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Liquid Terror Charges Dropped
A Pakistani judge has decided to drop terrorism charges against the man described as a "key figure" in the alleged plan to blow up flights out of London using liquid explosives. Instead of facing charges of terrorism for the plot, which forced many travelers to follow strict guidelines with respect to liquids, Rashid Raud now faces charges such as forgery. From the article: "Several commentators said the threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and that it helped to demonise British Muslims of Pakistani origin. The Crown Prosecution Service in the UK said the dropping of charges against Mr Rauf in Pakistan would "make no difference" to the case against the men charged in Britain."
I'd assume this means we're not going to have to take off our shoes or check our liquids anymore? Oh wait, I keep on assuming the TSA isn't a government agency run by the retarded and/or blind.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Now that that's cleared up, can I finally bring my oh-so-dangerous fifth of vodka in the same carry-on I use to hold my laptop so I can drink myself back into unconsciousness when the oh-so-harmless lithium batteries run out?
Numerous experts have said there's no practical or safe way to make a bomb from separate liquids onboard an airplane. Google for it, you'll be amazed how vaccuus the allegation from London police is.
Which leaves us with only one reason why the UK government would make such a noise around this fantasy: to raise the terror feeling in the general population in order to pass more restrictive laws and embed the police state a little deeper.
I keep wondering why nobody stands up to these clowns. There isn't a shred of evidence to support the current rules that prevent people from bringing soda pops and baby bottles in airplanes. Quite the contrary. Yet people seem to accept this. It's 1984 unfolding before our very eyes in Britain and in the US and that makes me sad...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's not physically possible to do the "mix household liquids" terrorist plot in a plane. It takes hours, releases a lot of fumes, and requires control over the temperature. The officials know this.
The "safety" measures were a show.
They had nothing to do with keeping people safe, and everything to do with keeping people affraid.
You can't take the sky from me...
Not sure if 'safety' would be a top priority.
The fact that the courts are not finding enough evidence to convict only support this theory. Combine that with timing of the event, and the new scare policies implemented in Airports, along with the speeches made by certain political parties (i.e. better not vote for our opponents or next time this would have killed your newborn child, puppy dog, and a baby seal) and you have yourself what appears to be a bonified piece of engineered political propaganda.
Interesting, are the times we live; the methods used to influence public opinion, and therefore events and public control, are no different than they were 50-60 years ago when the world was in turmoil. We never really learn do we?
Nowadays all politics are global. Pakistan is in America's back yard, Britain is a puppet state. Stories like this on Slashdot just reflect reality, not how some anonymous coward from Outer Fencepost, Wyoming would like things to be.
Pining for the fjords
However it appears an increasing number of my rights have been going offline as of late...
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Sounds like the batch of home-made beer my dad made when I was 10...
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
I agree with everything you said, but there is something I would like to add: what the authorities did wasn't even sound police work. It was a lame attempt for some good PR to justify the cost and inconvenience of all these policies designed to make us feel safe, even if they don't actually work.
Let us assume for the moment that there really was a plot. Instead of a photo-op and a few headlines, the smart thing to do would have been to continue efforts to infiltrate the group, gather more evidence and when there is a case, quietly arrest the suspects and let the justice system do it's job. Of course, I am making the huge assumption that the people in charge of the investigation were not subject to political interference at home, or abroad.
Unfortunately, the people who make homeland security policies seem to make decisions based on theater rather than plain-old boring police work. One gets you headlines, and the other gets you results. What a shame that massaging their own egos is priority #1.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Perhaps to travel with my documents secure (and not searched) and unfettered travel between states? There must be a reason this was spelled out by our forefathers...
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The videos were from Brainiac, and if you look carefully in the slow motion of the first bathtub they blow up, you can see the wire that leads over the size to the charge they set off. I've worked with cesium and rubidium, and they're not too much stronger than potassium- not enough that such a small amount would blow it up, anyway. Simply put, they fudged it with a small charge to wow the audience. Some great science going on there.
As for the "new terrorist binary explosive" video, that's simply a small demo charge in the post used to support the melon. The shower of sparks pretty much gives it away. No tiny amount of chemical exposives can cause that much damage. Moreover, if it were that strong, the author whipped up a massive batch of the stuff (in relative terms)- an explosive sufficiently sensitive to shock initiation that mixing it the wrong way would have killed him, when he could have made a much smaller batch. It's just silliness. It also seems the sky is a bit darker after the "explosion," as if the melon were removed and a small pyro charge was set off and spliced in there. The quantity of explosives used is far too small, even for the most powerful of primary explosives.
Disclaimer: I am, in fact, an explosives chemist with extensive experience with primary, secondary, and blasting explosives, including terrorist "improvised" explosives and devices.
The IRA received most of their funding from the USA, and the 'Real IRA' probably still has weapons left over from that. The big benefit of the WTC attacks from a British perspective was that the USA suddenly decided that funding terrorists wasn't cool anymore.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's also hard to be a leading superpower when our leadership is so incompetent, the rest of the world doesn't respect us. Right now, the only reason anyone listens to us is because we have bigger guns and lots of consumers to buy crap, and that's embarrassing. I'd rather be respected than feared.