Oh, Brother!!
Well, now they've gone too far - the "official" word is: NO LIQUIDS OR GELS OF ANY KIND WILL BE PERMITTED IN CARRY-ON BAGGAGE. ITEMS MUST BE IN CHECKED BAGGAGE. This includes all beverages, shampoo, suntan lotion, creams, tooth paste, hair gel, and other items of similar consistency.
Well, until they stop this silliness, I won't be flying unless ( Read more... )
Well, until they stop this silliness, I won't be flying unless ( Read more... )
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Chemicals sitting in anyone's bathroom at home could be used to make an easily smuggled bomb that would badly damage a passenger jet, and experts have been warning about this danger for years. The difficult part, experts say, is putting together such a bomb without blowing yourself up.
British police said they foiled a plot on Thursday to blow up aircraft flying between Britain and the United States, and U.S. and British authorities banned liquids, including drinks, hair gels and lotions, from carry-on baggage.
"My hunch is that the reason they are prohibiting this stuff is that it does obviously have the potential of being assembled on board so that it doesn't look like a bomb going through the X-ray machine," said Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who helped write a government report on explosives threats to airlines.
Such mundane items as nail polish remover, disinfectants and hair coloring contain chemicals can be combined to make an explosion and are not detectable by "sniffing" machines, which detect plastic explosives but are not used with all baggage.
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Explosive Gel Was to Be Concealed in Sports Drink
August 10, 2006 1:56 PM
Richard Esposito Reports:
The suspected terror plotters arrested in Britain had planned to conceal their liquid or gel explosives inside a modified sports beverage drink container and trigger the device with the flash from a disposable camera.
ABC News has learned exclusively that the plotters planned to leave the top of the bottle sealed and filled with the original beverage but add a false bottom, filled with a liquid or gel explosive. The terrorists planned to dye the explosive mixture red to match the sports drink sealed in the top half of the container.
This, they thought, would ensure that they would be able to pass through security -- even if they were asked to unseal and drink the beverage.
The flash in a disposable camera has enough electrical power, they apparently believed, to set off the homemade explosive.
There are any number of homemade or modified commercial liquids that would have made effective explosives, with enough energy to damage or destroy a plane.
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That said, the explosive would not be enough to bring down the plane. Maybe depressurize it, but not bring it down, unless half the passengers blew their asses up.
It still strikes me as a frigging movie plot, and dubious. False bottoms to cans aren't that easy to make without it being noticed. Nitrocellulose clothing is more feasible.
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How's that for a movie plot? Incendiaries could still damage the structural integrity of a jet, causing it to depressurize and break up.
Or you could get several guys to make a diversion while a couple more pried open one of the emergency doors with an improvised crowbar made from a coffee pot, while chanting "Allah Ahkbar!".
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In this, and every us vs. terrorist situation, the terrorists will Always Win.
Unless they sabotage their own plans by getting caught or doing something equally stupid.
Why? Because they have the upper hand. 100% anonymity until they ruin it for themselves. We don't know who they are. Even if you could safe guard the airlines (unlikely), what about the water supply? What about cars? If I went outside and disabled the breaks of every car on my block, which I probably could do unnoticed, who many people would I kill/injure?
What about our food?
What about our roads? How hard would it be, really, to shut down a segment of freeway?
What about college frat parties? How many aspiring students could you axe in a frat house?
What about telephone poles? Sewers? Aqueducts?
What about just plain old mass murder, emulated serial killer style?
What about sheer Visceral carnage? These guys are willing to die, why not do a crapload of pcp in a grocery store and see how many 6 year old girls you can kill by disembowelment with a quality knife before you blow yourself up? The idea is to terrorize, and killing 6 year olds might not do squat to the economy, but it'd really really screw us up as a nation. Ensure enough hate to keep this war on terror going forever, thereby siphoning considerable wealth and respect for our country away over time.
Can you prevent all this?
You need to make a choice... treat everybody like a potential terrorist, or accept that you cannot stop one fuckhead from killing a whole lot of people if he's cunning enough.
And, trust me, until he tells us who he is, you cannot. You have to hope that he screws up in planning (as these fundy idiots tend to do), or that in execution of the plan, somebody steps forward and stops him. Which may happen in a well armed, intelligent, population with something that resembled actual values... but not often in our's.
Not now that we're mostly a society of afraid cowards.
--flutter
PS: I'm still driving wherever the hell i need to go. Screw the airlines.
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