Todays Terror alert

[Furr]

Yeh I don't meant what their culture developed hundred of years ago. I mean today in this day and age what is the benefit that Islam has given to the UK.

 

[throdgrain]

They have made some fearsome rucksack improvements.

 

[Trem]

They invented the convertable bus and high tower plane parking.

 

[leggy]

Well I'm glad the majority of posters in this thread will never have any major political standing. It worries me, some of the thoughts in here.

Except Trem that is. I love his plan and think it will be an effective couter terrorism measure. When combined with tomatoe sauce though. NOT BROWN SAUCE.

 

[Munkey]

It'd never work. Arguments would erupt over the exact definition of a 'round' of sandwiches. The goverment would become bogged down in a bitter battle to create legislation with the exact definition of how many rounds to put out in the airport.

 

[throdgrain]

Put a few rounds into a beardy rucksack wearer

 

[Trem]

Except Trem that is. I love his plan and think it will be an effective couter terrorism measure. When combined with tomatoe sauce though. NOT BROWN SAUCE.

OMGZORZ!!! Red sauce........I aren't lying now but I am almost crying at the thought....a bacon butty.....with.....red......RED......sauce*?


HP Sauce for teh win!

I am so sick of these Exploding Mong threads that I am now going to mention bacon in each and every one from now on, bacon and maybe cheese sometimes. We are all sat at our desks tapping away on our keyboards putting the world to rights, its all shit, fuck 'em, forget about 'em. Search for b00bs and plasma tellys rather than starting a thread each time an imbecile tries to kill something.

Jesus, its all that FH has been lately, I may start a thread about me being right on something and everyone else being wrong again.








*wub

 

[rynnor]

HP Sauce for teh win!

Bah - infidel - clearly Bacon and Mayo is God's grand design!!

 

[rynnor]

I disagree with that old chesnut Rynnor. We must address the causes of <insert anything> is the way liberal thinking has continued for the last few decades. I would have agreed with it myself at one point. However having lived through the past few decades fills me with experience. The must- address-the-causes statement is a fine soundbite but offers NO practical solutions except of the "free holidays for criminals" type. You know, its not thier fault they're peodophiles/rapists/muggers/arsonists/terrorists we must try to understand thier problems.

Not my point really - any solution that just seeks to brand the terrorists as random nutters whilst ignoring the political dimension is doomed to failure no matter how good the anti-terrorist squads get.

Society is fundamentally vulnerable to terrorism - if we ignore the causes or we just say its all the extremists fault then how the hell will we stop it?

Its not rocket science - we must make an exit plan for Iraq - the only practical one is to split the country into 3 parts for the Sunni/Shia and the Kurds and then we have to really let them govern themselves - if they choose an Islamic based government then thats their choice and we have to leave em to it - we cannot force these countries into western style democracies - attempts to do so only make it less likely.

We should then look at what aid we can give to the palastineian's and again they have chosen Hamas as their democratic choice - we have to respect that rather than take sanctions out against them.

The Lebanese peace deal must go through in a way that is fair to both sides rather than pro-israeli.

Finally we have to look at an exit strategy for afghanistan - this is the hardest of all since we cannot allow the country to fall back into Taleban hands but we cant stay there holding it together forever...

 

[Calaen]

Not my point really - any solution that just seeks to brand the terrorists as random nutters whilst ignoring the political dimension is doomed to failure no matter how good the anti-terrorist squads get.

Society is fundamentally vulnerable to terrorism - if we ignore the causes or we just say its all the extremists fault then how the hell will we stop it?

Its not rocket science - we must make an exit plan for Iraq - the only practical one is to split the country into 3 parts for the Sunni/Shia and the Kurds and then we have to really let them govern themselves - if they choose an Islamic based government then thats their choice and we have to leave em to it - we cannot force these countries into western style democracies - attempts to do so only make it less likely.

We should then look at what aid we can give to the palastineian's and again they have chosen Hamas as their democratic choice - we have to respect that rather than take sanctions out against them.

The Lebanese peace deal must go through in a way that is fair to both sides rather than pro-israeli.

Finally we have to look at an exit strategy for afghanistan - this is the hardest of all since we cannot allow the country to fall back into Taleban hands but we cant stay there holding it together forever...

So basically what you are saying is give these terrorists everything they want. I would rather boil my cock off than see those fucking scum bags get what they want.

Identify and exterminate that will teach the fuckers. I am passed caring about them and their shitty school yard sob stories, whiney fucking cocks they all need a good fucking fisting.

Spoiler

YES IN THE ARSE!

 

[nath]

Identify and exterminate that will teach the fuckers.

I understand that you're venting, and I can see why one would need to at a time like this - but do you really believe that?

Honestly?

 

[D0LLySh33p]

I found this thread hilarious.

Especially Trem

 

[nath]

By the way - I was up in Newcastle a couple of weeks ago. Went to a wetherspoons with a mate for breakfast - asked for some toast. "How many rounds?". "uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, two please?". "That's four slices..."

WTF?

Rounds! Stupid fucking term for bread related products!

 

[rynnor]

So basically what you are saying is give these terrorists everything they want. I would rather boil my cock off than see those fucking scum bags get what they want.

Identify and exterminate that will teach the fuckers. I am passed caring about them and their shitty school yard sob stories, whiney fucking cocks they all need a good fucking fisting.

Spoiler

YES IN THE ARSE!

Nah - I think that those things are just morally right - I'd also like to minimise the deaths of our Army personnel stuck in hostile territory on what in Iraq at least is a disintegrating situation.

You dont have to do what the extremists want but if you act fairly the moderates come on board and the extremists begin to look even more isolated within their own community - the new recruits dry up and the whole thing fades away.

Its the only way that can work tbh.

 

[Furr]

Even if we are venting, its better to vent on the forums than out in "teh real world" where you'll get taken to court and chucked in jail by the Ali-baba-prosecution-service for saying what you think about a group of people as they are more concerned about that than chucking paedos and murders in jail.

 

[throdgrain]

Unfortunately I have to agree Furr

 

[Mobius]

I think there was a bomb scare yesterday at a station I was at yesterday afternoon. I was just listening to my mp3 player when suddenly security guards ushered me and about 100 other people out of Ealing Broadway train station, and left us all in the road outside. Then about 4 police cars came, and they started questioning this Asian bloke who had just 5 minutes earlier been standing next to me in WHSmiths reading a copy of NME!

Unfortunately I missed absolutely everything because I couldn't be arseholed to remove my earphones from my lugholes, but it seemed a bit mental.

 

[Choc]

My dad is gutted cause he had a flight booked from spain and had to drive from malaga to uk over this weekend and has lost his money freeking easyjet

 

[bob269]

My dad is gutted cause he had a flight booked from spain and had to drive from malaga to uk over this weekend and has lost his money freeking easyjet

Is it Easyjet's fault that some extremists want to blow up their planes?

Or would you prefer for your dad to come home is 34 bodybags!

 

[tris-]

Is it Easyjet's fault that some extremists want to blow up their planes?

Or would you prefer for your dad to come home is 34 bodybags!

reminds me of some people i seen on the news. all they did was moan and whine because their plane was delayed. i wonderd why the person interviewing didnt just tell them to shut the fuck up.

 

[Mofo8]

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but is anyone else confused about the various timings of events?

When was the evil mastermind arrested by the ISI in Pakinstan?

How long had the rest of the plotters been under surveillance in the UK?

When did Tony hear about it? ("Hang on guys... could you hold off a day or two till I get my flight to the Caribbean?")

Could it be that some poor bastard has been tortured in Pakistan until he gave them two dozen names, and then the UK security services held off on raiding them until it was politically expedient? Distraction from Lebanon and a shot in the arm for the so-called war on terror (jebus... George Orwell will be spinning in his fucking grave).

Good linky here by Max Hastings, who is by no means a lefty or typical Guardian reader on what he thinks of Al Quaeda or however it's spelled this week.

 

[Wij]

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but is anyone else confused about the various timings of events?

When was the evil mastermind arrested by the ISI in Pakinstan?

How long had the rest of the plotters been under surveillance in the UK?

When did Tony hear about it? ("Hang on guys... could you hold off a day or two till I get my flight to the Caribbean?")

Could it be that some poor bastard has been tortured in Pakistan until he gave them two dozen names, and then the UK security services held off on raiding them until it was politically expedient? Distraction from Lebanon and a shot in the arm for the so-called war on terror (jebus... George Orwell will be spinning in his fucking grave).

Good linky here by Max Hastings, who is by no means a lefty or typical Guardian reader on what he thinks of Al Quaeda or however it's spelled this week.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Even The Mirror poured scorn on the idea that it was timed for Lebanon. Get out more.

 

[Mofo8]

Oh, for fuck's sake. Even The Mirror poured scorn on the idea that it was timed for Lebanon. Get out more.

Aaaahhhhh.... a Mirror reader.... that explains some things.

 

[Wij]

Aaaahhhhh.... a Mirror reader.... that explains some things.

Nope. Just happened to read it. The Mirror is almost as loony-left as The Guardian though.

Personally I read The Sun. I prefer tits to pretend news. I'd read The Sport if the Mrs would let me tbh.

 

[rynnor]

Personally I think its all a ton of shit - watch and see how many people ever actually appear in court over this...

 

[Mofo8]

Personally I think its all a ton of shit - watch and see how many people ever actually appear in court over this...

Yip, I agree completely. It's starting to look like Muslims are the new Irish. I wonder how many miscarriages of justice will emerge from this episode?

Oh... and here's a linky for Wij from his favourite paper who states that one of the suspects helped member of the public in his capacity as a bus conductor on 7/7. Hardly the actions of a raving maniacal islamofacist terrorist.

The suspects hadn't bought tickets, and many of them didn't have passports. How the fuck were they planning to board aircraft without passports. Link

Also I'll post below a excerpt from a blog that goes into how highly fucking unlikely this alleged plot is:

First, a note of introduction. Until recently, I was a computer security guy, and as with many in my profession, the application of computer security analysis to non-computer security problems was increasingly interesting to me. Now, for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, I’m back at school, studying chemistry, and I’m spending this summer in a lab doing organic synthesis work. Strangely, today I find my interests colliding.

So, I’m doing a bunch of reading, and I find the claimed method the “highly sophisticated” attackers came up with for bringing down airliners kind of implausible. I wonder if it could ever work in reality.

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.

Based on the claims in the media, it sounds like the idea was to mix H2O2 (hydrogen peroxide, but not the low test kind you get at the pharmacy), H2SO4 (sulfuric acid, of necessity very concentrated for it to work at all), and acetone (known to people worldwide as nail polish remover), to make acetone peroxides. You first have to mix the H2O2 and H2SO4 to get a powerful oxidizer, and then you use it on acetone to get the peroxides, which are indeed explosive.

A mix of H2O2 and H2SO4, commonly called “piranha bath”, is used in orgo labs around the world for cleaning the last traces out of organic material out of glassware when you need it *really* clean — thus, many people who work around organic labs are familiar with it. When you mix it, it heats like mad, which is a common thing when you mix concentrated sulfuric acid with anything. It is very easy to end up with a spattering mess. You don’t want to be around the stuff in general. Here, have a look at a typical warning list from a lab about the stuff:

http://www.mne.umd.edu/LAMP/Sop/Piranha_SOP.htm

Now you may protest “but terrorists who are willing to commit suicide aren’t going to be deterred by being injured while mixing their precursor chemicals!” — but of course, determination isn’t the issue here, getting the thing done well enough to make the plane go boom is the issue. There is also the small matter of explaining to the guy next to you what you’re doing, or doing it in a tiny airplane bathroom while the plane jitters about.

Now, they could of course mix up their oxidizer in advance, but then finding a container to keep the stuff in that isn’t going to melt is a bit of an issue. The stuff reacts violently with *everything*. You’re not going to keep piranha bath in a shampoo bottle — not unless the shampoo bottle was engineered by James Bond’s Q. Glass would be most appropriate, assuming that you could find a way to seal it that wouldn’t be eaten.

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’t 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.

You also need quite a bit of organic peroxides made by this route in order to be sure of taking down a plane. I doubt that just a few grams is going to do it — though of course the first couple of grams you are likely to go off before you make any more. The possibility of doing all this in an airplane lav or by some miracle at your seat seems really unlikely. Perhaps I’m just ignorant here — it is possible that a clever person could do it. I can’t see an easy way though.

So far as I can tell, for the pragmatic terrorist, the whole thing sounds really impractical. Why not just smuggle pre-made explosives on board? What advantage is this “binary system” idea in the first place? There are also all sorts of ideas a smart person could come up with in a few minutes of thinking — see below.

The news this morning was full of stuff about “ordinary looking devices being used as detonators”. Well, if you’re using nasty unstable peroxides as your explosive material, you don’t really need any — the stuff goes off if you give it a dirty look. I suspect a good hard rap with a hard heavy object would be more than sufficient. No need to worry about those cell phones secretly being high tech “detonators” if you’re going this route.

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.

There are other open questions I have here as well. Assuming this is really what was planned, why are the airport security making people throw away their shampoo? If you open a shampoo bottle and give it a sniff, I assure you that you’ll notice concentrated sulfuric acid very fast, not that you would want to have your nose near it for long. No high tech means needed for detection there. Acetone is also pretty distinctive — the average airport security person will recognize the smell of nail polish remover if told that is what they’re sniffing for. Oh, and even if they used a cousin of acetone, say methyl ethyl ketone (aka MEK, aka 2-butanone), you’ll still pick up on the smell.

And now, on to the fun part of this note. First they came for the nail clippers, but I did not complain for I do not cut my finger nails. Now they’ve come for the shampoo bottles, but I did not complain for I do not wash my hair. What’s next? What will finally stop people in their tracks and make them realize this is all theater and utterly ridiculous? Lets cut the morons off at the pass, and discuss all the other common things you can destroy your favorite aircraft with. Bruce Schneier makes fun of such exercises as “movie plots”, and with good reason. Hollywood, here I come!

We’re stopping people from bringing on board wet things. What about dry things? Is baby powder safe? Well, perhaps it is if you check carefully that it is, in fact, baby powder. What if, though, it is mostly a container of potassium cyanide and a molar equivalent of a dry carboxylic acid? Just add water in the first class bathroom, and LOTS of hydrogen cyanide gas will evolve. If you’re particularly crazy, you could do things like impregnating material in your luggage with the needed components. Clearly, we can’t let anyone carry on containers of talc, and we have to keep them away from all aqueous liquids.

See the elderly gentleman with the cane? Perhaps it is not really an ordinary cane. The metal parts could be filled with (possibly sintered) aluminum and iron oxide. Thermit! Worse still, nothing in a detector will notice thermit, and trying to make a detector to find thermit is impractical. Maybe it is in the hollowed portions of your luggage handles! Maybe it is cleverly mixed into the metal in someone’s wheelchair! Who knows?

Also, we can never allow people to bring on laptop computers. It is far too easy to fill the interstices of the things with explosives — there is a lot of space inside them — or to rig the lithium ion batteries to start a very hot fire (that’s pretty trivial), or if you’re really clever, you can make a new case for the laptop that’s made of 100% explosive material instead of ordinary plastic. Fun!

No liquor on board any more, of course. You can open lots of little liquor bottles and set the booze on fire, and besides, see the dangers of letting people have fluids. Even if you let them have fluids, no cans of coke — you can make a can of coke into a shiv in a few minutes. No full sized bottles of course, since you can break ‘em and use them as a sharp weapon, so no more champagne in first class either, let alone whiskey.

Then, lets consider books and magazines. Sure, they look innocent, but are they? For 150 years, chemists have known that if you take something with high cellulose content — cotton, or paper, or lots of other things — and you nitrate it (usually with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids), you get nitrocellulose, which looks vaguely like the original material you nitrated but which goes BOOM nicely. Nitrocellulose is the base of lots of explosives and propellants, including, I believe, modern “smokeless” gunpowder. It is dangerous stuff to work with, but you’re a terrorist, so why not. Make a bunch of nitrocellulose paper, print books on it, and take ‘em on board. The irony of taking out an airplane with a Tom Clancy novel should make the effort worthwhile.

So, naturally, we have to get rid of books and magazines on board. That’s probably for the best, as people who read are dangerous.

And now for a small side note. It is, of course, commonly claimed that we have nitro explosive detectors at airports, but so far as I can tell they don’t work — students from labs I work in who make nitro and diazo compounds for perfectly legitimate reasons and have trace residues on their clothes have told me the machines never pick up a thing even though this is just what they’re supposed to find, possibly because they’re tuned all the way down not to scare all the people who take nitroglycerine pills for their angina.

Now, books aren’t the only things you could nitrate. Pants and shirts? Sure. It might take a lot of effort to get things just so or they will look wrong to the eye, but I bet you can do it. Clearly, we can’t allow people on planes wearing clothes. Nudity in the air will doubtless be welcomed by many as an icebreaker, having been deprived of their computers and all reading material for entertainment.

Then of course there is the question of people smuggling explosives on board in their body cavities, so in addition to nudity, you need body cavity searches. That will, I’m sure, provide additional airport entertainment. By the way, if you really don’t think a terrorist could smuggle enough explosives on board in their rectum to make a difference, you haven’t been following how people in prison store their shivs and heroin.

However, it isn’t entirely clear that even body cavity searches are enough. If we’re looking for a movie plot, why not just get a sympathetic surgeon to implant explosives into your abdomen! A small device that looks just like a pace maker could be the detonator, and with modern methods, you could do something like setting it off by rapping “shave and a haircut” on your own chest. You could really do this — and I’d like to see them catch that one.

So can someone tell me where the madness is going to end? My back of the envelope says about as many people die in the US every month in highway accidents than have died in all our domestic terrorist incidents in the last 50 years. Untold numbers of people in the US are eating themselves to death and dying of heart disease, diabetes, etc. — I think that number is something like 750,000 people a year? Even with all the terrorist bombings of planes over the years, it is still safer to travel by plane than it is to drive to the airport, and it is even safer to fly than to walk!

At some point, we’re going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I’m happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?

 

[Tom]

Its a good article, but unfortunately it only considers one possible combination of explosive chemicals, based on rumours.

 

[Wij]

It's also missing the point. Just because the police/secuity forces may be incompetent doesn't mean they were doing it for propaganda.

 

[Mofo8]

But every time we have one of these half-assed badly thought out series of arrests and revelations it damages any real work being done by the police and security forces and badly damages relations between the muslim community and the rest of the population.

This is only my personal theory, but I suspect the timeline goes a bit like this:

1) Police/Security services in the UK have a large number of young muslims (with radical views perhaps) under surveillance perhaps since July, perhaps last year... it's a bit unclear as various official sources have reported different timings.

2) Some people were arrested and "interviewed" by the Pakistani ISI.

3) During their tortur.... erm.... interview... they probably gave the ISI the names and addresses of every single Muslim they knew in the UK, as well as spinning some tale about liquid explosives and aircraft.

4) Police/Security services in the UK swoop (probably egged on by their political masters)

5) Chaos for a few weeks until most of the suspects are released Forest Gate stylee.

You should try doing some googling for information on the ISI and claims by the Indian governement that they fund and train terror cells to carry out terrorist attacks within India. There are also alleged links between the ISI and Al Quaeda.

 

[Paradroid]

Ahh, yes, but this also doesn't take into account the in-fighting between the police and MI5 (highlighted recently with the last bungled Forest Gate terror-raid...the one with 200 coppers & the guy was shot in the chest in his own home in his pyjamas)...