On The Nashville Bombing

 Hopefully by the time you read this you will understand more about the event than we do now. But The Omnivore wants to document some thoughts  at this time as we go forward.

1. Bombing targets are either selected for logistical/practical importance (the Marine Barracks in Lebanon), symbolic significance (the World Trade Center bombing, the Oklahoma Federal building bombing), or opportunity (i.e. it was what the bombers could get to).
2. There is a long history of bombings with warnings. The Weathermen did it. The IRA did it. Not always--but often enough. Usually the bombers call in the bomb-threat but in this case the PA system works well enough. This is in keeping with a politically motivated bombing--but it has an issue: historically the bomb-threat would not be heard by the populace at large so it didn't need to be especially political. In this case though, the warning was heard by everyone in the vicinity so it could have made a statement. It didn't. Why not?
3. The bomb was powerful and delivered in a way that was, if not for the warning, pretty undetectable (people who live on the street said that seeing an RV parked there on Christmas day wouldn't alarm them--they'd assume that someone was visiting family). So it could have been a lot worse (no warning, positioned somewhere designed to cause either more damage or more casualties).

The AT&T Switch Building

In the early aftermath of the reports, The Omnivore and Co. went online to see what was in the vicinity. A Melting Pot restaurant, a Brazilian Steakhouse, and a brick windowless building. At that early hour, The Omnivore and team knew what a windowless building represented: a hardened telephony base. There's a huge one in NYC--designed to survive a nuke-hit (not direct). That was the guess and it turns out? 

It was right. The blast knocked out 911 service for miles and disrupted communications and flights into Nashville. 

While The Melting Pot made for a good joke about anti-immigrant sentiment, it's pretty clear that the switch building was target: practical effect.

The Turner Diaries

It is tempting to make too much of this but if you are not aware, The Turner Diaries are the racist race-war fan-fic books that inspired McVeigh to target the OKC building with his truck bomb (that kicks off the Great Race War in the novel).

In the novel they also target telephony communications centers--so symbolically this could be some more race-war Turner Diaries shit. The Omnivore isn't sure though: attacking communications hubs is pretty par-for-the-course in asymmetric warfare so it doesn't have to be using the T-Diaries as a playbook.

Still, if it was--if it turns out it was--that's a point in the  direction you should be aware of.

Whodunnit?

There is a great tendency to blame the Trump Civil-War II right for this bombing--but there are some reasons not to, at least not until we know a lot more. The first is that the significance of Christmas Day isn't exactly the time for the Christian Right to launch an attack . . . even one that doesn't kill anyone. 

The date, however, might fall into the "opportunity" category (parking laws would not be stringently enforced over the holidays making it unlikely that the vehicle would be towed for example).

Secondly, we can say that the Trump-right definitely wants to think of themselves as "the good guys"--they do (as does everyone who takes up arms) but in this case the reluctance to kill people would have more credibility with a home-grown group than, say, an international group. So The Omnivore predicts that these are Americans (not a stretch). 

The targeting of infrastructure--communications and response infrastructure---is also interesting: the blast may have been a test-case to see if the shock, from outside the building, would take out the hardened (remember: no windows) structure. It did. This indicates that they could go after a more meaningful target somewhere else (Nashville isn't exactly a hotbed of liberalism).

The lack of a message coded into this bombing indicates to The Omnivore that, unless the Diamond Exchange was robbed across town yesterday morning, there's still another shoe to drop--probably not in Nashville and probably with less concern about casualties. 

Merry Christmas.