'A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale'

[NVMojo]

I'm still trying to believe this ...

· Police: up to 12 aircraft to be blown up
· Plan to hide liquid explosives in luggage
· Five US cities targeted
· 24 held after dawn raids
· Travel chaos hits thousands

Sandra Laville, Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd
Friday August 11, 2006
The Guardian
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pic...

Armed police officers patrol Glasgow Airport terminal. Photograph: Jeff Mitchell/Getty Images



British suicide bombers were within days of blowing up 12 passenger jets above five US cities in an unprecedented terrorist attack designed to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale", counterterrorism sources claimed last night.
Anti-terrorist agents said they had uncovered the plot from surveillance of a group of young British Muslims, which began nearly a year ago and was on a scale never before undertaken.

US and British counterterrorism officials claimed the men, the majority British Muslims of Pakistani descent, were going to disguise liquid explosive as bottles of soft drink and carry them in their hand luggage on to US-bound planes leaving British airports.

When the jets were in midair over American cities, they planned to combine the explosives and detonate them using an electric charge from an iPod, the security services believe. BA flights were among the targets. US officials said the bombers had been seeking to hit New York, Washington, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles. Other airlines targeted were thought to be United, American and Continental.

more...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1842272,00...

[kaygore]

1. We really need to distance ourselves from the British now, right?

Bush must understand now, by his simple-minded logic, that having such a dangerous ally as the UK puts us all at terrible risk!

Hmmm...guess I'll leave DU for a while and spread this logic around the RW blogsphere. They'll eat it up.

[soothsayer]

2. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. I thought it was over the oceans at first?

[Warren Stupidity]

4. It is unimaginative that this could happen.

Oh sorry I meant unimaginable.

I need to go see the myth busters episode where they demonstrate the feasability of this particular technique.

I believe that there were conspirators. I suspect that they were about as realistic as our Shoe Bomber in terms of actual threat. I wonder just how involved in all of this the British agent was, seeing as how they were tracking this plot for over a year.

[kestrel91316]

3. Hmmmm.............. mass murder "on an unimaginable scale"???

Let's do the math here.............12 airplanes times maybe 300 people on each plane equals 3600 fatalities, plus a few more IF the planes exploded over land versus the sea.

Given how many died on 9-11 it doesn't seem "unimaginable" to me, but then a lot of things are unimaginable to this rather unimaginative administration.

Besides, haven't about 30 times that died in Iraq at our hands and the hands of the insurgents? Oh, but Western lives count for ten times as much as those icky foreigners' lives..............

[index555]

5. oohhh, yuck, foreigners....

[kestrel91316]

7. Excuse me. I meant furriners.

[The_Casual_Observer]

6. That guy was some local police guy who had no real authority.

The entire deal is bogus. Wait a few more hours until the French & German press start tearing this shit apart.

[yellowcanine]

8. "Within days of blowing up 12 passenger jets"......Let's review the facts:

No tickets bought, no reservations made. What were these guys going to do - walk in and buy transatlantic tickets at the counter in the middle of a busy travel season?

No explosives or exploding sneakers found that we know of - what were they going to blow up the planes with? - hydrogen peroxide, shampoo and urine, mixed together in the plane bathroom and it's 75 virgin time in paradise?

Who wants to bet that no one will ever be put on trial for this "plot" - and if they are - no one will ever be convicted?

[orwell]

9. A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale...

...I guess they must be talking about the US and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

[stranger81]

10. I'd call Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

the anniversaries of which were only days ago, a "plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale."

JMHO.

[Bark Bark Bark]

11. "How. Gullible. Are. You?"

I work at an airport. In fact, I work for an airline directly involved in 9-11.

Today, as my work crew was gathered in the briefing room for the swing shift briefing, one of my co-workers stood up and belted out, "Thank God they caught those bastards! Can you imagine what would've happened? It would've been the end of this airline and the end of us!"

"How. Gullible. ARE. YOU?" another voice declared, deliberately spacing each word. Everyone's head swiveled to the second co-worker.

"The last time we had elections, all we heard was ORANGE ALERT! ORANGE ALERT!," the second worker continued. "Whenever a Democrat made news, the news guys screamed ORANGE ALERT! Whenever Bush f***ed up, they screamed ORANGE ALERT!"

"That stopped right after the election," I chimed in.

"Yeah," the second co-worker said. "Now, it's the day after Liberman got his face scrubbed in the primaries, and the GOP got slapped around hard, and the real elections are coming up. Suddenly, they're screaming that they've saved the damn world from a secret plot, like on 24. They've arrested a bunch of people who'll never get a trial and they're telling us they were going to kill thousands of people with soft drinks. What timing, huh?"

"It's an Orangeaide alert," a third co-worker shouted, getting a few giggles.

"And now those f***ers will be telling you that they're the only one who can keep America safe, even though they're the ones who let 9-11 happen in the first place. You can believe that s**t if you want, but I don't buy it."

The first co-worker: "Oh...yeah."

I wanted to--but didn't--jump on my own soapbox right there, and go on about all the plots White House press secretaries have claimed to have been foiled, but refused to detail for "security reasons." Now, those details flow freely...for some reason.

Wait a week or two. I would bet money the "plot" story will begin to unravel. It smells to high heaven.

In the meantime, we'll see just how gullible people are.

[windbreeze]

12. Wait a minute, wait a minute....

When they caught the guy in 1996 that was responsible for bombing the WTC the first time in 1993....didn't he have plans on him for bombing 12....12, mind you...the exact same number of planes...over the Pacific ocean...planes flying from points East to the US, and planes flying West from the US??? I seem to recall reading about it...now isn't it strange that we have a plan once again for the bombing of 12 planes...(what is it with 12 planes)only this time, over cities in the US...are they perfecting the plan little by little and hoping no one catches on?
idiots...

I have to wonder if there were any put options placed on airlines...seems they are targeted for destruction, if not actually by bombs, by "terroristic" type threats...
wb