Attack of the Cadillac Escalades
Juan Cole today has a post that confirms some things I was wondering while watching coverage of the UK terrorist incidents on televisions at Reagan airport in DC. In that post, Juan links to terrorism consultant Larry Johnson, who has some great lines:
“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 incendiary. 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 shrapenal.”
“You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.”
“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.”
This guy reminds me of somebody I sat next to on a flight recently.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 10:06 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.
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