Initial reports are never right, but today was really strange. Who are these guys?
1) It seems clear that this was a semi-professional team of guys who knew how to work together, and who had either the capacity to make pipe bombs or connections who did. They carried out their plan and managed to exfil successfully before police could arrive. Yet hours later, they're still driving around in the same car, in the same kit, a mile and a half away?
2) The target doesn't make any obvious sense as a terrorist target, except that it was a soft target with lots of people.
It's like you had a team of guys who meticulously planned out how they'd carry out a major attack, but never got further in their planning than how they'd drive away from the scene within a given response time, leaving IEDs to cover their tracks. There was apparently no "then what?" considered. There were major freeways they could have taken, and if you've got three guys you surely have access to more than one car. They could have dumped the SUV and their kit, piled into a white sedan, and been in another state by the time the police caught up to the first vehicle.
Wannabe martyrs? One of whom lost his nerve and fled on foot when the final firefight arrived? But then why bother with the exfil? You could have stayed and killed a few more people, and become martyrs where you were. The police were coming.
It's like they had everything mapped out until a minute after they drove away, and then suddenly realized they had no idea what came next (and no imagination between them that would let them plan up something better than 'drive around the neighborhood in the getaway car').
The one thing that might make sense is if they had been trained by professionals who considered them disposable. They were taught how to do the part they did right, and then... what now?
Or maybe they're just yahoos who thought this out carefully on their own, and weren't bright enough to think beyond it.
Otherwise, conflicting details in all the reports make it hard to know what to think so far.
12 comments:
Drugs?
Now they say one of the dead suspects was a woman. That's not unheard of -- Paris attacks -- but it just adds to the strangeness of the situation.
NBC identifies one as a Syed Farook, former employee of the county as an Environmental Health engineer according to Wretchard. Apparently he was at the party? Wild.
One more possibility. If they were trained by someone, maybe this was an unauthorized op. Maybe the guy got angry at the Christmas party and they decided to do this on their own. Then, they call for extraction and their contact says no.
And this morning it looks as if the trio consisted of Farook, his wife, and his brother. The married couple dropped off their six-month-old daughter with grandma and went to take out a holiday party held by Farook's co-workers. Some kind of nasty workplace feud combined with a jihad fantasy, where these three family members felt they had to take a stand in solidarity?
My husband kept exclaiming in surprise yesterday that they hadn't managed to change cars. I guess there's no accounting for the results of disorganized, delusional thinking. Your idea that they might have been half-assedly trained and then abandoned might make sense, too. But I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this sick family trio--infuriated and distressed by a largely personal dispute--had latched onto a weird romantic fantasy of being religious warriors with or without active support by more serious terrorist types. Were they seething over a perception of Farook's having been dissed at work, and assuming that he'd been targeted for his religion or ethnicity? Farouk is now being reported as just having returned from paternity leave, for what that's worth.
I'm floating the two scenarios as plausible, because at this point both are. One scenario is one in which they were trained to carry out an attack of this type, but their training went no farther than the exfil for some reason. Maybe it was generalized training of the type you might have gotten at an al Qaeda camp back before 9/11 -- they trained for a lot of terrorist scenarios, but you might not have gotten the overall operational training you'd need to fully plan out a campaign. Maybe they were a cell trained to carry out an attack of this type with support that was absent in this case because they decided to go hot independently, as Tom says. Maybe they were partially trained because they were thought disposable.
The second scenario is that this was all the product of their independent minds. They sat down and, perhaps as some frequently-indulged revenge fantasy, worked out exactly how they'd carry out this particular attack. It went well while they were doing what they'd worked out, but then on the other side of it, they suddenly had no more plans. So they... just went home? Drove around in the same kit? Argued about it in the car?
Somehow, there they were, looking exactly like what the police expected them to look like, a mile and a half away.
Not to be too tin-foil-hattish, but how do we know the three in the car were the three shooters?
As my son was reading the ever-updating news on the webpage, I too was stunned when he said they were in the same vehicle less than two miles away from the shooting, hours after the shooting. That made me think it was too obvious. The shooters wore masks and didn't speak. They were in and out before any response arrived. They drove away slowly, making sure there were lots of witnesses to report a "black SUV".
And then what-do-you-know, a black SUV is in the same neighborhood with three individuals a few hours later...that smells like a setup. I think its plausible the shooters are in Mexico by now, and the three in the SUV were semi-willing patsies.
I mean, it looks like they just went home. The police picked them up at their house as they were leaving, hours later, in the same SUV. There are witnesses that put him at the party that was attacked. It's not impossible, of course: he could have gone, tipped off the hit team you're describing, and then later set himself and his wife up to take the rap for it -- after dropping off the baby with grandma.
It's a weird enough story that even wild conspiracy theories that adequately explain the facts are worth considering. Give it your best shot, and let's see if the facts line up.
I can't even imagine their frame of mind. Whatever sent them around this bend, combined with the shock of killing all those people, and the panic afterward--I wouldn't have been too awfully surprised to find them sitting at a stop sign gibbering in their seats. Maybe it's easier for me to imagine their unhinged state, since I've never participated in anything so violent or dangerous. Maybe they assumed they couldn't possibly have been identified, so they honestly thought they could drive home. I'm assuming there's something deeply wrong with their cognitive processing to start with.
RE: Give it your best shot, and let's see if the facts line up.
My thought that the shooters and the SUV folks were different seems to be falling apart as more information is released today. However, the new information just makes it all the more odd. I'll crawl back to my lurking cave now....
Honorably spoken.
Wild conspiracy theories degrade the ability to properly analyze intel with an objective lens.
The proper stance to take is to remain neutral and open to all possibilities, without deciding on any single one. Ever.
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