nebulous

21 people up in arrested in London connected with a plot to blow up airplanes heading for the United States.  Early reports indicate that the plotters may be connected with Al Qaeda.  Also, that the perpetrators would use liquid explosives hidden in common drinks like a Coke or Pepsi.

We know that Ramzi Yousef, the planner of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, key planner in 9/11, was almost caught, in the Philippines if I’m not mistaken.  While in the Philippines he was working on some type of liquid explosive.  The plan at that time was to blow up airplanes over the Pacific Ocean.  Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, describes the incident. 

“And he was planning to blow up US airliners in the Pacific with bomb smuggled on board, bombs we would not notice, using liquid explosives.  There assembled on board in the bathroom and then left there.  The terrorists gets off at the first stop and the plane continues on and blows up.  The Filipinos found some of the bombs, but not all.  He had all the flights picked out, United, Northwest… 11 of them, 747s.”

The above incident happened in January of 1995.  In the intervening 11 years what have we done to prevent these kind of incidents?  If the answer is nothing, many government officials should be fired!!!  This should have been a surprise.  We were warned about this method!