Everyone needs to read this article

[chrishansenhome]

While I hold no brief for those misguided people who want to blow us all up, the media have been pretty facile, on the whole, about the possibility of combining various liquids to form a bomb, which they would then detonate. This Register article gives some of the facts about the substance most likely to have been envisioned as the bomb material and how difficult it is to actually make and use it.

One might remember that several years ago a plot to do this type of thing in the Philippines was thwarted. However, after that there was no ban on liquids being brought on board. The reason is that it's so difficult to make this stuff and carry it around that it's not particularly likely that anyone will be able to do it.

If you see someone walking down the aisle of your airplane headed for the toilets with a thermometer, a beaker, and a cooler filled with ice packs, be concerned.

Comments

[keith-london.livejournal.com]

I had a quick scan of the aritcle, and was disappointed to find only the briefest reference, and no proper considration of a real, foiled plot to use TATP (dismissed as impossible to produce in a make shift lab on the plane!) - the case of Richard Reid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Reid_(terrorist)), the would-be suicide shoebomber:


I would suggest, entertaining as that article may be, it is misleading to downplay TATP. I suggest the author should take note (from this article (http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/tatp.htm), :


Having spent most of his energy dismissing liquid bombs as half-baked Hollywood plots, the author of the Regsiter article ends with what must be a chilling note: , "Meanwhile, the real thing draws ever closer."

[chrishansenhome.livejournal.com]

I think the point for me is that synthesizing TATP from liquids is so fiddly that banning liquids from airplanes probably isn't necessary. Methods such as screening for TATP in things like shoes (sniffing, for example) would probably be more effective in detecting the stuff.

[keith-london.livejournal.com]

''banning liquids from airplanes probably isn't necessary'' - I agree! Like the Ryanair chief said, "We're not in danger of dying at the hands of toiletries"

[chrishansenhome.livejournal.com]

Well, I also think the Ryanair chief is a clown, but he made a valuable point.