substitute

"Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, the nation's largest nuclear power plant, where security officials detained a contract worker with a small pipe bomb in the back of his pickup truck on 02 November 2007. The Department of Homeland Security said there was no known terrorism link to the incident at the plant west of Phoenix, Arizona. The worker, Roger William Hurd, told investigators he didn't know how the bomb got in his truck and was released"

WAT

From a wire service photo caption. I just.

The Counterterrorism blog has a chilling update on Pakistan. If this and similar reports are largely true, the American people are in for a big surprise. My guess is that most of it is accurate, because similar reports keep popping up.

They're one coup away from a nuclear-armed and unapologetically pro al Qaeda regime that could trash Afghanistan, re-start the Kashmir war with India, and provoke China into God knows what. Invading and subjugating such a nation is probably impossible and would require the cooperation of nearly the whole world.

The news from Pakistan is a Le Carré mess of garbled signals and spooky tidbits. It's pretty clear from everything you can see that bin Laden and Omar live there and are protected, that their "tribal areas" are not in any way governed, and that Musharraf is the classic doomed dictator trying to play both sides of a losing game.

And nukes. If Seymour Hersh is to be believed, Bush Sr. just barely kept Pakistan from attacking India with nuclear weapons during a particularly bad time in those two countries' relations. Personally I'd much rather worry about a nuclear Iran than about a place that's barely a nation and dominated by mobs and "tribes" owning nukes and F-16s.

I wonder how much bourbon they go through in the Pentagon when they play out these scenarios.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/05/terror/main1683852.shtml

It starts:

U.S. officials believe Canadian arrests over the weekend and three recent domestic incidents in the United States are evidence the U.S. will soon be hit again by a terrorist attack. Privately, they say, they'd be surprised if it didn't come by the end of the year, reports CBS News correspondent Jim Stewart in a CBS News exclusive.

Then they go on to say that terrorists are committing robberies in order to finance terror attacks, and list a couple of incidents in which various bad guys had what seemed to be political terrorism objectives.

The fun is all in the last sentence, though:

The next attack here, officials predict, will bear no resemblance to Sept. 11. The casualty toll will not be that high, the target probably not that big. We may not even recognize it for what it is at first, they say. But it's coming — of that they seem certain.

Okay. So, they're now reserving the option of pulling out any Very Bad Day that might have some tenuous connection to Islamic extremists and calling it a terrorist incident. If some career criminals who got Muslim names in prison rob a store in a mall and there's a big ugly shootout, or if some mentally unstable loser with a connection to Islam runs over a lot of people on a sidewalk, or if any number of medium-spectacular crimes occur that they can tie to "terror" in any way, it will be more evidence that we should be afraid and that we should give up yet more liberty.

And the news calls this an "exclusive" and runs it unchallenged. Bleah!

Vintage 1970s terrorist memorability and tchotchkes are available from the Baader-Meinhof store!

Whether you buy it from them or not, I recommend How It All Began, a memoir by one of the Baader-Meinhof people. It's fascinating and grim and important. But the bumper stickers are kind of cool too, in a post-everything way.

Santa Claus Uses Handgun to Protect Children From Terrorists

Here's the Christmas card sent out by the Citizens Committee to Keep and Bear Arms:



I have some concerns. First of all, Santa is not using an approved grip or stance for handgun shooting. One-hand shooting is not recommended, and the loose grasp he has on the firearm is going to result in instability, poor aim, and possibly total loss of control.

Second, although he has the children pushed behind him, there is an infant directly below the handgun. Not only could a terrible mishap occur if his gun somehow went off while pointed down, but raining hot brass from an autopistol on infants is very poor form.

Third, the terrorist does not appear to have any firearms himself and is soletly armed with explosives. Santa is not only risking everyone's life in that room by pointing a firearm at the explosives, but he's missing the opportunity either to shoot the bomber directly in the head — thus ending the terrorist mission — or to physically assault the bomber and remove him from the area so that he cannot demolish the tree or kill the children. Merely threatening him with the firearm may result in far worse results than either shooting him in the head or tackling him. Since the terrorist is very clumsily using dynamite sticks with fuses, there is unlikely to be any dead man's switch or trip wire that would frustrate this attempt, and a terrorist taken alive is far more valuable to the international community than a corpse.

Therefore I cannot support arming poorly trained Santa Clauses. Even though the threat to Christmas may be very serious, reflexively arming previously unarmed sectors of society is likely to result in more harm than good.

A bigger version of the card is available from the url above; I resized it.

I just finished reading Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, which I had begun and read about a third of when it came out and then set aside.

Ted Kaczynski was that odd math-major guy. He had an upbringing in which he couldn't come up to his parents' standards, was teased badly at school and left out, and was miserable a lot. He went to college, where he was a loner and withdrawn. Then he went to grad school and did really well, but wasn't very happy. Then he became a professor of math, and then he moved to nowheresville, and then he started killing people with bombs. Wait, where'd that come in? There are enough tightly-wrapped smart kids, lonely outsiders in college, and crazy mathematicians around who don't turn into terrorists.

Chase's thesis is that Ted was driven into a state of permanent homicidal rage by psychological experiments done at Harvard by Charles Henry Murray. Ted was coaxed into joining a lengthy psychological study as a subject, and it apparently was no fun. For example, participants (who were chosen for their intelligence and sensitivity) were asked to write out a thorough explanation and defense of their philosophy of life, and then called in to a meeting in which a trained and prepared speaker demolished their ideas and attacked them as viciously as possible while they sat in a chair with EEG and blood pressure monitors on them and cameras pointed at them. Other participants in this program are bitter to this day about these experiences.

Murray was clearly a class A weirdo who had a lot of trouble separating his work from his personal life, and who enjoyed power over others way too much. He was also an ex OSS spook with a background in interrogations. Chase makes a lot of the CIA connection, and certainly Murray's friends were dosing hapless victims with LSD and doing other grimy things at this time, and he was part of an academic alliance with intelligence agencies.

Chase was also an undergrad at Harvard around this time, and he spends about 100 pages attacking the school. The elitism, coldness, and anomie of the environment are described in detail. He also dissects the academic dogma of the time, which was despairing in the extreme: existential, tragic, and rigidly structuralist. The Universe was described essentially as a huge machine for grinding up the Soul.

After Harvard, Ted did go around telling people he wanted to move to a remote place and kill a lot of people. He was also full of rage against "The System", but who wasn't? But he didn't participate in any of the Berkeley radicalism even when he was a young professor there in the late sixties. In fact, he left for Nowheresville in 1969.

Chase overstates his case all over the place, as monomaniacs do. Harvard and Murray are demonized to an unbelievable degree, as if poor Ted was a tabula rasa until he stepped inside the gates of Hell and met the Tempter himself. It's pretty clear that Murray's "research" was deeply fucked-up, though. It can't have been good for a hypersensitive and socially withdrawn guy with critical parent issues to be screamed at and belittled over and over again with a bright light shining in his face. And it's significant that this was done in the context of a psychological institute with government ties, part of a big university.

What Ted did later on was make war on industrial society. He wasn't insane by any good definition; he was a terrorist. His stated aim was to bring down the entire structure of computer technology, big government control, the military, and big businesses. He also wanted to kill a Communist but I guess he couldn't find one. He wasn't an environmentalist or a hippie. He was, if anything, a revolutionary anarchist. Chase points out that a lot of his behavior and language seems drawn from a few books, one of which is Joseph Conrad's meditation on anarchist violence The Secret Agent, which is also one of my favorites. Oddly Ted didn't get the message about the pointless, tragic nature of this kind of violence. It reminds me of Tim McVeigh getting inspired by watching Robert DeNiro's heroic A/C repairman blow up government buildings in Brazil, only a bit worse. Ted was highly intelligent and sophisticated about literature.

I'd recommend this book if you're interested in terrorism, psychology, or this case in particular. A chunk of salt is recommended, since Chase is pretty clearly rehashing his own problems with Harvard and the America of 1962; there's far too much generalization about generations and Big Ideas of the Time. I'd also not pay more than a few bucks for it, since it was expanded from a magazine article by dumping in a lot of filler, including an unnecessary forty page history of Western thought.

No, it wouldn't. It would be terrifying. But that wouldn't happen.

( Would it? )

The entire story is behind the cut, or you can just read it here if the url hasn't gone away. From the Asia Times, via Harry Shearer in the Huffington Post.