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Thursday, May 06, 2010
WEIRDNESS. I'm not trying to incite conspiracy theories with this. It's just that there are a couple of things going on right now I don't understand at all.
The first is being kicked around at NRO this morning. Here's the best summary of the riddle:
If we're operating under the assumption that the firecrackers were supposed to ignite the propane gas (not) leaking into the truck, which was in turn supposed to burn the gasoline and ignite the fertilizer, then there is absolutely no place in the circuit for a couple of digital alarm clocks with some Radio Shack wires hooked up (?) to them. Even if the bomb were rigged to a timing device, it would need an explosive detonator that could respond to an electrical signal (off the top of my head, a model rocket engine or something). This device had no such element.
No amount of stupid accounts for this, if you ask me. It's the kind of thing that only a few too many action movies and a big disconnect from reality can explain.
Does this mean that Shahzad was living in
a fantasy world? Does it
mean that — to use some psycho-babble — this wasn't terrorism so much
as a "terroristic gesture"? Does it mean he wanted to get caught? (When
he was arrested on the Emirates flight, Shahzad reportedly told
authorities "I was expecting you. Are you NYPD or FBI?"). Or was he a
sincere, true-blue jihadist who was just incompetent, perhaps the best
the Tehrik-e-Taliban — harried on the ground by the Pakistani army and
from above by the drones — could come up with?
It doesn't make sense. On the one hand he's supposed to be a trained
terrorist in an international jihadi network. On the other hand he's
planted a bomb that wasn't so much dysfunctional as a prop designed to
look like a bomb. Feel free to explain it to me.
Here's the second item that has me scratching my head. It was
forwarded to me by Lloyd Pye, who has no more idea what it means than I
do. Obviously it has no provenance whatever. But it sure is curious. A
pair of commenters on the oil rig explosion in the gulf:
#1
There is something fishy with this disaster. Long ago I worked in oil
refining. Safety devices are everywhere and yet on this rig none were
set off. This rig is massive so whatever blew it had to be something
other than oil. The fire is on the deck. The flotation legs don't burn.
So the fire would have burned out leaving a floating wreck. So how did
it blow up?
[Am] I missing something?
#2
This just doesn’t make sense, if the well was just cased and cemented
that would leave the well totally isolated from the down hole formation
fluids. It might be possible that they did not control down hole
pressure and some oil (and more importantly gas) was circulated up
ahead of the cement slurry, but even that would give all sorts of
obvious signs that would have set off alarms. There are panic buttons
in several places on the platform that would have automatically shut in
the well on the seabed, but none of them had been activated. The oil
and gas was 18,000 feet deep, it does not blow out instantaneously. The
well would have to displace thousands of gallons of fluid in the
wellbore first.
So a highly unlikely and sudden explosion occurs on a state of the art
drilling rig, on the eve of Earth Day, just a few weeks after an
announcement of increased offshore drilling.
I think that the investigation of this disaster should also include a
background check of everyone involved just to be prudent.
I don't know anything about this subject. If you do, let me know.
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