Let us first remember that there are other forms of divisiveness besides religion that impel terrorism: today is the 10th day after the suicide car bombing that killed 38 in Ankara, Turkey: most likely the work of a Kurdish separatist organization. The death toll was nearly the same for yesterday’s bombings at the Brussels airport and a downtown metro station: 34 so far, with about 100 injured.
There’s now little doubt that the Brussels bombings were the work of Muslim terrorists: ISIS has claimed credit for them (and warned that more such attacks are in the offing), and the Belgian police have released photos of three men who were probably responsible for the airport bombing. The Belgian police have now identified two of the suspects:
The brothers were identified as Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, and Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, 30, whom the police had been searching for since the March 15 raid on an apartment in the Forest district of Brussels, the radio station RTBF reported, citing police sources. A third attacker has not been publicly identified, and is still at large.
Note the gloves on only one hand of both men to the left: a curious thing that might have been noticed. But even if it had, the bombings would have proceeded, since detonation requires only the press of a button. As the New York Times reports:
Belgian officials have identified the three men in the photo as central suspects in the bombings at the airport: Two of them, in black and wearing single black gloves on their left hands, were thought to have been killed. The third, wearing white, is still being sought in the attack, which along with another bombing at a train station was quickly claimed by the Islamic State militant group.
The image offers potential clues to the techniques and mindset of the suspects, though it cannot alone provide answers.
First, the gloves on two suspects prompted speculation that they were hiding detonation devices. In the Paris attacks on Nov. 13, hostages held by the Islamic State attackers inside the Bataclan concert hall reported seeing the gunmen pacing the hall with detonators in their hands. And next to the bodies of those who set off their explosive vests, officials found electrical wire, nine-volt batteries and melted plastic believed to have been part of the detonation mechanisms.
It also seems likely that the explosion was caused by triacetone triperoxide (TATP), probably hidden in the suitcases of at least two of them men. TATP is the explosive of choice for ISIS attacks in Europe.
Among the ways a TATP bomb can be ignited is through an electrical charge, using a simple battery and wiring that can be held in the palm of one’s hand, explained Jimmie C. Oxley, a professor of chemistry at the University of Rhode Island, considered a leading expert on TATP.
I’m not sure if the wires have to be connected to the explosives in the suitcase, or if any such wires can be seen in the blurry photo .
Finally, there’s one more clue:
A third hint to the Islamic State’s protocols for terrorist attacks may be evident in the faces of the suspects.
Their beards seem to be trimmed close to their faces, in contradiction of the strict Islamic codes practiced by the Islamic State in the territories they control in Syria, Iraq and Libya, where men are not allowed to trim their facial hair. But the Islamic State has instructed its operatives to shave their beards while in Western countries so they blend in better, according to court documents.
And of course there’s ISIS’s own statement:
Islamic State issued a statement saying its attackers chose the sites “carefully” and were “wrapped in explosive belts and carrying explosive canisters and machine guns.”
“Thanks be to God for his accuracy and success, and we ask God to accept our brothers among the martyrs,” the terrorist group said.
We will hear, if this proves to be ISIS’s work, that this is not an act of “true Islam,” but a perversion of the faith. That’s bogus. There is no one “true Islam”, any more than there’s one “true” Christianity; and, to greater or lesser degrees, all faiths are perversions of rationality.
I have no solutions to offer to this kind of terrorism, or to the ISIS problem. All we can do is be appalled at the brutality of those who thank God for killing so many innocent people, and to mourn them, their friends, and their loved ones. The same goes for the deaths in Ankara, motivated not by religion but by ideology. It’s hard to deal with enemies who place little value on their own lives.
Mo Dawah parody site has lots of sage insights in the vein of nothing to do with Islam. I’d best stop being a hog now as I went into overdrive previously.
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It seems clear to me that since the 3 men in the photo show several strong indications of being terrorists, profiling could have prevented or reduced the severity of the tragedy. But profiling is not PC. The worry is you’ll infringe on the rights of minority non-terrorists. Where is Sam Harris when you need him?
I’d say the ‘one glove’ thing is certainly unusual enough to be decent cause for security to come up and ask questions. Beyond that, I’m not sure what sort of profiling you’re suggesting. Having a darker skin tone? Bearded people? Out with it, man! Don’t hide your implication in vagueness. If you think airport security should be stopping swarthy passengers, you should say that.
I don’t really know what to think. I do know that if I saw three “swarthy” men with Middle Eastern names with heavy bags and one glove in an airport in Belgium, I’d run like hell.
I think Harris’s main point was that these guys should at least be given thorough screenings, while others with fewer indicators could be more lightly screened, saving resources. Random screening is more expensive.
They didn’t go through security, did they? So where would this screening take place? I think they are exploiting the key flaw we all have observed in airport security… the unscreened crowds of people milling about before the security checkpoints.
A solution to this is going to be very difficult. What can you do, stop cars/people a mile out and search them before they get close to the concentration of people?
Maybe the security checkpoints have to start at the entrance. Harsh, but the only solution to trying to prevent bombings like this. The businesses inside would suffer the most since most people would probably wait in their cars and such. Then there’s the problem of a car bomb in the goddamn parking garage. I give up. 🙁
Yeah its a squishy issue: people will always congregate somewhere. Add security to area A and they’ll just congregate in B instead.
However perfect should not be made the enemy of good. If we can protect ‘high value’ targets and this drives the terrorists to select less ‘optimal’ targets, well that’s at least better than having them hit their optimal targets.
The security screening at airports is designed to prevent dangerous items from being taken aboard airliners. As places where people congregate, airport terminals are no different from other places, such as shopping malls, concert halls, or stadiums — as the Paris attacks last November demonstrate.
Screenings based on what? That’s what I’m asking. Olive skin tone? Beards? You’ll have a lot of people to screen, if that’s the case. Literally millions of misses for each possible hit. Are you, as a taxpayer, willing to pay for that? Should we send you the bill? Who is going to pay for the extra screening you want to do for the approximately 10-20% of all US travelers that would probably fit such broad criteria?
Precisely.
Agreed. This is one of Harris’s weakest points – something that sounds ok until you get into specifics.
I thought they were going to (literally) shoot me once at Miami airport customs when I came through with an aluminum box of dried insects they profiled to be a bomb. Profiling suppresses the unconventional; penalizes the exuberance of being.
The unfortunate truth is that British and American intellectuals are very principled when it comes to preserving the sanctity and tolerance of other people’s countries(or other people’s parts of the country) – it takes a certain proximity for anything like this to puncture their yolk. A few carefully-targeted attacks in Islington or its American equivalent and I can imagine a certain percentage of those opposed to profiling would drop their principles like a countess chucking away her shoes on the Titanic.
Forget me, I’m just being overly cynical.
Heh, I don’t think that particular yolk has been unpunctured for decades. Just look at Trump’s statements about Mexicans and how well they’ve been received on the right. Or police relations with our African American communities (including NYC’s explicit targeting); Americans are perfectly happy to generalize/profile people based on how they look or where they come from. Our real problem is not getting us to do it, its getting us to stop doing it in cases where profiling makes no sense.
“It’s hard to deal with enemies who place little value on their own lives.”
But on the plus side, if they don’t value their own lives it means that we needn’t feel any guilt about killing them. We want them dead, they want martyrdom – it’s a win-win situation.
I think the only solution to this is to crush IS in its Iraq-Syria heartland, hopefully killing its leaders and as many as possible of its active fighters. Unlike Al-Qaida before them, hey’ve committed themselves to creating and maintaining a territorial state, so the loss and destruction of that “state” could be a fatal blow to this particular strand of jihadism. I’m not a military expert so I can’t offer an operational plan to achieve this, but I have to say that at this stage I’m not inclined to be fussy about the methods, or the alliances that we might need to make. If getting Assad and Putin on board will get the job done, that’s fine by me.
The problem with intensifying the war in Iraq and Syria is civilian casualties. To take that approach, you’d have to be willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of innocents in order to eliminate a few wicked bastards. If initially successful, would such an outcome be stable? These are failed states which may not be repairable by outside intervention.
And the fact that out of the ashes will rise a phoenix more pernicious than isis.
I disagree. ISIS already beheads, crucifies and burns people alive, then posts snuff videos of their deaths on the internet for the gratification of its supporters. It exults in the deaths of civilians blown up or machine-gunned in cold blood. It has openly restored slavery in the territories it controls. It obliterates all traces of pre-Islamic cultures on its territory. Given the chance it would burn every art gallery, musuem and library in the world. It freely admits that its ultimate aim is world conquest and the creation of a theocratic empire in which all non-muslims will be enslaved or exterminated. True, it hasn’t yet killed people by the million-fold, but does anyone seriously doubt that it would do so if it had the capability?
ISIS is the apotheosis of muslim extremism. No more pernicious movement could or will exist. We should do whatever is necessary to destroy it now, while it’s still comparatively small and weak.
I may be misunderstanding, but are you implying it’s OK for us to kill innocent civilians in our war with ISIS because ISIS kills innocent civilians? Death by beheading and death by precision guided missile is still death. I completely agree that ISIS must be stopped but the means to that end is very important. The “kill ’em all and let g*d sort them out” method hasn’t worked for a few centuries now. Maybe a different approach is warranted?
“The “kill ’em all and let g*d sort them out” method hasn’t worked for a few centuries now.”
It worked quite well in World War II. We waged total war against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, slaughtering their fighting men and pulverising their cities without regard to civilian casualties until their surviving leaders sued for peace and agreed to surrender unconditionally. Since then, both countries have been peaceful, stable pluralist democracies.
For the record, I’m not advocating that approach in Iraq/Syria. I would imagine that a very large percentage of the captive population in the “caliphate” would be glad to be rid of ISIS, and we should make every effort to minimise civilian casualties. That’s where precision-guided missiles have a distinct advantage over dumb bombs dropped from a B-17.
I still don’t think that strategy would work here. You’re right that it did work in WWII. Also, when insurgences rose up in certain cities/towns/villages that the Nazi’s occupied, they were quickly quashed: every single person was murdered. Sometimes an “insurgency” was simply one civilian decapitating a Nazi motorcyclist with razor wire. The news spread fast when entire towns were vanquished, and neighboring towns towed the line.
But with 23% of the human population…1.6 billion people spread out across the world with instant access to information, I don’t think all out war would work. If we had murdered every Iraqi man, woman and child, I don’t think that would have stopped an ISIS type Islamic cult to form.
In the past, when Islamic death cults formed, the Muslim people themselves destroyed them. To me, that is still the most common-sense solution. But it doesn’t seem to be happening this time around.
Fortunately, total war against the Nazis was *not* always done. A distant relative of mine was a German conscript in the last days of WWII. (I.e, a Nazi soldier, but not by choice.) He told the story of how he was captured by Americans, and how they treated him as a *human being* who may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time or what not. They brought him cigarettes and “girly mags” while a prisoner of war, just like they would share amongst each other. He told this story when Abu Graib and what not were in the news; he wondered what had happened to the Americans who treated him right. (I wonder whether he was paying attention to Korea and especially Vietnam, but …)
The story is an anecdote, but the principle I think is correct: namely not everyone “over there” is an enemy. They may not be your friend either, but at least if you give them some basic humanity (though I wouldn’t suggest sharing “girly mags” with a Muslim!) maybe you’ll get some in return in one day. Doesn’t always work, but if you don’t try, what do you expect?
Military experts have recognized that the strategic “area” bombing done by the Allies in Europe during War 2 was a costly, brutal mistake — just as was such bombing done by the Germans earlier in the war during The Blitz. The Allies also never engaged in “total war” as that term is legally understood. They did not execute enemy captured, did not put civilian populations in forced labor camps, did not engage in unrestricted naval warfare against civilian ships, or engage in many of the other earmarks of “total war.”
For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, straight-forward, and … wrong. “Carpet bomb the shit out of ’em” (a mash-up of the only “strategies” announced by the two primary Republican candidates for US president) is that solution as to ISIS. We will be much more successful in the long run if our military actions in the Middle East are conducted according to “just war” theory. How many Dresdens would you willing to inflict upon the Levant?
However, Assad isn’t any better. So I don’t believe that a solution including Assad will be any solution at all.
“How many Dresdens would you willing to inflict upon the Levant?”
To eradicate Islamic jihadism – I would inflict as few as possible, but as many as necessary.
We know how many Dresdens were “necessary” to win World War Two. That number would be zero.
Why would the obliteration bombing of a city without significant military target ever be necessary in the battle against ISIS?
“Total war” is based on a terroristic strategy — i.e., the purposeful infliction of punishment upon a nation’s civilian population as a means for defeating its government. That seems a particularly inapt strategy for use against a foe like ISIS, given its demonstrated disregard for the wellbeing of the civilian population living under its control.
Given extant international law concerning the conduct of war, were you to propose that solution to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you’d get the same answer given by the HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s 2001:
“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
I don’t know how much this is tempting fate, and it may seem grisly considering thirty people have been killed, but I think this is evidence that the post 9/11 security protocols are(to a certain, admittedly imperfect extent) working. If these guys had had their way they’d have vaporised entire planeloads of people. That’s no longer an option – it’s an avenue that’s been closed.
The number of fatalities is relatively low considering the locations they attacked – 7/7 involved only one more terrorist, yet it was much deadlier.
Their inability to coordinate something bigger may also be a consequence of increased surveillance levels Europe-wide – the necessarily cellular structure of the ISIS network prevents anything more joined-up and dangerous coming to pass.
I won’t write any more, but I wanted to point out the possibility that there are positives to be gleaned from this, and that groups like ISIS are now operating in a more constrained environment than they were fifteen, ten years ago. Those constraints are there and we sometimes forget that they do make a difference, even if it’s not much consolation to the families of the dead. It’s a ‘red queen’ scenario, in that the levels of jihadi terrorism have risen alongside our levels of surveillance and counter-terrorism initiatives, but it’d be nice if a little credit went to Orwell’s “rough men who stand ready” – already the Belgian police are getting kicked from pillar to post(maybe rightly, I don’t know), whereas those occasions when some grubby little plot is foiled, and tens of lives are saved, are barely even covered by the media, never mind commended.
Good point. It could have been worse. It may be we will just have to keep working to constrain the bad guys while accepting that there will continue to be tragedies like Brussels for a long time to come.
I’m not sure. The working theory now is that they were looking for large groups of people, not just that they would’ve preferred to target airplanes and had to settle for the airport outside the security cordon. Their second choice of a metro station would seem to support that; they could have easily put the bomb on a metro train and detonated it in transit, but they chose not to – they chose to attack the station instead.
Of course 30 << the 300 they might have gotten from an in-flight blast; something not true of the metro station vs. metro train distinction, so you may be right.
Yes, they could’ve targeted other areas and killed a lot more people but they could’ve done that any time over the last decade too. The difference is that now certain avenues are a great deal more difficult to target ‘successfully’.
And part of the reason why airports and metros are such glittering prizes for these people is that attacks on these places cripple their cities’ infrastructures – if you can instil an unwillingness on the part of the populace to use basic commercial necessities like trains and planes you do a great deal of slow-acting ancillary damage. An attack like the Bataclan, which killed a lot more people, won’t have the same effect on the ability of society to function. It doesn’t harm the economic hubs of large cities. This is grotesquely pragmatic reasoning, but we also know this is how they think.
So, contrary to the nihilistic rhetoric of certain hard-left ideologues, ISIS are not free to switch their targets willy-nilly. Suicide bombers are apparently both expensive and in shorter supply than ISIS would have us think(they’re also not a great deal of use in the long term – what with being ‘one-use-only’). This means that their handlers have to select targets carefully, and they do so based on more than just the possible body-count: things like symbolic impact, newsworthiness, effect on the economy and on society’s ability to function normally…all this is swirled in.
Brussels, the capital of Europe, hub of the EU, economically important, a daily recipient of influential international commuters who rely on its transport systems(and, of course, there is the fact that Belgium seems to have an extremely high concentration of essentially self-segregating conservative Muslims – a fecund source of potential martyrs) – you can see the cold logic behind their decision, but you can also see how their ability to optimise the body-count at their targeted locations was constrained by tighter security. I’m not trying to paint a rosy picture here – thirty people are dead and many more injured after all, and the Belgian police are getting a shellacking for their apparent incompetence, but you’d think from the general media conversation on terrorism that the improvements we’ve made to our national security have been worthless.
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Very insightful analysis, SS-T.
Very nice, well done.
There are fewer attacks in transportation, a trend, I predict, will continue.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/attacks-on-transportation-targets-like-those-in-brussels-have-become-rarer/
A slow process of good change. In less than a century women became voters, blacks became people (according to the Mormons), and gays can marry. Society will undo terrorists more than anything else; it just takes time.
I am a habitual pessimist, and my bet is that society will undo terrorists the way it undid communist terrorists in Eastern Europe in the mid-1940s, that is, by fully submitting to their ringleaders.
As Kevin said, “it just takes time.” Certainly, someone in Bulgaria knows full well which side won against the Eastern European communists circa 1989.
It wasn’t an active win. The economy just collapsed, and because USSR was too weak to support its empire, normalcy was restarted. However, there seems to be no end of waiting in Russia itself, in North Korea, Cuba and (of course!) the Muslim world.
Future adherents should be concerned about the sustainability of a self-immolation advertising campaign.
“the 10th day after the suicide car bombing that killed 38 in Ankara, Turkey: most likely the work of a Kurdish separatist organization.”
considering what turkey does in the Kurdish regions, the response is an act of war and those actions could be seen as self defense against a regime that bombs a city like Cizre.
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/dozens-believed-dead-following-raid-building-cizre-turkey-601330753
Turkey broke a ceasefire agreement with the PKK
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/turkey-strikes-kurdish-militants-in-iraq-ending-truce/2015/07/25/1b7405b8-32b7-11e5-97ae-30a30cca95d7_story.html
and began bombing their positions.
Turkey is also in support of Daesh by allowing them travel through Turkey, supplying Daesh fighters with medical assistance within Turkey and buying oil from Daesh and targeting YPG position in Syria who are fighting Daesh and Al Nusra.
With friends like that…
Damn, the Middle East is a fucking mess.
I support the cause of Kurdistan. However, I cannot find any justification for the killing of random, innocent Turks.
Neither can I find any excuse for Turkey breaking a ceasefire agreement and then flattening Kurdish towns and villages. Turkish regimes have a history of atrocities from killing Armenians to Bulgarians that rivals the Nazi atrocities.
With that history in mind I can at least understand why the Kurds want to preserve themselves by all means possible especially keeping in mind they fight a vastly superior enemy for years already.
No excuse for this either, of course. I hope that NATO’s Article 5 is not valid for separatism within a member state.
Many years ago some airports started checking people as they first entered the airport. Had the metal detectors and some baggage checking at the very first door. This was the case at Kempo Airport in South Korea. Also, when they were first building the Narita Airport in Japan, they had a security point along the road going into the airport. If you were on a bus, they stopped the bus and came in to look over the passengers before letting it go on to the terminal. I think they also stopped cars at random. These things were being done long before we heard about Islamist terrorist.
That’s right – I remember the checkpoints at Narita. If you rode the bus (and the train at that time didn’t go all the way to the terminal), you were checked at the border of the airport, unless you rode the airport bus from T-CAT near Tokyo Station, where they checked you before you got on the bus. If you drove to the airport, your car was checked at the same checkpoint – open hood and trunk, mirror underneath, and all. But once the guerrilla actions against the airport had ceased for some time, many of those checks were abandoned.
I remember my luggage being “sniffed” for explosives at the entrance to Dublin Airport about 20 years ago.
BUT, a lot of what these actions do is move the crowd to a new spot, not dissipate the crowd. A bomb at T-CAT wouldn’t take down a plane, but it would still cause many casualties; an explosive-laden car at the airport checkpoint ditto.
And these are airports – what do you do at regular train or bus stations that protects people but does not make travel (especially commuting) hopelessly inconvenient?
We will doubtless hear the cries of the apologists reminding us how Muslims’ feelings of humiliation and centuries of oppression are the real cause of this genre of mass-murder.
There was a hilarious post on this blog after a previous major terrorist attack in Europe:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/11/17/a-satire-of-western-apologetics-for-jihadist-terrorism/
Centuries of humiliation and oppression are doubtless a primary contributing factor — but it is a centuries-long humiliation and oppression imposed upon them primarily by their own coreligionist political rulers.
On the one hand, I think rich, powerful, societies like ours can absorb attacks at the current rate indefinitely. We could just treat it as a hazard of life, the way we put up with the constant stream of automobile deaths, or in the US, gun deaths. Tragic, horrific, but at a low enough rate that most people can go about their lives without undue fear. We could, but given the psychology I don’t think we will.
Instead, I expect more wars. Not immediately, from this particular attack, but soon. The next big ISIS attack, under the next president (and all of them are hawks except maybe Bernie, who won’t win) will likely result in US troops going back into the middle east. If I could make only one prediction for the 2017-2018 year, it would be that there will be US ground troops fighting ISIS before 2018.
Absorption. As long as a society’s capability of absorbing this kind of atrocity is high, then these types of attacks will also be a potential threat.
America has its own version of mass murders and they are all easily absorbed. Gun ownership will last forever under these circumstances.
There is also ideological absorption. The Christian right is unwilling and incapable to say to a Muslim, “Your God does not exist.” For that would be bad news for what the Christian believes. But a Christian is willing to contort, “You believe in a nasty, untrue version of the transcendent. You will go to a Christian Hell.” The ideology absorbs the Islamic tenets (as hideous as they may be) and weakens a society’s ability to critically examine any religion.
“As long as a society’s capability of absorbing this kind of atrocity is high, then these types of attacks will also be a potential threat.”
I disagree. As long as a society’s capability to absorb such atrocities is low, these attacks will be effective and will continue. We saw what happened in Spain after the subway bombings. We saw how Netanyahu was pushed aside in Paris after Islamists killed 4 Jews.
” The Christian right is unwilling and incapable to say to a Muslim, “Your God does not exist.””
However, I’ve read such statements more often from the Christian right than from the left, with the unilateral love of many leftists to all things Islamic.
True. A society’s unwillingness to absorb any atrocity of terrorism is also a major motivation for terrorists, i.e., they get the attention and disruption they want. They get both benefits from either being in the noise or being all the rage.
If I could make only one prediction for the 2017-2018 year, it would be that there will be US ground troops fighting ISIS before 2018.
If a Republican wins, I 100% agree. If Hilary wins, I would hedge that we would only initiate total war if ISIS takes credit for a planned massive bombing in the states.
They may be hawks, but I think they are all isolationists. So I expect the world to continue to be on an autopilot.
The argument you make in your first paragraph was the one advanced by the novelist David Foster Wallace after the 911 attacks.
Yeah, this is basically my view. Do what you can to prevent such attacks short of betraying you’re very reason for existing (e.g. by engaging in torture, or tossing in the towel on civil liberties, etc.), and then accept that there is a certain amount of death and destruction that is going to be unpreventable. Of course, at some level of death it would become intolerable and something would have to give, but that level should be related to the level of death and destruction we find acceptable in other endeavors, such as driving, living with guns in society, etc. It’s a bit irrational to treat terrorism so differently than all the other sources of death and destruction. This is, of course, an exceedingly unpopular view.
The exception I might carve out for this is nuclear bombs used for terrorism. I can see treating that very specific threat differently in a number of ways.
“TATP-based bombs require technical know-how and bulk purchases of hydrogen peroxide or hair bleach. That helps authorities narrow down potential bomb-making suspects, because making the explosives can sometimes bleach hair. So authorities can identify bomb-makers in part by recognizing unusually bleached hair or asking sellers to report any suspiciously large purchases of hydrogen peroxide.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/europe/brussels-investigation/
It’s depressing that Arabs buying large amounts of hair bleach didn’t raise anybody’s eyebrows… (it’s a scene taken straight from the Four Lions movie!) Europeans must be more vigilant and better educated about such suspicious activities…
Possibly a regressive left attitude. No one wants to point a finger at someone with accusations of potentially being a terrorist.
This kind of vigilance is hard to come by at the citizenry level. A five-dime store owner may also simply not care enough when someone buys $300 worth of hair products in one go at 11PM at night.
Unfortunately, as the “war on drugs” shows, criminalizing some compounds or what not is tricky, especially organic ones. What counts as a precursor?
Mind you, my father (an organic chemist) says that the fact we are not awash in street drugs suggests that a lot of chemists are honest, since synthesizing most of them would require a BSc level knowledge of chemistry, if that. (Apparently.)
A few years ago US put Sudafed back “behind the counter” to counter the drug trade, precisely so they could monitor bulk purchases. It would be annoying but not hard to do the same for hydrogen peroxide purchases. And we wouldn’t need to profile arabs or muslims to do it; we would want to track all bulk purchasers because we get a lot of home grown bomb-makers, too.
Hopeless! It is a routine disinfectant, also used to change hair color.
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