A Few Words On Body Bombs and Security Theater…

//BEGIN

//UNCLASS

Has AQAP Been Watching “The Dark Knight” Or What?

It seems lately that the officials out there “in the know” have decided to allow a leak about a certain 15 page report alleging that Al-Asiri, the mad bomber/designer and much described “genius” of terror, has been attempting to perfect a design for an internal “body bomb” Now, no one really knows if this is indeed “the truth” or just how far Asiri may have come in his plans to create these surgically implanted bombs. However, what one can extrapolate from the press on this thing and the sources on “background” willing to talk, is that this seems to be more of a propaganda ploy than anything else on the face of it.

While I have no doubt that this vector of attack has been on the minds of AQ for a long time, so too has the use of CBRN, but to date, they have not been able to do anything in those areas and in fact the BIO warfare program they tried to start was a miserable failure. So, do we really see them getting to the point where a convincing as well as operational “body cavity bomb” is actually put to the test? I suspect that it may be some time until such a plan is put together and operational but as the media would have it now, as well as those leaking the “details” here, they seem to be saying FEAR NOW!

The Case for Surgically Implanted Munitions: Possible, Crazy, Exceedingly Hard to Pull Off

Now that we are all abuzz about the “surgically implanted bombs” lets take a look at the actual nitty gritty of how this would have to be conceived and acted on to work.

1. You have to have a willing shahidi… Well, there are some out there so there you go. One that is willing to have srugery as well as recuperation time, well, ok… Harder but possible
2. You have to have a sealed, self contained system that will not bleed (inside the device) and make it malfunction
3. You have to have explosives that are high power and yet only require small amounts to be of use
4. You have to have no metal parts to pass through the magnetometer
5. You have to have a surgeon or surgeons willing to do the cutting and sewing (Well Ayman is a Dr. after all too so…)
6. The device will have to be hidden enough inside the body so as to not alert others and preclude mobility issues (i.e. small, though the BVD bombs seem to be so as well)
7. Your detonator has to be either chemical or electric/remote (timed or say an RF device) I lean toward chemical for these but who knows

All of these facts are not impossible to overcome, however, they are pretty tough in the long run to get working for you and have a success. Now, with all of this said, I guess the question then becomes are what are the odds that this is going to happen? Maybe even one might beg the question of how soon? You really have to want this and in much of the AQ mind, many things are termed as “aspirational”, a term meaning wild fantasy, much like a lot of their doctrine and hopes. This by no means means that they are in fact going to happen.

The Case for FUDDERY as A Means to an End For BOTH Sides

So, what we have here though seems to be a lot of clucking about bombs inside of people and the fear mongering that goes on with some quarters of the intelligence community feeding this all to the media. SOFREP, a site concerned with SOF (SPECOPS) had this story out there last week and now it seems to be making the rounds with backup data (background from anonymous sources) that the mad bomber is in fact working on this with a cadre of doctors. Of course one can only assume that this “data” is perhaps coming from the recent mole that got into AQAP posing as a suicide bomber and stole their new prototype BVD bomb.

If true, then yes, sure, they had plans and were trying to make a bomb system that would be hard to detect, I mean, how many MRI’s are at the airports now huh? If this data did not come from the mole though (and there is data that this has been floating around now since at least last fall, way before mole man) then why now is this being thrust upon the media? Or, now that I think about it, there was that arrest of the guy with the pr0n that had the stegged “future work” file in there.

AH HA!

I am willing to bet that is the provenance of the file in question. Ok, so, there you have it. We have the plans and.. What.. Why release this to the public? I mean, what real purpose does it serve other than to scare the populace into submission? In the SOFREP report there is mention of something along the lines of “So how do you feel about your L3 machine now?”Uhhh, just fine really, I mean, it won’t help me if there is a surgically implanted bomb, but it gets much of the rest of the stuff when used properly. I am guessing that the impetus here was to make the TSA look good, by saying “you think you are hassled now, but look at what the jihadi’s are planning!”

Honestly, sure, it could happen, but the odds are slimmer than one might think I think and this seems to be a play here to manipulate the public mindset. Others have called the same foul on the play here but I just wanted to put it down here and sort through all the issues to ascertain where the truth might lie. In this case, for me, it seems like this story serves the purposes of both sides. For one, the security services here and the politicians both get a win by leaking data to sow fear, a fear that was ever so well used in the past (like G’Dub’s admin) and others to sway thought and perhaps lessen resistance to certain things. On the other side, this also works for AQAP because even if they are planning it, they are causing us to create even more elaborate Rube Goldberg devices to stop them, costing us more money and time.

It’s a win win for all of them.. FUD it seems is a booming business.

So, IF They Make These Bombs Happen Then What?

In the end, it comes down to this; “What are we going to do?” Do we really expect that we will now install MRI’s and X-Ray machines in the TSA lines to scan our internal organs as well as the sniffer/blower/wand/m-wave that we already have? This is a means of bombing that would be hard to detect if done well and certainly would not easily be seen under clothes or even with an M-Wave scan if it is not protruding/bulging the persons body in some way. Hell, for that matter, AQAP should just be looking for morbidly obese shahidi candidates huh?

Certainly, leaking this data to the news serves little purpose than to perhaps get people (including those on the hill) to buy into new measures and monies to appropriate them? It would not make one whit of difference in the current protection scheme now would it? Frankly, if AQAP and A-Asiri have been working on this, and it were a major threat, I personally would not have been dropping this to the media. Keep the intel secret (as the report is alleged to be) and keep it out of the public eye…

Unless you all think that by leaking this data you are retarding the chances that AQAP will try this method? I really don’t think that will be the outcome here.

In the end.. I call shenanigans.

K.

//END

//UNCLASS