The Thomas Chronicles

It’s these kinds of things that make you remember just how strange and hostile the world can be. To think, the metal thieves in the UK used to be a joke to us Americans. Thieves made a lucrative living stealing people’s doorknobs, metal lawn chairs, and other unlikely metal objects and sold them to dealers who then melted them down to create other things. To those aware of that strange wave of crime sweeping the UK, I don’t think we would’ve thought it would come here…

Undercover Op Leads To Cell Phone-Triggered Bomb
Improvised Explosive Device Offered For Sale To Undercover Officers

SAN JOSE, Calif. — By NBC11’s Garvin Thomas

San Jose and Santa Clara police chiefs announced Wednesday the results of a massive sting operation in their cities. Operation Meltdown, as the joint effort was called, netted investigators hundreds of criminals, tons of stolen copper, dozens of stolen cars and weapons, and in one case, homemade bombs.

A Fremont man was arrested in October as part of Operation Meltdown. He is accused of trying to sell the officers improvised explosive devices capable of being denoted remotely by a cell phone. During a news conference at San Jose Police headquarters Wednesday morning, police showed a video, recorded by hidden camera, of the suspect demonstrating the technology to officers by detonating a bomb for them.

Operation Meltdown was begun in March 2007. Undercover officers from both departments opened a fake metal-recycling business in the city of Santa Clara called Jose Clara Co-Op.

Within days, San Jose Police Chief Rob Davis said, customers started showing up offering to sell what appeared to be stolen copper. Over the course of the next year, the undercover officers purchased 14 tons of copper with a street vale of almost $100,000. Soon after the officers began buying the copper, though, Davis said visitors to the recycling shop started offering to sell other stolen goods. The officers eventually purchached 40 stolen vehicles and 74 firearms, including 21 assault weapons.

You can read the rest of this article here.

After sifting through much of the news on the recent car bombing at Glasgow International Airport, I think there’s a critical question not being asked, and I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not. Just days before the Glasgow car bombing, two car bombs were found outside nightclubs in central London. It is clear that both of these attacks were linked and authorities are afraid that another attack is well under way.

We have been given information that the some of the suspects associated with these attacks are doctors.

The fast-moving investigation into failed car bombings in Glasgow and London has swept up at least five physicians and a medical student, officials said Tuesday, including a doctor seized at an Australian airport with a one-way ticket. Many of the men had roots outside Britain—with ties to Iraq, Jordan and India—and worked together at hospitals in Scotland or England, officials said.

None of the plotters arrested so far is named on U.S. terror watch lists that identify potential suspects, according to a senior American counterterror official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

When you think of doctors, you don’t think of explosive gas cylinders strapped to a car. At least I don’t. While infamous al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri was a doctor, I don’t remember him acting in concert with a four other doctors in a coordinated attack. Even Zawahiri displayed a methodical mind in his brutality.

But the question we are not asking is: Why are professionally trained doctors using crude such methods of attack?

Why would these people attack others by methods outside their competencies?

I am not shocked at the allure that this fascist ideology has over people, even physicians. Fanatic ideologies warp and twist the human mind into shapes we can hardly identify regardless of their levels of intellect. That is beyond doubt.

Maybe I’m giving these terrorists doctors too much credit, but it just seems that their method of attack was sloppy and… well, just plain stupid.

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Mrs. Michelle Malkin, as on top of it as usual.
Shrinkwrapped

London is sitting on edge today. Another wave of terrorism strikes the UK.

GLASGOW, Scotland (AP) - Two men rammed a flaming sport utility vehicle into the main terminal of Glasgow airport Saturday, crashing into the glass doors at the entrance and sparking a fire, witnesses said. Police said two suspects were arrested.

The airport - Scotland’s largest - was evacuated and all flights suspended, a day after British police thwarted a plot to bomb central London, discovering two cars abandoned with loads of gasoline, gas canisters and nails.

“One has to conclude … these are linked,” Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, former head of Britain’s joint intelligence committee, told Sky News. “This is a very young government, and we may yet see further attacks.”

Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, who took office only Wednesday, was being briefed on developments by his officials, Downing Street said.

In Glasgow, the green SUV barreled toward the building at full speed shortly after 3 p.m., hitting security barriers before crashing into the glass doors and exploding, witnesses said. Two men jumped out of the burning vehicle, one of them engulfed in flames, they said.

“The car came speeding past at about 30 mph. It was approaching the building quickly,” said Scott Leeson, who was nearby at the time. “Then the driver swerved the car around so he could ram straight in to the door. He must have been trying to smash straight through.”

I’m going to keep an eye on these events in the coming week.

Chavez Strikes Again!

Addressing Venezuelan soldiers at Tiuna Fort, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez says that their military must prepare for a guerrilla war with the United States.

President Hugo Chavez urged soldiers on Sunday to prepare for a guerrilla-style war against the United States, saying that Washington is using psychological and economic warfare as part of an unconventional campaign aimed at derailing his government.

Dressed in olive green fatigues and a red beret, Chavez spoke inside Tiuna Fort—Venezuela’s military nerve-center—before hundreds of uniformed soldiers standing alongside armored vehicles and tanks decorated with banners reading: “Fatherland, Socialism, or Death! We will triumph!”

“We must continue developing the resistance war, that’s the anti- imperialist weapon. We must think and prepare for the resistance war everyday,” said Chavez, who has repeatedly warned that American soldiers could invade Venezuela to seize control of the South American nation’s immense oil reserves.

U.S. officials reject claims that Washington is considering a military attack. But the U.S. government has expressed concern over what it perceives as a significant arms build-up here.

Just a few months ago, he accused our government of trying to assassinate him, and last year, he called President Bush the Devil himself. Is Chavez paranoid, or is he stating his direct intention to attack the United States through asymmetric warfare?

One of our primary concerns in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was the turmoil down in Latin America. If the communist FARC merged with the drug cartels and had state-sanctioned support, we could be in for a very bumpy ride. Unlike our current Islamofascist enemies whose tribal mores and religious zealotry we can spot a mile away, Latin American terrorists can really hurt us.

The drug cartels and FARC have support structures and safe houses all across the United States in every city through the drug trade. We haven’t yet shut down our borders six years after 9/11, and terrorist operatives from Latin America can easily hide within our unregulated illegal immigrant population. Well, the merger between FARC and the drug cartels have already largely happened since 9/11 and there are links that tie Hugo Chavez to them as their ringleader. (See here and here.)

It seems like our solution so far to this very real threat is to stuff our heads in the sand and hope it all goes away because, you know, it’s really inconvenient.

We really have got to close our borders. And our Senate ain’t helping matters much.

The Russia Factor

What’s even more ominous is the omnipresence of Russia. Where there’s an enemy of the United States, there’s Russia selling them arms.

Under Chavez, Venezuela has recently purchased some $3 billion worth of arms from Russia, including 53 military helicopters, 100,000 Kalashnikov rifles, 24 SU-30 Sukhoi fighter jets.

Last week, Chavez said he is considering arms purchases, including submarines and a missile-equipped air defense system, as he prepares for a tour of Russia, Belarus and Iran.

“We are strengthening Venezuela’s military power precisely to avoid imperial aggressions and assure peace, not to attack anybody,” he said Sunday.

This report comes hot off the heels of Russia selling Syria highly advanced MiG-31 fighter jets, which many consider one of the best in the world.

Russia has “advisors” in Southern Lebanon during and after Hezbollah’s war with Israel in the summer of 2006. Russia had “advisors” in the Gaza Strip shortly before Hamas seized control from Fatah. Russia sells advanced nuclear weapons technology to China, (They’ve agree to sell China their new Topol-M missiles as well as other high-tech weaponry. They say that their new Topol-M missiles are capable of defeating any missile shield.) under the guise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Russia is also the nation building the nuclear reactors for Iran.

The list goes on and on. Given Putin’s declaration to resume the Cold War with the United States, one has to wonder about Russia’s intention.

Their recent, unprecedented cyber-attack on Estonia, which virtually shut down their entire country, doesn’t indicate Russian good will toward those they disagree with either.

Tentative Summation

We’re in deep kim-chi, and we’re talking about Paris Hilton.

Have a good day.

***Update***

Earlier this week at work, a co-worker— let’s call him Billy— pulled me aside and told me a rather interesting story of something that happened to him the night before. He received a call some time after 12 a.m. from a his little brother if I recall— we’ll call him Bob— and he told Billy that the police was evacuating people from their homes for four blocks around.

They live in Wilmington which is part of the greater Los Angeles area, and next to them laid the Pacific Coast Highway and an enormous Shell oily refinery. Apparently, Bob said, the police found two tons of explosives in a truck near that Shell refinery and Bob’s house. Police were dragging people awake and removing them to another location.

Billy was pretty excited and shook up over the ordeal. Terrorism? Here in the United States?

I’ve known Billy for a number of years and I’ve never known him to be pro-war. That’s no surprise living in Blueberry State Southern California. However, within the past few months, he’s slowly beginning see the importance of this war and he’s also seeing what it means if we fail.

I have a strange, sickly gut feeling from Billy’s story that we’re going to hear many more stories like his in the coming months…

Update 6/10/07

Since this posting I’ve queried why this terror incident wasn’t reported in any of the news. I’ve checked and ran searches all over the net to find just an inkling of news on this event. To evacuate four square blocks in the LA Basin is no small matter. To have four blocks evacuated because of two tons of explosives sitting near an oil refinery isn’t exactly a package of peanuts.

The more I thought about it the more I thought to myself: “Well, isn’t this the way terrorist incidents have been treated all year long?” The terror plot at Fort Dix was covered without any sense of alarm. In fact, the media went out of its way to play down implications of such an attack. Ditto with the JFK Airport incident, even though had the plan been successful, tens of thousands of people would have died. The media emphatically brushed aside the story of JFK and buried down in page thirty something in the NY Times.

Hell, even Fox barely mentioned it, opting instead to focus in on Paris Hilton and lurid tabloid scandals…

It seems as though the simple fact of terrorist activity cannot even be reported without politicians and political junkies and activists jumping on to spin it. From the outside, it seems that terrorism cannot be reported with the seeming ubiquitous accusation that the Republicans and Bush administration is playing it up for the own political advantage.

“They’re playing politics with it!”

How absurd… Reality is rarely what we would like it to be.

One more thought

If the simple existence of terrorism threatens an entire political ideology, I cannot think of a greater, more emphatic mea culpa than that.