for the price of one manhattan project and a fat boy...,
2007-08-21 13:19:12
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Posted to the comments section...,
2007-08-21 18:50:48
we have met the enemy...:
Here's another story on the IED-IRA angle from The Sunday Times, March 19, 2006:
For 13 years [Kevin] Fulton was an IRA terrorist, involved first in courier runs, later as a driver and enforcer, and finally as a master bomb-maker in a unit in Newry, Co Down, credited with numerous advances in explosive technologies. "I was recruited as a serving British soldier," he said. "I was in the Royal Irish Rangers. I agreed to go into the IRA as a soldier."
Security sources have said Fulton was implicated in numerous bombings and shootings, allegations on which he declines to comment. He has said his handlers knew the nature of his role but ignored his warnings of forthcoming bomb attacks, including the Omagh atrocity, which killed 29 people in 1998.
Fulton and four other members of his unit in Newry pioneered the use of flash guns to detonate bombs. This technology was used in a bomb that killed Colleen McMurray, an RUC officer, in 1992. Her colleague Paul Slaine lost both his legs in the attack. He was later awarded the George Cross for his bravery.
Fulton claims he tipped off his handlers about this attack but they allowed it to go ahead to protect agents. "Two days before the attack on Slaine and McMurray I knew my officer commanding was using what we called a doodlebug, a horizontal mortar," he said.
"I told my MI5 handlers and they took me to London for two days. The day I came back the bomb went off. The police were taken off the streets to allow the bomber to get in, set the device and get out."
The trip to America came after the killing of McMurray, when the IRA had built sufficient trust in Fulton for commanders to send him abroad to buy remote control infrared devices that would allow IRA teams to refine the flash technique and detonate explosives from up to a mile away.
When he told his MI5 handlers about the mission, they arranged with the FBI to procure the detonators for Fulton.
In this month's edition of Atlantic Monthly, Fulton outlines how an MI5 agent was sent ahead of him by Concorde to make preparations. He has also described the trip in interviews with The Sunday Times over the past few months.
In New York he attended a meeting with FBI agents and British intelligence officers. There he agreed to expose IRA operatives in America to the FBI. However, the same terrorists, who were arrested months later, were first allowed to procure and send the infrared technology to the IRA. Fulton claims this technology was used in the Troubles and forms the basis for insurgent bombs in Iraq.
National Defense Magazine, June 2007, on how Iraq is the source of further IED development and tech export:
Mobile phones, walky-talkies, radio controlled toys, keyless entry systems all followed as U.S. forces countered with jamming technology.
Out of necessity, the triggering devices in Iraq have grown in sophistication, Nielsen said. Where jamming equipment is not used in the Philippines - for example - insurgents have not needed complex switches, he said.
But there are some indications that this triggering know-how is migrating. High-powered cordless phones - a method first employed in Iraq - have been used in attacks in Pakistan and Algeria, he noted.
The one thing the triggers used in Iraq have in common is that they're based on commercially available items.
I bet Iran has commercially available items!
And along with bomb making techniques, Iraq's explosives are making it outside the borders. On at least two occasions, munitions smuggled from the country were used in terrorist attacks in neighboring Jordan, Nielsen said.
So if I follow correctly the MI5 tried a double-blind on the IRA, bought the tech from the United States, and the IRA kicked out the British with it, whence the deadly infrared garage-opener bomb ignitition travelled via the IRA to Columbia, Lebanon, and Palestinian refugee camps, forwarded to points east, including Iraq.
The EFP meanwhile is just classic modern tech upgrade to counter the post-invasion humvee up-armoring effort. A simple answer to a simple question.
Iran, meanwhile, hasn't fought a campaign like this in its history. Why would they develop the DIY technical expertise for home and garage fabricated IEDs anyway? The far more likely source, if any were necessary - it's not rocket science, would be the volunteers who've flooded into Iraq (see: we've got the bodies of evidence to prove that one) that we know already recieved their training for this kind of war during our jihad in Afghanistan.
It's ludicrous: were Iran involved in the process somehow, in addition to all the others involved in the process, attacking them would do nothing to disrupt the supply of such elementary components and low grade tech to Iraq. The only reason they're recycling these charges again is because they want to attack them, and figure just such an excuse might fly with the public.
