[mzmtg]

Subject: Video of suicide bomber being "assisted"

This sequence is of a suicide bomber in Baghdad, who attempted to ram
an explosives-packed car into an Abrams tank and destroy it.

The attempt failed; all the explosives in the car did not detonate.
The car was partially destroyed and the driver wounded, but he was still
capable of detonating a further charge. This was a very dangerous situation, so
the Army and Iraqi police closed the road to traffic, and an ordnance
detachment used a tracked, remote-controlled robot to approach the car, take
pictures of it and its dazed driver, then place a demolition charge beside it,
and "assist" the driver in completing his own suicide.

Even after destroying the car and killing the driver, a package of
several undetonated artillery shells and land mines is seen remaining on the
pavement. In the last frames, they seen being blown by the EOD people
in a field at a remote site.. Note the size of this explosion, which would
have taken place beside the Abrams tank, if the suicide driver's car had
originally detonated as planned.

The accompanying description reads as follows: "The pictures and video
are from the EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) robot you'll see in the
video. If you look closely in the picture of the inside of the car you can see
projectiles and explosives used as the primary explosive charge
(you'll see them later as well). The guy is still alive and can still function
the device, so what do you do? Army EOD knows; just place an "explosive disruption tool"
under said vehicle to "disrupt" the explosives and their initiators... along
with the suicide bomber.

Good video taken by an EOD robot. Interesting! (more)

 

[gunsmoker]

Removed

The link says the video has been removed, or you have to sign-in and prove you're an adult to see it.

I've seen it before, a few days ago. Our soldiers planted a bomb under his car and blew the car apart while he was pinned in the wreckage, wounded, but conscious and talking and making hand gestures. The actual footage of the car being blown up was taken from a few hundred yards down the street and the camera was in wide angle view, so you don't see HIM, the terrorist, just before the blast. But you know he's there.

Then you see him half-in and half-out of the twisted hulk of the car, which has now been crashed into a tank, partially blown up by the terrorist, and partially blown up by the U.S. military.

And then the video shows the UNEXPLODED ordinance they recovered from the vehicle. Artillery shells, mortar rounds, mines, etc. So if the terrorist had wired this stuff right, it would have been a very big explosion indeed.

However, I still don't understand why they just didn't shoot him and his car with a bunch of small-arms fire. That would have "disrupted" the bomb's triggering mechanism, and killed the driver, and it wouldn't have taken such a long time, and we wouldn't have needed a $200,000 robot...

... oh, wait. That's it. Doing it any other way would not have helped justify the purchase of a quarter-million dollar robot and some really huge profit for a lucky or well-connected defense contractor. Okay. Makes sense now.