Let me tell you, it is only through a little bit of luck and a whole lot of incompetence that an awful lot of innocent people were not blown into bits by the "car bomb" left in Times Square. And while the bad news is that this poorly thought through plan got a lot farther than I would have preferred, the good news is that if this guy really was trained in bomb making in Pakistan and/or has ties to the Taliban and that particular "car bomb" was the best he could do then we don't have a whole lot to worry about in that aspect. Other aspects are rather troubling, but the actual constructing of an actual bomb that could do actual damage is a lot less worrisome to me at the moment.Meet Faisal Shahzad. He is now going to be known far and wide and until the end of time as the
"Times Square Bomber". Never mind that he didn't ever blow anything up. Never mind that his "bomb" had about zero chance of actually working. He's the Times Square Bomber. It's just like the Christmas Day Bomber. That guy gets that name, but all he did was light his grundle on fire and singe his panties a bit. No bombing. No bomber. But that's his name. Same with Richard Reid, the infamous Shoe Bomber. He has bombs in his shoes, that part is accurate. But he didn't bomb anything. No bomb went off. If I mail a letter, am I considered a postal carrier? I don't think I am. I've never felt like I was. Even if I was mailing something and I was wearing one of those safari hard hats at the time, I still knew I was just the mailer.This guy is like the worst terrorist ever. Thanks to the folks over there at The Telegraph for providing us with this beautiful diagram of how this moron constructed his "car bomb". Why I can't find a lovely diagram like this in a US publication is beyond me. Oh, wait. That's right. The media sucks. I forgot. Behold! The "car bomb".
Oh, what the hell is that? You know what that is? That's a Nissan Pathfinder filled with a bunch of stuff, that's what we've got here. Let's go through the incompetence a piece at a time, shall we? First of all, he has these two alarm clocks for some reason. They don't appear to have much to do with the contraption as a whole, as there needed to be a fuse ignited first (which Shahzad did before he got out of the vehicle and left). Here is one of those clocks:
Where did he get that? Did he get a discount on it at an 80s store or something? It strikes me as an odd choice for some reason. It sure as hell doesn't look reliable. Then again, from what I can tell, it didn't really play a part in the "bomb" at all, so I guess who cares what it looks like? I wonder what he had to say about that? "What's the clock for?" "What is the clock for? Have you never seen Batman? All of the bombs always have a clock!"Next on the list is the M88 firecrackers that he purchased and set up at three separate locations
in the vehicle. All in all there were 152 of these things. Each one has its own fuse. According to something called Mid Day, a one Bruce Zoldan, who owns the chain of fireworks stores which included the one where Shahzad bought the M88s, in order for the fireworks to go off, each one of them has to have their own fuse individually lit. He said, "The M88 he used wouldn't damage a watermelon." Hmmm. And a Nissan Pathfinder is definitely a lot more sturdy than a watermelon, so there was really not a lot of thought put into this now, was there?
Mr. Zoldan also said that he would have been better off buying his fireworks on the black market. According to him, one M88 "...has an amount of pyrotechnic powder that is less than 1/6 the size of an aspirin." So, he had about 25 aspirins worth of powder? Was he too lazy to go to the black market to get his fireworks? Was he suddenly worried about doing something illegal by purchasing underground fireworks? Considering his goal was supposed to have been to blown people up, I'm finding it hard to believe he would have drawn the line at purchasing illegal fireworks.Now, as you can see in the above diagram, there were three propane tanks in there as well.
Propane is highly flammable. And that's the reason that we keep valves on those propane tanks. Those allow us to regulate the flow of the gas out of the tank. However (and this is important, kids!), in order for the gas to get OUT of the tank, the freaking valve has to be OPEN! That's right. He didn't even open the valves of the tanks! That according to Jonathan Alter over there at Newsweek. Could this guy have been more of a moron?
The answer to that is yes. Please note the type of fertilizer that he used for his "bomb". It is something called urea fertilizer. Over there at the University of Minnesota's website, they have a splendid data sheet on urea fertilizer. (It doesn't explain exactly what "urea" is though. It sounds like a female body part. Female body parts rarely explode, even when you guys are doing it right.) If you look down on the fourth section, it clearly states "Urea usage involves little or no fire or explosion hazard." This stuff wasn't going to explode no matter what. He might just as well have gone out and bought a bunch of bags of horse manure and threw those in there as well. The result would have been the same. No bomb.And finally, in the last act of incompetence in this scheme that sounds like it was designed by all
three Stooges AND Shemp, according to the huffy folks over at The Huffington Post, Shahzad "...left his keys in the ignition of an SUV" and his "...landlord....got a call from him that night saying he had lost his apartment key and needed to be let into the building." So he just put the key to the Pathfinder (that he bought specifically for the purpose of constructing this odd, odd paperweight) on his keyring with all of his other keys?! Was it too difficult for him to keep track of a separate loose key? And if it was, shouldn't he have maybe set things up so that he didn't have to return to his home after setting this thing off? Locked himself out of his house. What a maroon.I'm just so confused by the ineptness of the whole ordeal. And he
has allegedly had training in Pakistan? Screw Pakistan next time and spend fifteen minutes on the Internet. Hell, I spent five minutes on the Internet before I learned that urea fertilizer isn't very explode-y. And the amount of non-explode-y fertilizer that he used? That's right. About 250 pounds. Soooo, what? FIVE bags? Um, not to get all nit-picky or anything here, but the bomb that Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City was about 7,000 pounds. What in the world did this dumbass think that 250 pounds was going to do? Was he just not that angry? I don't get it.The only thing that would makes sense to me and that would adequately explain how someone who "trained in Pakistan" could have committed all of this bungling is very simple: It wasn't Shahzad at all. It was Wile E. Coyote.
