"Ira IRa IRA Humperdink MD" <markdemer15@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:a5ecdc0d-24e7-4a4f-a11a-216a9f08041c@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
dumb ass! car bombs can't hit military installations, only market
places.
Really!!! Then how did they manage to bomb the US barracks in Beirut?
killing all those US Marines?
Redman
On Feb 5, 10:04 pm, kangarooistan <perama...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Tomgram: Mike Davis on the History of the Car Bomb
>
> Latest Programs
> Saturday 02 February 2008
>
> Listen Now - 02022008 |
> A Short History of the Car Bomb
>
> September is a dangerous month in New York city. The horror of our
> times started on September 20, 1920 when an Italian anarchist called
> Mario Buda packed a horse and cart with a hundred pounds of dynamite
> and drove it down Wall Street. At midday a massive explosion killed
> more than thirty and maimed many more. It was the first act of public
> terror using a wheeled vehicle. With the help of author Mike Davis,
> Tony MacGregor investigates a century of car bombing. The feature
> traces the story of how various individuals and groups have used the
> 'informal' weapon of war over the past century.
>
> http://www.abc.net.au/rn/radioeye/default.htm
>
> 1920 car bomb on wall street
> photohttp://www.abc.net.au/rn/radioeye/galleries/2008/2141652/image.htm
> ================================================================
>
> In a column on March 23 (A Vision, Bruised and Dented), David Brooks
> of the New York Times' wrote about "the rise of what Richard Lowry of
> the National Review calls the 'To Hell With Them' Hawks." In part,
> Brooks characterized these hawks as being conservatives who "look at
> car bombs and cartoon riots and wonder whether Islam is really a
> religion of peace." One of the advantages of history is that you have
> to check such thoughts at the door. If Islam can't be considered a
> "religion of peace," thanks to what Mike Davis calls "the quotidian
> workhorse of urban terrorism," then at least its jihadists join a
> roiling crowd of less-than-peaceful car-bombers that has included
> Jews, Christians, Hindus, anarchists, French colonials, Mafiosos,
> members of the Irish Republican Army, and CIA operatives among others.
>
> The Poor Man's Air Force
> A History of the Car Bomb (Part 1)
> By Mike Davis
>
> Buda's Wagon (1920)
>
> "You have shown no pity to us! We will do likewise. We will
> dynamite you!
>
> -- Anarchist warning (1919)
>
> On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of
> his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named
> Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and
> Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He
> nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the
> lunchtime crowd.
>
> A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets
> warning: "Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for
> All of You!" They were signed: "American Anarchist Fighters." The
> bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they
> stopped, the wagon -- packed with dynamite and iron slugs -- exploded
> in a fireball of shrapnel.
>
> "The horse and wagon were blown to bits," writes Paul Avrich, the
> celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true
> story. "Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve
> stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a
> great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan's offices, Thomas
> Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble
> of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets."
>
> Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan
> himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded -- the
> great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge.
> Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of
> scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented
> terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.
>
> His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of
> anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was
> also an invention, like Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, far ahead
> of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic
> bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued
> insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical
> potential of Buda's "infernal machine" be fully realized.
>
> Buda's wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first
> use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban
> setting, to trans****t large quantities of high explosive into precise
> range of a high-value target. It was not replicated, as far as I have
> been able to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang
> drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in
> Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-
> fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the
> right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car
> bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately
> reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian
> nationalists.
>
> Vehicle bombs thereafter were used s****adically -- producing
> notable massacres in Saigon (1952), Algiers (1962), and Palermo (1963)
> -- but the gates of hell were only truly opened in 1972, when the
> Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) accidentally, so the legend
> goes, improvised the first ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) car bomb.
> These new-generation bombs, requiring only ordinary industrial
> ingredients and synthetic fertilizer, were cheap to fabricate and
> astoni****ngly powerful: they elevated urban terrorism from the
> artisanal to the industrial level, and made possible sustained blitzes
> against entire city centers as well as the complete destruction of
> ferro-concrete skyscrapers and residential blocks.
>
> The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic
> weapon that, under certain cir***stances, was comparable to airpower
> in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as
> well as terrorize the populations of entire cities. Indeed, the
> suicide truck bombs that devastated the U.S. embassy and Marine
> barracks in Beirut in 1983 prevailed -- at least in a geopolitical
> sense -- over the combined firepower of the fighter-bombers and
> battle****ps of the U.S. Sixth Fleet and forced the Reagan
> administration to retreat from Lebanon.
>
> Hezbollah's ruthless and brilliant use of car bombs in Lebanon in
> the 1980s to counter the advanced military technology of the United
> States, France, and Israel soon emboldened a dozen other groups to
> bring their insurgencies and jihads home to the metropolis. Some of
> the new-generation car bombers were graduates of terrorism schools set
> up by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the ISI), with Saudi
> financing, in the mid-1980s to train mujahedin to terrorize the
> Russians then occupying Kabul. Between 1992 and 1998, 16 major vehicle
> bomb attacks in 13 different cities killed 1,050 people and wounded
> nearly 12,000. More im****tantly from a geopolitical standpoint, the
> IRA and Gama'a al-Islamiyya inflicted billions of dollars of damage on
> the two leading control-centers of the world economy -- the City of
> London (1992, 1993, and 1996) and lower Manhattan (1993) -- and forced
> a reorganization of the global reinsurance industry.
>
> In the new millennium, 85 years after that first massacre on Wall
> Street, car bombs have become almost as generically global as iPods
> and HIV-AIDS, cratering the streets of cities from Bogota to Bali.
> Suicide truck bombs, once the distinctive signature of Hezbollah, have
> been franchised to Sri Lanka, Chechnya/Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait,
> and Indonesia. On any graph of urban terrorism, the curve representing
> car bombs is rising steeply, almost exponentially. U.S.-occupied Iraq,
> of course, is a relentless inferno with more than 9,000 casualties --
> mainly civilian -- attributed to vehicle bombs in the two-year period
> between July 2003 and June 2005. Since then, the frequency of car-bomb
> attacks has dramatically increased: 140 per month in the fall of 2005,
> 13 in Baghdad on New Year's Day 2006 alone. If roadside bombs or IEDs
> are the most effective device against American armored vehicles, car
> bombs are the weapon of choice for slaughtering ****ite civilians in
> front of mosques and markets and instigating an apocalyptic sectarian
> war.
>
> Under siege from weapons indistinguishable from ordinary traffic,
> the apparatuses of administration and finance are retreating inside
> "rings of steel" and "green zones," but the larger challenge of the
> car bomb seems intractable. Stolen nukes, Sarin gas, and anthrax may
> be the "sum of our fears," but the car bomb is the quotidian workhorse
> of urban terrorism. Before considering its genealogy, however, it may
> be helpful to summarize those characteristics that make Buda's wagon
> such a formidable and undoubtedly permanent source of urban
> insecurity.
>
> First, vehicle bombs are stealth weapons of surprising power and
> destructive efficiency. Trucks, vans, or even SUVs can easily
> trans****t the equivalent of several conventional 1,000-pound bombs to
> the doorstep of a prime target. Moreover, their destructive power is
> still evolving, thanks to the constant tinkering of ingenious bomb-
> makers. We have yet to face the full horror of semi-trailer-sized
> explosions with a lethal blast range of 200 yards or of dirty bombs
> sheathed in enough nuclear waste to render mid-Manhattan radioactive
> for generations.
>
> Second, they are extraordinarily cheap: 40 or 50 people can be
> massacred with a stolen car and maybe $400 of fertilizer and
> bootlegged electronics. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993
> attack on the World Trade Center, bragged that his most expensive
> outlay was in long-distance phone calls. The explosive itself (one
> half ton of urea) cost $3,615 plus the $59 per day rental for a ten-
> foot-long Ryder van. In contrast, the cruise missiles that have become
> the classic American riposte to overseas terrorist attacks cost $1.1
> million each.
>
> Third, car bombings are operationally simple to organize. Although
> some still refuse to believe that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols
> didn't have secret assistance from a government or dark entity, two
> men in the proverbial phone booth -- a security-guard and a farmer --
> successfully planned and executed the horrendous Oklahoma City bombing
> with instructional books and information acquired from the gun-show
> circuit.
>
> Fourth, like even the 'smartest' of aerial bombs, car bombs are
> inherently indiscriminate: "Collateral damage" is virtually
> inevitable. If the logic of an attack is to slaughter innocents and
> sow panic in the widest circle, to operate a "strategy of tension," or
> just demoralize a society, car bombs are ideal. But they are equally
> effective at destroying the moral credibility of a cause and
> alienating its mass base of sup****t, as both the IRA and the ETA in
> Spain have independently discovered. The car bomb is an inherently
> fascist weapon.
>
> Fifth, car bombs are highly anonymous and leave minimal forensic
> evidence. Buda quietly went home to Italy, leaving William Burns, J.
> Edgar Hoover, and the Bureau of Investigation (later, to be renamed
> the FBI) to make fools of themselves as they chased one false lead
> after another for a decade. Most of Buda's descendants have also
> escaped identification and arrest. Anonymity, in addition, greatly
> recommends car bombs to those who like to disguise their handiwork,
> including the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, the Syrian GSD, the Iranian
> Pasdaran, and the Pakistani ISI -- all of whom have caused unspeakable
> carnage with such devices.
>
> Preliminary Detonations (1948-63)
>
> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/76140/mike_davis_on_the_history_of_th...
|
