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Beiruty wrote:

mrvmax wrote:

You and others keep saying it looks like a bomb or a hoax bomb...hooey. As the photo above shows it looks like, and is, a disassembled alarm clock. I get that scientific and technical knowledge in this country is at pretty pathetic levels, but one would pretty much have to be a technophobe or have a pretty lurid imagination to turn something so obviously prosaic into an explosive device. The idea of a hoax bomb is to make people think it's a bomb. That could have easily been accomplished by adding something that could be mistaken for an explosive charge. That "hoax bomb" wouldn't have hoaxed my grandma.

Since you seem to be an expert on explosives, how many real bombs have you seen? I am just wondering what real experience you have to be making determinations on what does or does not look like a bomb. If you have read through this entire thread you will see that I do have actual experience working with explosives and I doubt seriously you have any real experience but I may have missed something in this thread.

Is that too complicated to imagine, a timed bomb comprises of timer and a bomb. A bomb comprises of an explosive material and an initiator/primer/cap a device to start the explosive material. Whatever it was in that case is just the timer/clock thingy.

What is wrong with you guys? Any kid at school has a cell phone more advanced and more dangerous than that the timer/clock thingy in that case. I do not need to say more.

You and others keep saying it looks like a bomb or a hoax bomb...hooey. As the photo above shows it looks like, and is, a disassembled alarm clock. I get that scientific and technical knowledge in this country is at pretty pathetic levels, but one would pretty much have to be a technophobe or have a pretty lurid imagination to turn something so obviously prosaic into an explosive device. The idea of a hoax bomb is to make people think it's a bomb. That could have easily been accomplished by adding something that could be mistaken for an explosive charge. That "hoax bomb" wouldn't have hoaxed my grandma.

Excaliber wrote:There is another possibility here:

The device was designed to look suspicious but be provably innocuous in order to generate the response it actually got from teachers and police who could be foreseen not to use common sense when confronted with a situation like that. It is certainly the sloppiest and ugliest simple function clock I've ever seen and hardly what I would call a triumph of junior engineering. A non genius could do much better with a few cheap parts from Radio Shack.

Following this hypothesis, the purpose would be to present a situation that could be exploited in the media as blatantly unfair treatment of an innocent boy based on "islamophobia". When you think about it, that's not as far out as it seems at first. It is entirely predictable that the media would react as it did, that enormous sympathy would be generated for the "victim," and that he would be given all kinds of opportunities he otherwise would have to have earned. The police description of passive-aggressive behavior by the student during his interview would support at least considering that his motives were not as entirely innocent as he presents them to be.

Would that scenario take an adult a cynical worldview and some thoughtful planning behind the whole deal? Sure, but it would be consistent with the level of sophistication we're seeing from radical islamists, who are media aware, highly manipulative and much better grounded in reality than many of what passes for leaders these days.

I have no idea if that was the case here or not, but from an investigative standpoint I would treat it as one of the lines of investigation that should be followed until it is either proven or disproven.

Even if that was what was really going on, a little common sense from the police would still have ended the situation quickly and without fanfare. The bomb squad would have been called and determined that the device was neither dangerous nor designed in a manner consistent with a trigger for explosives, and the police would have handed the kid back his "clock" and told him to have a nice day. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and that's why we're looking at the stinking mess this case has become today.