Car bomb blasts rock Iraqi town --my solution

Two car bombs have exploded in the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, causing heavy loss of life. Officials said at least 20 people were killed in the attack, and others were trapped as a building collapsed. The attacks came at the end of a day of violence in Iraq, that included bomb attacks on a mosque and a restaurant, which killed at least 24 other people.

In another incident, the commander of a new unit set up to fight insurgents was shot dead in the capital, Baghdad.

The bombs in Tal Afar went off outside the home of a community leader, Hassan Baktash, who has links with Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party. The explosion brought the building crashing down.

"I don't have a final number for the dead or wounded but it's between 20 and 30," a police source told Reuters, adding "some are still trapped."

Elsewhere, a car bomb exploded outside a Shia mosque in Mahmoudiya, a town south of Baghdad. At least seven people were killed and more than 20 injured. Doctors said many of the casualties were children. "The kids were playing outside the mosque when a car came up quickly and then exploded," said a witness, Mohammed Awad.

Earlier on Monday, another car bomb went off outside the popular Habayibna restaurant in the Shia-dominated Talibiya area of Baghdad.

The attack came during a busy time for the restaurant. At least eight people were killed in the blast and as many as 100 were injured. Several cars parked outside were set ablaze.

In Tuz Khurmatu in northern Iraq, a car bomb exploded killing five and wounding 13 others.

The attack happened near the council offices in the town, 88km (55 miles) south of Kirkuk, police said.

In central Iraq, two suicide bombers detonated car bombs outside a military base in the town of Samarra, 95km (60 miles) north of Baghdad.

A third attacker approached the base carrying explosives and was shot by soldiers, the US military said. Iraqi police said two Iraqi men were killed and six wounded, including women and children. The US military said three soldiers sustained injuries that were not life threatening.

In Baghdad, Iraqi officials said Wael Rubaie, head of operations at the Ministry for National Security, and his driver were killed on their way to work.

Maj Gen Rubaie had been recently appointed to command a special operations room set up to co-ordinate the fight against insurgents across all Iraqi ministries and with the US-led multinational force.

My proposed solution to the Iraqi car bombs is as follows. All cars in Iraq would be fitted with a tamper-proof, cell phone-based "automatic minder".

These phones would each include a sophisticated microprocessor and be "always on" and "always talking and sending" to and from the main station.

The main station would be connected to all parts of the country via a hardened network of cell phone towers. Monitoring of each car would be 24/7. Hence, doctoring of the automatic minder would be extremely difficult.

There would be numerous internal sensors to detect tampering. Tampering would be communicated instantly to the main station.

Take down of a cell phone tower would have to be rare. There would need to be some tower redundancy in any case. When a tower went down, any car thereby cut off from contact would immediately be quarantined and grounded. A traveling repair company would recertify each vehicle's minder before it was allowed to move.

All moving cars would have their automatic minder monitored by a combination of UAVs, roadblock monitoring stations, and troops with cell phone-enabled laptops. (Alternately, Wi-Fi or some other technology might be used in place of cell phone. Probably a different, military type of communications net with more security than cell phones or Wi-Fi.)

The automatic minder would be connected to tamper-resistant sensors inside the car as well as possessed of remote monitoring capablities (near remote--as inside the car but outside the automatic minder.) The placement of explosives into the car would probably be detected.

In addition, the automatic minder would include a profile of the owner and all registered drivers for the vehicle. Anyone caught driving a vehicle who was not a registered driver for that vehicle would be arrested. All monitoring stations could query the automatic minder for this info, or query the main database using the car ID #.

The continuous reports of the automatic minder would provide a record to the main database of all travel of all cars, so suspicious travel (ie, trips to the Syrian border) could be investigated.

Just a thought

My gut tells me that many of them have these bombs planted and are remotely detonated.

I think that's plausible. I think it's also probable that many were forced to do it, blackmail (Arab conception of honor) or threats against families compelled many PLO genocidists. I believe I recall a report of discovery of evidence that some Iraqis were handcuffed to the steering wheel.

If the terrorists have resorted using innocents and remote control then their ideological program is failing. And they're pissing off their neighbors. Terrorism works best if there's some assurance of safety to the compliant.

I tend to think this situation is like a case of seven-year itch I had many years ago. I itched for quite a while before finally going to the doc. The medicine that killed the mites temporarily made the itching dramatically worse.

I'm praying that's the situation now.

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