Category Archives: Bombings
Frontline: “Top Secret America” After the Boston Bombings
Frontline, the WGBH/PBS investigative news show, will air “Top Secret America” After the Boston Bombings tonight on PBS stations. Local station listings can be found here.
Have the hundreds of billions of dollars spent since Sept. 11 on counterterrorism efforts in America made us safer?
In response to the recent terrorist bombings in Boston, FRONTLINE will take a definitive look at that timely, urgent question next Tuesday, April 30, in Top Secret America – 9/11 to the Boston Bombings, an updated version of our film which originally aired in September 2011. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest traces the journey from 9/11 to the marathon bombings, examines efforts to improve information sharing among federal agencies tasked with keeping us safe and investigates the secret history of the 12-year battle against terrorism.
APNewsBreak: Russia caught bomb suspect on wiretap – Yahoo! News
Russian authorities withheld information from the FBI while asking for FBI assistance. If this is what’s been allowed into the public record, it’s not a big leap to think that Russian authorities, perhaps not the most trustworthy parties on the international stage, know (and knew) even more:
WASHINGTON AP — Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which one of the Boston bombing suspects vaguel
Dzhokar Tsarnaev. Image via Voice of America.
y discussed jihad with his mother, officials said Saturday, days after the U.S. government finally received details about the call.In another conversation, the mother
of now-dead bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials said.The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev
family.As it was, Russian authorities told the FBI only that they had concerns that Tamerlan and his mother were religious extremists. With no additional information, the FBI conducted a limited inquiry and closed the case in June 2011.Two years later, authorities say Tamerlan and his brother, Dzhohkar, detonated two homemade bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring more than 260. Tamerlan was killed in a police shootout and Dzhohkar is under arrest.In the past week, Russian authorities turned over to the United States information it had on Tamerlan and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva. The Tsarnaevs are ethnic Chechens who emigrated from southern Russia to the Boston area over the past 11 years.Even had the FBI received the information from the Russian wiretaps earlier, it’s not clear that the government could have prevented the attack.In early 2011, the Russian FSB internal security service intercepted a conversation between Tamerlan and his mother vaguely discussing jihad, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation with reporters.The two discussed the possibility of Tamerlan going to Palestine, but he told his mother he didn’t speak the language there, according to the officials, who reviewed the information Russia shared with the U.S.In a second call, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva spoke with a man in the Caucasus region of Russia who was under FBI investigation. Jacqueline Maguire, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington Field Office, where that investigation was based, declined to comment.
via APNewsBreak: Russia caught bomb suspect on wiretap – Yahoo! News.
Images of London 7 July 2005 bombings
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See also German authorities find new al-Qaeda documents hidden in porn files on flash drive: CNN (a related post here on Popular Logistics). The slideshow which follows is a preliminary attempt to compile a more useful visual data set of the events in London on 7 July 2005. We’ve got a few things in mind, after the jump:
As the BBC reports further details, the Norway attacks have taken on a particularly cold-blooded and calculated character. It appears that, after bombing the government center in Oslo, dressed as a police officer, the killer went to an island on which the Labour Party was holding a recreational event for teenagers. Posing as a police officer conducting an investigation, he asked a large number of children to gather in a crowd, and began to open fire. (Current counts seem to vary between 84 and 85 reported deaths among the teenagers on the island of Utoeya.
From BBC: Norway youth camp attack kills 84
At least 85 people died when a gunman opened fire at an island youth camp in Norway, hours after a bombing in the capital Oslo killed seven, police say.
Police have charged a 32-year-old Norwegian man over both attacks.
The man dressed as a police officer was arrested on tiny Utoeya island after an hour-long shooting spree.
Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said many people were still looking for their children and had not so far been able to locate them.
He was speaking after meeting victims and relatives with Norway’s King Harald, Queen Sonja and Crown Prince Haakon in the town of Sundvollen near the island.
These images, via the BBC, may help to illustrate the sequence of events. Motive will be harder to discern; the suspect in custody is believed to have right-of-center politics.
two attacks in Norway
Via the BBC, Twin terror attacks shock Norway
Norway has been hit by twin attacks – a massive bomb blast in the capital and a shooting attack on young people at a governing Labour Party youth camp
At least seven people were killed in the bombing, which inflicted huge damage on government buildings in Oslo city centre. Four more died at the camp, on an island outside Oslo, local media said. One witness later said he had seen more than 20 bodies on the island, but police have not confirmed this. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, whose Oslo offices were among those damaged by the bomb, described the situation as “very serious”. Norwegian media reports said the shootings on the island were carried out by a man in police uniform. Police said the suspected gunman had been arrested, and later said he was also linked with the bomb attack, reports said.
No group has said it carried out the attacks.
Hours after the bomb struck Oslo, officials said some people were still inside the damaged buildings, some of which were on fire.
Indonesian Terror Networks decentralize, vary methods of attack
Mail Bomb from collection of National Postal Museum, courtesy Wikipedia Entry "Letter Bomb"
Indonesian terrorists are decentraling networks, scaling down cells, and varying modes of attack. From the Jakarta Post:
The International Crisis Group (ICG) said in its latest report issued on Tuesday that Indonesian law enforcers’ aggressive clamping down on terrorism had driven terrorists to act in smaller groups independent of larger organizations.
“The suicide bombing inside a police station mosque on April 15, 2011, and a spate of letter bombs delivered in Jakarta in mid-March are emblematic of the shift,” the group said.
Dynno Chressbon, intelligence expert and director of the Study Center for Intelligence and National Security said Wednesday that the shift meant acts of terrorism would likely be harder to monitor.
“[These acts] will be harder to detect because the database the police have is limited to the old terrorist networks. New players from smaller groups will be difficult to detect until post-bombing,” he added.
Another terrorism expert, Noor Huda Ismail, told The Jakarta Post that smaller terror groups meant bomb attacks would be conducted on a minor scale with a smaller explosion impact but more sporadically.
“Terrorists today are ‘just-do-it’ terrorists,” he said.
Dynno said the change in terrorist movements in Indonesia started as early as 2008, and as terrorists shift to act in smaller groups, they cut the usual long chain of command.
“It was decided in a consolidation in 2008, followed by [the military-style] training of Jamaah Anshorut Tauhid [JAT] in Aceh, that there was no longer a need to have a long chain of command. Now small groups can act on their own to launch executions,” he said.
Their targets were clear: law enforcers and Muslims whose ideology differed from theirs, or in short, secular Muslims, Dynno added.
The ICG said while police still top the list of targets in attacks conducted by small-scale terror groups, it also pointed out there were other new targets in such attacks.
Terror groups get smaller, harder to detect (21 April, 2011, The Jakarta Post)
Faisalabad car bomb blast causes explosion in a compressed natural gas station
Via Wikipedia Entry 2011 Faisalabad Bombing:
The 2011 Faisalabad bombing occurred on 8 March 2011. ((Masood, Salman (8 March 2011). “Car Bomb Kills at Least 24 Near Spy Agency in Pakistan”. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/world/asia/09pakistan-blast.html. Retrieved 8 March 2011)). At least 25 people were killed and over 127 wounded when a car bomb
blast occurred in a compressed natural gas
This underscores the target value of energy storage to terrorist attacks, which has two aspects:
- The increased blast yield – the explosive energy – charge shaping aside – is the sum of the energy of the car bomb and the stored natural gas. This is another example of the problems inherent in centralizing energy storage.
- Infrastructure disruption. Again, the more centralized the energy storage, the greater the disruption. This principle, of course, applies not only to energy distribution networks, but to water supplies, sewage systems, and communications networks.
July 2010 Kampala attacks – via WikiNews
Via WikiNews, some details of the recent Uganda bombings:
The first bombing was carried out at a restaurant called the Ethiopian Village, situated in the Kabalagala neighbourhood, with many of the victims foreigners.[9] Fifteen people died in this attack.[3] The Kabalagala bombing occurred during the 2010 FIFA World Cup Final.[10]The second attack, consisting of two explosions in quick succession, occurred at 11:18 pm at Kyadondo Rugby Club in Nakawa, where state-run newspaper New Vision was hosting a screening of the match.[11] According to eyewitnesses, there was an explosion near the 90th minute of the match, followed seconds later by a second explosion that knocked out the lights at the field.[12] An explosion went off directly in front of a large screen that was showing the telecast from South Africa,[10] killing 49 people.[3] The discovery of a severed head and leg at the rugby field suggests that it was a suicide attack carried out by an individual.[3] A third unexploded vest was later found.[13]
via July 2010 Kampala attacks – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Suicide Bomber on Bike Kills 29 Iraqi Policemen; highest-ranking American to be injured in Iraq evacuated to hospital in Germany
From Alissa J. Rubin’s piece in this morning’s Times,Suicide Bomber on Bike Kills 29 Iraqi Policemen
Police training in the provincial capital of Baquba turned into a blood bath on Monday when a suicide bomber on a bicycle set off his explosive vest in the midst of policemen, killing 29, the local police said.
A suicide bomber killed seven people just north of Baghdad, and the United States military said a brigadier general had been wounded by a roadside bomb in northern Baghdad, according to The Associated Press. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Dorko, the highest-ranking American officer to be hurt since the invasion in March 2003, was evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. His wounds were not life-threatening, The A.P. said.
That a brigadier general was hurt may be worth noting for the fact that it took so long to happen in a war without a “front.”
The combination of bicycle and suicide vest, however – I don’t think it’s entirely unprecedented. Butit may well make life in Baghdad even more dangerous for bicyclists, as those in the field become more cautious about bicycles. This in a country where – among all the other dangerous things – people are in harm’s way filling vehicle fuel tanks.