Homeland Security: Be wary of pressure cookers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27523-2004Feb10.html

We all know the Middle East is a pressure cooker that produces terrorism. But here’s a new twist, courtesy of a Department of Homeland Security bulletin issued last week to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. Its title: “Potential Terrorist Use of Pressure Cookers.”

The memo warns those who search homes, cars and cargo to be suspicious of the culinary appliance, which it defines (per Merriam-Webster) as an “airtight utensil for quick cooking or preserving of foods by means of high-temperature steam under pressure.” Pressure cookers, it notes, can be turned into “improvised explosive devices” with the addition of one ingredient – explosives. Terrorists taught this technique in Afghanistan, according to the bulletin, which cites four international incidents, including one last year when Indian security forces found more than 80 pounds of explosives in two pressure cookers.

“So let me get this straight,” one homeland security operative mused. “The pressure cooker is the dangerous part, not the 40 kilograms of explosives that the terrorists placed inside the pressure cookers? Maybe we should regulate them to ensure they don’t fall into the wrong hands.”

Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said yesterday that the bulletin was among several recently circulated to warn agencies that terrorists can turn “innocuous items” into bombs. Presumably, these might include the Cuisinart, the George Foreman Grill and the microwave oven, but the bulletin provides one comfort: “Based on this notification, no change to the Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) level is anticipated; the current HSAS level is YELLOW.”

Right, so almanacs, pressure cookers, maps, and box cutters. Any other household items that we should throw out in favor of duct tape, the Department of Homeland Security’s household item of choice?

Perhaps cardboard boxes will be treated as suspicious next, since you can put things like explosives in them too.

edit: typo fixed so that I can pretend to be a better grammarian than steve.

Straws. You gotta watch out for straws. With spitwads of paper they become lethal weapons!

Almanacs, pressure cookers… so they’re banning (well maybe not, but issuing notices to law enforcement to be on the lookout is pretty close) seemingly random items for fear that they might harm society… Odd, this sounds familiar. But where could I have seen this before?

Oh yeah: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=751

:(

The almanacs thing was pure sillyness.

This isn’t, at least not taken in the context of an advisory that such devices have been used as in concealment tactics.

And it makes me want to go out into the desert with a pressure cooker, some explosives, shrapnel and some large melons. I’d never though of the potential of a pressure cooker before. :P

I’m thinking of locking my reference library up in Vault 13. We will need it after Armageddon…

We should make backpacks illegal. And bags and boxes of all types.

The Department of Homeland Security has gone right through Threatening and has entered Ridiculous. What kind of lunatics are running that place? And why are they allowed to walk the streets without supervision by a trained professional?

But why pressure cookers? Why not just… “WARNING! Criminals hide things in pots and pans!”… [size=2]because that’d be really really stupid…[/size]

I mean, I have a hard time believing that any police officer or agent rummaging through a closet of pots and pans looking for contraband is going to go… “hrm, that’s a pressure cooker, and there’s probably not anything in that…”

And it makes me want to go out into the desert with a pressure cooker, some explosives, shrapnel and some large melons. I’d never though of the potential of a pressure cooker before.

The Pressure Cooker WMD! I smell a new MythBusters!

We should make backpacks illegal. And bags and boxes of all types.

Even crates? :/

You could also blow tiny poison darts from them.

Or worse, AIDS virus injectors. Imagine the economic strain and the collapse of the social welfare system if you added a few thousand new HIV positive people every year.