I Have Questions About The Latest Terrorist Attempts

The two terrorist attempts over the pasat week, that is, the Fairford vans with mostly empty cannisters and Flydubai flight FZ1073, were as best we can tell so far both badly bungled. Let's look at Fairford first.

Eight to ten dudes wearinbg black and in masks turn up after midnight in three vans in a rural village not far from the Fairford airbase. Most of the cannisters in the vans are empty, although one is full of gasoline. One of the dudes calls 999 on himself and the rest of the group, although police don't turn up for nearly an hour, and then only after a local resident has also called 999. At that point, they scatter in apparent panic, but five are caught.

What on earth did they think they were going to accomplish? Some UK commentators ventured the theory that it was some sort of "dry run", or maybe an attempt to see how the authorities would react, but the problem with the latter is that five of them got caught and have apparently been talking to authorities. This also tipped off authorities that something was up and blew operational security. My questions about this incident, as well as FZ1073, boil down to "Where have you gone, Osama bin Laden?" His operations were meticulously planned and rehearsed.

I asked Chrome AI mode, "How would Osama bin Laden have prepared for the Fairford raid in order to keep from getting caught?" It answered,

Had a historical Al-Qaeda operative from Bin Laden’s era planned a major operation against a high-security military installation like RAF Fairford, their doctrine—outlined in captured training manuals and intelligence files—relied on strict operational security to avoid detection.

To evade electronic surveillance from agencies like the NSA or GCHQ, Bin Laden strictly banned the use of cell phones, internet, and satellite communications among his inner circle, relying entirely on physical couriers.

Prior to major strikes (such as the 1998 embassy bombings or 9/11), operatives spent months or even years conducting passive surveillance on targets to map out security rotations, response times, and perimeter vulnerabilities without drawing attention.

It appears that actual strikes were also carefully rehearsed. So for starters, none of the van dudes would even have had a cell phone, much less called 999 on himself, and any surveillance on the base would have been carefully concealed. Eight to ten dummies in three vans running off in a panic wouldn't have happened if a real professional was running the op.

I have the same reaction to the co-pilot on Flydubai flight FZ1073, who attacked the pilot with the plane's crash axe while both were in the cockpit. There have been a number of suicides by members of the cockpit crew in recednt decades in which they crash the plane and take out the passengers as collateral damage, although in most cases, these haven't been politiclly motivated, and whether suicide was actually involved has also been in dispute. The clearest example is Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 24, 2015:

The crash was deliberately caused by the first officer, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared unfit to work by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and set the plane to fly downward in a controlled descent into a mountain.

In this case, Lubitz planned things so he could avoid a struggle with the captain, which would have had an unpredictable outcome. Hamam al-Hammami, the Flydubai co-pilot, doesn't seem to have taken the possibility that the captain could resist him long enough to open the cockpit door into consideration. There's also the precedent of United Airlines Flight 93. Osama bin Laden appears to have reckoned that five hijackers would be necessary to seize a cockpit and keep the passengers under control on 9/11; for some reason, only four were on Flight 93, and the passengers were able to thwart that attempt.

Flight 93 appears to have entered some type of collective consciousness, and there was no way a single terrorist would be able to maintain control of both the cockpit and determined passengers, something Hammami doesn't seem to have thought through. The video embedded at the top of this post suggests that although Hammami was trying to disable the flight controls and shut down the engines during his attack, he was trying to fight the design of the 737, and he would have had to get every last thing right, which he didn't.

So we're left with the inescapable impression that a competent terrorist would have planned these incidents much more carefully and used better-trained and more reliable participants. In other words, both incidents were badly bungled by incompetent terrorists, which is something they both have in common. Were they both hired by incompetent masterminds?

Prime Minister Burnham has said Iran is behind the Fairford incident. President Trump so far has said Flight 1073 is linked to Iran "based on what I'm hearing," while Prime Minister Netanyahu is non-committal. All we can surmise is that if Iran is in fact behind both incidents, they can be motivated by nothing short of last-ditch desperation. Whoever is behind these incidents is definitely no bin Laden.