So I turn on the telly this morning and find breathless CNN anchors hyperventilating over the nuclear suicide car weapon of mass destruction discovered smoldering outside of a London nightclub. One report from the scene notes that:
London police were contacted when witnesses saw a Mercedes being driven erratically near London West End night club Tiger Tiger, and the driver jumped out of the automobile and ran away. The car was reported to have two gasoline canisters and be full of nails.
CNN adds:
Explosives officers discovered the fuel and nails attached to a “potential means of detonation,” inside the vehicle. Officers “courageously” disabled the trigger by hand, he said. Security sources told CNN that the “relatively crude device” in the first car contained at least 200 liters, or about 50 gallons, of fuel in canisters.
You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.
For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapnel.
The fact that “officers courageously disabled the trigger by hand” coupled with the report of the smoke in the car leads me to believe that the mad London “bomber” tried to construct a Molotov cocktail of sorts and lit a cloth fuze. Fortunately he left the windows in the car up and there was not enough oxygen to really get the fire going. Looks like the brave British police reached in and snuffed the flame.
Judging from the overreaction to this non-incident I think we can safely conclude that Osama Bin Laden will remain holed up in Pakistan and let the fear mongers at CNN, MSNBC, and FOX do the dirty business of scaring the shit out of people.
Ahem. ‘Gas’ in this context means propane or butane or somesuch rather than gasoline.
The car contained several canisters packed around with nails for shrapnel and some kind of jury-rigged detonator.
Regards
Luke
I read reports that said ‘petrol’…last I knew, that still meant gasoline.
BBC currently says “60 Litres of Petrol, gas cylinders, and nails.”
Here
Perhaps the perpetrator(s) should have found themselves a Pinto if they wanted to be taken seriously. /snark
Although I share your scorn for the breathless coverage that CNN (and MSNBC) can give to triviality, the report I just heard compares the London bomb to those used as roadside bombs in Iraq. If this is the case, it is not an overreaction
There is something really weird about this whole incident.
They find a second car that was parked in a tow-away zone and haul it to a garage, and only later decide to look inside it and notice canisters and nails. What kind of terrorist parks a car in a tow-away zone? Were they in hiding, waiting for the police to show up and then remotely detonate the car? Two duds?
This is a really weird story….
Based on past reports of this type, I’d wait a few days for the initial hyper-eagerness of the media to scoop the competition on the latest-breaking, scariest-sounding report, until the real truth comes out… Their initial reports are always making these incidents into far more than they are, but they aren’t so good at covering the news a few days later where you learn that the big plot was the work of complete amateurs who had no idea how to really fashion a bomb.
It is worth noting that the first-responders — London police — did their job.
And that the media is pushing the sensationalism angle because their real purpose isn’t to discover and report the truth, but to keep you tuned to their channel so you see as many commercials as possible.
Lets assume it is a real, scary terrorist bomb.
SO WHAT?
Doesn’t it simply PROVE that the war has not made us any more secur?