CorkyMoo.com

We have many things to be thankful for and one is that our President and all the intelligent agencies are working vigorously to prevent terror attacks here in our homeland. If we only knew, just how many plans that have been foiled since 9/11 it ........

Be sure and let the terrorist know that you wanted them to be released from GITMO just before they cut your head off with a knife.

What part of "You are the enemy" don't you comprehend ?

Either AQ never really planned this or they did. If they didn't we may have given them an idea. If they have, we either reminded them (not likely to have been forgotten) or there was a serious flaw (like more people would get hurt announcing a shoe sale at Macy's).

Or this could just be a way to get AQ to bite their own tail going after a mole. If so, they would need to have baited it with accurate information about the attack.

There's a corollary to "has to be large," however: "have a lot of them." If these devices can be as small as a soft-drink can, then it wouldn't take major efforts to disperse them in the tens, if not hundreds. It'd probably be more effective that way, anyway.

Body counts, by the way, aren't the only measure of success. A few of these devices, if set off in widely dispersed areas--say, for instance, shopping malls or cinemas in a dozen Mid Western cities--would do the job of sowing terror just perfectly...

The concept of a binary chemical weapon is old news. So old I don't even know who first theorized about developing one. I do know that we began manufacturing rocket delivered binary chemical munitions in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

The odd part is the technical challenge. US engineers had to develop binary seals that could withstand the force of instantaneous rocket acceleration. A terrorist merely has to identify and manufacture a seal that can withstand the likely corrosive effects of the chemicals for hours or days. A seal that can be breached by some sort of detonator. Does not seem to me to be a big challenge.

And surely a couple of CIA engineers could probably knock something like this out over a weekend, given a sufficient supply of beer.

I imagine it would be smart to replicate the terrorist's design. But I can't help wondering how effective such a device would actually be.

What concentration of the gas is necessary to have a fatal effect? Unlike Nazi death chambers, most buildings are not air tight. Maybe the subways would be a more deadly location, gases would tend to drift downward. It seems to me that (using the Tokyo attack as a yardstick) weapons of these types would have to be very large. The weapon would need to create a large volume of gas over an extended period of time (scenes from 24 not withstanding) in order to threaten more than 50 or 100 people.

What will it take to get the "goody to shoes" anti American, cowards and those who want to release every terrorist we have in jail, to see a little light ?

I tell you, I'm feeling better and better about that 40% cut in New York's federal anti-terror funding. Sure, al Qaeda was set to unleash a cyanide bomb attack in the city's subway system in 2003, but they did call it off, after all....

A new book claims U.S. officials received intelligence that al Qaeda operatives were just 45 days fr...