The media and terrorist bomb making

There’s an interesting NPR article here about how the media report bomb making details.  The general thrust is that the genie is already out of the bottle and if a terrorist wants to make a bomb he doesn’t require education or prompting from press reporting to be able to make the final step.  As readers of this blog will know I don’t hold the press in high regard anyway for reporting useful facts in this domain!  (Note the comment from the CNN expert who clearly doesn’t know the difference between a fuel component in an explosive and an “accelerant” component in an incendiary.)   In general I would hope the point that making the public more aware of precursors is working – several recent cases have been reported to the police to start with by retailers of fertiliser or Hydrogen Peroxide who were suspicious of people buying the material from them.

Despite that I’m still a little amazed that in incidents such as the Glasgow airport incident and the Times Square effort that well educated terrorists mounted an attack with large devices that were never going to “detonate” in a million years. Wishful thinking gets you a long way but not far enough. It indicates strongly that these were lone wolf attacks without the training and  resources of an effective terrorist organisation behind them… which is good.  There is another argument though… from a terrorist’s perspective both attacks “succeeded” in terms of raising awareness of their cause…..Discusss…