Container Ships The Next Terrorist Weapon?

NEWSMAX ^ | 4/15/02 | Dave Eberhart

[Travis McGee]

98% of containers are never checked or touched by human hands. Computers guide cranes that load them onto railcars and trucks, and send them on into interior America.

A simple GPS trigger could then detonate the container bomb, 20 times bigger than OKC, when it's in downtown Chicago or passing over the Golden Gate Bridge.

This will happen.

But as I said above, look at the bright side: the islemmings will have a few decades to adapt to drinking oil and eating sand.

[Travis McGee]

Darn right!

[Travis McGee]

bttt

[Travis McGee]

bttt

[Squantos]

I never sleep well anyway these days ..........:o)

Stay Safe !

[wardaddy]

Yep..their oil is ours for the taking..if they want to play hardball...that is hardball from the soft Muftis sitting in Riyadh paying their minions to do the dirty work.

Not to mention, their investments outside their oil infrastructure is in the West almost totally.

[StockAyatollah]

A simple GPS trigger could then detonate the container bomb, 20 times bigger than OKC, when it's in downtown Chicago or passing over the Golden Gate Bridge. This will happen.

It makes one wonder why this has not already happened. If Al Qaeda and the like really want to disrupt the world economy, then they could follow your script or numerous others involving dirty bombs, bio-weapons, etc. They could perform such attacks in several financial centers (i.e. NY, Chicago, SF, London, Bonn, Tokyo) simultaneously or in rapid succession. This would ensure all-out panic rather than just a dip in equity markets as the 9/11 attacks did. There would be no safe havens. If I put my "tin foil" hat on I could contemplate taking out the WTC so that I could profit from shorting the insurance/re-insurance industries while staging a diversionary, lesser attack on the Pentagon.

[Travis McGee]

I hope in my lifetime to see the Sand Princes return to their noble roots as desert nomads, herding goats from well to well...

[Travis McGee]

Nothing tin foil about it I can see. And the madder the insane death cultists get at the West, the more likely it becomes.

[Travis McGee]

At least you're in a nice safe spot, miles from seaports or any other dangerous targets.

[2sheep]

Bump.  The author above is about ten years late.

[dennisw]

Good post! A radiological bomb is so easy to make. Just detonate one in Grand Central Station and a transport hub is out for months while very nook and crany is decontaminated.

[dennisw]

I hope in my lifetime to see the Sand Princes return to their noble roots as desert nomads, herding goats from well to well...

After Mecca and Medina are taken out they can return to being the lovely oasises they once were. Places to get water for your camel and sheep with date palms waving in the gentle desert breeze.

[Travis McGee]

Certainly a yacht could deliver a smaller payload, which would be sufficient for a WMD attack but not an "industrial weight" ANFO attack. Cultural differences tend to make me discount the yacht threat: arab islamists I think have little familiarity with this area and would tend to go with what they know.

That's why I think the container route is more likely. OBL and others do actually control shipping lines, they are familiar with the ins and outs of moving containers from port to port.

It would be a simple matter to set up a proprietary front company in a target city to deliver the container to, after "laundering" it through several intermediary ports. The container bomb (as powerful as several Daisy Cutters) could be driven by a suicide truck driver after the terrorist cell takes delivery, but this would bring a greater risk of interception by the FBI and tracing back to the origin for retaliation.

OTOH, the bomb could be triggered remotely with a simple GPS trigger set to detonate along the train route of the container. For example, the trigger could be set to explode the bomb exactly on passing a certain longitude, which would cause it to go off in the center of a critical east to west bridge, or on a rail line in the center of a city. All of the electronic interfaces are off the shelf GPS to boat autopilot items available in any marine catalog world wide. A child could rig this up. The COLE bombers for example could do it easily.

The 40 foot long ANFO bomb could be prepared anywhere in the world in a warehouse before entering routine shipping lines. The needed tonnage of nitrogen fertilizer being assembled would be 100% undetectable in a foreign country without a lucky intell break, (far luckier than the one we did NOT get pre 9-11).

There would be no exotic "precurser chemicals" needed (as in chem/bio weapons) which might hopefully send up a red flag to Western intelligence. Just ANFO. And no radiation to detect, and no intell trail on the movement of stolen or Iraqi uranium or plutonium.

The "beauty" of this type of attack is its utter simplicity and difficulty in detection.

The "cure" for this type of attack would involve shutting down world trade to a tiny trickle for a long period while new inspection methods were created and brought on line. The shutdown would cause a global economic meltdodwn as all ships inbound to Western ports went unloaded for weeks or longer.

I kindly ask anyone to point out where I have missed some vital protection which would negate this type of attack.

I really hope I am wrong here.

[harpseal]

Other wonderful possible ship bombs include bulk carriers loaded with fertilizer. The Texas City disaster was an explosion on the same scale as a small nuke. Likewise in WWI an ammunition ship detonated in a Canadian port it was in the same order of magnitude of explosive power as the Hiroshima blast. Nor do the Tangos need to restrict themselves to the most conventional explosives. Bulk Carriers loaded with sugar and dosed with a few tons of a particular chemical would take out a large portion of a city. Wheat carriers have a whole lot of grain dust and are a major disaster when they burn. Chemical and fuelk barges and tankers also have a major destructive potential.

The USCG was overstrectched in 1999 and things have just gotten worse since then.

Stay well - stay safe - stay armed - Yorktown

[Joe Brower]

It is my opinion that it is going to take the mass destruction of a major population center, by this or other means, to incite the American people to finally get off their collective arses, get with the program, and wipe radical Islam off the face of the the earth for all eternity. And because of the enormous collective disinterest of the public at large, it is only a matter of time until this occurs.

It's a classic case of nasty creeps living in a glass house throwing pebbles at the giant who owns the rock quarry.

This is a great quote in your post #19. I've sent that one along to some friends of mine who I know will appreciate it, along with another of your classics:

Radical Islam is an insane death cult, and 'moderate' Islam is it's Trojan Horse.

Stay safe, Travis. San Diego has to be on the prospective targets list.

[Travis McGee]

I think that the Sea Marshal program in effect today is screening potential dangerous cargo ship bombs very closely, it's possible but would take a major terrorist team to hijack a HAZMAT ship and then kill the Sea Marshals etc. Not that it's impossible, but it would most likely be a one-time event. (Of course one time is plenty if the result is worse than 9-11.)

But a dozen or a hundred ANFO bomb containers could be set out on the worlds oceans with GPS triggers, and it would take stopping world trade utterly to track them down before they exploded in our cities while being delivered.

[harpseal]

What you say could easily work. In fact the fianal transport of the container or multiple containers need not even be under the control of any person who is involved in the plot in any manner. The GPS trigger would entirely negate any need for personal involvement. If it went off on a freight car that was part of a train carrying other hazardous materials likew say Peopane, LNG, methyl Isocyanate or any of a number of other routinely transported substances the devastation would be even greater than originally planned.

Even simpler would be a suicide bomber aboard a ship carrying an explosive cargo. He merely defeats the safety systems and boom. As an example take an LNG tanker where the valves are opened so that the LNG is released to the air and then the bomber flicks his bic. It is as cheap and simple asit gets. large quantities of LNG are exported from the Arab nations and an Arab aboard such a vessel would attract no attention.

Stay well - stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown

[Travis McGee]

No doubt at all, it's just a matter of when and where and how, but we are going to lose a big chunk of a city, bigger than 9-11.