Using Thermite to Drop Suspension Bridges...and U.S. plans to do so

[Bill Stewart]

At 09:42 AM 11/02/2001 -0800, someone claiming to be Tim May wrote:
>I found this URL, and several equally-interesting ones, as part of my
>research on using thermite to collapse suspension bridges. Looks like
>the U.S. military has been planning similar ops for a while...could be
>why the alerts are being taken seriously by the gubmint.

Which Gubmint? CA Gov. Gray Davis appears to have taken the FBI's warning
seriously enough to go out on a limb and announce that they'd
gotten a bit more specific than "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,
Terrorists are Hiding under the Bed and we WON'T TELL YOU WHICH BED
they're hiding under because that would give away our sources and methods!
But This Time it's Rilly Cred-a-Bull!"  And I think they were only
saying that because Jay Leno was giving them a hard time about
doing a second no-specifics-attached iteration of "Wolf! Wolf!"
and they were worried the sheeple might not fall for it.

Of course, that's entirely separate from the problem of whether
there *are* wolves, and whether they're more likely to
opportunistically take advantage of the current wave of terrorism
to do their own, or whether they're more likely to lie low because
there are too many cops running around who might catch them,
plus too many other people who might get credit for their work,
or whether some of the wolves work for or at least with the Feds.

>Here's an item I sent to another forum about using thermite to cut the
>cables on suspension bridges. A couple of folks had claimed that using
>explosives on the piers and other support structures would be
>extraordinarily difficult to arrange (and detectable by bridge security
>personnel). I agreed, but noted in my piece that thermite quickly placed
>on the main cables could cut or weaken the cables significantly.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't do the job with an
OKC-sized truck bomb - stop it at an appropriate point on the bridge,
have the engine compartment smokebomb go off to create plausible deniability,
hop into the car your co-conspirators are driving just in front of you,
and drive away.  If your smokebomb is good enough, and you do it during
low traffic, you might get off the bridge without getting caught.
The question is how much you trust your backup co-conspirator
who's sitting at the vista point with the radio transmitter....
If they're not keeping all trucks off of the bridges, they can't stop it.

>An interesting part of the URL chunk included below is that the DOD
>endorses use of "peacetime" operations to collapse bridges...surely an
>act of "terrorism" comparable to bringing down the World Trade Center.
>(Oh, I forgot, if the CIA does it to a country we are not at war with,
>it's "nation-building," not terrorism.)

The Feds have apparently decided that they should drop their policy of
helping the Peruvian Air Force shoot down suspected drug dealing planes,
like that US missionary and her baby they took out this spring
(shot them down and machine-gunned them as they swam out of the plane.)
Not because extra-judicial executions are wrong, of course,
or because shooting down civilian airplanes is terrorism,
but because their accuracy has been low enough to cause embarassment.