Geov Parrish | WorkingForChange.com | August 22, 2006
An article posted last Thursday in the British online outlet The Register raises a very good question I haven't seen posed anywhere else, certainly not in our sycophantic American media: was the exposed British "plot" to bring down commercial airliners by mixing harmless household chemicals in the lavatory even remotely possible from the standpoint of basic chemistry?
To address that question, it's worth quoting from The Register's article:
"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. ... 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.
First, you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.
But let's assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you've got them on hand.
Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It's all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don't forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked "perishable foods"), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You're going to need them.
It's best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate -- especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation -- to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.
Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide/acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.
After a few hours -- assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities -- you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.
The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible."
I'm no chemist, but if The Register's description is true, it raises another question: was the dramatic inconveniencing this month of untold hundreds of thousands of air travelers around the US, and probably millions around the world, justified as a reaction to such an unlikely threat? Or is this all about the politics of fear, yet another in a long line of overhyped terrorist "plots" that got tons of government hype and, thus, media attention, but which in reality never got much farther than the fertile yet bumbling imaginations of a few would-be jihadists?
The fact is, a number of the British plotters didn't even have passports yet (which in Britain, take months to obtain), let alone plane tickets, so not only was a "catastrophe" not likely, but it also wasn't "days away." Even if they had the technical know-how to develop the bomb as described, which seems like, um, a stretch. Certainly, the plot was not developed or imminent enough to justify the panicky overreaction of US and other Western authorities.
These plots and lurid announcements accumulate; each necessarily has to be a bit more lurid than the last, as in this year's Miami, Canadian, and now British busts, so as to properly frighten a public plagued by a short attention span. In most cases, the "plots" turn out to be far less credible than originally advertised (remember Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber?), with charges quietly either reduced or dropped entirely. Their fantasies become fodder in a still larger war, the endless war for political power.
Meanwhile, a truly well-trained team of commandos could probably commandeer an airplane with their bare hands. And if you truly want to smuggle explosives on board, all you'd really need is to blow yourself up –- literally. Line up a sympathetic jihadist surgeon and anesthesiologist, and insert the bomb in your abdominal cavity. Let it heal a bit, don't forget your cell phone detonator, and happy travels. Good luck stopping it. Or, forget a plane; T-bone a boatful of explosives into one of those floating cities called cruise ships, somewhere in international waters. That's the sort of serious, militarily-minded terrorist activity authorities should be worried about.
There have been credible reports that British authorities, unconcerned about any imminent threat, wanted to wait and let the plot unfold, so as to gather more information and evidence regarding the people involved, but that Washington pushed hard for early arrests. Gee, I wonder why? A November election that is likely to turn on Republican mismanagement of the so-called "Global War On Terror" wouldn't have anything to do with the timing of arrests and the unprecedented (and helpfully color-coded) security alert, would it?
Would it?
(c) 2006, WorkingForChange.com
URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=21261
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