Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Three wheels on Buda's Wagon, and we're still rolling along
I also used to work around that way, and often walked past the spot where the cars were parked on my way to a better boozing-place than "Tiger Tiger". So I'm an expert too. Couple of thoughts:
I think it's interesting how much information we've got about this bomb - the Guardian today is discussing the patio gas, the petrol, nails, the different kinds of fuel bomb you can have (the one bit of information we don't have that would be interesting would be whether it was a double-detonator fuel/air bomb, but I bet it wasn't), the smoke coming from the engineer's safety fuse, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. Compare this to the 7/7 bombs, where we still don't know if they were TATP, C4 or whatever. I don't know why this is; I suspect that given that the 7/7 bombers clearly were very connected to international terrorism[1], the glasnost about this latest plot means that it isn't.
The "Iraq-style" bomb stuff is surely bollocks. It's a propane gas car bomb, about the simplest thing you can imagine. You might as well say that the bombers "ate the same Cornflakes as al-Qaeda in Iraq". Slightly dismayed to see that all the British newspapers have now seemingly uncritically accepted the American designation of every terrorist in Iraq as an al-Qaeda.
In general, successful organisations move up the technology curve, not down it. This looks like a regress for the terrorists to me (I'm assuming that it was jihadis rather than anyone else, which isn't actually proven but there you go). Also, not a suicide attack, which also suggests that whoever was behind this is more likely an isolated nutter (or small gang thereof) rather than a hardcore political organisation. I suppose that agents provocateurs can't be completely ruled out either, but this is unlikely to be a productive hypothesis as the UK state has no real history of fake bomb plots, and the possibility of another state doing it is pretty far-fetched.
[1] Note that merely to say this is actually to accuse the police and intelligence services of lying. The official story is still that the 7/7 bombers were purely homegrown extremists with no al-Qaeda connections. Conspiracy theories, how are ya.
this item posted by the management 6/30/2007 06:32:00 AM
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