On this topic, here's Teresa Nielsen Hayden, cogent and no-nonsense
as usual. I recommend that folks following this thread take the time
go read this post, and its associated links, carefully.
Udhay
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007871.html
August 17, 2006
Nothing to hope for but fear itself
Posted by Teresa at 11:28 AM * 52 comments
I'm a fan of [9]The Register (motto: Biting the hand that feeds IT), a
tough, cynical, technologically savvy news site that does a lot of
original reporting. If you haven't seen it already, allow me to
recommend their article, [10]Mass murder in the skies: was the plot
feasible? (Short version: "No, and we laugh derisively at your
stupidity.")
Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers. It
would be tedious to enumerate the movie terrorists who've employed
relatively harmless liquids that, when mixed, immediately rain
destruction upon an innocent populace, like the seven angels of God's
wrath pouring out their bowls full of pestilence and pain.
The funny thing about these movies is, we never learn just which two
chemicals can be handled safely when separate, yet instantly blow us
all to kingdom come when combined. Nevertheless, we maintain a great
eagerness to believe in these substances, chiefly because action movies
wouldn't be as much fun if we didn't.
Now we have news of the recent, supposedly real-world, terrorist plot
to destroy commercial airplanes by smuggling onboard the benign
precursors to a deadly explosive, and mixing up a batch of liquid death
in the lavatories. So, The Register has got to ask, were these guys for
real, or have they, and the counterterrorist officials supposedly
protecting us, been watching too many action movies?
We're told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone
triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common
household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. A
little hair dye, drain cleaner, and paint thinner--all easily concealed
in drinks bottles--and the forces of evil have effectively smuggled a
deadly bomb onboard your plane.
Or at least that's what we're hearing, and loudly, through the
mainstream media and its legions of so-called "terrorism experts." But
what do these experts know about chemistry? Less than they know about
lobbying for Homeland Security pork, which is what most of them do for
a living. But they've seen the same movies that you and I have seen,
and so the myth of binary liquid explosives dies hard.
Better killing through chemistry
Making a quantity of TATP sufficient to bring down an airplane is not
quite as simple as ducking into the toilet and mixing two harmless
liquids together. ...
A long, knowledgeable, pungent description of the technical
difficulties follows. For further commentary on this same problem, see
the recent [11]comment thread on "I got your cold equations right
here."
As The Register goes on to summarize their analysis:
So the fabled binary liquid explosive--that is, the sudden mixing of
hydrogen peroxide and acetone with sulfuric acid to create a
plane-killing explosion, is out of the question. Meanwhile, making TATP
ahead of time carries a risk that the mission will fail due to
premature detonation, although it is the only plausible approach.
Certainly, if we can imagine a group of jihadists smuggling the
necessary chemicals and equipment on board, and cooking up TATP in the
lavatory, then we've passed from the realm of action blockbusters to
that of situation comedy.
It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK
and the USA--and the "terrorism experts" who inform them and wheedle
billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition
gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology
gear--have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have
even acted upon it.
We've given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes
with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane,
whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would
have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence,
and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year.
But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves
governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot.
Liquids are now banned in aircraft cabins (while crystalline white
powders would be banned instead, if anyone in charge were serious about
security). Nearly everything must now go into the hold, where adequate
amounts of explosives can easily be detonated from the cabin with cell
phones, which are generally not banned.
Action heroes
The al-Qaeda franchise will pour forth its bowl of pestilence and
death. We know this because we've watched it countless times on TV and
in the movies, just as our officials have done. Based on their
behavior, it's reasonable to suspect that everything John Reid and
Michael Chertoff know about counterterrorism, they learned watching the
likes of Bruce Willis, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Vin Diesel, and The Rock
...
For some real terror, picture twenty guys who understand op-sec, who
are patient, realistic, clever, and willing to die, and who know what
can be accomplished with a modest stash of dimethylmercury.
You won't hear about those fellows until it's too late.
The Register has been covering this beat for a while now. See their
earlier articles on [12]Homebrew chemical terror bombs, hype or
horror?, and [13]Amazing terror weapons: the imaginary suitcase nuke.
Onward.
From The Nation: [14]Fear and Smear, on the symbiosis between Muslim
terrorists and American politicians, and Bush & Co.'s increasingly
desperate reliance on scaring American voters into supporting them.
[15]The nexus of politics and terror from MSBNC's Keith Olbermann. Same
subject, only he traces specific correlations between terrorism scares
and the advantages Bush & Co. have derived from them.
In general I don't approve of weblogs duplicating entire articles, but
it's useful for keeping the complete text available. the Tennessee
Guerrilla Women site has [16]Paul Krugman's "Uses of Fear" (originally
in the NYTimes) on Bush & Co.'s history of fearmongering, and their
neglect of real security issues. I love the last two paragraphs:
Above all, many Americans now understand the extent to which Mr. Bush
abused the trust the nation placed in him after 9/11. Americans no
longer believe that he is someone who will keep them safe, as many did
even in 2004; the pathetic response to Hurricane Katrina and the
disaster in Iraq have seen to that.
All Mr. Bush and his party can do at this point is demonize their
opposition. And my guess is that the public won't go for it, that
Americans are fed up with leadership that has nothing to hope for but
fear itself.
Available in Richard White's weblog, "My 2 Cents," is the full text of
[17]Dan Froomkin's piece in the Washington Post on how the White House
timed their attacks on Democrats as being "weak on security" to
coincide with announcements they knew were coming about the supposed
terrorist plot.
Ned Lamont has been a major target of Bush & Co.'s latest piece of
terror-opportunism. [18]From ABC News:
Democratic Senate nominee Ned Lamont, the anti-war candidate who
toppled Sen. Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary, says he was
surprised by Lieberman and Vice President Dick Cheney's claims that his
victory could embolden terrorists.
"My God, here we have a terrorist threat against hearth and home and
the very first thing that comes out of their mind is how can we turn
this to partisan advantage. I find that offensive," Lamont said in an
interview Sunday with The Associated Press.
After British officials disclosed they had thwarted a terrorist airline
bombing plot on Thursday, Lieberman warned that Lamont's call for a
phased-withdrawal of troops from Iraq would be "taken as a tremendous
victory" by terrorists.
Cheney on Wednesday had suggested that Lamont's victory might encourage
"the al-Qaida types" who want to "break the will of the American people
in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task."
Lamont said Lieberman's swipe at his candidacy "sounded an awful lot"
like Cheney. "It surprised me," he said. "It seemed almost
orchestrated."
No kidding. The amount of energy and gratuitous nastiness the
administration has expended on Ned Lamont, and the matching Carolrovian
tone of their and Lieberman's rhetoric, has convinced me of one thing:
Lieberman wasn't just suborned, he was turned. It seems almost unfair
that someone who looks so much like Senator Palpatine should be acting
like a cardboard villain. I haven't seen the like since the days of
"Nixon can't possibly be as shifty as he looks."
More on the non-believability of British reports:
[19]Bellatrys has contributed links to three superior articles on this
subject. One's from [20]Bloggerheads, and makes the Exploding Shampoo
Plot sound even thinner and more contrived.
The other two links are to essays by Craig Murray: writer, broadcaster,
former British Ambassador to the Cenetral Asian Repuublic of
Uzbekistan. He really knows his stuff. His essays are attempts to
reconstruct the true story. Here's the first, [21]The UK Terror plot:
what's really going on?, 14 August; and the second, [22]Hitting a
Nerve, 17 August.
Counterpunch is definitely not my favorite news source, but
[23]Christopher Reed's article about the contradictions and
improbabilities in the official stories about the Walthamstow terrorist
plot, and the convenience of its timing, sounds plausible to me.
[24]Monsters and Critics is likewise dubious about the story.
Here's another underrated news source: the World Socialist Web Site.
They do solid news analysis that doesn't assume you're stupid, but also
isn't opaque if you haven't been following eight or ten newspapers a
day. Personally, I don't care whether their site has "Socialist" in its
name. They give good explanation. Anyway, they've run long chewy
articles on [25]The politics of the latest terror scare (15 August) and
[26]Contradictions, anomalies, questions mount in UK terror scare (17
August).
Just to make the whole situation smell a little riper, here's
[27]AmericaBlog pointing out that the extremely credible Seymour Hersh,
in his latest article in The New Yorker, says the Bush administration
gave Israel the green light to attack Lebanon earlier this summer. That
is: before the Hezbollah kidnappings that supposedly prompted the
attack. These idiots haven't learned a thing. They're still exploiting
supposed terrorist threats as a cover for cooking up insanely
ill-conceived wars in the Middle East.
Here's the [28]Seymour Hersh article itself.
And, finally, the Washington Post [29]discusses the increasing--no,
breathtaking--extent to which Bush, and even more so Cheney, have been
contriving to shake off the press corps that would normally accompany
them. Instead, they're flying around the country unscrutinized, on
taxpayer money, in order to speak to closed-door gatherings of their
contributors and other staunch supporters.
Previous administrations brought the press along. If you've been
running on memories, augmented by TV shows like The West Wing, you've
probably been assuming they still do. Not so. As in so many other
areas, Bush and Cheney have stealthily rewritten the rules.
I swear, this feels like summer reruns. Bush and Cheney are off
pursuing other activities, while we're getting treated to the same old
episodes of Terrorist Threat Tonight. I feel slighted. We're Americans,
dammit. We're supposed to be worth the trouble it takes to generate a
few first-rate new deceptions.
Making Light copyright 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 by Patrick &
Teresa Nielsen Hayden. All rights reserved.
References
1. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/index.rdf
2. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
3. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007874.html
4. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007882.html
5. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight
6. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007874.html
7. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
8. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007882.html
9. http://www.theregister.co.uk/
10.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/print.html
11. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007856.html#007856
12. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/04/chemical_bioterror_analysis/
13. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/31/red_mercury_trial/
14. http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?pid=111640
15.
http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Olbermann_The_Nexus_of_politics_and_0815.html
16.
http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2006/08/krugman-hoping-for-fear.html";
17. http://blog.richardgwhite.com/?p=20
18. http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/print?id=2308242
19. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007871.html#139120
20. http://www.bloggerheads.com/archives/2006/08/mockup_setup_or.asp
21. http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007871.html
22. http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/hitting_a_nerve.html
23. http://www.counterpunch.com/reed08142006.html
24.
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/uk/article_1189480.php/Analysis_U.K._doubts_over_terror_plot
25. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/terr-a15_prn.shtml
26. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/terr-a17.shtml
27.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/08/hersh-cheney-bush-gave-israel.html
28. http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact
29.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/11/AR2006081101834_pf.html
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
