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2 Men Accused of Trying To Make X-Ray Weapon
gurps_npc writes "Two radical pro-Israel terrorists were caught in upstate NY when they tried to solicit money from various honorable Jewish organizations to build a truck based x-ray weapon. They intended to drive the truck around and then turn on the x-ray machine, focusing on enemies of Israel. But the Jewish organizations they tried to solicit money from refused to participate. Instead they called the FBI, who promptly set up a sting. The men were arrested before the machine was in working order."
... I can see right thru it.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
No such thing!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They were probably just broke and got solicited by undercover FBI goons to make a "terrorist" plot.
rumor has it they got their x-ray training right under the nose of the TSA without raising suspicion
Anything is acceptable. burning witches, executing gays, xraying muslims, rocketing israelis, raping kids, car bombing protestants. its all good as long as god agrees....and if you read your books there are passages that'll help you along :)
also known as "Ark of the Covenant". Moses should thank God that the Egyptians didn't have the NSA.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Gotta say, after everything I've heard on the Internet; the Zionist conspiracy really doesn't live up to the hype...
Nazi doctors used X-rays to try to sterilize Jews.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
It's one thing to be an AC troll but someone modded this insightful. Did they not read it right?
This sounds almost like what the government is already deploying. In one context, x-ray trucks are terrorism. In the other, they're part of the counter-terrorism effort.
And yes, I know the doses would be different, but where do you draw the line?
Obviously the Jews that turned in the pro-Israelis are self-hating Nazi scum!
Seastead this.
Big old X-ray tubes that are used for taking pictures of welds in bulkheads, etc. I heard a story that some guy in the '80s killed one of his co-workers on purpose by aiming the tube through a wall at his victim. Having worked with the bigger tubes, I can see it.
no, you should read about the foot x-ray machines some shoe stores used in the 1940s, they gave some people 20 REM of dose! It doesn't take that much power to make dangerous levels of X-Ray radiation.
to demand that people take off their shoes.
Maybe they can get jobs with the TSA.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
1) The editors at Slashdot who curate the submissions don't bother to check the basic sources
That's OK, we were all new here once.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"What's that big truck in front of our office?"
"I don't know, and why is your spleen showing on my laptop?"
Table-ized A.I.
Exactly, the gear could be man-portable. This is actually an amazingly brilliant plot, you're not around when the victim dies, you leave no evidence on the victim, even if someone spots you during the assassination they couldn't tell you're killing the person (just holding a suitcase near them or backing them with a backpack). This is the most impressively clever thing I've heard of in ages, I'm kind of jealous I never thought of it myself.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Really glad to hear that it was Jewish Americans who turned the crazies in. Hopefully many of the mosques in America that encounter radical and/or terrorism sympathetic persons will rise to the occasion and do the same when they hear something actionable, instead of waiting for the government to find the bad guys without assistance.
That is, in fact, the norm rather than the exception.
Did I dodge the knee jerk liberal piling-on?
No, you just told us that you don't know how liberals think.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"radical terrorist" is something interesting. That suggests there could be some "moderate terrorist". Anyone encountered that weird kind of terrorist?
2) The editors at Slashdot have some sort of Antisemitic agenda
Why would I say that? If you bother to read the second sentence of the article you will notice that the weapon builders were not Jews.
The summary neither says nor implies that they were. It's perfectly compatible with the linked article.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've read the article several times and can't find any mention of them being pro-Israel. It seems like the only real "Israeli" connection is that Jewish people were the targets of a scam and did the right thing and alerted authorities...
Timothy McVeigh. Blew up Oklahoma building.
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians.
So many idiots going in and shooting up schools.
Not one of them muslim.
Technically, perhaps, it doesn't explicitly say they're jews, but it does heavily imply it, and that's not good editing. Good editing leaves no room for confusion. It's the difference between easy to read and hard to misunderstand.
The summary DOES say they were pro-israel terrorist, which is incorrect. They were not, they tried to sell this same thing to the KKK (who are anti-jew). Just because you attempted to sell it to a group, and ESPECIALLY if you try to sell it to the opposing group, does not mean you are of that group.
As far as the original commenter's suggestion that the editors are antisemitic, I doubt it. "Never assume malice, when incompetence will do."
While the editors are pretty bad around here, more people seem to pick up on the facts more quickly than folks here. Much of the discussion still seems to be about "Israel" and "Jews", when these two guys were neither Israeli or Jewish. They're simply far right-wing nuts who figured that Jews would happily "give them money" on the promise that they'd use it to "kill their enemies" - in other words they were counting on their own negative image of Jews to be fulfilled to in turn feed their own greed. They're no more pro-Israel than a shop selling Halal meat in order to cater to their customers needs is "pro-Iran".
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
The damper only sees several kV pulses, not enough to generate X-rays strong enough to get out of the tube.
The culprits in old color TVs were the HV rectifier, the HV shunt regulator, and the CRT itself.
Good article on the TV X-ray issue in the April 1968 issue of Popular Science, available on Google Books.
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Koresh and the Branch Davidians were hardly terrorists. The FBI shot first.
The idiots shooting up schools are just that, idiots. They're not doing it to terrorize for some political or religious end.
I'll give you McVeigh and Kaczynski.
-- Alastair
I was really hoping that no one would think of portable radiation generators for this. The only way to stop this is to control some very broadly useful technologies - high voltage generators, vacuum equipment. The basic problem is that a clever person can do a huge amount of damage with readily available, difficult to regulate equipment. Unless we eliminate the situations that motivate terrorists (politically very difficult), we will either need ever increasing security and monitoring, or we will need to accept that a fair number of people will die. I'm willing to accept the deaths, but I don't think most americans are.
Hopefully many of the mosques in America that encounter radical and/or terrorism sympathetic persons will rise to the occasion and do the same when they hear something actionable,
Yeah, they never do that!
The FBI wasn't spying on mosques to eavesdrop on people agonizing over temptation to eat bacon
Yeah, that's totally why american muslims distrust the FBI.
Man, they sure are dummies to think the FBI was spying on them because of pork!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Dan Rather has been doing this for years.
No brain, no pain.
I've read the article several times and can't find any mention of them being pro-Israel. It seems like the only real "Israeli" connection is that Jewish people were the targets of a scam and did the right thing and alerted authorities...
Look for "that they intended to use to secretly sicken opponents of Israel", in the very first sentence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
http://www.labx.com/v2/adsearch/detail3.cfm?adnumb=491358#MoreDesc
Mobile unit, runs on batteries, would fit in a van. However....its only a mobile xray unit. Claims ~1900 exposures per charge. I doubt it is made to run in continuous output.... and still only going to be effective at a very short range.
Maybe if you parked a van along a route that your target walked several times a day, for multiple days.... and his path took him within a few feet of the side of the van....and the van.... its not a metal body is it? That's going to be a problem too. Not entirely impossible that a dangerous dose could be delivered, and by dangerous I mean like, increasing his chance of cancer and possibly thyroid or kidney issues in his old age sort of dangerous.
So two things:
1. He went to jewish groups, after going to the Klan:
But Doesn't the Klan hate the Zionists? Huh? This guy is just playing the I hate muslims thing....ok, that works I guess. Still, a bit of a douche move to pitch it to the Klan and then adopt the "Enemies of Israel" spiel. Good salesmanship I guess.
2. This seems overly complex and expensive. Shit, at that point, why not just buy some laser diodes and have a hand portable device capable of blinding someone permenantly from a safe distance, and instantly? Oh.... wait... that would only cost a few hundred bucks.
So I am thinking the scam artists who were looking to take some people for some cash they couldn't rightly sue him for the return of, got caught up in a bigger con game where the FBI set them up to con us into thinking that we really need their protection.
I bet you if they didn't arrest them when they did, they would have driven off with the van and disappeared, gone back to the KKK and offered their services, and then shopped around for more suckers. If they finds out it doesn't expose film, they would have had some films made up and claimed its too dangerous to be nearby while it runs.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Actually from reading the article it was the KKK that called the FBI. Talk about strange bedfellows.
""Crawford has specifically identified Muslims and several other individuals/groups as targets," investigator Geoffrey Kent said in a court affidavit. According to the indictment, Crawford also traveled to North Carolina in October to solicit money for the weapon from a ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan, who informed the FBI. Crawford claimed to be a member."
The FBI led the pair along for a while by supplying parts and money to build the device.
Sounds like FBI was helping them in hopes of incriminating a lot of KKK members, but KKK saw right through (:P) FBI sting.
FBI is trying to salvage another failed self manufactured terror. They will probably claim NSA spying helped them catch this.
This might be a result of an order from DC to somehow pull 50 foiled terror plots out of their asses.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
This is actually not a new idea. In East Germany, the STASI is alleged to have done that:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/352461.stm
Pretty scary and brutal stuff.
That doesn't make them pro-Israel. That makes them "pro-the-highest-bidder".
Fascism combines elements of both the right and the left while being moderate on few, if any, aspects.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
How were you modded informative? From the article:
"Crawford approached Jewish organizations last year looking for funding and people to help him with technology that could be used to surreptitiously deliver damaging and even lethal doses of radiation against those he considered enemies of Israel."
How are they not pro-Israel? Not everything that you disagree with is anti-semitic. Really the only bias evident is your own.
And if they wanted to request funding from Iran they would have offered to use their weapon against the enemies of Iran.
Would that mean they are pro-Iran?
I don't know if you are anti-semitic or not, but an anti-semitic would jump to the same conclusion you did without a really thinking about it. Perhaps you are not anti-semitic, you just don't really think.
It's hard to re-direct an x-ray once it's made, but typical X-Ray tube Bremsstrahlung sources are fairly directional to start with. Orient the tube in the right direction, and you can be standing in far lower flux than your target. The Cobalt-60 sources used for industrial radiography to X-ray whole buildings (while keeping the operator shielded) would also be nasty in the wrong hands.
A coworker that was living down the road from the Davidian compound tells me that the Dividians had been legally shooting rifles on their property. A neighbor made a noise complaint and the local sheriff had already been out and worked out a compromise to resolve the complaint. As the story goes, the issue had already been resolved with the kooky but harmless Davidians.
A solid science story, and people are going off on tangents. First thing I though, yeah this is a brilliant plan: How long would you have to point an x-ray machine at someone before it would even cause radiation sickness? Several hours or something? Remember, all EM radiation falls off with the square of the distance, so if someone sits in a truck with an x-ray machine pointed at you from across a parking lot, it is losing a lot of potency. It would be much simpler to go stab the person with a broken bottle if you really don't like them that much.
Also, this thing is hardly going to be medical grade safety, so I give you 50/50 odds that the operator ends up dying of radiation poisoning before any of his 'victims'. Finally, you can generate EM radiation without nuclear material, but that would suck down quite a bit of power to create something as energetic as x-rays. This guy going to power that off his car's cigarette lighter ac adapter?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This is just CIA/NSA propaganda. Grocery store celeb news mags for people "afraid". Something "terrible" is gonna happen one day if we don't justify our fucked society.
If what you say is true, not long from now they will arrest some "terrorists" from China, some other "terrorists" from Cuba, from Russia, and from North Korea will be arrested too, and their "weapon of choice" will be ranging from "portable gamma knife" to "dirty bombs" and everything in between
Yep, NSA is here to save the United States of America, and they will catch the "terrorists" and parade them in front of all of us to gawk at
Chechyan rebels? And what religion do you think their creed flies under?
I think you are part of the problem. If we call everything that is harmful to a civil society terrorism, the word loses its meaning.
However, it has already lost its meaning because white folk are no longer being classed as terrorists. The classic example being Anders Breivik -- when he struck they cried "terrorist". When it turned out he was a white supremacist, the word disappeared.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
The biggest crime of the Jews is the fact of their survival, and as such, every person not supporting their demonization, dehumanization, and double standards against Jews and Israel is a terrorist by definition. Truly, how low can those Juice stoop? What will they think of next...
Calling out Israeli oppression, torture and killing of Palestinians is not demonisation, and it is not dehumanisation. The majority of those who call for the Israeli government and military to be brought before judges in The Hague do not condone the Palestinian suicide bombers, so it is no double standard to say that serving soldiers should not be firing live rounds into school playgrounds.
I feel sorry for the people of Israel, I really do. Prior to World War 2, Europe was a horrible place, defined by xenophobia and division; xenophobia and division that had been managed and manipulated by nation-builders since the Renaissance to create a rabid type of patriotism that medieval kings would have killed for, and which powered the engines of imperial expansion. World War II was the culmination of this philosophy, and the actions of the German Nazi regime shone a mirror on all of us.
World War 2 became a breakpoint, where we had to change, and within Europe we put our energies into building bridges across countries. Before the explosion in mass tourism, town twinning and exchanges were set up so that we would mix across borders and see that people from other countries are human, just like us.
Gradually, over time, we got to the point where countries that had previously been at war practically ceaselessly for centuries were now sitting at a table, putting the final touches onto a plan to share a currency.
The second half of the 20th century was a time of unprecedented peace in Europe, and I feel very lucky to have been born into that.
But unfortunately for the people of Israel, they missed all that. A great many of them left Europe before the reconciliation began, and they have a folk memory that has retained the very worst of the treatment their ancestors received in Europe.
The people of Israel genuinely believe they are reviled by a racist, backward Europe. They believe themselves to be hated with an intensity greater than the animosity shown to (innocent) Muslims in the backlash after the Woolwich attack, an intensity of hate has no currency outside of a few extreme hate groups. They believe this, and they should be pitied for it.
I once heard the Holocaust described as "Europe's dirty little secret." Again, the implication was that Europe hates Jews, and therefore buries this. But the Holocaust is the most widely recognised war atrocities in the world, and one of the most widely discussed features of World War 2. Discussion of the Holocaust centres around the Jews, and what is swept under the carpet is the Gypsies, the Poles, the gays, the disabled... all the other people the Nazis abused institutionally. Oh, and that's not to forget the atrocities committed by the "good guys": the firebombing of Dresden, the looting and pillaging, and the betrayal of the Cossacks at Leinz. The use of nerve agents in WWI, the military tactics that disvalued human life. We have done many bad things and continue to downplay them, but the Holocaust of the Jews is no secret.
So let's get one thing clear: "the Jews" have commited no crime, but the "State of Israel" exists in contravention of international laws, and commits regular atrocities that break those laws. An attack on the State of Israel is not an attack on the Jews.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No, the reason they stopped calling him a terrorist is because they decided they were not going to be terrorized or give him a platform. They didn't want him to be seen as a soldier fighting a war or on some kind of crusaded. They demoted him to a simple criminal, a deranged murder.
We could learn a lot from that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
That is, in fact, the norm rather than the exception.
To some degree, but not enough yet.
No, you just told us that you don't know how liberals think.
My observation is that some liberals, when they encounter a statement against Islamism, respond with knee-jerk defense of "Islam" as this idealized, peaceful religion that is cruelly maligned for no reason whatsoever by mentally deficient redneck American Christians. They can't get it into their minds that the actual core religion (not a perversion thereof) of a substantial fraction of humanity wants to kill us. Case in point: a professor at a local university who regularly travels to Pakistan for international peace-oriented academic conferences. He and I have corresponded at length in letters to the editor and email, and I've been disgusted by his failure to see the obvious, for example a book by a top legal scholar and judge in Pakistan that acknowledges that the only reason Muslim nations shouldn't war against the non-Muslim world is that it isn't practical right now. In other words, al-Qaida is merely foolhardy and jumping the gun, not morally wrong in their objective of militarily defeating the non-Muslim world.
That kind of blindness is pervasive in liberal culture, for reasons I can't really understand. Protecting the feelings of peacefully-intentioned American Muslims is fine, but when I criticize Islamism, I'm not talking about peacefully intentioned Muslims. So it's sort of a red herring fallacy liberals use.
So if we are supposed to accept the NSA recording our phone meta-data and storing email and internet traffic so they can stop terrorists, why is it they didn't stop these people? It always seems that it's regular people on the plane noticing someone trying to light their underwear or whatever. Nobody stopped the Boston bombers. But at least we have this backtrack of meta-data to look at. Who cares about the dead, we give up the freedom so we can have the full picture after the fact. That way the movies made years later can be accurate.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.