Mass murder on an unimaginable scale

The British Chief of Police on BBC last night announced the capture of alleged terrorists who were planning to attack transatlantic aircraft. He used the phrase "Mass murder on an unimaginable scale" twice in less than a minute. The BBC website also attributes to Home Secretary John Reid  the words "loss of life on an unprecedented scale"

Right there, all my alarm bells went off. When two people use almost identical expressions, and one of them repeats that expression verbatim within seconds, something else is going on. There is collusion to get the expression floated and the attached meme launched.

But let's look at some of the other information environment surrounding this event.

We have been introduced to a new expression in the mass media, it is liquid explosives to be delivered apparently in 1.25 litre drink bottles. From the way the story is being presented, this is some new kind of science being unleashed, but its not; it has already been used about last year's London bombings.

USA Today had the story back in November 2005 The London train bombers used liquid explosives to kill 52 others.   

London's subway and bus bombings in July involved homemade bombs made of acetone and peroxide — readily available ingredients — that were mixed in plastic containers. The TSA currently has no equipment specifically designed to check liquids. The Homeland Security Department inspector general warned this year that screeners were not getting better at finding weapons and that improvements may require new technology.

This is doubly interesting because acetone peroxide is indeed made from liquids (acetone, peroxide and an acid catalyst) but the resultant explosive is not a liquid but a crystalline powder. It is also staggeringly dangerous to use.

For its instability, it has been called the "Mother of Satan". It has perhaps sprung into notoriety due to its use in the July 2005 London bombings.

It meets all the other requirements for suspicion, cool terrorist name, easily made from highly available products, very powerful, it had already been used to enormous effect, but apart from being extremely difficult to deploy, and despite being referred to as a liquid, it isn't. So why are the security people looking for a liquid? Maybe there is something else?

The BBC presents what it calls an answer to that question. They call on Dr Clifford Jones, an explosives expert from the University of Aberdeen,who says;   

"even a small amount of liquid explosives carried on to an aircraft would result in a catastrophic explosion."

Can we stop there for a moment? An explosives expert makes a definitive statement about liquid explosives. He makes other definitive statements   

If someone wanted to obtain a solid high explosive in a liquid form, it would not be difficult for a trained chemical technologist.   

The size of a device necessary could be carried in hand baggage. Explosives in a toilet bag, certainly inside a shoulder bag would be enough to meet the terrorists' needs.

That should be enough to scare all of us. A tiny amount of this magical liquid would be enough to bring down a jumbo jet. But then;

... However, I would not be surprised if it is possible to produce solid explosives in liquid form.   

There are such things as liquid explosives that are high explosives and they behave in exactly the same way as solid explosives, such as TNT.

He offers no name or chemicals you could use for a home made liquid explosive and our expert would not be surprised, but he doesn't know, otherwise, as an expert, he would have said. It would have bolstered the case for the story, but he's not bolstering the case, he's undermining it.

Now liquid explosives do exist, Dyna Nobel makes liquid mining explosives for a start. But you don't put them in a bag and detonate them, you pour them into the fissured rock because the one thing explosives need is surface area and a bag of liquid has the smallest possible surface area. That's why FAE's have two detonations, one to turn the liquid into a mist and the second to detonate it. And we are proposing that this should happen inside an airplane. Mhm.

I think the good Dr is being pushed into saying things he doesn't want to because they don't stand up.

And if liquid explosives that can be hidden in fizz bottles have already been used in an attack, how come it has taken this long to forbid their carriage on an airplane? Why, suddenly, should they be banned now? Has the security force been playing ducks and drakes with air safety? Or are there a few of different animals involved?

Update: There is more coming out about liquid explosives, binary devices that can be mixed and detonated in one hit. The background from the NYTimes does not, however, give any more cause for comfort.

Despite knowing for years that liquid explosives posed a threat to airline safety, security agencies have made little progress in deploying technology that could help defend against such attacks, security experts say.

Why do we have to leave these decisions till the very last moment when they will cause the greatest possible damage? We could easily have adapted to not carrying fluids aboard aircraft any time in the last 5 years. But doing it this way is in danger of wrecking the businesses that keep us in the sky in the first place.

The operation brought forward suddenly.

There are many reasons this might make sense, one of them is that the terorrists suddenly decided to act based on some external stimulus, perhaps they realised they had been infiltrated or were under observation, maybe they had a breakthrough in the production of the explosives, or possibly the environment had become very favourable; the admission by US generals that Iraq is sliding into chaos and civil war, the short sharp war in Lebanon has turned into a military and ethical quagmire, what better time could there be to mount a terror attack.

On the other hand, look at the organisational barriers to suddenly changing the plan of an attack of which journalist Daniel Sanford at the BBC says "the Scale of the plot simply staggering".

It involves blowing up 3 or 4 airliners over the Atlantic, then doing it again a couple of days later, and again a few days after that. OK, even assuming you got away with day one, to even fantasize about days 2 and three call into question the intelligence of the plotters. As a credible threat it falls far short, but that is what we are being asked to swallow.

 

But even if it were feasible, a plot on that scale cannot simply be brought forward in a hurry, for a start the plotters would have to have bought at least 10, possibly 20, maybe more, air tickets across the Atlantic, clustered a few days apart. If the police knew who they were, and I don't doubt that such a plot existed, then letting them roll it out would be the surest way of catching them in possession.

Most of the chaos in the airline system right now is down to the fact that, by pulling the main group of plotters, the police may have triggered a secondary team. Why would you take a position of relative knowledge and throw yourself into a position of total ignorance, how is that a good thing for public security?

And are they admitting in the process that airport security is so lax that such a plot has some statistically significant chance of success?

And there have been unintended consequences.

In the BBC report, the Chief policeman was said to have had the "mask break" as the stress of the last few hours overtook him. I'll bet it did. With the memory of recent fiascos in mind, he could now see the whole European and North Atlantic airline industry groaning under the weight of his decisions and I bet that right now he feels sick as a pup.

If he was wrong, the business world will be baying for his head, the opposition politicians will be doing the same, and even if he was right, how close to collapse have his actions pushed a strained and marginal airline industry?

But, like the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the raid on the suspected bomb factory, from which the suspects were released without charge, and the arrest of 7 alleged terrorists in Miami in June, the internals on this story don't add up. Something else is going on.

Another Update:

I caught a piece on ABC (US) news today, where Diane Sawyer was interviewing a former commercial Pilot about bombing planes out of the sky. He pointed out that for such a plot to be credible they would have to know, and be able to arrange to sit in, exactly the right places, of which he said there are only perhaps three on a jumbo. Modern aircraft are not fragile machines; they can fly with very significant amounts of damage. Witness UA Flight 811.

and Aloha flight 243

Your bomb has to do more damage than either of these aircraft suffered to achieve your objective. Which means you need either large quantities of homemade explosives, or military ones.
Sawyer also referred, by name, to "acetone" as the explosive, which I've dealt with above. It does have a fatal attraction for corporate media, however, its slang name. You KNEW they couldn't resist that, never mind the facts. Oh, and about those "facts". This from the SMH just now

A senior congressional source told CNN that the plot was believed to hinge on mixing an energy drink with a gel-like substance inflight to create a potent explosive capable of being ignited by an MP3 player or mobile phone.

ABC however has an even fancier riff on this process.

the specific plan was to conceal a liquid bomb ingredient — acetone peroxide, also called the "Mother of Satan."

It would be dyed the color of the beverage at the bottom of a drink container.

This peroxide-based explosive is the same substance reportedly used by London subway bombers just over one year ago.

The top of the bottle would contain the original beverage, allowing terrorists to even drink from the bottle if questioned by security.

A co-conspirator on the same flight, another terrorist, would bring the detonator — in this case the filament found in a disposable camera's bulb.

Notice how the "mixing an energy drink with a gel-like substance inflight to create a potent explosive" has become "The top of the bottle would contain the original beverage, allowing terrorists to even drink from the bottle"? Which is it? I don't know, what I do know for sure is that the people carrying the story cannot be trusted to get it straight, let alone ask sharp questions of the panic merchants.

Does it trouble anyone that the plan is almost verbatim the failed Bojinka Plot?

• blow up 12 Western airliners simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean in the mid-1990s,
• terrorist mastermind Ramzi Youssef had planned to
• put together an improvised bomb using
• liquid in a contact lens solution container.

Why would anyone clone a failed operation? If there is one thing we can depend on its that our security people always go looking for the bad guys to do the same thing again so we can catch them next time. If there is one thing the bad guys do, its find new ways and new places to catch us out, that's how terrorism works. Which is why this whole fiasco smells.

The plot is straight out of Mission Impossible, endlessly complex (why would you need a second conspirator to carry the detonator if the first guy could get through with a drink bottle?) and we all know what happens with highly complex plans, they go universally go to hell.

The elegance of 911 was that it was essentially extremely simple; minimally armed people on low traffic days willing and physically able to overpower and kill those who got in their way. Then they used the aircraft as weapons. No clever science, no elaborate plans that had to succeeed every step of the way or fail, no laboratories, no James Bond wristwatch detonators, no having to sneak dangerous materials through security or get exactly the right seat allocations, nothing.

I'd start looking for the infiltrator to be the source of the plan, in the same way the Florida 7 plant led those guys by the nose into an insane plan that would never have worked.

Now, perhaps the London Underground bombers had stabilised the bombs till they were detonated by drowning the stuff in water and firing with a flash gun filament. But in that case the system has been kown by the authorities for over a year, and they have not taken any action in that time to avoid such bombs being used by plotters they had not detected. Until right now.

Does that trouble you as much as it troubles me?

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Comments

[Taka]

The phrase "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" set off the alarm bells in my head as well, but for different reasons.

I saw a report suggesting 9 planes were to be targeted so assuming around 500 passengers per plane, that's about 4,500 people. Hardly an unimaginable scale. Unimaginable scale would be more along the lines of, oh I don't know, nuking two cities in Japan, perhaps? :rolleyes:

[Earl Mardle]

Aye,

In fact I Googled the phrase immediately and came up with just 6 hits, most of them referring to the holocaust.

I didn't get into the fact that mass murder on vastly more vile scales has been committed multiple times in our history, and therefore imagined.

Nor did I get into the sad fact that if what was being planned was as described, then our imaginations have become VERY stunted.

I frankly blame the managerial culture, but that's another story.

[Steve Hayes]

I'm glad I'm not the only one to think that the "unimaginable scale" thing was a dangerous piece of media hype.

[John]

Tri-acetate peroxide requires preparation at around -10deg to formed correctly. Any variation in temperature can spoil the end product, simply producing lots of warm steam from peroxide decomposition.

Liquid slurry type explosives are normally very poor explosives, and without confinement and initiation via det cap would hardly start a fire.

Astrolite is the only notable liquid explosive and would have required chemicals that are detected by standard screening measures ( Ammonium Nitrate ).

The liquid explosive story is just that a fabrication to incite fear. And would suggest that poor middle eastern people have run off to detention for carrying soft drinks on to a plane.