Ed,
You seem to keep forgetting that TrebleRebel is an expert at coating with silica. That’s his day job. He did contract work for DARPA. Your day job is looking at nude celebrity photos.
So as to the reason nanosilica particles bind, and the underlying principles at work, he is the relevant expert.
The life scientists don’t need to know the science between what they observe. Similarly, if on a faked photo, Sandra Bullocks nipples stand erect, you don’t need to understand the science of the capillary action behind that.
Now, TrebelRebel, we need to get you reading something other than SEMs.
Before you and Dany now have us bombing Iran or Syria, start with the new edition of “Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner’s Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities.” It is Malcolm Nance. 480 pages. ISBN 978-1420071832. Said to be the definitive text on terrorist recognition. The main theme of the book, says one reviewer, as detailed in chapter 1 is critical awareness. The book notes that criminal investigators spend years studying criminal behavior to better understand and counter crime. Nance writes that the field of terrorism is no different as it is a specialized subject that requires serious study and requires that those in the front line of defense be as knowledge as possible. Those more interested in Sandra’s booty should keep their hands of the keyboard.
In a later chapter, Nance gives the Iraq war as an example of a group of leaders that were not as knowledge as possible and ignored the advice of those that were as knowledgeable as possible. Had the Bush administration consulted Nance, a trillion dollars and thousands of lives could have been saved in the Iraq debacle says the reviewer.
The book is divided into 5 sections comprising 21 heavily-detailed chapters. Each chapter is a progression in detailing, understanding and identifying terrorists. In chapter after chapter, the book details every aspect of terrorism and indentifies all of the various elements. The various aspects of different guns, explosives, and other elements are described and categorized in detail.
In the section on suicide bombers, an important point the book makes is that contrary to popular belief, suicide bombers are rarely insane or the “bogey men” that Ed imagines. They are most often intelligent, rational individuals with beliefs that those in the West finds difficult to comprehend. Nance does not for a second rationalize the actions of such groups and individuals. But notes that it is critical to understand why they do it in order to prevent future attacks. Similarly, you need to walk in their shoes in profiling the motive of the anthrax perp(s).
Chapter 8 is quite valuable in that it provides a comprehensive overview of how terrorist cells operate and are organized. While the cell is the fundamental unit of a terrorist group; cell operations and their members are the least understood part of terrorism. Their operations are always secret and never seen, until they attack. The chapter details the many types of terrorist cells, operative membership pools, and how cells and leadership communicate. The document found on Ali Mohammed’s computer after the 1998 embassy bombings, when FBI agents secretly swarmed his apartment pursuant to a FISA warrant, detail those principles very possibly followed in Amerithrax well.
Chapter 19 is a fascinating primer on al-Qaeda and the global extremist insurgency. The chapter details how al-Qaeda divides its enemies into two categories: Far Enemies and Near Enemies. The terms are taken from the Islamic concept of the community and those who oppose it. While the far enemies of al-Qaeda are the USA, Australia, UK, Europe and Israel, the near enemies are those Moslem’s or nations that al-Qaeda sees as corrupted governments or apostate rules. These include the governments of over 20 countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh, India and many more comprising billions of people. In the anthrax planning, Ayman prevailed in the debate whether to attack the near versus far enemies. The motive was to deter the invasion of Afghanistan.
While the post-9/11 attacks from coalition forces have indeed hurt al-Qaeda and killed many of its top leaders, Nance notes that al-Qaeda now acts a terror strategy consultancy. This transformation of al-Qaeda is in response to the loss of its base of operations in Afghanistan and the displacement of its leadership to the Pakistani border. The most significant changes were a shift of operational responsibility from the regional terror commanders, who executed a long awaited plan for jihad operations, to a more radical and difficult to detect posture: jihadist who were self-starting and worked independently from al-Qaeda.
The most significant changes al-Qaeda’s structure occurred when it was able to co-opt the Jordanian Salafist group Tawhed Wal Jihad and organize the foreign fighters into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). AQI changed the structure of the military committee’s roles dramatically and Iraq would become the cornerstone of al-Qaeda’s global operations. Much of the invasion of Iraq was premised on a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. There was never such a link, but the war turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as al-Qaeda is now a mainstay in Iraq. Similarly, the Shoham/Jacobsen did a great disservice along these lines perpetuating the myth that Iraq was involved in the anthrax mailings.
The book explains that it is important to note that contrary to popular belief, al-Qaeda is not a single terrorist group, rather a collection of like-minded organizations that cooperate and receive funds, advice and orders from Osama bin Laden and his supporters. Al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a physical chain of terrorist training camps to a virtual network that uses the Internet to create a network centric information and advisory body. Nance therefore notes that al-Qaeda has transformed itself from a global terrorism operation into a terrorism management consultancy. The 6 main aspects of this consultancy are that al-Qaeda: provides inspiration, contributes finances, shares collective knowledge, provides weapons resource and contacts, accepts responsibility and releases video propaganda. So unlike Ed’s simple and uninformed view of Al Qaeda, an “Al Qaeda Theory” was never limited to AQ proper but extended to supporters of the Salafist-Jihadis in the US. Even many in EIJ or IG think Ayman is a fanatic and disagree with his tactics.
The Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A Practitioner’s Manual for Predicting and Identifying Terrorist Activities voids all of the hype, politics and bias that inflects Ed’s thinking. He simply focuses on its task at hand, to be a field guide for anti-terrorist and counter-terrorist professionals to use to prevent attacks.
The Terrorist Recognition Handbook is a must-read for anyone tasked with or interested in profiling the anthrax crimes. One would hope that Ed gets a copy of this, pores over it for every little bit of commentary on Amerithrax.
The author should send a copy to Jim Fitzgerald at Quantico who might then realize it truly was quite irrelevant that Leahy and Daschle were democrats.
He may be an expert at coating NON-LIVING objects with silica, but he's shown again and again that he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to spores.
Experts outside of their specific area of expertise are very often the dumbest of the dumb.