How to Send a Car to Hell

The top leadership of Al Qaeda has suffered attrition since 9/11. Meanwhile,it is becoming increasingly difficult to send jihadists across borders for training. The open source model is a strategy to reduce dependence on command and training apparatuses in favour of individual initiative and distance learning. But since the recipients of the source code are untrained and untested,security analysts dismiss the phenomenon.

Besides,browsing the how-to pages of Inspire is like reading the précis of a classic in the genre The Anarchist Cookbook. This seminal guide to hatching bizarre plots in Western cities which is what open source jihad boils down to was published in 1971. One of the weirdest books of all time,it was rejected by every credible imprint until it reached Lyle Stuart,the New York publisher whose credo was to print what no one else would,even if he found it abhorrent himself. But he actually liked this book,which taught people how to make plastic explosive from household bleach and incendiary bombs and lethal rockets from freely available chemicals and hardware.

William Powell wrote the book when he was 19,in a fit of rage over the threat of being drafted for the Vietnam war. He spent the rest of his life distancing himself from it,creating website after website to explain that he had become a believer and disagreed with every word he had written,but he had let loose a monster. Stuart,to whom he had made over the copyright,had no interest in winding down a controversial title. Though Stuart is long dead,the book is still in print,has had a bootleg digital version for about two decades,and retains a cult following in the livelier neighbourhoods of the Internet. It has also inspired a 2002 Hollywood comedy of the same name,in which the book surfaces in an anarchists commune.

Al Qaedas guide to explosive violence is like a pale shadow of The Anarchist Cookbook. The latest issue of Inspire tells the reader how to set cars on fire. Earlier issues have taught how to use a car as a people-mower,a skill known to Indian drivers. Powells book has a whole section titled Ways to Send a Car to Hell. The first way is to set fire to a spoonful of thermite on the hood and see it burn through the engine block to the pavement. Some pages earlier,there is a helpful guide to making thermite,starting with aluminium powder and a rusty nail. For the chemically challenged,thermite burns at 1,500 Celsius and is used to weld steel. Its military avatar is the alumina bomb,an incendiary which has,shamefully,been used against civilian populations.

Right,time for a statutory warning or two. The Anarchist Cookbooks recipes seem to have been culled from all over. Some of them should work in the lab. Others may have been written up by a suicidal lunatic. Im not telling which is which so if you cook by them,the resulting Big Bang could put you in orbit around Tau Ceti. Besides,this book was written 42 years ago,before terrorism went global. Some of the ingredients are on watch lists now. If you try to buy them,you will be tracked,apprehended,beaten over the kidneys and shipped to Damascus for further processing. This cookbook is a curiosity for the library,not the kitchen or lab.

For the record,an anarchist is someone who believes that the state and its institutions impede normal human relations. But the hellish archetype of the anarchist who looks vaguely like Leon Trotsky and has a bomb with a smouldering fuse tucked in each armpit is much easier to sell. And indeed,The Anarchist Cookbook is still selling well.