Low Tech Dirty Bombs Back in the Limelight

In the wake of the chlo­rine tanker truck bomb­ing in Taji, Iraq today, domes­tic gov­ern­ment agen­cies are tak­ing another look at how easy it might be for ter­ror­ists to wreak state­side havoc. This from the Associated Press:

QUANTICO, Va. — Kirk Yeager makes bombs from the stuff found under kitchen sinks. He does it to help the FBI defend against what offi­cials say is the next fron­tier for ter­ror­ists in the United States.

Ten years ago, peroxide-​​based bombs were mostly the work of young pranksters. But the easy-​​to-​​make yet deadly chem­i­cal cock­tails were embraced in the late 1990s by Palestinian mil­i­tants and sui­cide bombers bent on killing large groups of people.

Now, Yeager says, the “Mother of Satan” explo­sives are con­sid­ered the most likely weapon that ter­ror­ists will use against the U.S., more so than a nuclear or radi­o­log­i­cal “dirty” bomb.

“Every seri­ous ter­ror­ist group knows about them and knows how to make them,” Yeager said. The foren­sic sci­en­tist heads the explo­sives unit at the FBI’s lab­o­ra­tory in Quantico, Va., about 35 miles south of Washington.

“Bad guys are bombers. You don’t have to have the level of sophis­ti­ca­tion to make a bomb that you need to get nuclear mate­ri­als,” Yeager said.

The bombs are made by mix­ing chem­i­cals that are used in com­mon house­hold items, includ­ing hydro­gen per­ox­ide and paint thin­ner, and eas­ily found at drug stores or hard­ware stores. Experts know them as TATP, short for tri­ace­tone triper­ox­ide, and HMTD, or hexa­m­eth­yl­ene triper­ox­ide diamine.

Recent cases of explo­sions or thwarted attacks with TATP or HMTD in the U.S. include:

–Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam. He was car­ry­ing HMTD among the 124 pounds of explo­sives in the trunk of his car when he was arrested near the U.S.-Canadian bor­der in December 1999.

–Richard Reid. The would-​​be British shoe bomber tried unsuc­cess­fully to det­o­nate 8 ounces of TATP hid­den in his high-​​top sneaker dur­ing a Paris-​​to-​​Miami flight in 2001.

–University of Oklahoma sui­cide bomber Joel Henry Hinrichs III. He used TATP to blow him­self up near a packed foot­ball sta­dium in October 2005.

–College stu­dent Matthew Rugo in Texas City, Texas. He was killed last July when a plas­tic stor­age con­tainer of TATP that was mixed in his apart­ment exploded. The FBI has not found any con­nec­tion in the case to inter­na­tional ter­ror­ist groups, but the inves­ti­ga­tion continues.

Additionally, coun­tert­er­ror­ist author­i­ties say ter­ror­ists planned to mix a solu­tion sim­i­lar to TATP in last summer’s thwarted attacks on as many as 10 London-to-U.S. flights — lead­ing to the crack­down on bring­ing liq­uids aboard airlines.

Also, ecoter­ror­ists and ani­mal rights extrem­ist groups such as Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front are believed by author­i­ties to use peroxide-​​based explosives.

Yeager, 41, who helps the FBI solve bomb­ing cases by inves­ti­gat­ing the crime scene debris, is the only U.S. offi­cial who makes TATP and sim­i­lar explo­sives in mass quantities.

His inter­est in bomb-​​making began at Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in organic chem­istry. He honed his skills at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, one of the nation’s top cen­ters for explo­sives research and testing.

Yeager’s brews are used for test­ing and train­ing police offi­cers and bomb-​​sniffing dogs. Until recently, author­i­ties knew lit­tle about peroxide-​​based bombs because they are too volatile to han­dle casu­ally. Moreover, TATP in par­tic­u­lar is hard for dogs to detect.

Over the past year, the FBI and Transportation Security Administration have trained dog teams to sniff out the chem­i­cal cock­tails at 75 air­ports and on sub­way, train and bus sys­tems in 13 cities. The gov­ern­ment pays up to $50,000 to train each of the 420 teams cur­rently in action.

“It’s a threat that’s not here right now, but we see it com­ing,” said Dave Kontny, direc­tor of TSA’s national explo­sives detec­tion canine teams. “So we’re bet­ter off to have these teams.”

John Rollins, a coun­tert­er­ror­ism expert at Congressional Research Service and for­mer U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cial, said TATP and other vari­eties of peroxide-​​based bombs are most likely to show up in the hands of home­grown extrem­ists and other splin­ter sym­pa­thiz­ers of inter­na­tional ter­ror­ist groups.

The larger and cen­trally orga­nized groups, such as al-​​Qaida, are more inter­ested in “big bang” weapons that he said would cause wide­spread deaths and eco­nomic losses.

But aspir­ing ter­ror­ists, Rollins said, “would lean toward this because it’s so read­ily avail­able, it’s so hard to detect.”

“It cer­tainly would be enough of a bang to draw atten­tion to their cause, and shake the foun­da­tions in the short term of society’s belief that the gov­ern­ment can pro­tect the United States,” Rollins said.

– Ward

February 20th, 2007 | Chem-Bio | 350041 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2007/02/20/low-tech-dirty-bombs-back-in-the-limelight/Low+Tech+Dirty+Bombs+Back+in+the+Limelight2007-02-20+16%3A20%3A05murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.