Time for some armchair strategising...

I've been a little lax with this blog over the past few weeks.

What with what's been happening in the past 24 hours, here's my thoughts, for anyone who gives a remote fuck. (And it should bring a few more interesting search engines to the Blogspot version.)

I don't think the second wave of bombings on London are copycats. If it was an unrelated copycat group of angry young men, they wouldn't be trying to blow themselves up (which seems to have been the case in at least one of the failed bombings - a fleeing bomber discarded a dirty, forensic evidence coated, shirt, the moron). It takes time to brainwash/train someone to become a suicide bomber. Copycats would only have had two weeks to go through the entire process of separating someone from everything they love about life and instilling into them that God wants them to martyr themselves.

My theory is that the explosives seizures in Leeds meant that 'Cell B' were unable to put together proper bombs for the second wave of attacks, hence the failure rate, the strange smell that was noticed (some are speculating they may have been fertiliser-based explosives), and the fact that at least one of the bombs was apparently wrapped in nails (a la David Copeland's half-arsed neo-Nazi terror campaign of a few years ago which, despite being targeted for maximum casualties, only killed three people with the same number of bombs).

Standard Al Qaeda practice is to send in an expert from overseas, to show a local cell how to do whatever they're planning on doing, and then have him leave the country before the attacks are launched. On the one hand, it makes sense that the expert would have manufactured all of the bombs several weeks ago, while he was still in the country. On the other, maybe these bombs were put together by the people he trained here (a graduation test, of sorts). Possibly, if they had the explosives that he trained them with (which, coincidentally, the police began destroying yesterday), they could have repeated 7th July*. Or maybe the bomb maker this time around just sucked balls.

On the plus side, all four bombers fled the scene,


On a more recent note, the headlines on the BBC website at the moment is that armed police shot a man at Stockwell Tube station, around 10am today. From what's been gathered so far, around a dozen armed, plain-clothed, police officers, stormed into the tube station (apparently surprising the uniformed officers at the station). Three of them pursued a man onto a train, chased him along the aisle. The Asian man, wearing a heavy jacket, was bundled to the ground and held there by two officers. One of the officers fired five shots and killed him (this has been confirmed by Scotland Yard). Blasting away until the target stops moving is what is used in Israel for dealing with suspected suicide bombers, if you think they're about to detonate.

By all accounts, this wasn't a random armed patrol who spotted someone they didn't like the look of. This sounds like a Met, Special Branch, and/or even MI5 team targeting an individual, or being called in to deal with a specific threat. Other eye witnesses are

Police procedure when using firearms is to only fire if there is a direct, imminent threat to either the public or the officers themselves. If they fired, whether it was a suicide bomber, a drug dealer or a drunk with a katana, the shots would be direct to the torso (largest, most static, part of the body). As a BBC journalist said, there's no half-measures when the police shoot someone.

Yet more forensic evidence for the police, plus whatever the dead guy had in his pockets.

There was apparently a smoking package on a different train at Stockwell.



I've heard, several times and from various people, over the past few weeks, "What's the world coming to?" My response has always been that, "It's always been like this, we've just pretended it wasn't."




*You won't catch me referring to it as 7/7. This was just another bombing. 9/11 was a historic event, with sixty times as many fatalities. Describing 7th July as Britain's 9/11 is just disrespectful to the dead and arrogantly (and ignorantly) nationalistic. 9/11 killed more Britons than the London attacks.