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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA Short Recent History of Pressure Cooker Bombs
Authorities are now saying that the explosive devices in Boston were fashioned from pressure cookers. (Yes, like the closed pot you might use to cook rice at home.) As it happens, pressure cookers have a nefarious history in counterterrorism circles. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was concerned enough about pressure cooker bombs to issue an alert to federal and state security officials: A technique commonly taught in Afghan terrorist training camps is the use/conversion of pressure cookers into IEDs, the bulletin warned.
That bulletin cited several plots from 2002 to 2004 to use pressure cooker bombs in France, India and Nepal. But more recently there have been at least three other instances of would-be terrorists in the west, all of them Islamic radicals, in possession of pressure cookers for reasons that seemed not to involve having friends over for dinner. One was an Army private linked to the 2010 Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, who had reportedly been taking bomb-making tips from the al Qaedas short-lived (literally) magazine Inspire and had various weapons and explosives along with his cooking pot. (The magazine reportedly recommended pressure cookers as explosive devices.) A 2010 suicide bomber in Stockholm had rigged a pressure cooker bomb that failed to detonate. And as a newer DHS warning about the kitchen devices noted, the failed 2010 SUV bomb in New Yorks Times Square was a pressure cooker device featuring 120 firecrackers. The same DHS memo refers to a March 2010 bombing with a pressure cooker at a western Christian aid agency in Pakistan that killed six people.
Counterterror officials are surely well aware of these facts and studying any leads that might link the device in Boston to Islamic radicals here or abroad. But its important to bear in mind that the ability to make these bombs is hardly unique to al Qaeda and its sympathizers. Details on how to make a pressure cooker bomb can also be found on websites associated with anarchy and other forms of non-religious radicalism, including this one, which describes how to build what is affectionately known as a HELLHOUND.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/16/a-s
Some good background information
cali
(114,904 posts)over 200 and injured 700+.
It seems to be a popular device in and around Karachi.
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)who you want it to be think it was.
quinnox
(20,600 posts)There is a contingent that seems determined to blame the "Muslims" for this.
hack89
(39,171 posts)with the internet, such knowledge is universal.
The post was simply to explain about pressure cooker bombs.
quinnox
(20,600 posts)There have been at least a few posts here lately who seem begging for it to be those "scary muslims", sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes more blatantly.
ProgressiveProfessor
(22,144 posts)whomever they dislike and are openly doing so, even here on DU
Eleanors38
(18,318 posts)hack89
(39,171 posts)with the internet, such knowledge is universal.
I have no idea who did it. If pressed, I would say a lone wolf wacko but that is nothing more than a gut feeling.
whatchamacallit
(15,558 posts)My bad.
hlthe2b
(102,197 posts)but it is with some sense of irony that I've been looking at recipes and contemplating buying a pressure cooker, given how little time I seem to have to cook and a recent study that showed pressure cookers + induction burner to be the most energy efficient manner of cooking...
So... with this finding, will those purchasing pressure cookers now come under some level of suspicion? (Again, one would think common sense would reign, but given we now have to give more id to purchase ephedrine-containing OTC meds than we do a gun, who knows what Homeland Security has in store for us).