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Are Liquid Explosives on a Plane Feasible?
permaculture writes "The Register describes the difficulty of mixing up a batch of liquid explosives on a plane. Further, it opines that such a plot might work in a Hollywood film, but not in the real world. Liquid explosives were used for the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, according to the official account — or not, as now seems more likely."
This story selected and edited by LinuxWorld editor for the day Saied Pinto.
Does anyone else think that these terrorists' true purpose is not to kill the passengers on a few planes but to inconvenience travellers for years to come? Blowing up a plane is a one-time deal but scaring people into not taking drinks onto planes, making people take off their shoes before boarding, checking their ipods in with their luggage, these annoyances are going to be with us for decades to come! Why terrorize when irritating is so much easier?
The UK Terror plot: what's really going on?
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_ uk_terror_p.html
I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane t
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Firstly, the 7/7 bombs were reported to be TATP. This compound is made with acetone, hydrogen peroxide and drain cleaner. The ingredients are liquid, yes, but the end product is a powder. Creating TATP requires access to a cooler or ice water bath, it is not something you can whip up in a bathroom.
The hysteria this has caused is mind boggling. There are an infinite number of ways terrorists could attack random innocent civilians. It is not, repeat not, possible to protect everyone from everything. Banning iPods and water bottles is not making anyone safer. It is an attempt to appear that something is "being done". It's a pacifier for the masses.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
There are so many problems with this. Why weren't liquids blocked before? I'm sure in the billions they spent investigating possible methods for bombing a plane that liquid explosives were considered. Authorities aren't gonna make people get on planes naked, so they have to let people take stuff on. They are only blocking liquids now because they have to show the public that they are doing something. There are still dozens of other ways to easily get dangerious stuff onto planes, but they don't block those now, do they? easy examples: Sharp pencils and pens, materials in laptops and other electronics that show up as normal shapes on the xray but could easily be reconfigured into weapons, etc.
In any event I just took a flight from China to Los Angeles and they claimed you couldn't bring liquids aboard, but no one was checking. It's all just noise to make people feel like they are being protected.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
You know, I've read several articles now talking about the potential difficulties in mixing a binary explosive on a plane. And you know, I'll buy that. But, for my dollar, and ease of use, why not just carry on some bleach and ammonia? When mixed they do some pretty nasty stuff. And there's no concern about explosion beforehand, and no strange requirements for mixing them properly. Plus, once you mix them, you can't stop the reaction. The end result is the same. Everyone on the plane dies, and it falls out of the sky. That was the whole point, right?
--Brian
What I see there is a Pakistani woman caught with a water bottle full of "possibly explosive" material. They don't know what the material was yet.
This certainly could be "a terrorist caught with explosives", the conclusion you jump to; given that it was a real possibility, evacuating the airport and investigating further as they have done was of course the appropriate course of action for the time being.
But it also seems possible this is a false alarm, similar to this morning when a bomb sniffing dog detected a suspicious container that turned out to be full of completely ordinary rags, or the day before when an "unruly passenger" was widely reported to have "Vaseline, a screw driver, matches and a note referencing al-Qaeda" and then it turned out she had nothing of the kind and was just having some kind of nervous breakdown and peeing in the plane aisles (?), or a couple days before that when three men of Arabic descent were arrested with a bunch of cell phones on suspicion they were going to blow up a bridge but then turned out only to be buying cell phones to resell in Dallas at a profit.
Again, it could be that this woman arrested in West Virginia was part of a real terrorist plot, and it could be that some unhinged lady was inspired by recent media reports about plane bombs to pour lighter fluid in a couple of water bottles and attempt to board a plane. Perhaps there really was a legitimate threat to passenger safety there. I shall be watching the news on this one with interest to find out exactly what happened.
But until we do find out exactly what happened, it seems awfully odd in this case to say "reality has intervened" when in fact what you mean is "partly speculative media reports have intervened".
Another reader pointed out that, while the explosive scenario is problematic, incindiary devices are easy. A soup-can full of Potassium Permanganate and a rougly equal volume of Glycerine will make a heck of a blaze -- or a really nice igniter for a thermite bomb. I suspect all of these materials could be smuggled aboard (though I'm not about to try).
Another potential venue is nerve agents. Without going into any real detail, hydrofluoric acid is the foundation for several nasty nerve agents, some of which COULD be whipped up in the lav in just a few minutes. Probably not enough to kill the whole plane, and I'm assuming the pilots have a seperate air supply, but killing half the passengers on a loaded airliner might be good enough to interest a terrorist.
Then there's biological agents. Some years ago I worked with cyanotoxins, primarily anatoxin. Nasty stuff, and available at any nice warm, eutrophic lake in the U.S. I was playing around with extracting the toxin, and ended up with a protocol that used DMSO as a solvent to help seperate the toxin from cellular membranes. This stuff used to scare me to death -- a nice liquid that, if splashed on your skin (or clothing) would cause death in a matter of minutes. Imagine a squirt-gun or a water-balloon filled with this on a plane.
For the record, I'm far more frightened of the current Government that I am of terrorists, and I'd rather just take my chances that submit to the "protections" that are being provided. However, it doesn't take a lot of effort to come up with some plausible scenarious where a lunch-box might conceal some fairly deadly things.
"Except Nitro Glycerine would most likely detonate the second you had any turbulence, or even upon takeoff, given how unstable it is."F light_434
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Airlines_
How about this for logic. If it has been done then it is is possible.
Yes Virgina somebody manged to smuggle nitroglycerin on to an airliner and use it as a bomb.
Nitro is nasty stuff but you all have been watching too many old movies. They used to ship the stuff in wagons over dirt roads. It did blow up every now and then but it isn't impossible to transport.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's an unpleasant topic...
Yes, it is. Because it once again brings into focus how the internet tends to fuel the psychoses of paranoid schizophrenics worldwide. These people need help, but instead the internet just helps them descend further into madness. It's 9/11, it's chemtrails, it's Morgellons, and above all it's depressing to watch.
I rest easier on an airplane knowing that we're soundly protected from the most bizarre Hollywood movie plot type attacks, desperately trying not think about all the simple, easy practical things the idiots running things have overlooked.
The real terrorists have got to be laughing their asses off at the way we snarl air traffic, tie up millions of dollars in police resources, botch up air travel and twist ourselves in nervous knots over nothing. I'll bet they're more than a little amused at the video of people throwing toothpaste and hair gel into dumpsters.
If the terrorist plan is to make us live in fear, scared of our shadow and squander our national treasure on security that doesn't work while we go into staggering national debt spending 5 billion a month in a no-win war half-way around the world, then I'd ask which political party is really helping the terrorists?
A small group of people could cause mass panic and a surprising amount of damage armed with nothing more dangerous than a little training and a cigarette lighter or box of kitchen matches. We are so easily spooked, then our over-reaction and fear takes the little bit of damage the terrorists actually do and magnifies it to absurd proportions. Remember the panic and fear on the east coast when the sniper and his kid were on the loose? There were road blocks, random searches, helicopters, overtime for police...one guy with a rifle. Un-fucking-real.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As a follow up, some people aren't realizing that it isn't necessary to actually have a chemical reaction and form an organic peroxide molecule to make an explosive. A solution of oxidizer and fuel can easily be a shock sensitive explosive. This requires higher concentration peroxide than is available off the shelf, but concentrating a modest amount is not very challenging.
The feasibility of this really isn't open for debate. There is no doubt that you can reliably mix two liquids and produce a high explosive that can be detonated with a sharp impact.
A quest for perfect safety from all conceivable threats is, of course, ridiculous, but I'm sure there will be many more added security measures thrown in as a result of this, to little real benefit and much general annoyance. Personally, I would have been completely comfortable flying immediately after 9/11 with absolutely no additional security measures. Statistics and probability leave me with no fear of terrorism.
John Carmack
And, to a suicide bomber, this is a downside how?
Dying from the noxious fumes in a small bathroom before you can make enough explosives to blow up the plane isn't really meeting the goals of most suicide bombers. I suggest you read the actual articles before posting from now on.
AccountKiller
Weren't most of these terrorists British-born and thus pretty well off? Actually, none of the 9/11 hijackers were poor either. Heck, Osama bin Laden himself is a millionaire.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
A few verbal slips and some video that you don't understand as a lay person do not a huge conspiracy make. Occam's Razor should be applied, as usual.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
How is that relevant? The Wikipedia article clearly states that he used liquid nitroglycerin. Nitroglycerin will be easily detected by regular modern airport explosives-detection means, which puts nitroglycerin out of consideration. The whole point of The Register article, if you read it carefully, is to research the possibilty to create explosives from apparently _innocent_ liquids.
Hell yeah! Just got out of the theater for our special 10:00 Thursday showing, and I must say the crowd was the best movie crowd I've ever seen. Cheering when snakes attack, cringing when other snakes attack, quoting lines from a film that *NO ONE* had seen "I'm tired of these mutherfucking snakes on my mutherfucking plane!".
I do believe that New Line cinema may have unintentionally hit upon a new type of film making, but much more and I'll be modded off topic. So, on to the next thread about films!