Posted on 04/16/2013 11:14:20 AM PDT by Sir Napsalot
News organizations are reporting that authorities in Boston believe at least one of the explosive devices in Boston was a pressure cooker. (Yes, like the closed pot you might use to cook rice at home.) As it happens, pressure cookers have a nefarious history in counterterrorism circles. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was concerned enough about pressure cooker bombs to issue an alert to federal and state security officials: “A technique commonly taught in Afghan terrorist training camps is the use/conversion of pressure cookers into IEDs,” the bulletin warned.
That bulletin cited several plots from 2002 to 2004 to use pressure cooker bombs in France, India and Nepal. But more recently there have been at least three other instances of would-be terrorists in the west, all of them Islamic radicals, in possession of pressure cookers for reasons that seemed not to involve having friends over for dinner. One was an Army private linked to the 2010 Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, who had reportedly been taking bomb-making tips from the al Qaeda’s short-lived (literally) magazine Inspire and had various weapons and explosives along with his cooking pot. (The magazine reportedly recommended pressure cookers as explosive devices.) A 2010 suicide bomber in Stockholm had rigged a pressure cooker bomb that failed to detonate. And as a newer DHS warning about pressure cookers noted, the failed 2010 SUV bomb in New York’s Times Square was a pressure cooker device featuring 120 firecrackers. The same DHS memo refers to a March 2010 bombing with one of the devices at a western Christian aid agency in Pakistan that killed six people.
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(Excerpt) Read more at swampland.time.com ...
I thought the blast pattern was pretty directional, but if they find pressure cooker fragments, that’s what’s used.
The cooker blast would have been circular.
I had a friend in Arkansas who had a dirt floor in the kitchen. (Well it was in the Ozarks.) One day his pressure cooker blew up and he had bean plants growing on the floor for a long time. True story.
That’s the reason for the pressure cooker, so that it would be circular? That IEDs have come to America just makes me want to not go anywhere or do anything, which is what they want.
I think that now, all of a sudden, the DHS are experts on it. It has similarities with explosively formed projectiles used in IEDs mainly against armor, but it ends there - the EFPs aren’t formed with ball bearings.
IIRC, the DHS/TSA hasn’t stopped a terrorist proactively (other than once somewhere they claim was in an Arab country before it happened - no possible way to verify except by their word), since its inception.
The DHS/TSA didn’t catch the shoe bomber until the plane landed after his shoe didn’t go off, or the underwear bomber until after his shorts didn’t blow up well enough... For those that cite the Northwest Border Agent who got suspicious about a car with explosives bound for Lower Kallie, that was a fluke - I’m guessing she was good at being suspicious, perhaps with a former philandering BF.
The truth is they can’t find their ass with both hands and a flashlight.
>>> The truth is they can’t find their ass with both hands and a flashlight.
But they do sure cost a lot.....
Flashlights apparently made of solid gold, uniforms of finespun perfumed silk, epaulets of the most festooned design, all draped over a high school dropout of the lowest intelligence.
Yep, Hold on to your pressure cookers.
Commonsense pressure cooker and shrapnel reform inc..
Article and referenced report both fail to explain why a pressure cooker is used. Does it concentrate the explosion, or what? Some of the confiscated Malaysian cookers look a flimsier than what we usually think of.
No reason to get particularly excited, because fools and teenage boys have been making crude bombs for decades now.
Probably the most popular “fad” explosive being made is fairly easy to make at home with common materials, but is so stupidly unstable that the odds favor the maker blowing themselves up much more than intentionally hurting someone else.
One recent jackass made up a small pile of powder in his apartment kitchen, yet became so scared of it that he just left it there. Several days later, a cop knocked on his door on some unrelated minor deal, and the fool asked the cop how to safely dispose of it.
One apartment building evacuation and bomb disposal team visit later, he was arrested, and confessed, willing to do jail time because he knew he had fouled up badly, should go to jail, but, as he actually told the judge, “At least I still have all my fingers.”
Rice? Who cooks rice in a pressure cooker?
Glad I have my All American in hand.
Any good counter-terror expert, especially a Brit or an Israeli will tell you that if you are looking to spot something at the last minute you have already lost. That’s why all this airport screening and other stuff is largely for optics. You have to know who the bad guys are well ahead of time and have an eye on them. When you see the Brits bust up a plot or the Israelis smoke someone, they have usually been watching these folks for a long, long time. They only move in when the cake is nearly baked and they have all the evidence. They aren’t waiting to catch them on a scanner at Heathrow by accident.
It’s those Amish “Apple Butter” Terrorist’s again!
As a former teen-aged boy I feel qualified to answer that. The better you can contain the incendiaries, the bigger the boom, provided you don't run out of oxygen first.
No. Not Fluke, who obviously doesn't know what she's doing or the guys would be willing to chip in to cover her condom bill. She was a professional who took her job seriously and responded to an amateur terrorist who looked way too nervous for a simple border crossing - not Barney Fife harassing everyone without quite knowing what she's doing but more Sheriff Matt Dillon knowing that something didn't look right (a close relative of mine knows Diana well). I'd trade ten people in government like the typical drone for one like her and consider it a huge win.
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