the meme of who will turn out our lights. It could be Iran or China using hackers. Or it could be Iran, employing electromagnetic pulse.
Iran has a lot of options, apparently. I’m afraid, aren’t you?
Writes the instapundit guy at the Wall Street Journal:
Over the past few decades, American society has become steadily more wired. Devices talk to one another over the Internet, with tremendous increases in efficiency: Copy machines call their own repairmen when they break down, stores automatically replenish inventory as needed and military units stay in perpetual contact over logistical matters—often without humans in the loop at all. The benefits of this nonstop communication are obvious, but the vulnerabilities are underappreciated. The Internet was designed for ease of communication; security was (and is) largely an afterthought. We have created a hacker’s playground.
Worse yet, computer hardware, usually made in China, is sometimes laced with “logic bombs” that will allow anyone who has the correct codes—the Chinese government comes to mind—to turn our own devices against us. [Richard Clarke] and Knake are particularly concerned with risks to the electric grid
Here the enemies, as usual, are Iran and China. A couple months ago it was North Korea.
Clarke’s book — Cyberwar: The Next National Security Threat and What to Do About It — was said to have claimed North Korea was a cyberwar power to be feared because it was primitive and poor. The reasoning being that it was invulnerable to cyber-retaliation. Because it was poor and primitive and so on.
(Clarke repeated the substance of this for Maddow again tonight. Because North Korea is infrastructurally a cybernobody, it’s a cyber superpower).
“Worrying about threats to the electric grid is all the rage these days, with anxious planners troubled by electromagnetic pulse attacks or even solar superflares that could melt down the power net for months or even years, bringing civilization to a halt,” argued the instapundit.
“But Richard Clarke … [warns] in ‘Cyber War’ that if such a calamity occurs, the culprit behind it might not be a high-altitude nuclear burst or strange solar weather but a computer hacker in Beijing or Tehran.”
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04.10.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons at 7:53 am by George Smith
It was only a couple days ago when the Short Count advised us the hottest idea from the mentally ill far right was to attack Iran with electromagnetic pulsing nuclear bombs. (Just hit the ‘Crazy Weapons’ tab on the right or type ‘Short Count’ into the search bar.)
But nourished by a steady diet of Heritage Foundation press releases (how’d that one naughty thing slip in there, tee-hee), it never takes long for GOP stalwarts to bring the threat of us being electromagnetic pulsed into discussion.
It’s been written into GOP national security policy that it must be mentioned at least once every 48-hour cycle. Or sooner. Generally speaking, the media’s opinion page editors pretend not to notice how nuts this is.
Writes Dick Morris today:
Republicans should reply [to Obama’s non-nuclear retaliation announcement] by introducing a bill in the Senate committing the United States to a nuclear response should any nation attack us with biological, chemical or electromagnetic pulse weapons. Let the Democrats vote against it. Let them filibuster it. Let them explain why we will not use our strongest weapons to deter an attack that could kill millions of our citizens or immobilize our entire economy!
Obama’s motivations for this absurd policy are plain enough. He wants to up the ante for Iran and make it clear that the Islamic Republic can develop crippling weapons for use against the United States without going nuclear. He wants to invest chemical, biological and electromagnetic pulse weaponry with an impunity that can only be obtained at the price of nuclear virginity …
He has made a big mistake, and the Republicans must pounce on it.
Morris is counting on the assumption that GOP voters, Tea Baggers and such don’t know that the usual Heritage script for electronic pulse attack involves Iran using an atomic bomb. Which, of course, is a situation under which President Obama’s nuclear get-out-of-jail free card is not redeemable.
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04.08.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 7:00 pm by George Smith
The last time we read of Washington Times’ columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave, he was writing about how neocon Dan Pipes thought Barack Obama could save his lost presidency. (This was before healthcare reform passed.)
Called the Short Count behind closed doors, if he is called at all, de Borchgrave wrote:
Mr. Obama is floundering as he tries to reset his presidency on economics. Defense is sacrosanct. Either taxes go up, or entitlements go down, or both. On Capitol Hill, it’s still burned toast for the president.
For centuries, leaders faced with insuperable domestic problems found escape in foreign distractions. In some cases, the distractions occurred suddenly and fortuitously, such as World War II, which started in Europe and pulled America out of the Great Depression.
President Obama isn’t looking for such a distraction, but others have no pangs illuminating what they think is the way out of the “clueless in Washington??? dilemma. Right-wing scholar-activist Daniel Pipes, a neocon icon, could not be more blunt: President Obama can “save??? his presidency by bombing Iran. The fact that this also could cost him the presidency is not deemed worthy of discussion
It was time to bomb Iran — actually, it’s always time to bomb Iran — because, as readers of DD blog know, the mullahs could send the US back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance via electromagnetic pulse attack.
But electromagnetic pulse attack is a wonderful tool of the extreme GOP right. If one must pause for an instant in warning about how Iran will attack the US with electromagnetic pulse, the empty time can be filled with a discussion of how WE can attack Iran with electromagnetic pulses.
And today, the Count writes of allegedly fevered discussion recommending the excellence of attacking Iran via electromagnetic pulse:
If Israel decided to explode an electromagnetic pulse weapon over Iran, the latest hot rumor in the blogosphere, and fry all electric appliances, including those at 27 nuclear sites, would Mr. Obama disown America’s closest ally? Such a high-altitude nuclear explosion would, inevitably, cause collateral electrical damage in neighboring countries, e.g., Turkey, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The answer: A loud yes.
Maybe Israel ought not to do that, the Short Count seems to be thinking.
But where is this hot rumor in the blogosphere coming from?
As you may have guessed, it’s not so hot. It’s kind of cooled off year-old tea, in fact.
Writing at Human Events, the agency which publishes Ted Nugent’s various advices, someone “who was closely associated with former President Reagan for a number of years” (quite a recommendation) writes:
There is another alternative [to nuclear-armed Iran]. It’s called EMP for “electro-magnetic pulse??? …
Chet Nagle, a former naval intelligence officer and author of “Iran Covenant”, says that an EMP pulse is “much like a powerful radio wave.??? It would have an impact on a conductor of electricity and could knock out transmission lines, transformers and even power-generation stations.
As Nagle put it recently: “The easiest solution to the threat of Iran’s nuclear weapons program is an EMP strike. A nuke detonated 450 kilometers over Tehran at high noon on a sunny day would not even be noticed by the folks on the ground; however, their lights would go out and everything electrical would stop, including those enrichment centrifuges.??? He adds that, “a few aircraft could then drop commando teams in the resulting darkness, chaos and lack of communications and do whatever else needs doing. Iran then would be living in the late 19th Century.???
Remember: no radiation; no blast effect. A dividend could be that the “Greens,??? the democratic reformers, would seize power. If that were to happen, we and our allies could help the country recover from the EMP attack, with the nuclear enrichment facilities permanently shut down.
Yes, no doubt Iranians would be really happy to have Americans assist them after we and/or the Israelis detonated a couple low yield nuclear weapons high in the sky over their country. The rest of the world would be mighty impressed by our great exhibition of good will, too.
Anyway, who is Chet Nagle?
DD has the answer for you.
Another old white guy, one who’s been flogging a self-published novel, Iran Covenant, on how the US and Israel smash Iran after the latter goes on the attack, for about a year.
“My first novel will be on Amazon.com by 1 January 2009, at last, and the second follows as soon as the editing process is finished, the man writes here.
“Iran Covenant is the story of a clandestine attack on Israel by Iran – using a smuggled nuclear weapon – ending with non-nuclear strikes by Israel and the United States that destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The plot details how that could be accomplished without putting boots on the ground.”
That was thoughtful.
More recently, Nagle writes of an apparently enjoyable to him fictional attack on Iran by Israel from the POV of the Israeli prime minister here:
The prime minister knows the calculus well. First, he thinks, will be the salvo of Jericho III missiles. EMP from their nuclear warheads will destroy Iran’s electrical power grid, communications, television, radio, air defenses, and most of the industrial infrastructure. At noon the flashes will not even be noticed, so high there is no blast or radiation on the ground. Then cruise missiles from submarines for high value targets. They should save one for Ahmadinejad’s presidential palace. With chaos in the dark streets, maybe our commandos have time to open that Evin prison hellhole and let out the political prisoners. Those kids, that ‘Green’ opposition—they can deal with the mullahs if they like. And the best part, with the radar and air defenses inoperative, our air force can overfly Iran. They will finish the job with none of my boys lost, God willing …
“Afterwards, he thought, to show no hard feelings I invite President Obama to make a visit to Jerusalem,” Nagle continues. “If he comes I will make him a present. Perhaps a little framed photo from our satellite that shows such a peaceful Iran.”
What is the title of this musing?
Electromagnetic Pulse: The Answer to a Jewish Prayer.
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03.31.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 8:09 am by George Smith
Survivalism expert Jim Rawles discussed the mindset of preparedness in an uncertain world, and the wild cards to prepare for including solar flares, EMP attacks & global economic collapse …
Part of what made Mark Thompson’s write-up for TIME magazine on electromagnetic pulse doom so wretched was the omission of how many far right kooks subscribe to it. When a journalist does this he’s dishonest, trying to cover up those inconvenient details which strip an issue of respectability and take it into the land of nuts.
The box quote is from a recent post to YouTube of a recording from Coast to Coast, the nationwide radio show that caters to listeners who believe in ghosts, big feet, UFOs, chem trail poisoning and the coming end.
For the past two years, electromagnetic pulse doom has been a regular feature of it, too. And one can frequently hear William Forstchen there, for his book — One Second After — which deals with an EMP attack throwing America back to the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Forstchen is connected with Newt Gingrich, another member of the Cult of EMP Crazy, one fond of pushing the author’s book because he wrote a foreword for it.
Amusing one-star reviews of the book are here on Amazon.
Forstchen’s book is only fiction.
However, there is a far right kook portion of this country’s populace that is obsessed with end times mythology and survivalism. The Coast to Coast guest tries to make the point that the Christian white identity crazies who comprise ninety-nine point eight percent of it somehow share common ground with tree-huggers and hippies.
When the mainstream media covers these stories, the pieces are linked to the arrival of Barack Obama as president of the United States. And more and more, one sees experts from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks extremism in the US, consulted when small groups of these people are carted off to jail.
The electromagnetic pulse doomers are not generally potential criminal nuisances. But they share much with the Hutaree including an increasingly insane rage over the Obama administration.
Some, like the Hutaree, are obsessed with the apocalyptic ending of civilization. Fortschen’s book, for example, is hardly the only example. Here is another entire series of Christian sermonizing built into an extended parable about the end brought on by an electromagnetic pulse. (And still another here, including a rant about the president.)
Reasonable people see the connections. The far right is a home for these types. It is welcoming and inclusive to them in 2010. The raging gripes about the descent of the US government into tyranny and the coming of the end are part of the mainstream daily noise.
Back in September, sampling from the old blog:
Stockpile! Obama will bring on the end of things. The masses — me included — will come rushing out of LA, head north and try to steal your stuff. Buy ammo or books on how to make landmines and makeshift claymores, so you can defend your stuff from those of us who would take it without paying in silver or gold.
“[Some white Americans, all Republicans] think an electromagnetic pulse — EMP for short — set off by a hostile nation exploding a nuclear device in space could fry computer chips — shutting down everything from toasters and cell phones to trucks moving food, medicine and other essentials around the nation,” reports the Oregonian.
[A precious metals] dealer, said some of his customers ‘are actually making sure they have a vehicle that’s not going to be impacted by an EMP.'”
“Failure of the power grid is a common theme — say if huge federal deficits trigger inflation and workers abandon their jobs, or if solar flares damage the grid the way they fused telegraph lines in 1859.”
“[Some fellow in the countryside] has factored predatory gangs into his plans to flee to his Snake River hideout with his wife … and their supplies.”
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03.30.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 3:46 pm by George Smith
Not that it will work.
TIME magazine has just demonstrated it is as lame as your longtime perception of it.
Today, writing about the Cult of EMP Crazy, Mark Thompson does the usual bad dog journalist thing of imagining there must be some relative merit to the Cult — and that the truth must be somewhere between it and the people who have reasonably been brushing off Roscoe Bartlett for over a decade. (And the Heritage Foundation for the last couple of years.)
TIME:
If America needs a new threat around which to organize its defenses, try this one: Bad guys explode nuclear weapons miles above U.S. soil, sending out an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that fries the electronic guts of everything in America. The nation’s financial and transportation systems collapse, hospitals and the Internet go dark, water and electrical grids freeze and runaway Toyotas with electronic throttles are finally brought to a stop. “The EMP resulting from the blast would cause widespread damage, devastating the economy and resulting in the deaths of millions of Americans,” the hawkish Heritage Foundation warned last week, launching a call on Congress to establish an EMP Recognition Day.
The Heritage Foundation. Hawkish.
Calling the Heritage Foundation ‘hawkish’ is like calling a blue whale “big-ish.”
But wait, Thompson’s clowning gets better:
“Despite repeated warnings, Congress has taken virtually no action to prepare or protect against an EMP attack,” write the Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill and James Jay Carafano. “In order to facilitate a national discussion regarding the EMP threat, Congress should establish March 23 as EMP Recognition Day” — not coincidentally, that’s the date of Reagan’s famous 1983 speech launching his missile-defense initiative. Leaving aside the contradiction of urging Congress to concentrate attention and resources on a threat that most in Washington consider an infinitesimal probability, the whole notion seems rooted in some visceral need for foes with diabolical destructive abilities. There’s something almost pathetic about cowering in the shadow of such a threat, instead of shrugging it off with the resilience that was typical on the American frontier.
As its own contribution to EMP Recognition Day, the Heritage Foundation — sounding more like the Green Party than the conservative think tank that it is — is urging lawmakers to shut down congressional cafeterias, walk to work, shut off their BlackBerries and turn off the lights. “If Congress took these four steps for one day,” the Heritage Foundation says, “all members would understand the magnitude of the dangers posed by an EMP attack.” (They’ll also be slimmer, healthier and more mellow.)
[Crap deleted for the punch line]
Like with taxes and health care, the debate over the EMP threat is polarizing.
The line asks readers to believe the unbelievable — that a sizable number of Americans have an opinion on electromagnetic pulse doom, like they do on real daily news, like health care reform, as opposed to extremist right-wing manufactured stuff, like EMP.
It also leaves out all the self-impeaching details on the true nature of the Cult of EMP Crazy: That it’s not only the property of the missile defense/bomb Iran lobby, but also exclusively GOP far right and home to birthers, the nuts pastor of a superchurch hoping for end to come so Jesus can take his flock to heaven, a congressional staffer who used to push the non-existent threat of suitcase nukes, and still another fringe GOP congressman who is a birther, to name a few.
TIME also highlites James Carafano, who’s work includes recommending we fight pirates with lasers, that ‘cash for clunkers’ cut into needed missile defense, and this gem of nose gold, even fresher than the Electromagnetic Pulse Memorial Day he recommended last week:
An enemy detonates a nuclear weapon over the Pentagon. In four seconds, the blast wave reaches the Jefferson Memorial. It collapses in an instant. Scorching hot winds, at 300 miles an hour, scour every person and vehicle off the Memorial Bridge. The fireball, bright as a thousand suns, quickly reaches the Capitol building. The structure shakes, yet stands. But inside, everything flammable — from clothes to curtains — bursts into flames.
Soon, 40 square miles are covered by roaring flames. Fingers of fire stretch as far as eight miles from the blast.
The D.C. area is home to 5.3 million people. All who haven’t died within the first hour of the attack are in desperate need.
It’s not a happy scenario. And Washington’s doing nothing to improve it.
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03.26.10
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Extremism at 10:25 am by George Smith
While there is no one in policy-making position in the current US administration who even remotely cares about electronic pulse doom or the notional threat it is said to pose, the Cult of EMP Crazy is so vigorous it has true believers all over the country.
And if there was a demographic study or poll to test the water, DD would theorize EMP Crazy — when not being exploited by the missile defense lobby — aligns with Tea Party membership and the irrational belief that the US will soon collapse from a combination of socialist tyranny, apocalyptic attack from overseas and the ruination of its currency.
EMP Crazy, as now owned by the GOP — the party of the irrational far right — seems to grow in appeal in this demographic the more ridiculous and extreme it becomes.
For today’s bit from the front lines, into this rather standard brew is popped Nicola Tesla kooky-ness and the belief that he could trigger earthquakes with electromagnetic rays. This idea, while it may sound odd and utterly nonsensical, is not uncommon in US extremism.
A little more disturbing is that the person giving the lecture — a four hour one — is employed as an emergency response specialist from the Emergency Operations Training Academy, an adjunct of the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Training Adminstration.
From a Del Norte, New Mexico, newspaper:
During a recent free seminar, a New Mexico woman explained how a single solar flare incident, or one 10-kiloton nuclear blast 300 miles in the atmosphere over the state of Kansas, could destroy a century’s worth of accumulated technology in this country.
The force created by a flare or a nuclear explosion— or even some other solar incident— is called an electromagnetic pulse, (EMP).
It would easily knock out all major power sources, land line and cell phone communications, emergency service telecommunications, erase all electronic digital data and even disable all forms of transportation dependent on any sort of electronic ignition devices.
A simple power outage could become much more once those trying to call their local utilities provider or start their car would soon discover. If a nuclear device exploded from a 300-mile distance above the earth, it would create only a brief light flash, probably unseen by most.
Virginia Silcox, a Training Specialist II with the Emergency Operations Training Academy in Albuquerque, New Mex., laid out the scenario of an immediate return to the 19th century to a small audience in Del Norte earlier this month.
During the four-hour seminar, Silcox gave a PowerPoint presentation followed by a detailed discussion and the construction of actual Farraday cages used to protect electronics … Basically the EMP attack was first known as Nicola Tesla’s death ray, Silcox said, technology some speculate was stolen from Tesla following his death in 1943.
Tesla used a little black box in his Colorado Springs laboratory in the early part of the 20th century and created an actual earthquake in the city while testing his vibration technology equipment there.
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