Comments on: UK Car Bombs May Have Al-Qaeda in Iraq Link

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:26:59 +0000

From the description of the "bombs" themselves we can assume that any relationship to Al Qaeda is small. Obviously these UK "bombers" had none of the explosives knowledge that Al Qaeda regularly employs. All of the descriptions I have read talk about gasoline and patio gas (propane in a pressurized tank). Liquid gasoline does not explode, it just burns, and not very fast. Gasoline vapor will explode, but I haven't seen any mention of a means to disperse the gasoline to get a vapor to ignite. Standard propane tanks will also not explode, then are specifically designed to not explode. Even the car that did catch fire did not have any of it's propane tanks explode. These seem like some guys who have heard about Al Qaeda, put a bunch of stuff they new would burn into a car, and expected a big *kaboom* when they lit a match. This attack shows that the best way to combat Al Qaeda is to show them lots of US action movies.

By: PoliBlog ™: A Rough Draft of my Thoughts » London Times Reports AQI Link for One British Car-Bomber

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 17:05:11 +0000

[...] regards to the AQI link, James Joyner rightly notes: There’s a lot of speculation here. Basically, a terrorist in London at some time [...]

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 14:13:41 +0000

It still looks to me as though we should hold our judgement on the direct al Qaeda connection of these guys until we have more information. I still suspect that they're what John Robb calss “unsupported organic terrorists”. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be taking measures to reduce the likelihood of such attack succeeding, though. I've been seeing more and more claims that the Brits have overreacted. I use the light bulb approach to evaluating overreaction. Question: how do you know whether you have enough light in the room to read by? Answer: when you've, like, got enough light to read by. If you can't, you don't have enough.