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"Important Message
10th August 2006 08:22
Due to the heightened security at UK airports, the BAA website is currently experiencing a high level of people visiting the site for information.
All BAA airports remain open but passengers should expect delays.
For further information on the security restrictions (link to BAA media statement)"
" Passengers are being asked to be patient when facing delays
Heathrow Airport has been closed to all incoming flights that are not already in the air, following a police anti-terror operation.
Stringent security measures have been put in place at airports across the UK.
Passengers are being asked to check in all hand baggage except for some essential items and travellers are experiencing long delays.
Flights from Brussels to all London airports have been cancelled. Lufthansa has also cancelled flights to the UK.
BAA strongly advises all passengers not to travel to Heathrow airport unless the journey is essential and there is an increased police presence at London Underground stations leading to the airport.
Long delays
Heathrow management took the decision to close to all flights not already in the air due to the congestion at the airport.
Manchester Airport have said there are delays on all flights of between one and three hours.
Donald Morrison, a spokesman for BAA at Glasgow Airport, said there would be delays at security for all passengers. "
The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.
"Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world," he said.
. . . Vice President Dick Cheney . . . went so far as to suggest that the ouster of Mr. Lieberman might encourage "al Qaeda types."
The majority of the public understood its seriousness but there were those who "just don't get it", whose opposition was undermining the struggle. They included:
· Politicians who opposed the anti-terror measures the police and security services said were necessary to combat the threat.
· European judges who passed the "Chahal judgment" that prohibited the home secretary from weighing the security of millions of British people if a suspected terrorist remained in the UK against the risk he faced if deported back to his own country.
· The media commentators who "apparently give more prominence to the views of Islamist terrorists rather than democratically elected Muslim politicians like premier Maliki of Iraq or President Karzai of Afghanstan".
The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.
The result is that the core conflict has been allowed to fester. Had it been solved, or even if there had been a serious effort to solve it, the current crisis would have been unimaginable. Instead Bush's animating idea has been that the peoples of the Middle East can be bombed into democracy and terrorised into moderation. It has proved one of the great lethal mistakes of his abominable presidency - and the peoples of Israel and Lebanon are paying the price.
Responding to an apartment fire, Philippine investigators uncover an al-Qaeda plot to assassinate the Pope that is scheduled to take place when he visits the Philippines one week later. While investigating that scheme, they also uncover Operation Bojinka, planned by the same people: 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. [Independent, 6/6/2002; Los Angeles Times, 6/24/2002; Los Angeles Times, 9/1/2002] The first phase of the plan is to explode 11 or 12 passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean. [Agence France-Presse, 12/8/2001] Had this plot been successful, up to 4,000 people would have been killed in planes flying to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Honolulu, and New York. [Insight, 5/27/2002] All the bombs would be planted at about the same time, but some would be timed to go off weeks or even months later. Presumably worldwide air travel could be interrupted for months. [Lance, 2003, pp. 260-61] This phase of Operation Bojinka was scheduled to go forward just two weeks later on January 21. [Insight, 5/27/2002]
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:27 AM on August 10, 2006