NYT : British Prosecutors Open Case in Airline Bombing Plot

British Prosecutors Open Case in Airline Bombing Plot

By ALAN COWELL | April 4, 2008

LONDON — British prosecutors laid out charges on Thursday at the trial of eight men accused of planning suicide attacks on trans-Atlantic airliners “in the name of Islam,” using explosives made of household liquids mixed into a deadly cocktail, as the planes flew from London to the United States and Canada.

Peter Wright, the lead prosecutor, said the men had identified seven United Airlines, American Airlines and Air Canada flights leaving within 2 hours and 35 minutes for what were to have been coordinated attacks. The bombs were to have been made of hydrogen peroxide and other organic chemicals and smuggled onto the planes disguised as soft drinks.

“These flights were particularly vulnerable to a coordinated attack upon them while in flight,” Mr. Wright told Woolwich Crown Court. “When the midflight explosions began, the authorities would be unable to prevent the other flights from meeting a similar fate as they would already be in midflight and carrying their deadly cargo.”

The defendants might have contemplated attacking more flights, he said.

His was the first detailed official account of the events in August 2006 that sounded widespread alarms as the British police descended on 21 suspects, and terrorism threat levels were raised. Senior British officials said then that the men had not been ready to strike immediately.

But Mr. Wright said that they had been “almost ready to put their plot into practice.”

“The disaster they contemplated was not long off,” he said in court on the first day of the trial, after the jury was sworn in Wednesday.

The defendants in the trial, expected to last eight months, were identified by the police as Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, also known as Ahmed Ali Khan; Assad Sarwar, 27; Tanvir Hussain, 27; Mohammed Gulzar, 26; Ibrahim Savant, 27; Arafat Waheed Khan, 26; Waheed Zaman, 23; and Umar Islam, 29, also known as Brian Young. Mr. Sarwar was said to have lived in High Wycombe, west of London.

The others were said to be residents of east and north London.

The defendants are charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to “commit an act of violence likely to endanger the safety of an aircraft.” All have denied the accusations. Mr. Wright said the liquid explosives based on hydrogen peroxide would be mixed with the drink Tang. The plotters planned to detonate the explosives with a substance called HMTD concealed in AA batteries. The detonator would have been ignited using metal wire, a bulb or the flash from a disposable camera, he said.

Mirror : 'Fanatics' on trial for Lucozade bottle planes bomb plot

'Fanatics' on trial for Lucozade bottle planes bomb plot

April 3, 2008

A GANG of Islamic fanatics planned to kill thousands by blowing passenger planes out of the sky with bombs concealed in Lucozade and Oasis bottles, a court heard today.

The eight would-be suicide bombers targeted seven flights to America and Canada, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

But the flights would never reach their destinations of Montreal, Toronto, New York, Washington, Chicago and San Francisco.

Peter Wright QC, prosecuting, said the men “were, we say, indifferent to the carnage that was likely to ensue” and described them as having "cold-eyed certainty of the fanatic".

He told Woolwich Crown Court an "unwitting civilian population" would be the victim of the murderous plot devised in the name of Islam.

Mr Wright said: "What these men intended to bring about was a violent and deadly statement of intent that would have truly global impact."

He added that the defendants were planning “a civilian death toll from an act of terrorism on an almost unprecedented scale”, but “fortunately they were arrested before they could put those plans into effect."

Mr Wright told the jury that the bombs were to be made from hydrogen peroxide smuggled aboard in the soft drink bottles and detonated with a substance known as HMTD, which would be hidden inside AA batteries.

The accused are Abdul Ahmed Ali, aka Ahmed Ali Khan, 27, of Walthamstow, Assad Sarwar, 24, of High Wycombe, Tanvir Hussain, 27, of no fixed address, Mohammed Gulzar, 26, of Barking, Ibrahim Savant, 27, of Walthamstow, Arafat Waheed Khan, 26, of Walthamstow, Waheed Zaman, 23, of Walthamstow and Umar Islam, aka Brian Young, 29, of High Wycombe.

WaPo : Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous

Homemade, Cheap and Dangerous

Terror Cells Favor Simple Ingredients In Building Bombs

By Craig Whitlock | Washington Post Foreign Service | Thursday, July 5, 2007; Page A01

LONDON, July 4 -- The 39-page memo recovered from an al-Qaeda laptop computer in Pakistan three years ago read like an Idiot's Guide to Bombmaking. Forget military explosives or fancy detonators, it lectured. Instead, the manual advised a shopping trip to a hardware store or pharmacy, where all the necessary ingredients for a terrorist attack are stocked on the shelves.

"Make use of that which is available at your disposal and . . . bend it to suit your needs, (improvise) rather than waste valuable time becoming despondent over that which is not within your reach," counseled the author of the memo, Dhiren Barot, a British citizen who said he developed his keep-it-simple philosophy by "observing senior planners" at al-Qaeda training camps.

Barot, who was later captured near London and is serving a 30-year sentence, had envisioned an attack with multiple car bombs that would detonate liquid-gas cylinders encased in rusty nails -- a strategy with striking similarities to an attempt last week by a suspected terrorist cell to blow up three vehicles in London and Glasgow, Scotland.

Counterterrorism officials have warned for years that Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants have tried to obtain weapons of mass destruction, such as a nuclear device or chemical or biological weapons. In response, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have invested vast amounts of money to block their acquisition.

So far, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on simple, homemade bombs crafted from everyday ingredients -- such as nail-polish remover and fertilizer -- when plotting attacks in Europe and the United States.

The makeshift bombs lack the destructive potential of the conventional explosives that rake Iraq on a daily basis. They are also less reliable, as demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go off in London last week after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to cellphones.

But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage, including the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public transit system on July 7, 2005.

"It makes no difference to your average person if somebody puts a car bomb out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer who studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates, all of a sudden you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved exactly what the terrorists wanted."

The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy and cheap to manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect. According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an al-Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic airliners last summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.

It is technically simple to make such explosives. Instructions are widely available on the Internet. Experts added, however, that it takes skill and sophistication to construct a viable bomb by adding timing devices, detonators or secondary charges.

Investigations have found evidence that most al-Qaeda cells involved in bombing plots in Europe have received training in camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, or were tutored by graduates of those camps.

Among them: cell members involved in the July 7, 2005, bombings in Britain and a separate plot two weeks later that also targeted the London subway. The suspected ringleaders of the May 16, 2003, bombings in Casablanca were also al-Qaeda camp veterans who had experimented in explosives. Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in 2001, was taught how to build his shoe bomb in Afghanistan.

Stephen Swain, former head of the international counterterrorism unit at Scotland Yard in London, said the culprits in each case had been trained by seasoned al-Qaeda operatives "without a shadow of a doubt."

"It's a common thread throughout the entire theater of al-Qaeda-style operations," said Swain, who retired last year and is a senior consultant for Control Risks Group, an international security firm. "There's quite a lot of training going on in this regard."

Terrorist groups have been using homemade explosives for years. In February 1993, Islamic radicals drove a truck loaded with about 1,500 pounds of urea nitrate -- a fertilizer-based explosive -- and hydrogen-gas cylinders into a garage underneath the World Trade Center.

The bomb killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Investigators determined that the cell built the bomb in New Jersey by consulting manuals brought from Pakistan. Two years later, the ringleader of the plot, Ramzi Yousef, tried but failed to use homemade liquid explosives to down 11 airliners crossing the Pacific Ocean.

The same year, Timothy J. McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City with a truck bomb consisting of 5,000 pounds of fuel oil and fertilizer, killing 168 people.

Since then, it has become more difficult to purchase large quantities of fertilizer without attracting attention; sellers in the United States and many European countries are supposed to notify authorities of suspicious customers.

The last known attempt by al-Qaeda to construct a fertilizer-based bomb in Europe came in 2003, when a cell operative bought 1,200 pounds of bagged Kemira GrowHow fertilizer for about $200 from an agricultural supply store in Britain. The salesman, John Stone, later testified that he thought the transaction was strange because it was the wrong time of year to apply the substance and the buyer claimed to have only a small garden plot.

"I hope you're not going around bombing anything," Stone said he told the buyer half-jokingly, although the salesclerk did not notify police.

British authorities were tipped off soon after, however, by an employee at a rental-storage center where the cell was keeping the fertilizer. In April, five members of the group were convicted in the plot, known as Operation Crevice. Many European fertilizer manufacturers have since reduced the amount of ammonium nitrate, a key bomb ingredient, in their products.

Partly as a result, European and U.S. counterterrorism officials said terrorist cells are increasingly turning to peroxide-based explosives, which can be made in much smaller quantities from materials available at drugstores.

The most commonly used compound is triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. Primary ingredients for a homemade batch typically include acetone, which can be found in nail-polish remover, and hydrogen peroxide, a chemical used in hair-bleaching products.

TATP wields about 85 percent of the explosive power of TNT and can be made in a kitchen or bathroom. A dime-size amount of the explosive can ignite a fireball the size of a basketball.

The risky side of TATP is that it is highly unstable. A spark or light friction can detonate the explosive, making it extraordinarily difficult to handle. Experts and police said there have been numerous cases in which suspected terrorists -- as well as foolhardy amateur chemists -- have set off accidental explosions, resulting in death or severe injuries.

"You need to concentrate the chemicals," said Hans J. Michels, a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London. "It's a filthy job and it's dangerous, but it can be done."

Despite the dangers, al-Qaeda cells have used peroxide-based explosives in more than a dozen plots in the past decade, including the July 7 and 21, 2005, London incidents, as well as attacks in Casablanca, Istanbul and the Indonesian island of Bali, according to counterterrorism officials. Danish police also discovered TATP in September during the arrest of seven terrorism suspects in Odense.

In crystalline form, TATP looks like powdered sugar and is difficult to detect in airports; security officials need to examine an exposed surface with a swab kit or other tester to determine its presence.

"TATP and peroxide-based explosives are concern number one for the aviation industry," said Ehud Keinan, a chemistry professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and a leading researcher on the substance. "It will take some time before we are protected. Right now, we are not."

Reached by telephone in Paris, where he was scheduled to give a lecture about TATP on Wednesday at an international conference, Keinan said he often carries a small sample of the volatile compound in his carry-on luggage when he flies -- just to test airport security. "Nobody ever stops me," he said.

When asked if it might be dangerous to sit next to him on a plane, he said, "If you know how to take care of it, it's okay. If you don't know what you're doing, you're in trouble."

U.S. Homeland Security officials have said terrorism suspects arrested last August in Britain on charges that they were plotting to blow up several transatlantic airliners might have been planning to smuggle on board TATP or a related compound, HMTD, hexamethylene triperoxide diamine. Experts said it would take as little as one or two quarts of those explosives to down a large plane.

TATP was discovered in the late 19th century but was deemed to have no industrial or commercial applications because it was so unstable. Researchers generally ignored the substance until 1980, when Palestinian fighters used it for the first time in a bomb in Israel.

Palestinian bombers have used it ever since. TATP was used for the first time in an attack in Europe in July 1994, when Palestinians exploded a car bomb outside the Israeli Embassy in London.

U.S. and European counterterrorism investigators paid limited attention to the explosive until the July 2005 bombings in London. Afterward, the New York City Police Department built an exact replica of the apartment in Leeds, England, that the July 7 conspirators allegedly used to manufacture their backpack bombs.

Hugh O'Rourke, deputy inspector of the NYPD counterterrorism division, said the police department wanted to show beat officers what a kitchen-counter TATP production line would look like. He said it is easy to mistake the white powder and its cooking tools -- such as pool cleaners, large tubs or commercial-size fans -- for a common drug lab.

"Patrol cops see a lot of white powder, think it's crack, and want to touch it and package it," which could easily result in an explosion, he said. "We don't want them doing that."

Raw Story : Sources: August terror plot is a 'fiction' underscoring police failures

Sources: August terror plot is a 'fiction' underscoring police failures

British Army expert casts doubt on 'liquid explosives' threat, Al Qaeda network in UK Identified

by Nafeez Ahmed | September 18, 2006

Lieutenant-Colonel (ret.) Nigel Wylde, a former senior British Army Intelligence Officer, has suggested that the police and government story about the "terror plot" revealed on 10th August was part of a "pattern of lies and deceit."

British and American government officials have described the operation which resulting in the arrest of 24 mostly British Muslim suspects, as a resounding success. Thirteen of the suspects have been charged, and two released without charges.

According to security sources, the terror suspects were planning to board up to ten civilian airliners and detonate highly volatile liquid explosives on the planes in a spectacular terrorist operation. The liquid explosives -- either TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide), DADP (diacetone diperoxide) or the less sensitive HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine) -- were reportedly to be made on board the planes by mixing sports drinks with a peroxide-based household gel and then be detonated using an MP3 player or mobile phone.

But Lt. Col. Wylde, who was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for his command of the Belfast Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in 1974, described this scenario as a "fiction." Creating liquid explosives is a "highly dangerous and sophisticated task," he states, one that requires not only significant chemical expertise but also appropriate equipment.

Terror plot scenario "untenable"

"The idea that these people could sit in the plane toilet and simply mix together these normal household fluids to create a high explosive capable of blowing up the entire aircraft is untenable," said Lt. Col. Wylde, who was trained as an ammunition technical officer responsible for terrorist bomb disposal at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Sandhurst.

After working as a bomb defuser in Northern Ireland, Lt. Col. Wylde became a senior officer in British Army Intelligence in 1977. During the Cold War, he collected intelligence as part of an undercover East German "liaison unit," then went on to work in the Ministry of Defense to review its communications systems.

"So who came up with the idea that a bomb could be made on board? Not Al Qaeda for sure. It would not work. Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure," Wylde stated.

"This story has been blown out of all proportion. The liquids would need to be carefully distilled at freezing temperatures to extract the required chemicals, which are very difficult to obtain in the purities needed."

Once the fluids have been extracted, the process of mixing them produces significant amounts of heat and vile fumes. "The resulting liquid then needs some hours at room temperature for the white crystals that are the explosive to develop." The whole process, which can take between 12 and 36 hours, is "very dangerous, even in a lab, and can lead to premature detonation," said Lt. Col. Wylde.

If there was a conspiracy, he added, "it did not involve manufacturing the explosives in the loo," as this simply "could not have worked." The process would be quickly and easily detected. The fumes of the chemicals in the toilet "would be smelt by anybody in the area." They would also inevitably "cause the alarms in the toilet and in the air change system in the aircraft to be triggered. The pilot has the ability to dump all the air from an aircraft as a fire-fighting measure, leaving people to use oxygen masks. All this means the planned attack would be detected long before the queues outside the loo had grown to enormous lengths."

Government silent on detonators

Even if it was possible for the explosive to have been made on the aircraft, a detonator, probably made from TATP, would be needed to set it off. "It is very dangerous and risky to the individual," Wylde said. "As the quantity involved would be small this would injure the would-be suicide bomber but not endanger the aircraft, thus defeating the object of bringing down an aircraft."

Despite the implausibility of this scenario, it has been used to justify wide-ranging new security measures that threaten to permanently curtail civil liberties and to suspend sections of the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act of 1998. "Why were the public delicately informed of an alleged conspiracy which the authorities knew, or should have known, could not have worked?" asked Lt. Col. Wylde.

"This is not a new problem," he added, noting that 'shoe-bomber' Richard Reid had attempted to use this type of explosive on a plane in December 2001. "If this threat is real, what has been done to develop explosive test kits capable of detecting peroxide based explosives?" asked Wylde. "These are the real issues about protecting the public that have not been publicised. Instead we are going to get demands for more internment without trial."

Lt. Col. Wylde also raised questions about the criminal investigation into the 7th July terrorist attacks in London last year. He noted that police and government sources have maintained "total silence" about the detonation devices used in the bombs on the London Underground and the bus at Tavistock Square. "Whatever the nature of the primary explosive materials, even if it was home-made TATP, the detonator that must be used to trigger an explosion is an extremely dangerous device to make, requiring a high level of expertise that cannot be simply self-taught or picked-up over the internet," Wylde stated.

The government's silence on the detonation device used in the attacks is "disturbing," he said, as the creation of the devices requires the involvement of trained explosives experts. Wylde speculated that such individuals would have to be present either inside the country or outside, perhaps in Eastern Europe, where they would be active participants in an international supply-chain to UK operatives. "In either case, we are talking about something far more dangerous than home-grown radicals here."

Spy slams police inaction against terrorists

Wylde's concerns are echoed by others familiar with British terrorism-related intelligence operations, such as Glen Jenvey, who is profiled in the bestselling book, The Terror Tracker, by terrorism investigator Neil Doyle. Jenvey worked for several military attaches monitoring terrorist groups in London and obtained crucial video and surveillance evidence used by British police to arrest radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was convicted last February.

"I've been closely monitoring the internet communications of extremist Muslim groups inside the UK both before and after 7/7, and they are intimately interconnected," said Jenvey, who is affiliated with the London-based terror watch group VIGIL. "We've identified a coordinated leadership of at least 20 and up to 60 people, extremist preachers with blatant international al-Qaeda terrorist connections."

Jenvey noted that even though they are known to the authorities and are monitored while breaking the law with impunity, particularly in their private sermons, the police have failed to take appropriate action against them. "The police don't need to round up and detain thousands of British Muslims. If they only arrested, charged and prosecuted these 20 key terrorist leaders, they will have a struck a fatal blow against the epicentres of al-Qaeda extremism in the UK. But they're sitting on this."

Jenvey points to Omar Bakri Mohammed, a colleague of convicted terrorist Abu Hamza who headed the now-banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun in the United Kingdom. Despite being exiled to Lebanon, Omar Bakri continues to communicate with UK-based extremist groups which are believed to be successors of al-Muhajiroun operating under new names, including the Saved Sect and al-Ghurabaa. British security sources have confirmed that the 7/7 bombers were associates of Omar Bakri's network, and Bakri himself publicly boasted a year before the London bombings that an al-Qaeda cell in London was planning a terrorist strike.

An investigation by the counterterrorism unit in the New York Police Department found that Bakri's al-Muhajiroun had formed 81 front groups and support networks in six countries, most of them based in London, the home counties bordering London, the Midlands, Lancashire and West Yorkshire. By the time Home Secretary Dr. John Reid moved in July to proscribe the latest incarnation of al-Muhajiroun, al-Ghurabaa, this sprawling interconnected network was fully functioning and continues to operate namelessly, despite proscription. Bakri's network has recently adopted the name "Al Sabiqoon Al-Awwaloon".

Jenvey complains that, despite the arrest in early September of radical cleric Abu Abdullah, convicted terrorist Abu Hamza's successor at the Finsbury Park Mosque, a "hardcore group of 20 or more extremists operating around Omar Bakri" remains at large. "The police have every reason to act, and they know who these people are. Their failure to do so has only exacerbated unjustified demonization of Muslims. These extremists are not Muslims in any meaningful sense, they are simply terrorists obsessed with violence."

MI5, MI6 recruiting extremists?

Even the arrest of Abu Abdullah only occurred after his support for terrorism was widely reported in the British and American media in late August. On 23rd August, he justified the killing of Westerners and told CNN correspondent Dan Rivers that Tony Blair is a "legitimate target" of jihad. The Sunday Times remarked that he "is apparently being allowed to operate unchecked by the authorities five months after a law was passed making it a criminal offence to glorify terrorism."

Torture may have been used to extract evidence for the weekend police raids which resulted in the arrest of 14 British Muslims, including Abdullah. Sources confirm that information came from detainees at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, where interrogation techniques classified as torture under international law are routinely used.

The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the extremist network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation. The MI6 connection raises questions about Bakri's relationship with British authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside British jurisdiction, he is effectively immune to prosecution.

Other London-based radical clerics with terrorist connections also had a relationship to the security services. Abu Qatada, described as al-Qaeda's European ambassador, was, according to French sources a long-time MI5 informant. Pakistani government insiders similarly believe that Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed, the British al-Qaeda finance chief from Forest Gate, not only worked with the ISI, Pakistani's military intelligence service, but was also recruited by the CIA as an informant. Saeed, who reportedly wired several hundred thousand dollars to alleged chief 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, is currently in Pakistani custody for the murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl.

Omar Bakri regularly uses the internet to communicate from Lebanon with his followers in Britain. On Sunday evening, 3rd September, Omar Bakri told participants in an online chat forum that he had been pulled in by the Lebanese authorities at the request of the US and British governments and questioned in relation to the "terror plot". Although he denied involvement in the plot, he claimed that some of the 24 British Muslim suspects were known to him. When asked to confirm or deny whether Bakri had indeed been arrested at the request of the British, the Foreign Office had no comment. Bakri said that he was regularly questioned by Lebanese officials on behalf of the British government.

The official reluctance to act against Bakri and his active associates in the UK does not match the government's willingness to act pre-emptively to foil a plot of doubtful reality. Official reluctance to acknowledge the significance of the detonators used in the 7/7 terrorist operation suggests that the threat is far more sophisticated than authorities have admitted, and that emphasis on home-grown amateurs is mistaken. Lt. Col. Wylde's observations would seem to indicate that the terror-threat narrative is being manipulated for reasons of political expediency.
#

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Graham Ennis, Nigel Wylde and Glen Jenvey for their research assistance and contribution to this story. They bear no responsibility for any errors therein. An abridged version of this story will be printed in The Muslim News, UK on 29th September 2006.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, £9:99) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Arris, £12:99). He testified in the US Congress about his research on international terrorism in July 2005. He teaches International Relations at the University of Sussex, Brighton.

OpEd News : CENSORED: The NY Times 'Terror Plot Expose' They Don't Want You (Brits) to Read

CENSORED: The NY Times "Terror Plot" Expose They Don't Want You (Brits) to Read

by Nafeez Ahmed | September 2, 2006

On 28th August 2006, the New York Times printed an investigative story on that month's 10/8 "terror plot", undermining the claims of US and British government officials, and suggesting that details had been exaggerated beyond all proportion for political reasons. The article was also published online here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/europe/28plot.html

But interested British readers quickly discovered that they had been denied access to the article. Instead they discovered the following web message:

"This Article Is Unavailable

On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial."

Even printed copies of the newspaper destined for the UK were scrubbed. Apparently for strictly legal reasons.

In fact, the New York Times' decision to self-censor its own expose from the British readership is, like the "terror plot" itself, more likely to have been based on reasons of political expedience.

Consider, for instance, the confident declaration of Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, that the goal of the apprehended suspects in plotting the attack was "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." Prejudicial to the case Mr. Stephenson? In similar vein, on the very day of the arrests, other officials estimated that as many as 10 planes were to be blown up, possibly over American cities. In Britain, the threat level was raised to its highest, "critical", signalling an imminent terrorist attack, while Home Secretary Dr. John Reid talked repeatedly of the likelihood of an immediate strike. Such pronouncements were repeated in the US. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that the plot was "getting really quite close to the execution stage."

Let's be clear on this. These were not qualified, tentative descriptions of suspicions about a possible plot. These were definitive, unqualified proclamations about having detected and successfully foiled an imminent al-Qaeda strike to blow up about 10 civilian planes using liquid explosives to be manufactured on board. So much so that Dr. Reid was rebuked by the Attorney-General for possibly prejudicing the trial of the arrested individuals.

Possibly?

My own research of public record sources published Monday 21st August, "The Truth about the 'Terror Plot'... and the new pseudo-terrorism", fundamentally undermines the official narrative. My findings, like that of the NY Times article, do not prejudice any trial -- but they do prejudice the standards of political convenience adopted by British and American officials, whereby their repeated distortions, exaggerations and outright fabrications about the "terror plot" have been used to justify government attempts to push for suspension of sections of the Human Rights Act 1998, and to drastically increase draconian anti-terror powers.

For this reason, publication of the latest evidence undermining the government's prejudicial claims serves not to create further prejudice, but to correct the lies and distortions that have already been widely disseminated and swallowed whole by an increasingly pathetic and subservient media, that remains unable to learn from the pattern of deceit long established in examples like the non-existent "Ricin Plot" (as former British Ambassador Craig Murray says, "there was no ricin; and there was no plot"). What the new evidence, indeed, demonstrates quite clearly, is that the British government, deliberately, consciously, pretended that there was an imminent threat from a plot which, it knew all too well, barely existed.

Therefore, for reasons of urgent public interest and in order to help correct the prejudicial distortions printed and aired repeatedly by the media on the basis of the false statements of our purported political representatives, I am posting the New York Times article in full, online, for the first time (see Annex below). And I would urge you all to re-post everywhere you can.

A number of points within the article, however, are worth highlighting. The New York Times points out, for instance, that according to "five senior British officials... the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately. Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike."

Unfortunately, this "fear" also had little basis in actual evidence. Consider the fact that "British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval." One of the men had apparently looked up airline schedules for flights from London to the US (a crime for any British Muslim?), but investigators confirmed that "the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets." Supposed "bomb-making equipment" described blandly as "chemicals" and "electrical components" (meaning household products and MP3 players) was found "five days after the
arrests," not before.

"In fact," continues the NY Times, "two and a half weeks since the inquiry became public, British investigators have still not determined whether there was a target date for the attacks or how many planes were to be involved. They say the estimate of 10 planes was speculative and exaggerated."

Speculative and exaggerated is a rather polite term, some might say. "In his first public statement after the arrests, Peter Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for the Metropolitan Police, acknowledged that the police were still investigating the basics: 'the number, destination and timing of the flights that might be attacked.'" So what did they know about this alleged plot?

Not very much really. Here we get to the really "prejudicial" part. "Despite the charges, officials said they were still unsure of one critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives while airborne."

In my 21st August analysis, I had already raised fatal questions about the technical viability of the "terror plot" scenario. So did, apparently, "a chemist involved in that part of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was sworn to confidentiality." Thus while officials and experts are cited as generally agreeing that "the investigation points to a serious and determined group of plotters", they also add that "questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time." So perhaps some of these people were extremists, possibly involved in criminal activity, possibly up to no good -- but the "terror plot" scenario remains fundamentally questionable.

As Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department told America's newspaper of record: "In retrospect, there may have been too much hyperventilating going on."

Hyperventilating is not quite the word I would use. "Bullshitting", appears to be a more fitting, if less polite, description.

Also consistent with what I wrote more than a week ago, the NY Times quoted British officials saying "many of the questions about the suspected plot remained unanswered because they were forced to make the arrests before Scotland Yard was ready." I had already noted that the Brits didn't want to move on the suspects due to the paucity of evidence. "The trigger was the arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a 25-year-old British citizen with dual Pakistani citizenship, whom Pakistani investigators have described as a 'key figure' in the plot."

But Rauf had been tortured by Pakistani interrogators, according to the Pakistani Human Rights Commission. Which means the central source for the details about the plot are inadmissible by law. "Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first". What the Times doesn't mention is that the impetus for the Pakistanis to move came from the Americans. "The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot."

Our boys in the police and intelligence services, in other words, saw no reason to do anything. But the Americans did. And in doing so, they compromised an ongoing intelligence operation, just so they could manufacture a false "intelligence success". It seems, moreover, that our government didn't only lie to its people. It also lied to its friends. "The plotters received a very short message to 'Go now,' " Franco Frattini, the European Union's security commissioner, told the NY Times. He had been briefed by Dr. Reid. "I was convinced by British authorities that this message exists", he said.

The message, folks, didn't exist. "A senior British official said the message from Pakistan was not that explicit", reported the NY Times. In other words, it didn't say 'Go now'. It said something else, far more ambiguous. But that didn't stop Dr. Reid from telling everybody the opposite. Meanwhile, "Mr. Reid and Mr. Clarke declined repeated requests for interviews." What a surprise. Two weeks after they had chorused a story of an imminent strike creating death on an unprecedented scale even worse than 9/11, "senior officials here [in the US] characterized the remarks as unfortunate."

Most people, I fear, would characterise those remarks in more damning terms.

Has anyone, by the way, noted the frequency with which anonymous British officials have been sourced for this story? Are they all in contempt of court for showing that the government's claims were untrue, for attempting to correct the public record? I don't think so.

And that's why I post the entire story for you. Read at your peril....


=================================================
ANNEX

August 28, 2006 -- The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/europe/28plot.html

Details Emerge in British Terror Case

By DON VAN NATTA Jr., ELAINE SCIOLINO and STEPHEN GREYLONDON, Aug. 27 - On Aug. 9, in a small second-floor apartment in East London, two young Muslim men recorded a video justifying what the police say was their suicide plot to blow up trans-Atlantic planes: revenge against the United States and its "accomplices," Britain and the Jews.

"As you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed," said one of the men on a "martyrdom" videotape, whose contents were described by a senior British official and a person briefed about the case. The young man added that he hoped God would be "pleased with us and accepts our deed."

As it happened, the police had been monitoring the apartment with hidden video and audio equipment. Not long after the tape was recorded that day, Scotland Yard decided to shut down what they suspected was a terrorist cell. That action set off a chain of events that raised the terror threat levels in Britain and the United States, barred passengers from taking liquids on airplanes and plunged air traffic into chaos around the world.

The ominous language of seven recovered martyrdom videotapes is among new details that emerged from interviews with high-ranking British, European and American officials last week, demonstrating that the suspects had made considerable progress toward planning a terrorist attack.

Those details include fresh evidence from Britain's most wide-ranging terror investigation: receipts for cash transfers from abroad, a handwritten diary that appears to sketch out elements of a plot, and, on martyrdom tapes, several suspects' statements of their motives.But at the same time, five senior British officials said, the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately.

Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike.

The suspects had been working for months out of an apartment that investigators called the "bomb factory," where the police watched as the suspects experimented with chemicals, according to British officials and others briefed on the evidence, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, citing British rules on confidentiality regarding criminal prosecutions.

In searches during raids, the police discovered what they said were the necessary components to make a highly volatile liquid explosive known as HMTD, jihadist materials, receipts of Western Union money transfers, seven martyrdom videos made by six suspects and the last will and testament of a would-be bomber, senior British officials said. One of the suspects said on his martyrdom video that the "war against Muslims" in Iraq and Afghanistan had motivated him to act.

Investigators say they believe that one of the leaders of the group, an unemployed man in his 20's who was living in a modest apartment on government benefits, kept the key to the alleged "bomb factory" and helped others record martyrdom videos, the officials said.Hours after the police arrested the 21 suspects, police and government officials in both countries said they had intended to carry out the deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11.

Later that day, Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." On the day of the arrests, some officials estimated that as many as 10 planes were to be blown up, possibly over American cities. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, described the suspected plot as "getting really quite close to the execution stage."

But British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers.

While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said. Some of their suspected bomb-making equipment was found five days after the arrests in a suitcase buried under leaves in the woods near High Wycombe, a town 30 miles northwest of London.

Another British official stressed that martyrdom videos were often made well in advance of an attack. In fact, two and a half weeks since the inquiry became public, British investigators have still not determined whether there was a target date for the attacks or how many planes were to be involved. They say the estimate of 10 planes was speculative and exaggerated.

In his first public statement after the arrests, Peter Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for the Metropolitan Police, acknowledged that the police were still investigating the basics: "the number, destination and timing of the flights that might be attacked."

A total of 25 people have been arrested in connection with the suspected plot. Twelve of them have been charged. Eight people were charged with conspiracy to commit murder and preparing acts of terrorism. Three people were charged with failing to disclose information that could help prevent a terrorist act, and a 17-year-old male suspect was charged with possession of articles that could be used to prepare a terrorist act. Eight people still in custody have not been charged. Five have been released. All the suspects arrested are British citizens ranging in age from 17 to 35.Despite the charges, officials said they were still unsure of one critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives while airborne.

A chemist involved in that part of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was sworn to confidentiality, said HMTD, which can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals, "in theory is dangerous," but whether the suspects "had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen."While officials and experts familiar with the case say the investigation points to a serious and determined group of plotters, they add that questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time."In retrospect,'' said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, "there may have been too much hyperventilating going on."

Some of the suspects came to the attention of Scotland Yard more than a year ago, shortly after four suicide bombers attacked three subway trains and a double-decker bus in London on July 7, 2005, a coordinated attack that killed 56 people and wounded more than 700. The investigation was dubbed "Operation Overt.''

The Police Are Tipped OffThe police were apparently tipped off by informers. One former British counterterrorism official, who was working for the government at the time, said several people living in Walthamstow, a working-class neighborhood in East London, alerted the police in July 2005 about the intentions of a small group of angry young Muslim men.

Walthamstow is best known for its faded greyhound track and the borough of Waltham Forest, where more than 17,000 Pakistani immigrants live in the largest Pakistani enclave in London.

Armed with the tips, MI5, Britain's domestic security services, began an around-the-clock surveillance operation of a dozen young men living in Walthamstow - bugging their apartments, tapping their phones, monitoring their bank transactions, eavesdropping on their Internet traffic and e-mail messages, even watching where they traveled, shopped and took their laundry, according to senior British officials.

The initial focus of the investigation was not about possible terrorism aboard planes, but an effort to see whether there were any links between the dozen men and the July 7 subway bombers, or terrorist cells in Pakistan, the officials said.

The authorities quickly learned the identity of the man believed to have been the leader of the cell, the unemployed man in his mid-20's, who traveled at least twice within the past year to Pakistan, where his activities are still being investigated.

Last June, a 22-year-old Walthamstow resident, who is among the suspects arrested Aug. 10, paid $260,000 cash for a second-floor apartment in a house on Forest Road, according to official property records. The authorities noticed that six men were regularly visiting the second-floor apartment that came to be known as the "bomb factory," according to a British official and the person briefed about the case.Two of the men, who were likely the bomb-makers, were conducting a series of experiments with chemicals, said the person briefed on the case.

MI5 agents secretly installed video and audio recording equipment inside the apartment, two senior British officials said. In a secret search conducted before the Aug. 10 raids, agents had discovered that the inside of batteries had been scooped out, and that it appeared several suspects were doing chemical experiments with a sports drink named Lucozade and syringes, the person with knowledge of the case said. Investigators have said they believe that the suspects intended to bring explosive chemicals aboard planes inside sports drink bottles.

In that apartment, according to a British official, one of the leaders and a man in his late 20's met at least twice to discuss the suspected plot, as MI5 agents secretly watched and listened. On Aug. 9, just hours before the police raids occurred in 50 locations from East London to Birmingham, the two men met again to discuss the suspected plot and record a martyrdom video.As one of the men read from a script before a videocamera, he recited a quotation from the Koran and ticked off his reasons for the "action that I am going to undertake," according to the person briefed on the case. The man said he was seeking revenge for the foreign policy of the United States, and "their accomplices, the U.K. and the Jews." The man said he wanted to show that the enemies of Islam would never win this "war."

Beseeching other Muslims to join jihad, he justified the killing of innocent civilians in America and other Western countries because they supported the war against Muslims through their tax dollars. They were too busy enjoying their Western lifestyles to protest the policies, he added. Though British officials usually release little information about continuing investigations, Scotland Yard took the unusual step of disclosing some detailed information about the investigation last Monday, when the suspects were charged.

A Trove of Evidence

"There have been 69 searches," Mr. Clarke, the chief antiterrorist police official from Scotland Yard, said Monday. "These have been in houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces."Investigators also seized more than 400 computers, 200 mobile phones and 8,000 items like memory sticks, CD's and DVD's. "The scale is immense," Mr. Clarke said. "Inquiries will span the globe."

He said those searches revealed a trove of evidence, and officials and others last week provided additional details.

Four of the law firms that are defending suspects declined to comment.When police officers knocked down the door to the second-floor apartment on Forest Road, they found a plastic bin filled with liquid, batteries, nearly a dozen empty drink bottles, rubber gloves, digital scales and a disposable camera that was leaking liquid, the person with knowledge of the case said. The camera might have been a prototype for a device to smuggle chemicals on the plane.

In the pocket of one of the suspects, the police found the computer memory stick that showed he had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to the United States, a British official said. The man is said to have had a diary that included a list that the police interpreted as a step-by-step plan for an attack. The items included batteries and Lucozade bottles. It also included a reminder to select a date.

In the homes of a number of the suspects, the police found jihadist literature and DVD's about "genocide" in Iraq and Palestine, according to British officials. In one house searched by the police in Walthamstow, the authorities found a copy of a book called "Defense of the Muslim Lands."A "last will and testament" for one of the accused was said to have been found at his brother's home. Dated Sept. 24, 2005, the will concludes, "What should I worry when I die a Muslim, in the manner in which I am to die, I go to my death for the sake of my maker." God, he added, can if he wants "bless limbs torn away!!!"

Looking for Global Ties

In addition, the British authorities are scouring the evidence for clues to whether there is a global dimension to the suspected plot, particularly the extent to which it was planned, financed or supported in Pakistan, and whether there is a connection to remnants of Al Qaeda.

They are still trying to determine who provided the cash for the apartment and the computer equipment and telephones, officials said.

Several of the suspects had traveled to Pakistan within weeks of the arrests, according to an American counterterrorism official.

At a minimum, investigators say at least one of the suspects' inspiration was drawn from Al Qaeda. One of the suspects' "kill-as-they-kill" martyrdom video was taken from a November 2002 fatwa by Osama bin Laden. British officials said many of the questions about the suspected plot remained unanswered because they were forced to make the arrests before Scotland Yard was ready.The trigger was the arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a 25-year-old British citizen with dual Pakistani citizenship, whom Pakistani investigators have described as a "key figure" in the plot.

In 2000, Mr. Rauf's father founded Crescent Relief London, a charity that sent money to victims of last October's earthquake in Pakistan. Several suspects met through their involvement in the charity, a friend of one of them said. Last week, Britain froze the charity's bank accounts and opened an investigation into possible "terrorist abuse of charitable funds." Leaders of the charity have denied the allegations.Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first. The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot.

But within hours of Mr. Rauf's arrest on Aug. 9 in Pakistan, British officials heard from intelligence sources that someone connected to him had tried to contact some of the suspects in East London. The message was interpreted by investigators as a possible signal to move forward with the plot, officials said."The plotters received a very short message to 'Go now,' " said Franco Frattini, the European Union security commissioner, who was briefed by the British home secretary, John Reid, in London. "I was convinced by British authorities that this message exists."

A senior British official said the message from Pakistan was not that explicit. But, nonetheless, investigators here had to change their strategy quickly.

"The aim was to keep this operation going for much longer," said a senior British security official who requested anonymity because of confidentiality rules. "It ended much sooner than we had hoped." From then on, the British government was driven by worst-case scenarios based on a minimum-risk strategy.

British investigators worried that word of Mr. Rauf's arrest could push the London suspects to destroy evidence and to disperse, raising the possibility they would not be able to arrest them all. But investigators also could not rule out that there could be an unknown second cell that would try to carry out a similar plan, officials said.Mr. Clarke, as the country's top antiterrorism police official in London with authority over police decisions, ordered the arrests.

But it was left to Mr. Reid, who has been home secretary since May and is a former defense secretary, to decide at emergency meetings of police, national security and transport leaders, what else needed to be done. Mr. Reid and Mr. Clarke declined repeated requests for interviews.Prime Minister Tony Blair was on vacation in Barbados, where he was said to have monitored events in London; Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott did not attend the meeting.

"While the arrests were unfolding, the Home Office raised Britain's terror alert level to "critical," as the police continued their raids of suspects' homes and cars. All liquids were banned from carry-on bags, and some public officials in Britain and the United States said an attack appeared to be imminent. In addition to Mr. Stephenson's remark that the attack would have been "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," Mr. Reid said that attacks were "highly likely" and predicted that the loss of life would have been on an "unprecedented scale."Two weeks later, senior officials here characterized the remarks as unfortunate. As more information was analyzed and the British government decided that the attack was not imminent, Mr. Reid sought to calm the country by backing off from his dire predictions, while defending the decision to raise the alert level to its highest level as a precaution.

In lowering the threat level from critical to severe on Aug. 14, Mr. Reid acknowledged: "Threat level assessments are intelligence-led. It is not a process where scientific precision is possible. They involve judgments."

Reporting for this article was contributed by William J. Broad from New York, Carlotta Gall from Pakistan, David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

NYT : Details Emerge in British Terror Case

Details Emerge in British Terror Case

By DON VAN NATTA Jr., ELAINE SCIOLINO and STEPHEN GREY | August 28, 2006

LONDON, Aug. 27 — On Aug. 9, in a small second-floor apartment in East London, two young Muslim men recorded a video justifying what the police say was their suicide plot to blow up trans-Atlantic planes: revenge against the United States and its “accomplices,” Britain and the Jews.

“As you bomb, you will be bombed; as you kill, you will be killed,” said one of the men on a “martyrdom” videotape, whose contents were described by a senior British official and a person briefed about the case. The young man added that he hoped God would be “pleased with us and accepts our deed.”

As it happened, the police had been monitoring the apartment with hidden video and audio equipment. Not long after the tape was recorded that day, Scotland Yard decided to shut down what they suspected was a terrorist cell. That action set off a chain of events that raised the terror threat levels in Britain and the United States, barred passengers from taking liquids on airplanes and plunged air traffic into chaos around the world.

The ominous language of seven recovered martyrdom videotapes is among new details that emerged from interviews with high-ranking British, European and American officials last week, demonstrating that the suspects had made considerable progress toward planning a terrorist attack. Those details include fresh evidence from Britain’s most wide-ranging terror investigation: receipts for cash transfers from abroad, a handwritten diary that appears to sketch out elements of a plot, and, on martyrdom tapes, several suspects’ statements of their motives.

But at the same time, five senior British officials said, the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately. Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike.

The suspects had been working for months out of an apartment that investigators called the “bomb factory,” where the police watched as the suspects experimented with chemicals, according to British officials and others briefed on the evidence, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, citing British rules on confidentiality regarding criminal prosecutions.

In searches during raids, the police discovered what they said were the necessary components to make a highly volatile liquid explosive known as HMTD, jihadist materials, receipts of Western Union money transfers, seven martyrdom videos made by six suspects and the last will and testament of a would-be bomber, senior British officials said. One of the suspects said on his martyrdom video that the “war against Muslims” in Iraq and Afghanistan had motivated him to act.

Investigators say they believe that one of the leaders of the group, an unemployed man in his 20’s who was living in a modest apartment on government benefits, kept the key to the alleged “bomb factory” and helped others record martyrdom videos, the officials said.

Hours after the police arrested the 21 suspects, police and government officials in both countries said they had intended to carry out the deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11.

Later that day, Paul Stephenson, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police in London, said the goal of the people suspected of plotting the attack was “mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” On the day of the arrests, some officials estimated that as many as 10 planes were to be blown up, possibly over American cities. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, described the suspected plot as “getting really quite close to the execution stage.”

But British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers.

While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said. Some of their suspected bomb-making equipment was found five days after the arrests in a suitcase buried under leaves in the woods near High Wycombe, a town 30 miles northwest of London.

Another British official stressed that martyrdom videos were often made well in advance of an attack. In fact, two and a half weeks since the inquiry became public, British investigators have still not determined whether there was a target date for the attacks or how many planes were to be involved. They say the estimate of 10 planes was speculative and exaggerated.

In his first public statement after the arrests, Peter Clarke, chief of counterterrorism for the Metropolitan Police, acknowledged that the police were still investigating the basics: “the number, destination and timing of the flights that might be attacked.”

A total of 25 people have been arrested in connection with the suspected plot. Twelve of them have been charged. Eight people were charged with conspiracy to commit murder and preparing acts of terrorism. Three people were charged with failing to disclose information that could help prevent a terrorist act, and a 17-year-old male suspect was charged with possession of articles that could be used to prepare a terrorist act. Eight people still in custody have not been charged. Five have been released. All the suspects arrested are British citizens ranging in age from 17 to 35.

Despite the charges, officials said they were still unsure of one critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives while airborne.

A chemist involved in that part of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was sworn to confidentiality, said HMTD, which can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals, “in theory is dangerous,” but whether the suspects “had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen.”

While officials and experts familiar with the case say the investigation points to a serious and determined group of plotters, they add that questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time.

“In retrospect,’’ said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, “there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.”

Some of the suspects came to the attention of Scotland Yard more than a year ago, shortly after four suicide bombers attacked three subway trains and a double-decker bus in London on July 7, 2005, a coordinated attack that killed 56 people and wounded more than 700. The investigation was dubbed “Operation Overt.’’

The Police Are Tipped Off

The police were apparently tipped off by informers. One former British counterterrorism official, who was working for the government at the time, said several people living in Walthamstow, a working-class neighborhood in East London, alerted the police in July 2005 about the intentions of a small group of angry young Muslim men.

Walthamstow is best known for its faded greyhound track and the borough of Waltham Forest, where more than 17,000 Pakistani immigrants live in the largest Pakistani enclave in London.

Armed with the tips, MI5, Britain’s domestic security services, began an around-the-clock surveillance operation of a dozen young men living in Walthamstow — bugging their apartments, tapping their phones, monitoring their bank transactions, eavesdropping on their Internet traffic and e-mail messages, even watching where they traveled, shopped and took their laundry, according to senior British officials.

The initial focus of the investigation was not about possible terrorism aboard planes, but an effort to see whether there were any links between the dozen men and the July 7 subway bombers, or terrorist cells in Pakistan, the officials said.

The authorities quickly learned the identity of the man believed to have been the leader of the cell, the unemployed man in his mid-20’s, who traveled at least twice within the past year to Pakistan, where his activities are still being investigated.

Last June, a 22-year-old Walthamstow resident, who is among the suspects arrested Aug. 10, paid $260,000 cash for a second-floor apartment in a house on Forest Road, according to official property records. The authorities noticed that six men were regularly visiting the second-floor apartment that came to be known as the “bomb factory,” according to a British official and the person briefed about the case.

Two of the men, who were likely the bomb-makers, were conducting a series of experiments with chemicals, said the person briefed on the case.

MI5 agents secretly installed video and audio recording equipment inside the apartment, two senior British officials said. In a secret search conducted before the Aug. 10 raids, agents had discovered that the inside of batteries had been scooped out, and that it appeared several suspects were doing chemical experiments with a sports drink named Lucozade and syringes, the person with knowledge of the case said. Investigators have said they believe that the suspects intended to bring explosive chemicals aboard planes inside sports drink bottles.

In that apartment, according to a British official, one of the leaders and a man in his late 20’s met at least twice to discuss the suspected plot, as MI5 agents secretly watched and listened. On Aug. 9, just hours before the police raids occurred in 50 locations from East London to Birmingham, the two men met again to discuss the suspected plot and record a martyrdom video.

As one of the men read from a script before a videocamera, he recited a quotation from the Koran and ticked off his reasons for the “action that I am going to undertake,” according to the person briefed on the case. The man said he was seeking revenge for the foreign policy of the United States, and “their accomplices, the U.K. and the Jews.” The man said he wanted to show that the enemies of Islam would never win this “war.”

Beseeching other Muslims to join jihad, he justified the killing of innocent civilians in America and other Western countries because they supported the war against Muslims through their tax dollars. They were too busy enjoying their Western lifestyles to protest the policies, he added. Though British officials usually release little information about continuing investigations, Scotland Yard took the unusual step of disclosing some detailed information about the investigation last Monday, when the suspects were charged.

A Trove of Evidence

“There have been 69 searches,” Mr. Clarke, the chief antiterrorist police official from Scotland Yard, said Monday. “These have been in houses, flats and business premises, vehicles and open spaces.”

Investigators also seized more than 400 computers, 200 mobile phones and 8,000 items like memory sticks, CD’s and DVD’s. “The scale is immense,” Mr. Clarke said. “Inquiries will span the globe.”

He said those searches revealed a trove of evidence, and officials and others last week provided additional details.

Four of the law firms that are defending suspects declined to comment.

When police officers knocked down the door to the second-floor apartment on Forest Road, they found a plastic bin filled with liquid, batteries, nearly a dozen empty drink bottles, rubber gloves, digital scales and a disposable camera that was leaking liquid, the person with knowledge of the case said. The camera might have been a prototype for a device to smuggle chemicals on the plane.

In the pocket of one of the suspects, the police found the computer memory stick that showed he had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to the United States, a British official said. The man is said to have had a diary that included a list that the police interpreted as a step-by-step plan for an attack. The items included batteries and Lucozade bottles. It also included a reminder to select a date.

In the homes of a number of the suspects, the police found jihadist literature and DVD’s about “genocide” in Iraq and Palestine, according to British officials. In one house searched by the police in Walthamstow, the authorities found a copy of a book called “Defense of the Muslim Lands.”

A “last will and testament” for one of the accused was said to have been found at his brother’s home. Dated Sept. 24, 2005, the will concludes, “What should I worry when I die a Muslim, in the manner in which I am to die, I go to my death for the sake of my maker.” God, he added, can if he wants “bless limbs torn away!!!”

Looking for Global Ties

In addition, the British authorities are scouring the evidence for clues to whether there is a global dimension to the suspected plot, particularly the extent to which it was planned, financed or supported in Pakistan, and whether there is a connection to remnants of Al Qaeda. They are still trying to determine who provided the cash for the apartment and the computer equipment and telephones, officials said.

Several of the suspects had traveled to Pakistan within weeks of the arrests, according to an American counterterrorism official.

At a minimum, investigators say at least one of the suspects’ inspiration was drawn from Al Qaeda. One of the suspects’ “kill-as-they-kill” martyrdom video was taken from a November 2002 fatwa by Osama bin Laden.

British officials said many of the questions about the suspected plot remained unanswered because they were forced to make the arrests before Scotland Yard was ready.

The trigger was the arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a 25-year-old British citizen with dual Pakistani citizenship, whom Pakistani investigators have described as a “key figure” in the plot.

In 2000, Mr. Rauf’s father founded Crescent Relief London, a charity that sent money to victims of last October’s earthquake in Pakistan. Several suspects met through their involvement in the charity, a friend of one of them said. Last week, Britain froze the charity’s bank accounts and opened an investigation into possible “terrorist abuse of charitable funds.” Leaders of the charity have denied the allegations.

Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first. The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot.

But within hours of Mr. Rauf’s arrest on Aug. 9 in Pakistan, British officials heard from intelligence sources that someone connected to him had tried to contact some of the suspects in East London. The message was interpreted by investigators as a possible signal to move forward with the plot, officials said.

“The plotters received a very short message to ‘Go now,’ ” said Franco Frattini, the European Union’s security commissioner, who was briefed by the British home secretary, John Reid, in London. “I was convinced by British authorities that this message exists.”

A senior British official said the message from Pakistan was not that explicit. But, nonetheless, investigators here had to change their strategy quickly.

“The aim was to keep this operation going for much longer,” said a senior British security official who requested anonymity because of confidentiality rules. “It ended much sooner than we had hoped.”

From then on, the British government was driven by worst-case scenarios based on a minimum-risk strategy.

British investigators worried that word of Mr. Rauf’s arrest could push the London suspects to destroy evidence and to disperse, raising the possibility they would not be able to arrest them all. But investigators also could not rule out that there could be an unknown second cell that would try to carry out a similar plan, officials said.

Mr. Clarke, as the country’s top antiterrorism police official in London with authority over police decisions, ordered the arrests.

But it was left to Mr. Reid, who has been home secretary since May and is a former defense secretary, to decide at emergency meetings of police, national security and transport leaders, what else needed to be done. Mr. Reid and Mr. Clarke declined repeated requests for interviews.

Prime Minister Tony Blair was on vacation in Barbados, where he was said to have monitored events in London; Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott did not attend the meeting.

“While the arrests were unfolding, the Home Office raised Britain’s terror alert level to “critical,” as the police continued their raids of suspects’ homes and cars. All liquids were banned from carry-on bags, and some public officials in Britain and the United States said an attack appeared to be imminent. In addition to Mr. Stephenson’s remark that the attack would have been “mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Mr. Reid said that attacks were “highly likely” and predicted that the loss of life would have been on an “unprecedented scale.”

Two weeks later, senior officials here characterized the remarks as unfortunate. As more information was analyzed and the British government decided that the attack was not imminent, Mr. Reid sought to calm the country by backing off from his dire predictions, while defending the decision to raise the alert level to its highest level as a precaution.

In lowering the threat level from critical to severe on Aug. 14, Mr. Reid acknowledged: “Threat level assessments are intelligence-led. It is not a process where scientific precision is possible. They involve judgments.”

Reporting for this article was contributed by William J. Broad from New York, Carlotta Gall from Pakistan, David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

Global Security : Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP)

Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP)

as of August 21, 2006

A new terrorist explosive, triacetone triperoxide (TATP), has recently appeared as a weapon in the Middle East. TATP has been used by suicide bombers in Israel, and was chosen as a detonator in 2001 by the thwarted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. It can be as or more powerful than military analogs. TATP is one of the most sensitive explosives known, being extremely sensitive to impact, temperature change and friction. Another peroxide-type explosive is hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), which is less sensitive than TATP but still dangerous. HMTD is somewhat more sensitive to impact than TCPT, but both are very sensitive explosives.

The explosion of TATP is not a thermochemically highly favored event. In conventional high explosives such as TNT, each molecule contains both a fuel component and an oxidising component. When the explosive detonates, the fuel part is oxidised and as this combustion reaction spreads it releases large amounts of heat. The explosion of TATP involves entropy burst, which is the result of formation of one ozone and three acetone molecules from every molecule of TATP in the solid state. Just a few hundred grams of the material produce hundreds of litres of gas in a fraction of a second.

The explosion of TATP is similar to the decomposition of azide, for example, which produces nitrogen gas but little heat, is used to fill airbags for cars. TATP is the most extreme example currently known, but it may be possible to design molecules that behave as an even more powerful explosive.

TATP can be easily prepared in a basement lab using commercially available starting materials obtained from, e.g., hardware stores, pharmacies, and stores selling cosmetics. TATP is a fairly easy explosive to make, as far as explosives manufacturing goes. All it takes is acetone, hydrogen peroxide (3% medicinal peroxide is not concentrated enough), and a strong acid like hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. I don't recommended mixing up a batch for Independence Day celebrations because it's easy to blow yourself up when you make it.

On Dec. 22, 2001, American Airlines Flight 63, carrying a crew of 14 and a passenger complement of 184, including "shoe bomber" Richard Reid, departed Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, France, bound for Miami, Florida. Approximately one and a half hours into the flight, a flight attendant smelled what she thought was a burnt match. After the flight attendant determined that it was coming from where Reid was seated, she confronted Reid, at which time he put a match into his mouth. The flight attendant alerted the captain over the intercom system. Reid went on to light another match in an apparent attempt to set fire to his shoe. The flight attendant then noticed a wire protruding from the shoe. A struggle ensued among several of the flight attendants, passengers and Reid. Ultimately Reid was subdued and restrained for the remainder of the flight. The flight was diverted for landing to Boston's Logan International Airport, where Reid was taken into federal custody. Later analysis by the FBI laboratory in Washington determined that there were two functional improvised explosive devices hidden in Reid's shoes made of the explosive material triacetone triperoxide, known as "TATP," and other components. Richard Reid's shoe had 8 or 10 ounces of triacetone triperoxide and PETN.

Because of the wide range of energetic materials and the many differences in their physical properties, several detection devices detect only certain types of explosives and fail to detect others. For example, many detection devices readily detect conventional explosives made of organic nitro and nitrate compounds, but fail to detect explosives made of inorganic nitrates or non-nitrogeneous compounds. In particular, many nitrogen-based detection devices fail to detect explosives such as ANFO (ammonium nitrate in fuel oil), Black Powder ("gun powder" formed from potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal), and triacetone triperoxide (TATP). As a result, such explosives are sometimes referred to as "transparent."