The narrator of the documentary Car Bomb, Robert Baer, was a CIA agent in Beirut during Lebanon’s bloody civil war. He was present when a suicide truck bomber (in a GM pickup) plowed into the U.S. embassy. And he was around for the even bloodier truck bombing against the U.S. Marines barracks at Beirut airport. He developed great respect for the destructive power of the automobile. With the wrong driver, a car can kill hundreds and change the direction of nations.
But just when you think Baer is ascribing the car bomb’s invention to the Lebanese, he pulls an abrupt turn and finds its origin in America. Well, it was probably the work of an Italian anarchist who blew up Wall Street in 1920 using a horse cart, not an automobile, but the principal of a mobile, inconspicuous weapon cheap to assemble and capable of wreaking mayhem was set. Oddly, no one seems to have developed the car bomb concept until Zionist terrorists used it in the struggle for Israeli statehood. Palestinians struck back in kind. Baer picks up the road of the car bomb in ‘60s Sicily where the Cosa Nostra used it for mob hits.
Before long it was the weapon of choice for freedom fighters/terrorists in Northern Ireland, Africa, the Middle East and the U.S. Baer interviews Karl Armstrong, whose car bomb destroyed the math research center at UW-Madison in 1970 and took a life. Timothy McVeigh, who brought down the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 with a rented Ryder truck, similarly used fertilizer and diesel fuel for his bomb.
The ominous music and occasionally hyperbolic tone is unnecessary. Most of the interviews Baer conducts with one-time car bombers are chilling for their matter of factness. In war, the bombmakers all agree, you will use any weapon at hand. But to what effect? Armstrong and his gang inadvertently helped stop the anti-war movement by arousing revulsion. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has dragged on in a spiral of killing. But Baer can point to one success, claiming the IRA’s car bombing campaign in the UK helped trigger the peace process.
Car Bomb is out on DVD.
