FBI on the Trail of the "Kitchen Sink Bomb"

Kirk Yeager works for the FBI making bombs; he does it to help the U.S. defend against the next frontier for terrorists in the United States, bombs made from household products.^[1] As the head of the explosives unit at the FBI's laboratory in Quantico, VA., Yeager helps the FBI solve bombing cases by investigating the crime scene debris.^[2]

The "Mother of Satan" explosives are considered the most likely weapon that terrorists will use against the U.S., more so than a nuclear or radiological dirty bomb. "Every serious terrorist group knows about them and knows how to make them….[and] you don't have to have the level of sophistication to make a bomb that you need to get nuclear materials."^[3] Yeager said. Yeager is the only U.S. official who makes TATP and similar explosives in mass quantities.^[4] Authorities have been worried for sometime that homemade suicide bombs were a larger threat to the U.S. than any other form of terrorist activity.^[5]

Ten years ago, peroxide-based bombs were mostly used by street punks, sub-urban pranksters, and chemistry teachers. But the easy-to-make yet deadly chemical mixtures were embraced in the late 1990s by Palestinian militants and suicide bombers bent on killing large groups of people.^[6] The bombs are made by mixing chemicals that are used in common household items, including hydrogen peroxide and paint thinner.^[7] Experts know them as TATP, short for triacetone triperoxide, and HMTD, or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine.^[8]

John Rollins, a counter-terrorism expert at Congressional Research Service and a former U.S. intelligence official, said TATP and other varieties of peroxide-based bombs are most likely to show up in the hands of homegrown extremists and other splinter sympathizers of international terrorist groups.^[9] The larger and centrally organized groups, such as al-Qaida, are more interested in "big bang" weapons that he said would cause widespread deaths and economic losses.^[10]

Under 18 U.S.C. § 2332a(a), any person, without lawful authority, uses, threatens, or attempts or conspires to use a weapon of mass destruction against any person in the United States can be imprisoned for any term of years or for life.^[11]

---

^[1] Lara Jakes Jordan, FBI Prepares Defense Against Kitchen Sink Bombs, Possible New Terror Weaponry, AP (via Canadian Press), February 19, 2007.
^[2] Id.
^[3] Id.
^[4] Id.
^[5] Bernd Debusmann, Suicide Bombs Biggest Threat to US: Experts, Reuters, Jun. 13, 2006.
^[6] Jordan, supra note 1.
^[7] Id.
^[8] Recent cases of explosions or thwarted attacks with TATP or HMTD in the U.S. include: Millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam. He was carrying HMTD among the 56 kilograms of explosives in the trunk of his car when he was arrested near the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999; Richard Reid. The would-be British shoe bomber tried unsuccessfully to detonate 227 grams of TATP hidden in his high-top sneaker during a Paris-to-Miami flight in 2001; University of Oklahoma suicide bomber Joel Henry Hinrichs III. He used TATP to blow himself up near a packed football stadium in October 2005; College student Matthew Rugo in Texas City, Texas. He was killed last July when a plastic storage container of TATP that was mixed in his apartment exploded. The FBI has not found any connection in the case to international terrorist groups, but the investigation continues. Id.
^[9] Id.
^[10] Id.
^[11] A weapon of mass destruction under this statute has a more expansive definition than many people realize, it is found in 18 U.S.C. §921(a)(4)(a)(1) (2006).