Senators demand crackdown on IED ingredient

[w8liftinglady]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2011-05-31-senators-target-IED-ingredient_n.htm?loc=interstitialskip

WASHINGTON — Several U.S. senators are demanding that the Obama administration pressure Pakistan to cut off the supply of chemical fertilizer to Afghanistan, where it is used as the main ingredient in homemade bombs, the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops.


By Alex Brandon, AP
Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., is one of several U.S. senators pressing the Obama administration to take "urgent action" to curtail the flow of fertilizer from Pakistan to Afghanistan.


"We need to be focused on this," Sen. Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat who chairs a Foreign Relations committee panel on the region, said in an interview. "I have not seen the kind of urgency that we need to have ."

Last week, Casey and 19 senators sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton a letter requesting "urgent action" to stem the flow of fertilizer from Pakistan into Afghanistan. They wrote that they want Pakistan to pass a law regulating fertilizer. They also want tighter border controls to eliminate shipments into Afghanistan, where the material is illegal for farming but still used for mining and construction.

[bemildred]

1. LOL.

:+

[kenny blankenship]

2. Sometimes it's all you can do.

[saras]

3. yep - sometimes you have to starve a whole country of innocents

And they'll put spikes in the roads, and we'll ban shipments of steel, and they'll put rocks in the roads and then what are we going to do?

[kenny blankenship]

4. Sometimes *laughing out loud* is all you can do.

In response to an ever growing list of idiocy and idiots.

[hobbit709]

5. So instead of fertilizer, they'll use something else.

I can easily make something that goes boom out of many commonly available materials.

[Igel]

6. This is where dropping out articles is a bad move.

They don't want "fertilizer" limited. They want a specific fertilizer limited. With diesel, it also makes a very nice, cheap, safe bomb.

It was used in the OK City bombing. In the 1998 Nairobi bombing. And it's been implicated in some attempted bombings in the US. It's widely used in Afghanistan, not just for growing food, and was used in a lot of IEDs (esp. the bigger ones) in Iraq.

I also used it as a kid when I had a backyard garden. I'd buy it at a local hardware store for a few cents a pound to give my garden a nitrogen boost in the spring. I suppose it's too hard for a reporter to check up on how it's used, or that ammonium nitrate is a specific kind of fertilizer. (If I wanted to have a bit of an explosion, I'd use thermite. I wasn't into mining, though.)

Now I'm more likely to use urea in my garden, but it tends to out-gass a bit faster than ammonium nitrate--and all those nitrogen oxides, not so good for the environment. But, like saltpeter (which I used in corning beef brisket) ammonium nitrate isn't worth the hassle.

Ammonium nitrate is regulated in the US, so it's not a case of hypocrisy, what's good for the US is bad for Afghanistan.


http://www.chemicalsecurity.com/ammonium-nitrate.shtml
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/chemsec_summit09_ammoniumnitrateregulations.pdf

[Forkboy]

7. The main ingredient seems to be war.

[gratuitous]

8. It seems to me . . .

None of these bombs would work in a vacuum. What we really need is to ban oxygen. Deprive the bombs of atmosphere, and you deprive them of their power to explode.

It takes an uncommon mind to think of things like this. Think I should notify Sen. Casey?