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Former CIA agent, Robert Baer, explains how the car bomb has become the deadliest weapon of all in modern warfare :

What happened in that summer of 1983 in Beirut has come back to haunt us in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their decades of civil war, the Lebanese, an inventive people, refined the weapon and became the best car-bombers in the world. The bombs that go off every day in Baghdad, the very concept of the suicide driver, were developed on the streets of Beirut.

The Lebanese raided the shelves of RadioShack and turned everyday electrical items – from mobile phones and electronic garage-door openers to model-aircraft control panels – into remotely controlled detonation triggers for car bombs. The Lebanese added gas canisters to boost the blast wave – a technique used in the attempted attack in July 2007 at Glasgow airport.

The threat from car bombs now spans the globe. Anywhere and anyone, a government building, an airport, could be a target. From Downing Street to the White House, governments are turning their offices into fortresses – and waiting for the next attack.

The Lebanese did not invent the car bomb; that honour goes to the Americans. The world’s first car bomb, a horse-and-car bomb, exploded on Wall Street on September 16, 1920, killing 38 people. But the Lebanese made car bombs a lot more lethal. When they planted them, it was to make the pavements run with blood. Everyone did it: the Christians, the Palestinians, Hezbollah and the Israelis.

For three decades Lebanon has been a research laboratory for car bombers. The same signature car-bomb techniques turned up in Baghdad soon after the 2003 US invasion. A lot of Lebanese car bombers just drove across the border into Syria and on to Baghdad.

Somewhat belatedly, the US military is spending £2.1 billion a year on secret programmes run by a military task force, JIEDDO (the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation), to counter the car bomb.

But even JIEDDO’s deputy director, Brigadier-General Anthony Tata, admits: “A car is a commercial entity. You go buy a car, find some old 155mm shells and you’ve got yourself a car bomb.”

More on the shocking history of the Car Bomb from Mike Davis here, who goes into the sort of detail that Robert Baer either doesn’t know, doesn’t believe, or doesn’t want to acknowledge is true.

And some more detail, from Davis, on that 1920 Wall Street attack :

On a warm September day in 1920, a few months after the arrest of his comrades Sacco and Vanzetti, a vengeful Italian anarchist named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon near the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, directly across from J. P. Morgan Company. He nonchalantly climbed down and disappeared, unnoticed, into the lunchtime crowd. A few blocks away, a startled postal worker found strange leaflets warning: “Free the Political Prisoners or it will be Sure Death for All of You!” They were signed: “American Anarchist Fighters.” The bells of nearby Trinity Church began to toll at noon. When they stopped, the wagon — packed with dynamite and iron slugs — exploded in a fireball of shrapnel.

“The horse and wagon were blown to bits,” writes Paul Avrich, the celebrated historian of American anarchism who uncovered the true story. “Glass showered down from office windows, and awnings twelve stories above the street burst into flames. People fled in terror as a great cloud of dust enveloped the area. In Morgan’s offices, Thomas Joyce of the securities department fell dead on his desk amid a rubble of plaster and walls. Outside scores of bodies littered the streets.”

Buda was undoubtedly disappointed when he learned that J.P. Morgan himself was not among the 40 dead and more than 200 wounded — the great robber baron was away in Scotland at his hunting lodge. Nonetheless, a poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap metal, and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the inner sanctum of American capitalism.

His Wall Street bomb was the culmination of a half-century of anarchist fantasies about avenging angels made of dynamite; but it was also an invention, like Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, far ahead of the imagination of its time. Only after the barbarism of strategic bombing had become commonplace, and when air forces routinely pursued insurgents into the labyrinths of poor cities, would the truly radical potential of Buda’s “infernal machine” be fully realized.

Buda’s wagon was, in essence, the prototype car bomb: the first use of an inconspicuous vehicle, anonymous in almost any urban setting, to transport large quantities of high explosive into precise range of a high-value target.

It was not replicated, as far as I have been able to determine, until January 12, 1947 when the Stern Gang drove a truckload of explosives into a British police station in Haifa, Palestine, killing 4 and injuring 140. The Stern Gang (a pro-fascist splinter group led by Avraham Stern that broke away from the right-wing Zionist paramilitary Irgun) would soon use truck and car bombs to kill Palestinians as well: a creative atrocity immediately reciprocated by British deserters fighting on the side of Palestinian nationalists.

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