WMD? WTF!

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Just to get back to the jolly days of the cold, cold Cold War when WMD had a degree of meaning and referred to a city buster nuke or something of the sort - mass destruction when compared to an ordinary bombing raid or artillery barrage - the real thing.

Destruction:

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Mass Destruction:

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When I was in the army I was told that the Ruskies had aimed some 20 tactical nukes at our garrison town, which for all practical reasons would mean turning a boring town in a lovely landscape into a glass crater in a formerly lovely landscape. Totally excessive, too, since one nuke would have done that job just, well, fine. Good the cold war is over without things taking a bad turn; the town wasn't that bad really.

The reason I write this is that Faisal Shahzad has been accused of trying to detonate ... a WMD. What a crock. That guy built, thankfully, only a crude, amateurish car bomb, that, thankfully, could be disarmed before it could detonate - he took a pick-up truck loaded with fireworks, propane tanks and gas cans wired to a crude detonator. Beyond legalism and legal definitions, in the real world, to call that a WMD is hysterical nonsense. If he had fiddled with Uranium spheres I'd see the point, but this?

Iirc before 9/11 building and blowing up car bombs was already easily covered by federal criminal statutes, like multiple instance of homicide and assault by means of detonating a destructive device, and destruction of property and probably arson as well. That'll safely puts one to jail for the rest of his life (never mind the death penalty) even without a bonus crime also covering that. This double-, triple- and quadruple-safing is ridiculous.

Same with this hysterical idiocy of wanting to try terrorists that are US citizens for treason - a crime for which the punishment is exactly the same than for killing a lot of people - the death penalty or life without parole. But no, that's not enough - it needs to be treason, because only that term is sufficient to express the perceive outrage. Same with the WMD, only that can express the perceived outrage of detonating a car bomb. That's my hunch anyway. In essence it's empty symbolism, really.

People ought to sober up - for violent crime there are no criminality gaps that need to be filled with more appealingly named punishable offences.

 

I wonder if they consider Cluster Bombs weapons of mass destruction. Since fireworks obviously are...

 

Who knows? Maybe he sneezed on the gas cans earlier?

 

Germs! Oh it was a biological weapon then!

 

If you set the bar low enough....

 

the US government love weapons of mass destruction.... they probably set the size low enough so that they can actually find some.

 

This guy is no different than McVeigh. He should be treated as such.

 

I played with (self built) firecrackers that were larger ... ... and coming to think of it, I detonated some WMD in the army on the range - when throwing hand grenades.

By that standard, considering that hand grenades are among the really small ordinance thrown around on a battlefield, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and any war actually, has been a WMD-fest. Idiotic. Nonsensical. This legal definition defines down WMD to meaninglessness.

 

Next they'll be defining a WMD as a guy with a bad case of gas...

 

Oh man, that sucks. Guess I'll be skipping the bean burritos for now on...

 

I never really thought of it that way, but you are completely correct. In a state that doesn't have the death penalty, the only thing you could do by lumping treason on top of it is to add another life sentence to the punishment, Such is the case with the Times Square bomber. There has been a moratorium on executions in NY for a few decades now, and there have been no execution in the state in that time.

I don't know how that is applied from a legal standpoint. I don't know if that means you can setence someone to death, if at some future point the moratorium is lifted, or if it means you cannot even sentence someone to death at all due to the moratorium.