Improvised Explosive Device in Times Square NYC

No effect to mass transit during rush hour this morning.

Law enforcement officials tell ABC News that a single, small improvised device was tossed, apparently by a man on a bike, at the armed forces booth in Times Square early this morning, causing the center of midtown Manhattan to be locked down and subways to be diverted but no major property damage.

Al-qaeda resources clearly very stretched.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension

ban bikes

Man on bike is identified as "in his 20s" but not by race, which is ... interesting.

POINTLESS SPECULATION: The fact that it's a janky window-breaking attack on the recruiting station initially made me a little afraid that this could turn out to be a crazy pissed-off lefty, but if they think it might be connected to the Mexican consulate bomb ... who knows? Both things are relatively ineffective as broad "terrorism," and seem more like weirdo "political" acts, only by people who won't do the important part where you announce what the point is.

i assumed it was a crazy pissed-off, you know, veteran

It was a crazy pissed-off cyclist

Next time use a giant, exploding bee from another dimension.

tho you could read it differently if it's a 'military outpost in the heart of new york city'

Next time blow up TCKTS

if I stick a thumbtack in a Black Cat is that an IED?

Man on bike is identified as "in his 20s" but not by race, which is ... interesting

lol white guy

Possibly the only thing we can safely presume is the "crazy" part -- doesn't seem like anything you'd do for any reason apart from wacko lone-man grudge-holding, right?

Just so long as nobody's trying to get all Weather Underground around here, and so long as they wait at least three months for the Law & Order.

xpost - Yeah, Dan, does that mean white guy by default? Except you'd think in a "terrorism" story that would be worth specifying. It also says his face was "partially covered," which is almost making me think someone said "man in his 20s" just based on his body, despite not actually seeing enough to identify anything at all.

It also says his face was "partially covered,"

Hijab or burqa?

hoodie

Thank god the UK banned hoodies and installed CCTV cameras or else they could have had devastating terror attacks like these with the potential for a massive loss of life.

http://www.anus.com/zine/db/unabomber/unabomber-sketch.jpg

THIS JUST IN

Explosive Devices Found at UC Davis
E-MailPrint Save

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 6, 2008
Filed at 10:52 a.m. ET

DAVIS, Calif. (AP) -- A student is in custody following the discovery of explosive devices at the University of California, Davis.

University police Capt. Joyce Souza tells the Sacramento Bee that investigators found what appears to be two pipe bombs in a dorm.

Four hundred students have been evacuated from eight dormitory buildings while police investigate.

Police became aware of the situation Wednesday night after a woman reported that students had possible explosive devices in a dorm room. Police say after questioning four students they arrested 19-year-old Mark Woods, a freshman from Southern California.

He's being held on possession of materials with the intent to make an explosive or destructive device and other charges.

My friend had a bomb thread called into his office in b0st0n

http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/8999/bape2gu2.jpg

I didn't call this bomb thread into my office, it just showed up.

I HAVE A GUB

I'm surprised it took this long for Brazil to finally become the documentary it was.

This has to be on video, right?

it was ethan with a truth bomb :(

it was custos with a logistical beatdown

Improvised? Like MacGyver?

Coltrane

are they sure it wasn't just more Aqua Teens swag

also ladies this is not a "pipe bomb"
http://www.amsterdamheadshop.com/how-to-make-a-bong.jpg

This thread = every future thread related to a bombing in a major U.S. urban center = 9/11 changed everything, maaaaaaaaaaaaaan

http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/0308/8_House_Democrats_get_letterspic_of_NY_recruiting_station_before_bombing.html

Did they ever find out who was responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension

-- Catsupppppppppppppp dude 茄蕃, Thursday, March 6, 2008 7:10 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Link

yeah, lots of fear in NYC today.

I think we're more afraid of your basic infrastructure failures.

http://www.anus.com/zine/db/unabomber/unabomber-sketch.jpg

-- gabbneb, Thursday, 6 March 2008 16:10 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

lol, what I was thinking.

Anthrax powder mailed to U.S. Senators! FBI busy investigating.

^^ "anus.com" ??

video http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/06/police-release-footage-of_n_90180.html

Looks like Hillary may have slept through the 3 am call.

Posted By: Sharon | March 06, 2008

guys obv this was a mccain flak in a hoodie

And right on time, it's the latest completely non-specific Al Qaeda threat alert!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080307/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_threat

i was in times square around 4:30 this afternoon and traffic was stopped for like 30 police cars with lights flashing (but not sirens) driving west on 42nd for no apparent reason. it was like a parade. kinda pretty, you could see the red lights for a few blocks.

Yeah, those cop cars apparently do those 'surges' all the time to

a) discourage streetcrime.
b) make everyone feel like the NYPD on top of things

...or so says the Aussie dude on the other side of the world who has only read of such things.

there were SOOOO many footcops all over midtown, too.

Assuming this was planned by ppl who KNEW there would be no injuries, all I can muster is... BRAVO.

tehresa, you witnessed a "show of strength." potential terrorists, fear our motorcades!

sheesh

So every car that breaks down now is gonna be a bomb scare? geesh. Good luck NYC.

apparently we are safe

i hope no one was inadvertently mirandized

On Oct. 20, 2008, Mr. Shahzad reported his marriage to a woman he identified as Huma Asif Mian, a U.S. citizen. He became naturalized as a U.S. citizen on April 17, 2009.

On her social networking page, his wife listed her languages as English, Pashto, Urdu and French, her religion as Muslim and her political views as "nonpolitical," according to AP. Her favorite television shows were "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "Friends."

Wait, again?

CNN:

New York's Times Square evacuated.

wtf, CNN.com

not trying to understand how we've ANGERED these people

And nearly a decade later, the media -- or any politician really -- still hasn't had the balls to pose this all-important question. Is it because the answers would be too unpopular? Or are we really just content to being ignorant towards the causes?

a white cooler? this sounds like bullshit

that cooler comes from a good middle-class family

Working on the causes would mean redefining, or at least clarifying, what "American interests" are. In a corporation-controlled democracy, this direction is not going to work for the corporate interest, therefore it is untouchable.

Or maybe they're just angry guys and there's not much you can do about that.

Your theory is shallow enough to be officially adopted by Fox News.

I think for most of us -- ie: Americans alienated from the political decisions and processes of our Capitalist Democracy -- it's not of huge use to discuss what things we could be doing differently. I don't even know our policy in Pakistan (and I'm a pretty educated guy) let alone have any say in how to change it. I protested the Iraq war years ago, and that did a lot of good. The truth is that we can acknowledge that there are things the United States does to make itself a ripe target, and still criticize people for targeting civilians who are pretty alienated and not influential in American decisions. There's this belief that Americans are lazy and they just need to wake up to fix everything. But the truth is that this is how Capitalism is designed to work.

(Which isn't to say we have NO power in decisions, but that trying to blow up Times Square is 100% the wrong tact to take if you're trying to change American foreign policy. It's the perfect tact to take tho if you're angry and thoughtless and frustrated and can't figure out a better way to enact the performance of your needs.)

it's the perfect tack to take if you want the US military to bomb/invade some random country in retaliation

Information has a monetary value to the holder of it, to the degree it is closely held. Therefore, information is too valuable to be given away to the general public. This, of course, is precisely contrary to the theory of democracy.

Thing is, the question isn't even allowed to be on the table, and hasn't been from day one.

It's perfected hypocrisy to deliver the line "They hate us for our freedoms," and then deny any further questioning into the matter at hand.

How do you figure? There are plenty of people asking these questions and have been since I was old enough to read about politics. When I was 14 Amy Goodman was talking about this shit ALL THE TIME on Democracy Now! (on a public radio station - Pacifica Radio, no less), and now that the internet has become the prime location of political news and discourse, it's all over the place. Glenn Greenwald, ILX, Progressive Blogs, etc. Not to mention the Academic discourses I've been involved with for the past four years.

it's kinda beside the point since muslim terrorists /= rational actors in this case. Like, Bin Laden may have gripes with the US, but they're almost entirely self-serving and kinda insane

Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk...

(xposts)

or take Sayed Qut'b (essentially the father of modern radical Islam) - dude's complaints about the West really DO boil down, at least in some ways, to "they hate our freedoms"...

like, that's the intellectual tradition these guys are coming from, and it's all well and good to be knowledgeable about it, but let's not pretend that US foreign policy is really the sole, root cause here. Because it isn't.

Naomi Klein, who is apparently so alienated that she wrote a best-selling book and had a HUGE Harpers article about a year ago. These POVs have strong cultural currency.

personally I think Fisk has perhaps the best grasp of the roots of radical Islamic terrorism, and he is very careful and intellectually nimble about properly identifying and separating the legitimate causes and complaints from the psychopathic urges for wanton destruction

and of course Fisk traces a lot of the current conflicts back to that perennial favorite, British/European colonialism

I will have to look into Fisk.

Still, I don't think these people have as much of an influence on the mainstream political discourse in America as they should.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/

the only Western journalist to have interviewed Bin Laden face-to-face, and on multiple occasions

re:shakey

Bin Laden has some weird political goals, like the return of the Caliphate, but given the few levers of power that were available for him to pull, he has been pretty shrewd in his approach. His propaganda has consistently played better than ours in a wide swath of the world. I agree, he's lost consistently on several levels, mostly having to do with technology, resources and applied force, but if he didn't go in expecting to lose in those areas, he'd have been delusive enough at the start to be dead today.

My verdict: he's not not insane, unless challenging the power of the US and NATO, when you are not in command of the Warsaw Pact is defined as insane.

update

Times Square has been re-opened after the police took away a grayish canvas bag of the kind used to hold lunches. The police said it contained bottled water and books.

What about Peter Bergen?

Anyway, there's the theory that Bin Laden intentionally wanted to draw the US into an aimless (or maybe victory free) regional conflict and miscalculated, which seems like a pretty big miscalculation, if so. Then again, it's still unclear if the extent of 9/11 was by design or by accident, right? In any case, as far as any goals are concerned, I assume terrorism would be a lot more successful as a means of ousting an occupier than in altering the foreign policy of a country several thousand miles away. Which is all to say I have no idea what a bombing in Times Square would achieve, even symbolically, when something easier to pull off could probably send a political message a lot more clearly and easily.

Bombs in Times Square tie up US resources far, far beyond the resources needed to plant them. Financially speaking, it is the equivalent of keeping several battalions of your enemy pinned down to their position by deploying one sniper.

I don't think these actors are in any place to try and exhaust US resources, unless they know something I don't. The US army is super developed beyond any other country in the world (not to mention most fully trained from the last bunch of years participating in war). Pinning down several battalions in Times Square isn't going to do anything to further the agenda of Pakistan.

what if the agenda of Pakistan involves fucking up Manhattan traffic

Yeah, really. You know what ties us up? Invading countries, not security in Times Square. And even, I don't feel, personally, terribly tied up in Afghanistan. It'd take something several times 9/11 to bring back the draft and truly, truly change the way we do business.

I think I'm going to start leaving McDonald's value meals lying around to see how often I can get SWAT to come deal with a combination of littering and absent-mindedness.

That's how business is done in Israel. Last time I was there i watched them detonate a box of clothing in the middle of Meah Sharim. Happens everyday.

Was it American Apparel? Because that would at least be funny.

I think it was schmattas.

What about Peter Bergen?

right sorry, "one of the few" I should've said

and it don't stop

NYPD evacuates parts of midtown, Times Square after reports of suspicious package being found

Just heard on the 10o'clock news. Can't find anyone covering it online tho.

"Determined to be garbage," much like these bulletins

Was it American Apparel? Because that would at least be funny.

― I guess for copraphiles this is gonna be awesome (Pancakes Hackman), Friday, May 7, 2010 2:50 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

shards of lamé spandex and thongs flung everywhere, what a mess.

a suspicious package was found outside my local american apparel a few years ago. they actually detonated it, i lolled

They weren't targeting American Apparel, they were targeting the apparel of America.

suspicious package, close to detonating:

http://cache.gawker.com/news/dov_again.jpg

ARGH MY EYES