It must be forty years since I first saw on a news segment that one could then build an A-Bomb to fit in a suitcase. The reporter put on a Russian uniform, and left a suitcase that size in the middle of New York. It stayed there. It was probably the only one that year that was left out in public in New York City and wasn’t stolen.

About anything that was possible forty years ago is easy now.

I hear the suitcase bomb mentioned in passing many times on TV.

Contrary to what I thought, I have been informed that many of the Islamic extremists are technicians. The terrorists I saw down the years blew themselves to Kingdom Come and many of them wandered around with bombs and didn’t know where, in the African bush, to put the damned things.

I keep reading about suicide bombers who blow themselves up. Naturally, since I can’t help being one of those smartasses who “has experience in the field,” so like them I just chuckled to myself and made a generalization.

I have said it before: I have made about every mistake I denounce, including thinking of myself as the Intellectual and the Idealist, at least twice. Many, many times, since I was the Spokesman and the writer of press releases, I thought I was smarter than the people who really knew what was going on.

But when I found out how many real techs they have, I immediately started wondering about that suitcase bomb again.

A lot of you knew all along that there were these real techs on the other side. It is not really my special knowledge, but my way of thinking, what I call Mantra Thinking and BBG calls street smarts, that I have to offer you. You had the knowledge before me, but you don’t THINK like I do.

That worries me, because knowledge can be passed on fairly easily, but a way of thinking dies with the man who does it.

This suitcase bomb maybe a very good case of this.

You must have the ability to create that forty-year-old device, but you, the few who can, must USE it. Our picture of the Islamic extremists is carefully cultivated to see them as mindless nuts. Any serious THINKING about it undermines this image.

More than one book has illustrated that the Islamic extremists only use terror when we go into THEIR territory. This is a message no one wants to hear, least of all respectable conservatives and Christian fundamentalists who demand total war in the Middle East.

When discussing 9/11, I have been astonished to find some people have MEMORY of it, and not just the stuff the media keeps repeating. A few people actually REMEMBER the It’s Not Israel Campaign right after 9/11.

When the towers went up, support for Israel in America dropped like a rock. Every discussion, and there were a LOT of them, had everybody agreeing that the Towers weren’t bombed, as those who did it claimed, because of US support for Israel.

They did it, and they SAID that was WHY they did it. So every single professional talker in the media began a It Has Nothing To Do With Israel campaign. They convinced a lot of people, according to their polls.

You have to be a bit stupid to think Arabs would attack the United States because our women don’t cover their faces when they see themselves as victims of a country that holds their territory in their own back yards.

So if you THINK about the suitcase bomb, it may be that the Arabs don’t want to just kill. There are devices that could do that a lot more intensely than the 2001 incident.

I think the suitcase bomb or its equivalent will be developed and used. But that can only happen when a critical mass of money and expertise decides to use it. So far, the total basket cases are blowing themselves up, and technology is beyond them.

So we are left with the conclusion that so far at least the Arabs who have the money and the technical expertise have not decided to USE it the way the They Just Hate America crowd say they naturally would, the way our image of them says they would.

The media doesn’t do any THINKING, but I think they avoid the whole question of suitcase bombs and bacteriological warfare by instinct. It requires a consideration of what the other side is THINKING, and the whole media image is based on insisting that they DON’T think.