Al-Qaida planned U.S. forest fires

JOSEPH FARAH'S G2 BULLETIN ^ | October 27, 2003 | Joseph Farah

[prairiebreeze]

FOX news crew was just talking about this. They seemed to conclude it was far-fetched. It's not hard for me to believe however.

Prairie

[OpusatFR]

That settles it. I guess the Islamofascists are all bedwetters.

[Piquaboy]

Just wait until the enviromentalist get hold of them. Then they will be sorry.

[Naspino]

FOX news crew was just talking about this. They seemed to conclude it was far-fetched. It's not hard for me to believe however.

Well of course. First the terrorist would have to make it into our country. Assuming they were able to make it past our racial profiling they would then have to obtain a drivers license in California just to get around. Assuming they could prove they were a citizen in order to get a license they would then have to purchase gasoline and matches -- and -- be able to drive into a forest. Fox is right its just ludicrous to assume. /sarcasm

[tray-sea]

Things that make you go hmmmmm..

I can't believe FOX thinks it's far fetched, unless they are trying to keep everyone in a coma-like state of everything is OK.

Reality - arson would be a very simple way to create distruction, especially when nature has started it for you.. all they are probably doing is setting a few fires here and there to add to the natural devestation and create confusion.

Is it me or did anyone else read the threads from last night and the folks in San Diego.. those people posting and in SD were really freaked b/c there were sooo many fires.

[Belisaurius]

One of these fires started at a firing range at Camp Pendleton, didn't it? Speaking of Foxnews, "Rev" Al Sharpton is on...what a blowhard.

[prairiebreeze]

My remote control made my TV go dark when the Rev. Dullness came on. Saw enough of all those dam* fools last night....!

Prairie

[Fresh Wind]

Yeah, maybe, but wouldn't it make more sense for the terrorist to commit acts that would never be mistaken for a natural event? There is no ambiguity when a bomb takes out a building. Not so with a brush or forest fire.

[steplock]

The news media does NOT report these incidents since they would back the "theory" of terrorist attack on our soil!

http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/7657408p-8597551c.html

More power towers are discovered vandalized
By Carrie Peyton Dahlberg -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Friday, October 24, 2003
As authorities issued an arrest warrant Thursday and the tally of vandalized electric towers grew to four, power experts said this is far from the first time that someone has tried to disable, dynamite or shoot at high-voltage towers.
Sometimes the sabotage has caused outages, and other times it has had no impact at all, even when transmission towers came tumbling down.

"More often than not there's no loss of customer load, no customer outages," said Dennis Eyre, chief executive officer of the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which sets rules for how utilities operate on the Western power grid.

The reassurances haven't diminished the intensity of the hunt for Michael Devlyn Poulin, 62, whom the FBI named Thursday as its suspect in the attempted sabotage of high-voltage lines in Oregon and California.

"We're most anxious to locate and arrest him so that he's not able to continue attempting these types of activities," said FBI Special Agent Karen Ernst.

Meanwhile, federal power workers said Thursday that the sprawling federal Bonneville Power Authority discovered one tower with missing bolts in northern Oregon on Monday and another in central Oregon on Wednesday. The FBI suspects that Poulin, acting alone, tampered with those two towers, as well as another in Oregon and the one near Redding in Northern California where a culprit was seen, prompting the search.

There has been no indication of why Poulin, who has a background of political activism and an explosives conviction, might allegedly be targeting power lines.

He served time in Folsom Prison for injuring his girlfriend's father with an explosive device, according to a Bee account from 1979. State Department of Corrections records show Poulin served eight years, from 1971 to 1979, after being convicted in San Mateo County of using an explosive device that causes "death, mayhem or great bodily injury."

He later lived in the East Bay Area, where he was active in Palestinian issues, before he and his wife moved to Spokane, Wash., to be closer to their grandchildren, said Mary Moore, a friend, fellow activist and editor of the online Sonoma County Free Press.

Neither violence nor energy issues attracted him when she knew him best and he wrote for her publication, Moore recalled.

The FBI is asking people to call authorities if they spot Poulin or his truck, a gray 1997 Toyota T-100 pickup with a white shell attached and Washington state license plate A36457P.

The FBI does not believe there is any connection with an earlier, unsolved Oregon case of someone removing bolts from guy wires that held up a high-voltage tower near Bend a few days before New Year's in 1999. That tower fell, but power was rerouted, no blackouts occurred, and the tower was righted the next day, Bonneville officials said.

Bonneville helicopter crews have been using binoculars to patrol power lines and look for more missing bolts.

"Bringing down a transmission line, anyplace, can cause major outages. The system is designed to prevent that, but it can happen," said Bonneville spokesman Ed Mosey.

Bonneville was targeted by an extortionist in the 1970s who dynamited towers and demanded money, but even those assaults did not cause outages, he said.

Around the country, attackers have gone after high-voltage towers with welding torches and explosives, and undermined them by shearing off or removing bolts, often with minimal effect, grid experts said.

"There's some resilience built into the system," said Eyre.

That's partly because industry operating guidelines, set by the North American Electric Reliability Council, require that the grid be able to recover without a glitch from the single worst failure of a major power line or power plant, said Lou Leffler, the council's manager of critical infrastructure protection.

Eyre said he believed federal records were once kept on vandalism incidents, but Leffler and others were reluctant to give many specifics, for fear of encouraging copycat or escalating attacks.

News coverage from pre-9/11 days has been far more specific, noting 1980s episodes of lines to a nuclear plant being disabled in Arizona and of a Kentucky high-voltage tower dynamited during a mine strike. In the 1990s, bolt removals took down a small power line in New York state and a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. line near Santa Cruz, in incidents that caused outages, according to published accounts.

Experts say a person wishing to cause major blackouts by downing a tower would need a fairly thorough knowledge of the power grid's workings at that specific point in time.

"The conditions would have to be just right," said Ross McFate, director of line maintenance at the Western Area Power Administration. "Even then ... we have ways of switching things around and getting back up quick, so it's not a critical thing like railroads or taking out the Golden Gate Bridge."

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About the Writer

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The Bee's Carrie Peyton Dahlberg can be reached at (916) 321-1086 or cpeytondahlberg@sacbee.com.


http://www.spadata.com

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States.

-- Noah Webster

[Peach]

This would be so easy for the terrorists to do that I'd be surprised if they hadn't already tried it.

[expatpat]

.....once it was realized that the fires were terrorist acts, U.S. citizens would put pressure on the U.S. government to change its policies......

The idiot's right -- we would change our policies, but not the way he thinks. We'd come down hard on mid-easterners harder.

[Kenton]

I've been concerned about this for some time. It's cheap, it's easy, and you can get all the info you need about areas with the worst drought conditions from online. You wouldn't need anything more sophisticated than a a car, a map, a few boxes of military trioxane bars and a finger to test the wind direction.

[ModelBreaker]

Just wait until the enviromentalist get hold of them. Then they will be sorry.

Actually, it is my opinion that forest fires are part of a deliberate hard-green strategy to drive humans out of rural areas and into the cities. Our Hayman fire in CO last year makes it more difficult to get hazard insurance on rural residences. No insurance means no financing on sales, no construction loans etc.

All they have to do is prevent thinning for another twenty years and their dream of concentrating humans in cities will be nearly complete.

[avg_freeper]

Just wait until the enviromentalist get hold of them. Then they will be sorry.

It is my belief that the "If I can't have it nobody can" enviro-nazis will join with Al-Qaida to implement this. McVeigh was an enviro PETA wacko as well and probably had close ties to Middle East terrorist organizations. And they all share contempt for Western values and capitalism.

[kinghorse]

Uh, didn't the Al Qaeda propagandist warn muslims to be prepared to endure shortages and a blanket of smoke the Ramadan? Didn't they say the earth would burn beneath our feet. Seem's far fetched? NOT.

The reason the government discounts this is because of the anger and loss of confidence (economic dislocation) that would result should it be determined to be an act of war.

[joesnuffy]

They dont want 'backlash' against muslims or against our Saudi Allies......

After all we dont want them to stop building their Mosques and Islamic Centers or buying up

large tracts of US land for their Training Summer Camps

There are organized terrorists taking orders from central command..and then their are wannabe terrorists graduating from muslim training centers...and sympathetic others to the muslim cause...many America haters of various 'other' groups willing to hide behind other groups..

Though fire as an act of terrorism and causing mass amounts of destruction pain and anger would be a good tool for these bass turds to use against us...

On a global scale many large fires causing mass amounts of destruction seem to have been set as of late

[SnarlinCubBear]

Immediately after 9/11, I, who live in So. Calif., said, if they want to demolish OUR economy, all they need do is start fires on a hot, dry day.

I live in San Diego County, and paced from the TV to the street yesterday, assessing the need to evacuate.

Many businesses will be closed today, and the air quality is BAD. The smell of smoke fills the air. It well could be another day of battling the fires, and resources get drained.

[Pharmboy]

Well, there were certainly plenty of fires in The Golden State before there was ever an Al-Qaeda.

But, who knows? 9-11 would have seemed far-fetched until it happened...

[milemark]

wouldn't it make more sense for the terrorist to commit acts that would never be mistaken for a natural event? There is no ambiguity when a bomb takes out a building. Not so with a brush or forest fire.

Don't they make a big deal about claiming credit for what they do? In fact don't they try to claim credit even for things they didn't do, like the big blackout? Or are they suspected of that in reality? I wouldn't be surprised if they are behind the fires. I wouldn't be surprised if they say they are but the government says they aren't. Who should be beleived in that case?