The Terrorist Attack that Wasn't Was a Threat After All

In August of 2006, British authorities announced that they had stopped a terrorist plot designed to blow up multiple airplanes flying between London and North America. This is the reason that you can only carry tiny amounts of liquids on board.

The reaction from the left was instructive. They were sure that the plot either did not exist or would ever have worked. The first reaction was that the announcement of the plot was timed to distract the world from the most significant democratic event since the signing of the Declaration of Independence*. When it was pointed out that the announcement came from Tony Blair's government, not George Bush's they went on to condemn Blair for doing Bush's handiwork.

The most common reaction was that the British had picked up on some people who were talking big but whose plan could never have actually worked.

The terrorists planned on smuggling explosives on board in pieces and assembling the bomb on the airplane. The left picked up on that and speculated that the terrorists would be using a binary explosive. They went on to list the difficulties of mixing the most common binary in a rest room. This was widely picked up and used as evidence that there was never any real threat. The politicians were just using a half-formed plot to scare people into giving up their civil liberties.

Several plots have been discovered since 9/11 and the left has reacted the same way over each of them. They insisted that the plotters were never a threat and the government was simply using scapegoats to scare the populous.

The trial of the British terrorists started recently and a funny thing is emerging - they were a serious threat. At least one of them had already filmed his "martyr" video.

More important, it turns out that the left got things all wrong about the explosives. The terrorists were going to use a hypodermic needle to empty drink containers then inject a fairly stable hydrogen peroxide-based explosive into the container. The hole would be sealed with super glue. They had already done experiments on how much coloring to use to make the explosive look like the original contents. They figured that security would never question a sealed container. They also had detonators hidden in C cell batteries.

They planned on attaching the detonators to the explosives in the restrooms.

I looked up the explosives they were dealing with. I'm not going to provide the link but I found someone telling how to create an unstable version of the same explosive. This was strained through coffee filters and left to dry. The site included a picture of the hole that one of the coffee filters blew in the bench it was drying on after it was left in the sun.

So the threat was real.

This reaction is related to Bush Derangement Syndrome. The left hates President Bush so much that they need to believe that everything he does is a lie. The extreme cases of this believe that the World Trade Center was brought down by explosives planted internally. Even the milder cases believe that the only reason that anyone int he world hates us is our president and that we will be universally loved once we replace Bush with an internationalist president.

In the meantime, there are people who want to kill us and our allies.


* You can be forgiven if you don't remember the momentous event. It was the defeat of Joe Lieberman by Ned Lamont in the Democratic primaries. Lieberman ran as an independent and retained his seat.