The media is going crazy over a potentially deadly car bomb at Piccadilly Circus in London this morning. Reports claim that it could have killed hundreds and wounded even more, but the police bravely detonated the device and everyone was saved from an act of terror. Or was it? Perhaps this was just another situation used to scare the crap out of people and keep their minds off of other things. Larry Johnson explains things at his site.
From No Quarter:
You know what you call a vehicle with 50 gallons of gas? A Cadillac Escalade. The media meltdown over this incident is simply shameful.
For starters, gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapenal.
The fact that "officers courageously disabled the trigger by hand" coupled with the report of the smoke in the car leads me to believe that the mad London "bomber" tried to construct a Molotov cocktail of sorts and lit a cloth fuze. Fortunately he left the windows in the car up and there was not enough oxygen to really get the fire going. Looks like the brave British police reached in and snuffed the flame.
Meanwhile the major news outlets are doing their best to maximize ratings by making this out to be another victory over the terrorists. It is a fact that actual terrorists are out there, but this is the act of some lone quack. If a well organized outfit like Al Qaeda had been behind this, things could have been much, much worse.
Oh and by the way, Londoners are shrugging this off unlike the press.
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