Posted on 07/07/2005 1:17:31 PM PDT by LexHoskin
Edited on 07/07/2005 1:45:05 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
Since "homicide bomber" is only used by Fox News and others to refer to suicide bombings, would the term "suicidal homicide bomber" be redundant? I mean, on the one hand, "homicide bomber" already means that it was a suicide bomber, but then again, "suicidal" actually adds a great deal of meaning if you actually think about the words.
Also, where do you live that property-exclusive suicide bombings are so frequent that you must take special care to make the distinction?
Possibly, but what if the "clues" were put there for the purpose of misdirection?
This I would think would be consistent with an EMP attack, however I suspect there would have been more trouble with an EMP attack, and that an attack without an EMP device would knock out power to immediate areas, but who knows?
It's not that simple tho. I am a cell tech for a cell company in a midwestern university town. Turning off one cellsite does not make a complete zone of darkness. In an urban area, there is usually enough signal from cell towers on the perimeter to provide service if one cell tower is down. You may have blocked call issues if everybody jumps on their phone, but not likely coverage issues outside at street level. So to make a complete cellular quiet zone, at street level, you would probably need to turn down all towers within a 10-20 mile radius.
Then, what carrier is the bad guy using?. In my city, the "authorities" would have to turn down US Cellular, Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Nextel. Not a simple task.
That's exactly what they did - they shut them *all* down.
In the UK, the government must give "permission" to erect towers - one of the conditions is that they can turn off the towers remotely. It's a matter of just a few minutes to shut down all the towers in a city, a little longer for the entire country - which is exactly what happened.
By the way, you might want to ask your operations center about that - the same provisions are in place here. It doesn't matter who the carrier is, the government can issue an order and ALL the towers in an area or the country will go offline in minutes, if not seconds. I have clients that do work for Nextel and Cingular, and both of those companies have those protocols in place - if not long ago, then certainly after 9/11.
An EMP attack at this point requires a very large device or a nuclear detonation. Neither one of which were observed.
They were announcing the power outage because the first bomb or two took out the power lines that are run in the tunnels, and they hadn't gotten any reports of actual bomb detonations since radios and cell phones do not work in the subways there.
Through government bureacracy, and my corporate bureacracy, there is no way cell sites are getting shut down in any short time frame. It would pretty much take a cop coming in, pointing a gun telling us to shut them down before that would happen.
Posts on here stating magic switches in the EOC bunker that turn off cellsites is pure bunk.
Makes sense.
Would think such a thing would have resulted in more widely reported disruption.
There are no "magic switches" under the direct control of the government, but all the large US companies will honor an executive order or one from the FCC on the matter. It does take time, as you say, but it can only be a matter of minutes. By the way, one of the companies that makes the towertop and base hardware you work on is one of my clients. It's in the software, whether they tell you that or not. It can be done - whether the owner of the equipment chooses to implement it or not, and whether they tell their employees or not is another matter.
You might want to send an email to your upper management and ask them what they would do if asked by local law enforcement (after an attack) to turn the system off temporarily to prevent further detonations, and whether they would wait for a court order. The answer might surprise you.
London is not the US. In the UK, MI5 *does* have software "magic switches" and they can take the systems down *fast*. They don't have to ask the tower operators to shut them down, they can do that themselves. That came about after the IRA bombing campaigns of the 80s.
I have no knowledge of the UK system, so I am not doubting you there. And I agree that you could dump a switch pretty easily, which would kill all the cellsites. That would actually be easier than doing just a couple cellsites. However, the time factor on that would still be pretty slow, due to bureaucracy. It reminds me of the movie Die Hard, where the federales are telling the power company guy to dump the grid. At my company it would work the same. For peons such as myself, we would not do it without one of our big chesses saying do it ("I'm gonna have to call this in"), or a bunch of dudes standing around with guns and badges saying do it.
It's not a problem where I live. Almost zero Muslims. There are plenty of high value infrastructure items like bridges that would cause enormous economic damage without killing a single person. I'm surprised such targets have not been hit at this point.
My bet would be cellphone activated. That is the MO of Palestinian bomb makers.
I'm suspicious.
The bombs were done by experts.
To have an unexploded bomb conviently left to frame some one or group would be one way to throw the police off the real bomber's tracks.
Remember that trick was done in the video Bourne Supremacy ?
BTTT--i heard last night from a good intel source that these were at CANARY WHARF in the HSBC building where gunshots were fired..this makes it a much bigger plot!
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