Killer Pagers

 

by Pa rock

Citizen Journalist

Isn't it a comfort to realize that in a world where we still cannot come up with a cure cancer or even the common cold, people are being wildly successful, nonetheless, in developing new and extremely clever ways to kill one another.  It's great to know that all of that expensive post-secondary education is not going to waste!

The week we have been treated to some amazing Orwellian, or perhaps James Bondian, tales in the press about mankind's obsession and dependency on electronic gadgetry being turned against some of us by others of us.  

On Tuesday at least a dozen people, including two children, were killed and thousands wounded in Lebanon and parts of Syria when their small, personal pagers began exploding.  The following day, Wednesday, there was another round of unexpected blasts in that same war-ravaged area, this time from personal walkie-talkies blowing-up.  During that attack twenty-five died and more than six hundred were wounded.  The attack of the killer walkie-talkies resulted in fires in at least seventy homes and shops in Lebanon as well as car and motorcycle fires.

An Israeli official reportedly told American officials that the attack was engineered by Israel.  The intended victims were members of the Hezbollah militant group which is headquartered in Lebanon and has been carrying out attacks on Israel since the start of the current war in October of last year.  During that time Israel has also been involved in a prolonged counter-offensive with Hezbollah.  The military group began relying on pagers earlier this year after leaders became concerned that Israel might have the ability to hack their cellphones.

There is still much speculation as to how Israel, or whoever instigated the attack, was able to arm the pagers and get them into the hands of Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and Syria.  The brand of the pagers involved was "Gold Apollo," a company owned and operated (somewhat) in Taiwan.  That company, however says that it only supplied the name for the pagers, and that the actual work of making them was farmed out to a company in Hungary.  From there they were headed to Hezbollah, but the shipment was stalled at some port for three months due to restrictions caused by various sanctions on the receiving countries.

Speculation currently is that agents opposed to Hezbollah intercepted the shipment at that point and placed small amounts of explosives and tiny metal balls into each of the pagers, and that the explosions were then detonated by special radio signals that caused the pagers' batteries to rapidly overheat.

Whatever the specifics of how the deadly process worked, the important thing is that it did work and terrorists who had the pagers deep in their pockets were killed, and so were children who happened to be standing nearby, and people in shops who were just going about their daily routines, and people on buses, and all manner of innocent civilians.  The indiscriminate nature of the attacks, in fact, has led to accusations that they amounted to "war crimes."

But that was there and this is here, and here in America we aren't dependent on gadgetry that could be used to control, defeat, or eliminate us.  We are smarter than that.

Or are we?