i’ve been thinking that there was something extremely suspicious about the timing of the alleged foiling of the alleged terrorist plot to allegedly smuggle alleged precursors to alleged explosives on to alleged airplanes from the time they first announced it, and even moreso after it was discovered that "they" were pulling some real poolitical hi-jinks behind our backs while they were dangling this alleged fiasco in front of our eyes to distract us, and now somebody is saying the same thing… coincidence?
We should be sceptical about this alleged plot, and wary of politicians who seek to benefit
By Craig Murray
18 August, 2006
Nine days on, nobody has been charged with any crime. For there to be no clear evidence yet on something that was “imminent” and would bring “mass murder on an unbelievable scale” is, to say the least, peculiar. A 24th person, arrested amid much fanfare on Tuesday, was quietly released without charge the following day.
Media analysis has been full of information from police and security sources. By and large journalists are honourable in this kind of reporting. Their sources, unfortunately, are not – viz the non-existent ricin, the Forest Gate “chemical weapons vest”, or Jean Charles de Menezes leaping the barriers. Unlike the herd of security experts, I have had the highest security clearance; I have done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis; and I have been inside the spin machine. And I am very sceptical about the story that has been spun.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not have passports. It could be pretty difficult to convince a jury that these individuals were about to go through with suicide bombings, whatever they bragged about on the net.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for more than a year – like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information from people desperate to stop or avert torture. What you don’t get is the truth.
We also have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing arrests the weekend before they were made. Why? Both in domestic trouble, they longed for a chance to change the story. The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a chance. Comparisons with 9/11 were all over front pages.
And we have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, the home secretary, warning us all in advance of the evil that threatens us and complaining that some people “don’t get” why we have to abandon traditional liberties.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most do not fit the “loner” profile you would expect. As they were all under surveillance, and on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity: that is what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. More than 1,000 British Muslims have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, but only 12% have been charged. That is harassment on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% were acquitted. Most of the few convictions – just over 2% of arrests – are nothing to do with terrorism, but some minor offence the police happened upon while trawling through the lives they have wrecked.
Plainly, Islamist terrorism does exist. But its growth is encouraged by our adherence to neocon foreign policy, by our support for appalling regimes abroad, and by our trampling on the rights of Muslims in the UK. Now David Cameron has joined Blair and Reid in the rush to benefit politically from the fear thus engendered. Be very wary of politicians who seek to benefit from terror.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
By Perry E. Metzger
August 11, 2006
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
Christian reconstructionists believe democracy is heresy and public school is satanic — and they’ve got more influence than you think.
By John Sugg
August 15, 2006.
Two really devilish guys materialized in Toccoa, Ga., last month to harangue 600 true believers on the gospel of a thoroughly theocratic America. Along with lesser lights of the religious far right who spoke at American Vision’s “Worldview Super Conference 2006,” Herb Titus and Gary North called for nothing short of the overthrow of the United States of America.
Titus and North aren’t household names. But Titus, former dean of TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University law school, has led the legal battle to plant the Ten Commandants in county courthouses across the nation. North, an apostle of the creed called Christian Reconstructionism, is one of the most influential elders of American fundamentalism.
“I don’t want to capture their (mainstream Americans’) system. I want to replace it,” fumed North to a cheering audience. North has called for the stoning of gays and nonbelievers (rocks are cheap and plentiful, he has observed). Both friends and foes label him “Scary Gary.”
Are we in danger of an American Taliban? Probably not today. But Alabama’s “Ten Commandments Judge” Roy Moore is aligned with this congregation, and one-third of Alabama Republicans who voted in the June primary supported him. When you see the South Dakota legislature outlaw abortions, the Reconstructionist agenda is at work. The movement’s greatest success is in Christian home schooling, where many, if not most, of the textbooks are Reconstructionist-authored tomes.
Moreover, the Reconstructionists are the folks behind attacks on science and public education. They’re allied with proselytizers who have tried to convert Air Force cadets — future pilots with fingers on nuclear triggers — into religious zealots. Like the communists of the 1930s, they exert tremendous stealth political gravity, drawing many sympathizers in their wake, and their friends now dominate the Republican Party in many states.
Titus’ and North’s speeches, laced with conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission, were more Leninist than Christian in the tactics proposed — as in their vision to use freedom to destroy the freedom of others. That’s not surprising — the founder of Christian Reconstruction, the late fringe Calvinist theologian Rousas J. Rushdoony, railed against the “heresy” of democracy.
A Harvard-bred lawyer whose most famous client is Alabama’s Judge Moore, Titus told the Toccoa gathering that the Second Amendment envisions the assassination of “tyrants;” that’s why we have guns. Tyranny, of course, is subjective to these folks. Their imposition of a theocratic state would not, by their standards, be tyranny. Public schools, on the other hand, to them are tyrannical.
North is best known to Internet users for his prolific auguring that a Y2K computer bug would cause the calamitous end of civilization. In the days prior to the advent of this millennium, North urged subscribers to his delusional economic newsletters to go survivalist and prepare for the end. Many did so, dumping investments and life savings, a big oops.
“I lost a million and a half dollars when I sold off real estate,” one of North’s fans, a home-schooling advocate from Florida, told me during a lunch break between lectures touting creationism and damning secular humanism. But my lunch companion still anted more than pocket change to hear North make more prophesies in Toccoa. “I believe Gary North on Bible issues,” he explained. I suggested that false prophets often pocket big profits, but I was talking to deaf ears.
Hosting the “Creation to Revelation… Connecting the Dots” event was a Powder Springs, Ga., publishing house, American Vision, whose pontiff is Gary DeMar. The outfit touts the antebellum South as a righteous society and favors the reintroduction of some forms of slavery (it’s sanctioned in the Bible, Reconstructionists say) — which may explain the blindingly monochrome audience at the gathering.
The setting was the Georgia Baptist Conference Center, a sprawling expanse of woods, hills and a man-made lake in the North Georgia mountains. Four decades ago, the Southern Baptists officially declared, “no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state” and “the church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work.”
Times change. The Baptists lust for power, and they demand the state to do their bidding. I guess that explains the denomination’s hosting of theocrats no less rigid and bloodthirsty than the Taliban’s mullahs.
DeMar christened the gathering with invective against science.
“Evolution is as religious as Christianity,” he said, a claim that certainly must amaze 99.99 percent of the scientific community. Science is irrelevant to these folks.
Everything they need to know about the universe and the origin of man is in the first two chapters of Genesis. They know the answer before any question is asked. DeMar’s spin is what he calls a clash of “worldviews.” According to DeMar and his speakers, God sanctions only their worldview. And that worldview is a hash of enforcing Old Testament Mosaic law (except when it comes to chowing down on pork barbecue), rewriting American history to endorse theocracy and explaining politics by the loopy theories of the John Birch Society. (Christian Reconstructionism evolved, so to speak, from a radical variation of Calvinism, AKA Puritanism, and the Bircher politics of such men as the late Marietta, Ga., congressman, Larry McDonald.) For most of the four-day conference, DeMar turned the Bible over to others to thump. North blamed the Rockefellers and the Trilateral Commission for the success of secularists. Titus told of Jesus making a personal appearance in the rafters of his Oregon home.
At the heart of what was taught by a succession of speakers:
- Six-day, “young earth” creationism is the only acceptable doctrine for Christians. Even “intelligent design” or “old earth” creationism are compromises with evil secularism.
- Public education is satanic and must be destroyed.
- The First Amendment was intended to keep the federal government from imposing a national religion, but states should be free to foster a religious creed. (Several states did that during the colonial period and the nation’s early days, a model the Reconstructionists want to emulate.)
- The Founding Fathers intended to protect only the liberties of the established ultra-conservative denominations of that time. Expanding the list to include “liberal” Protestant denominations, much less Catholics, Jews and (gasp!) atheists, is a corruption of the Founders’ intent.
Education earned the most vitriol at the conference. Effusing that the Religious Right has captured politics and much of the media, North proclaimed: “The only thing they (secularists) have still got a grip on is the university system.” Academic doctorates, he contended, are a conspiracy fomented by the Rockefeller family. All academic programs (except, he said, engineering) are now dominated by secularists and Darwinists.
“Marxists in the English departments!” he ranted. “Close every public school in America!”
Among North’s most quoted writings was this ditty from 1982: “[W]e must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation…which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.” Titus followed that party line when he proclaimed that the First Amendment is limited to guaranteeing “the right to criticize the government,” but “free expression is not in the Constitution.” When I asked him if blasphemy — castigating religion — was protected, he shook his head.
Like North, Titus sees public education as decidedly satanic. Also, welfare. He contended the Founding Fathers — and Americans today — owe their “first duties to God. It’s not just worship. It’s education… welfare to the poor. Welfare belongs exclusively to God. Why do schools fail? They’re trying to do the business of God. Medicaid goes. Education goes. The church gets back to doing what it should do.” And what should the church be doing According to these self-appointed arbiters of God’s will, running our lives. And stoning those who disagree.
At the Toccoa conference, DeMar organized several debates — and he commendably invited articulate opponents of his creed.
One was Ed Buckner, a retired Georgia State University professor, unabashed atheist and a member of the Atlanta Freethought Society. He debated Bill Federer, who makes a living trying to prove America’s founders intended this to be a Christian nation.
Buckner offered to concede the debate if Federer could disprove any one of four points: Americans don’t agree on religion, human judgment is imperfect, religious truth can’t be determined by votes or force and freedom is worth protecting. Federer ran from the challenge, and instead offered a litany of historic quotes showing that most of America’s founders believed in God.
Federer never got the point that if, as he argued, government should endorse his faith today, tomorrow officials might decide to ban his beliefs.
The other debate featured University of Georgia biologist Mark Farmer versus Australian “young earth” creationist Carl Wieland. Farmer, religious himself, tried to explain that no evidence had ever damaged evolutionary theory — at best, creationists point to gaps in knowledge.
“Yes, we don’t know the answers to everything,” Farmer told me. “That’s what science is all about, finding answers.”
It would be easy to dismiss the Reconstructionists as the lunatic fringe, no more worrisome than the remnants of the Prohibition Party. But, in fact, they have rather extraordinary entrée and influence with top-tier Religious Right leaders and institutions.
James Dobson’s Focus on the Family is now selling DeMar’s book, America’s Christian Heritage. Dobson himself has a warm relationship with many in the movement, and he has admitted voting for Reconstructionist presidential candidate Howard Phillips in 1996.
TV preacher Robertson has mentioned reading North’s writings, and he has hired Reconstructionists as professors at Regent University. Jerry Falwell employs Reconstructionists to teach at Liberty University. Roger Schultz, the chair of Liberty’s History Department, writes regularly for Faith for all of Life, the leading Reconstructionist journal.
Southern Baptist Bruce N. Shortt is aggressively pushing his denomination to officially repudiate public education and call on Southern Baptists to withdraw their children from public schools. Shortt’s vicious book, The Harsh Truth about Public Schools, was published by the Reconstructionist Chalcedon Foundation.
There are big theological differences between the Religious Right’s generals and the Reconstructionists. Traditional Christian theology teaches that history will muddle along until Jesus’ Second Coming. That teaching is tough to turn into a political movement. Reconstructionists preach that the nation and the world must come under Christian “dominion” (as they define it) before Christ’s return — a wonderful theology to promote global conquest.
In short, Dobson, Robertson, Falwell and the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation’s largest Protestant denomination) may not agree with everything the Reconstructionists advocate, but they sure don’t seem to mind hanging out with this openly theocratic, anti-democratic crowd.
It’s enough for Americans who believe in personal freedom and religious liberty to get worried about — before the first stones start flying.