Tannishblog

The Plot sickens…

David Farber of interesting-people.org shares with the world another assessment of the implausibility of the airline terrorist plot. It seems Perry E. Metger has been studying his chemistry and share his insights with us ignoramuses who might be buying into the propaganda ministries fictions. As he bigins:

A disclaimer, I'm working entirely off of news reported by people who don't know the difference between soft drinks and nail polish remover, but the information I've seen has the taste of being real. As near as I can tell, it is claimed that the terrorists planned to make organic peroxides in situ on board an airplane and use them to destroy the plane.

This seems, at least given my initial examination of the idea, implausible.

He continues with a primer on basic chemistry as it pertains to the alleged liquid explosives, specifically how astronomically difficult it would be to produce inside a "jittery" airliner lav.

So, lets say you have your oxidizer mixture and now you are going to mix it with acetone. In a proper lab environment, that's not going to be *too* awful — your risk of dying horribly is significant but you could probably keep the whole thing reasonably under control — you can use dry ice to cool a bath to -78C, say, and do the reaction really slowly by adding the last reactant dropwise with an addition funnel. If you're mixing the stuff up in someone's bathtub, like the guys who bombed the London subways a year ago did, you can take some reasonable precautions to make sure that your reaction doesn't go wildly out of control, like using a lot of normal ice and being very, very, very careful and slow. You need to keep the stuff cool, and you need to be insanely meticulous, or you're going to be in a world of hurt.
So, we've covered in the lab and in the bathtub. On an airplane? On an airplane, the whole thing is ridiculous. You have nothing to cool the mixture with. You have nothing to control your mixing with. You can't take a day doing the work, either. You are probably locked in the tiny, shaking bathroom with very limited ventilation, and that isn' going to bode well for you living long enough to get your explosives manufactured. In short, it sounds, well, not like a very good idea.
If you choke from fumes, or if your explosives go off before you've got enough made to take out the airplane — say if you only have enough to shatter the mirror in the bathroom and spray yourself with one of the most evil oxidizers around — you aren't going to be famous as the martyr who killed hundreds of westerners. Your determination and willingness to die doesn't matter — you still need to get the job done.

His conclusion?

Anyway, from all of this, I conclude that either

1) The terrorists had a brilliant idea for how to combine oxidizer and a ketone or ether to make some sort of nasty organic peroxide explosive in situ that has escaped me so far. Perhaps that's true — I'm not omniscient and I have to confess that I've never tried making the stuff at all, let alone in an airplane bathroom.

2) The terrorists were smuggling on board pre-made organic peroxide explosives. Clearly, this is not a new threat at all — organic peroxide explosives have been used by terrorists for decades now. Smuggling them in a bottle is not an interesting new threat either — clearly if you can smuggle cocaine in a bottle you can smuggle acetone peroxide. I would hope we had means of looking for that already, though, see below for a comment on that.

3) The terrorists were phenomenally ill informed, or hadn't actually tried any of this out yet — perhaps what we are told was a "sophisticated plot" was a bunch of not very sophisticated people who had not gotten very far in testing their ideas out, or perhaps they were really really dumb and hadn't tried even a small scale experiment before going forward.

Finally, he can't help poke fun at all the Hollywood Hysterics involved in this bogus political stunt, by listing all the ways a reasonably smart person (himself, I presume) can think of to sabotage an in-flight movie. If it wasn't so serious a matter to commit pathological fraudulence of information for political gain, I would laugh.

A bloke I’ve never heard of before, one Craig Murray, has a fascinating take on the real story behind the media circus surrounding the alleged Airplane Terrorists of London (Ow-ooooo!)

Pardon me.

Mr. Murray, drawing from impressive credentials as the UK diplomat of Uzbekistan, has parsed the few drops of reality from the gallons of ink devoted to this story in the Britain. Here’s his take:

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.

[…]

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 shoveled.

One must admit, there is quite a precedent for this pattern. WMD’s, anyone? The world has seen the like before. The tactics are eerily similar.

The morals to the story: Don’t believe everything you read, especially if it is repeated on every possible channel. As Mr. Murray notes, what we have been forced to listen to all week is pure propaganda. In that vein, I will close with Craig’s last sentence:

Be skeptical. Be very, very skeptical.

Every day one can find a blogger that really hits on something. Nicholas Carr opines on the state of blogosphere and it’s likely future via the concept of innocent fraud.

Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw.

Read more of Rough Type’s The Great Unread.