Suicide bombingKeeping underwear bombing in perspective
The Nigerian underwear bomber and the Saudi suicide bomber who hid explosives in his body cavities (although it now appears that he, too, was an underwear bomber) point to a new, if so far ineffective, tactics on the part of al Queda; how serious is this threat? One expert says we should keep three things in mind: the threat is not serious because of inherent limitations involved in carrying incendiaries inside the human body or one’s underwear; one of two of these bombers may go through, though; the sheer complexity inherent in the effort involved in trying to prevent this type of bombing may erases any theoretical benefits and gains beyond a certain point; we may have reached that point
The underwear bomber perfectly illustrated the difficulties the United States has found itself in since 9/11. For all Washington’s efforts to wall off the United States, it was still unable to prevent the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs from walking in off the street, volunteering for service at the local al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, and throwing themselves at airplane security. George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, a defense affairs think tank, who also writes that Dick Destiny blog, writes that the only upside is that such volunteers are generally of low quality, perhaps guaranteeing that their jerry-built experiments in explosive chemistry will fail.
There has been no definitive explanation of the mechanics of the underwear bomb, and the pictures that have been released indicate Abdulmutallab succeeded only in charring his device and parts of himself.
Smith notes that what may have been thought to be workable in a vacant lot somewhere in Yemen was hardly a plan that was sophisticated or foolproof in the hands of a “warrior” like Abdulmutallab. He had to get the device onto an airplane where it had to be yanked out of the trousers in the bathroom after being sat and sweat upon for hours, then squirted with a syringe of acid, the syringe partly destroyed by the corrosive effect.
In this sense it was a failure – the nefarious plan too constrained by its design and the requirements needed to make it work to make it a game-changing formula.
Smith writes that as the subsequent national stir made clear, however, the plan was still a success. The media became over-wrought and the U.S. political leadership overreacted, with the usual result. We got more vows of increased punishment to be meted out in the faraway place — Yemen — and were promised more technology and watch lists promised to keep the childlike populace safe.
Smith writes that the details which begin to emerge about the Saudi suicide bomber who, we were told back in the fall, was hiding explosives inside his body, also indicate that the case was one of an undearwear-bomber. The Saudi government reported that the device the suicide bomber was carrying exploded with a flash of light, indicating exterior placement, and the explosives were thought too toxic to have been inside the rectal mucosa for hours. It also detonated poorly, killing its wearer but only injuring the target. It was reckoned a chemical fuse had been used for
