"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 delaysposted by talitha_kumi at 1:30 AM on August 10, 2006
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.No. Just, no. Who was it that said that people who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither?
"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."Next day, MASSIVE TERROR THREAT.
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:Amazing, just amazing, how he says this yesterday, then today, MAJOR TERROR THREAT.
· 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.HM Government has stated, quite clearly, that those civil liberties you're citing need to be changed. And, amusingly enough, the next day, a MAJOR TERROR THREAT appears, to show why things like due process, access to consel, and freedom of speech are just things that help the terrorists.
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.posted by asok at 6:03 AM on August 10, 2006
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 rzklkng at 6:34 AM on August 10, 2006
Georgie has taken more vacation time than any president in history.
The Terrorism Bubble has BurstChalk it up as dead alongside the advantage of incumbency in Congress and the effectiveness of playing the "Anti-Semite Card" when criticizing Israel.
So, between this paper [CATO], and the cover story for this month's Atlantic, I'm happy to say that the war on terra is over.
"Chemicals sitting in anyone's bathroom at home could be used to make a bomb that would badly damage a passenger jet, and experts have been warning about this danger for years.posted by ericb at 11:17 AM on August 10, 2006
...Such mundane items as nail polish remover, disinfectants and hair coloring contain chemicals can be combined to make an explosion and are not detectable by 'sniffing' machines, which detect plastic explosives but are not used with all baggage.
'There remains an important explosives threat that our current procedures are not geared up for for carry-on baggage,' added Blumstein, who was on a National Academy of Sciences committee that wrote a 1998 report on the detection of explosives for commercial aviation security.
Plastic explosives can be concealed in bottles or other innocent-looking containers that would pass through X-ray machines.
'They don't have the wherewithal to detect it unless it is connected as a bomb because it'll just look like a pile of stuff,' Blumstein said.
Bombers who attacked London Underground trains and a bus in July 2005 used homemade peroxide-based explosives carried in backpacks.
An explosive chemical called triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, can be put together with sulfuric acid, found in some drain cleaners, hydrogen peroxide, a medical disinfectant and hair bleach, and acetone, found in nail polish remover.
Some combinations can be set off using another chemical such as hydrochloric acid, easily carried in a small glass bottle.
One of the most notorious explosives is nitroglycerin, and the clear yellow or colorless liquid can produce an explosion sometimes with vigorous shaking. Made by carefully combining glycerol or glycerin with nitric and sulfuric acids, it is very unstable and many people have been injured or killed in trying to make or mix it.
People have tried several times to use such easily concealed explosives on aircraft. Richard Reid, a British-born follower of Saudi-born militant leader Osama bin Laden, was tackled by passengers in December 2001 while trying to detonate explosives stuffed in his shoes.
In 1994, Islamic fundamentalists detonated liquid explosives on a Japan-bound Philippine Airlines plane, killing a Japanese passenger and injuring 10 others.
Mark Ensalaco, an international terrorism expert at the University of Dayton in Ohio, said Thursday's foiled operation appeared to be identical.
'I stress identical with the explosives in liquids, which appear to be assembled on the plane,' Ensalaco said in a statement."
[Reuters | August 10, 2006]
”The next terrorist attack could be carried out by airline passengers who hide bomb ingredients in hair gel or baby milk bottles and assemble their weapon in a locked restroom, security experts warn.posted by ericb at 3:16 PM on August 10, 2006
…Bomb experts and troubleshooters for airline security interviewed by The Associated Press said mobile phones, computers, wrist watches or anything else with a battery should be prohibited from flights.
Perhaps most chillingly, they warned that security staff at airports are not looking for the right things — and the change in tactics required would likely overwhelm current security operations.
‘That theater we see, of people taking off shoes, is not going to stop a suicide bomber. The terrorists have already sniffed out the weak spots and are adopting new tactics,’ said Irish security analyst Tom Clonan, who noted that security measures usually are designed for the last attack, not the next threat.
He said a terrorist group will almost certainly try to blow up a plane with a bomb assembled on board unless security measures improve fundamentally.
…The technology for the kind of liquid or crystallized explosives possibly involved in the thwarted terror plot is not new." [more]
"I'm suing TSA to make them stop demanding that citizens identify themselves in order to travel. Not only airports, but trains, cruise ships, and some buses, are now "asking for" IDs. You can't read the rules -- they define your rights and obligations, but they're super secret information (SSI). We've petitioned the US Supreme Court to examine whether the Feds can enforce secret regulations.Gilmore v. Gonzales.
If you politely decline to show ID whenever someone asks (or demands) it, you will discover what your rights are. You'll be surprised. Most of the people who were asking for it have no right to demand it. They've been relying on your voluntary cooperation. Hmm, they forgot to tell you that part; but you just found it out for yourself."
Although reports that Mr Bush was woken at his ranch in Texas yesterday morning by a call from Tony Blair were denied by the White House, the two leaders had been in regular touch — as recently as Sunday — about British police efforts to track and capture those behind the aircraft plot.There was no political timing here whatsoever. None at all. Not a single bit.
American authorities were told about a fortnight agoof an “accelerating plan” to target US airlines flying from Britain to Los Angeles, Washington and New York. One official was quoted yesterday as saying that British authorities would not have arrested the suspects “if they hadn’t thought these guys were ready to go — the trip line had been reached — they dropped the hammer when they did because they thought they were out of time”.
Although reports that Mr Bush was woken at his ranch in Texas yesterday morning by a call from Tony Blair were denied by the White House, the two leaders had been in regular touch — as recently as Sunday — about British police efforts to track and capture those behind the aircraft plot.There was no political timing here whatsoever. None at all. Not a single bit.
American authorities were told about a fortnight agoof an “accelerating plan” to target US airlines flying from Britain to Los Angeles, Washington and New York. One official was quoted yesterday as saying that British authorities would not have arrested the suspects “if they hadn’t thought these guys were ready to go — the trip line had been reached — they dropped the hammer when they did because they thought they were out of time”.
Iran Bid to Acquire Yellowcake Uranium from the Congo.posted by ericb at 7:12 PM on August 10, 2006
Bush's Famous 16 Words | State of the Union Address | January 28, 2003:“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .”Paging Mr. Joseph C. Wilson IV.
Downing Street admitted Tony Blair would not have left the country on Monday for his Caribbean holiday if he had known the police would need to swoop so quickly to disrupt a terrorist plot. He has known about it in general terms for months, and has spoken to President George Bush about it on a number of occasions. The two leaders discussed it in more detail on Sunday, during a conversation on a secure line in which the prime minister outlined what he knew of the British cell being monitored by the security services.That article, although it raises the question implicitly, doesn't explain the decision to act today. Assuming we can trust the memo the NYT describes, the explanation is the arrest of the suspected Al Qaeda contact in Pakistan yesterday.
...
From his holiday home, he spoke again to Mr Bush on Wednesday around 8pm UK time, again mentioning the security threat, but primarily discussing fresh plans to break the deadlock at the UN on the Middle East. Hours later police and security services were in contact with their US partners to say a specific threat was being acted upon.
The decision to sanction the raids took ministers by surprise.
One official said suicide attackers planned to use a peroxide-based solution that could ignite when sparked by a camera flash or another electronic device.'Solution' typically (but not always) denotes a liquid. The CTV news report I watched specifically mentioned liquids dyed to look like a sports drink. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a print version of the CTV story at the moment. In both cases, the information was presented as if it was from an official's statement, rather than as speculation of the news agency itself. I'd be interested to read an article that explictly conflicts with the reports I've seen and heard, if you've got a link.
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