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Percieved Threat
Aug. 14th, 2006 02:39 amI should be in bed. I was knackered earlier and fell asleep on the couch, and now I can't sleep.
Instead I've been thinking about the terrorist plot the UK Government claims to have discovered during the week.
From what I've read, a plot was uncovered whereby terrorists would smuggle liquid explosives onto planes and detonate them with batteries and paperclips. The police claim they knew who was involved, and that a "dry run" would have taken place within days, and would have been followed soon after by an actual attack that would simultaneously take down up to ten transatlantic flights.
Now if their intelligence is as good as they say it is, why not keep monitoring the suspects for a few days, and nab them as they board flights for the "dry run"? Then there would be solid evidence of an actual attack, not vague, and frankly somewhat fanciful, mutterings of a potential threat. Doesn't it sound just a little like the mobile bomb factories on backs of lorries that we were assured would be all over Iraq?
Nitroglycerin is quite difficult to manufacture. In purer forms it is quite difficult to transport. It may be desensitized, but then it becomes quite difficult to detonate. I'm not suggesting that an attack along these lines isn't possible, but there would seem to be lots of "soft targets" that a resourceful terrorist could inflict comparable amounts of death and destruction without going to nearly as much trouble. I haven't been able to figure out how much nitroglycerin you'd need to take down a plane. I suspect you'd need quite a bit to take down a plane, which is what you'd need to do to cause "mass murder on an unimaginable scale". Even an explosive decompression would be survivable by the majority of passengers.
Of course, if the terrorist aim was to cause widespread disruption to air services, then they have been largely successful.
I can accept a certain amount of erosion of my civil liberties in the name of protecting me from lunatics, but it had better be for good reason, and there had better be solid evidence of a real threat. Too many people have fought and died to win those liberties to give them up for anything less.
I can't help feeling that these restrictions are totally our of proportion with the threat as it is presented to us. Perhaps we will be shown the hard evidence in due course, but it's going to take some pretty compelling evidence to convince me that it's reasonable to force people to fly for ten hours or more without so much as a book or magazine to read.
I think the very least we must demand is a dramatic improvement in the quality of in flight magazines.
Instead I've been thinking about the terrorist plot the UK Government claims to have discovered during the week.
From what I've read, a plot was uncovered whereby terrorists would smuggle liquid explosives onto planes and detonate them with batteries and paperclips. The police claim they knew who was involved, and that a "dry run" would have taken place within days, and would have been followed soon after by an actual attack that would simultaneously take down up to ten transatlantic flights.
Now if their intelligence is as good as they say it is, why not keep monitoring the suspects for a few days, and nab them as they board flights for the "dry run"? Then there would be solid evidence of an actual attack, not vague, and frankly somewhat fanciful, mutterings of a potential threat. Doesn't it sound just a little like the mobile bomb factories on backs of lorries that we were assured would be all over Iraq?
Nitroglycerin is quite difficult to manufacture. In purer forms it is quite difficult to transport. It may be desensitized, but then it becomes quite difficult to detonate. I'm not suggesting that an attack along these lines isn't possible, but there would seem to be lots of "soft targets" that a resourceful terrorist could inflict comparable amounts of death and destruction without going to nearly as much trouble. I haven't been able to figure out how much nitroglycerin you'd need to take down a plane. I suspect you'd need quite a bit to take down a plane, which is what you'd need to do to cause "mass murder on an unimaginable scale". Even an explosive decompression would be survivable by the majority of passengers.
Of course, if the terrorist aim was to cause widespread disruption to air services, then they have been largely successful.
I can accept a certain amount of erosion of my civil liberties in the name of protecting me from lunatics, but it had better be for good reason, and there had better be solid evidence of a real threat. Too many people have fought and died to win those liberties to give them up for anything less.
I can't help feeling that these restrictions are totally our of proportion with the threat as it is presented to us. Perhaps we will be shown the hard evidence in due course, but it's going to take some pretty compelling evidence to convince me that it's reasonable to force people to fly for ten hours or more without so much as a book or magazine to read.
I think the very least we must demand is a dramatic improvement in the quality of in flight magazines.
