TIME
Swampland y
A Short Recent History of Pressure-Cooker Bombs
By Michael CrowleyApril 16, 201379 Comments
Navesh Chitrakar / REUTERS
A member of a bomb-disposal team holds on to a pressure cooker after a bomb
scare in Kathmandu on June 9, 2011 Related
* Boston Poses Biggest Challenge Yet for Obama’s Seasoned
Counterterrorism Team
* Obama: FBI Investigating Boston Bombings As An ‘Act Of Terrorism’
* The Hunt for the Marathon Bomber
Authorities are now saying the explosive devices used in the Boston attack were
fashioned from pressure cookers. Yes, like the kitchen pot you might use to
cook rice at home. As it happens, pressure cookers
have a nefarious reputation in counterterrorism circles. In 2004, the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was concerned enough about
pressure-cooker bombs to issue an alert to federal and state security
officials: “A technique commonly taught
in Afghan terrorist training camps is the use/conversion of pressure
cookers into [improvised explosive devices],” the bulletin warned.
That bulletin cited several plots from 2002 to 2004 to use
pressure-cooker bombs in France, India and Nepal. But more recently
there have been at least three other instances of would-be terrorists in the
West, all of them Islamic radicals, in possession of pressure
cookers for reasons that seemed not to involve having friends over for
dinner. One was an Army private linked to the 2009 Fort Hood shooter
Nidal Hasan, who had reportedly been taking bombmaking tips from
al-Qaeda’s short-lived (literally) online magazine Inspire and had various
weapons and explosives along with his cooking pot. (The magazine reportedly
recommended pressure cookers as explosive devices.) A 2010 suicide bomber in
Stockholm had rigged a pressure-cooker bomb that failed to detonate. And as a
newer DHS warning about the kitchen devices noted, the failed 2010 SUV bomb in
New York’s Times Square was a pressure-cooker device containing 120
firecrackers.
The same DHS memo refers to a March 2010 bombing with a pressure cooker at a
Western Christian aid agency in Pakistan that killed six people.
Counterterrorism officials are surely well aware of these facts and
studying any related leads. But it’s important to bear in mind that the
ability to make these bombs is hardly unique to al-Qaeda and its
sympathizers. Members of at least one prominent white-supremacist
website have shared terrorist tips from Inspire, which one called “highly
recommended
reading.” Pressure-cooker bombs are also discussed in detail on this anarchist
site, which describes how to build what is “affectionately known as a
HELLHOUND.”
Nor do these devices require much money or special training. As DHS put it in
2004:
Typically, these bombs are made by placing TNT or other
explosives in a pressure cooker and attaching a blasting cap at the top
of the pressure cooker. The size of the blast depends on the size of the
pressure cooker and the amount of explosive placed inside.
>Pressure-cooker bombs are made with readily available
materials and can be as simple or as complex as the builder decides.
These types of devices can be initiated using simple electronic
components including, but not limited to, digital watches, garage-door
openers, cell phones or pagers. As a common cooking utensil, the
pressure cooker is often overlooked when searching vehicles, residences
or merchandise crossing the U.S. borders
The identity of the Boston bomber or bombers remains very much
unclear, and it would be foolish to jump to conclusions. It would also
be foolish to ignore the twisted recent history of the pressure cooker
as a method for killing innocent people.
Read more:
http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/16/a-short-history-of-pressure-cooker-bombs/#ixzz2QjjXwQRj
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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