Is It FEAR Unit?

The British disruption of the civil aviation terror plot is a textbook example of why everyone should shut their mouths before these investigations move forward. Because the nature of sensationalist media and political opportunism will always hype a threat at the outset, and it remains to be seen if the dangerousness of that threat will hold.

The Pakistanis, who could find evidence whether there's a clue or not, can't find anything on the alleged mastermind of the plot:

Rashid Rauf, whose detention in Pakistan was the trigger for the arrest of 23 suspects in Britain, has been accused of taking orders from Al Qaeda"s No. 3 in Afghanistan and sending money back to the UK to allow the alleged bombers to buy plane tickets.

But after two weeks of interrogation, an inch-by-inch search of his house and analysis of his home computer, officials are now saying that his extradition is "a way down the track" if it happens at all.

It comes amid wider suspicions that the plot may not have been as serious, or as far advanced, as the authorities initially claimed.

Analysts suspect Pakistani authorities exaggerated Rauf's role to appear "tough on terrorism" and impress Britain and America.

The fact that Pakistan relies on the US for a massive amount of financial aid is a strong motivator to get results on terrorism. You remember that the US reportedly made a deal with Pakistan before the 2004 election to come up with a "high-value target" during the Democratic National Convention. So clearly there is implicit and explicit pressure on Pakistan to break big terror news on a timely basis.

Lost in the discussion about the plot, its seriousness, how advanced its stages were (you know, like the fact that a lot of the plotters didn't have passports), and whether or not it was imminent is the question of its feasibility. This article from a British paper takes a real sober look at that question, and yields some surprising results:

Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers. It would be tedious to enumerate the movie terrorists who've employed relatively harmless liquids that, when mixed, immediately rain destruction upon an innocent populace, like the seven angels of God's wrath pouring out their bowls full of pestilence and pain.

Now we have news of the recent, supposedly real-world, terrorist plot to destroy commercial airplanes by smuggling onboard the benign precursors to a deadly explosive, and mixing up a batch of liquid death in the lavatories. So, The Register has got to ask, were these guys for real, or have they, and the counterterrorist officials supposedly protecting us, been watching too many action movies? [...]

Making a quantity of TATP sufficient to bring down an airplane is not quite as simple as ducking into the toilet and mixing two harmless liquids together.

First, you've got to get adequately concentrated hydrogen peroxide. This is hard to come by, so a large quantity of the three per cent solution sold in pharmacies might have to be concentrated by boiling off the water. Only this is risky, and can lead to mission failure by means of burning down your makeshift lab before a single infidel has been harmed.

But let's assume that you can obtain it in the required concentration, or cook it from a dilute solution without ruining your operation. Fine. The remaining ingredients, acetone and sulfuric acid, are far easier to obtain, and we can assume that you've got them on hand [...]

The genius of this scheme is that TATP is relatively easy to detonate. But you must make enough of it to crash the plane, and you must make it with care to assure potency. One needs quality stuff to commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale," as Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson put it. While it's true that a slapdash concoction will explode, it's unlikely to do more than blow out a few windows. At best, an infidel or two might be killed by the blast, and one or two others by flying debris as the cabin suddenly depressurizes, but that's about all you're likely to manage under the most favorable conditions possible.

We believe this because a peer-reviewed 2004 study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) entitled "Decomposition of Triacetone Triperoxide is an Entropic Explosion" tells us that the explosive force of TATP comes from the sudden decomposition of a solid into gasses. There's no rapid oxidizing of fuel, as there is with many other explosives: rather, the substance changes state suddenly through an entropic process, and quickly releases a respectable amount of energy when it does. (Thus the lack of ingredients typically associated with explosives makes TATP, a white crystalline powder resembling sugar, difficult to detect with conventional bomb sniffing gear.)

This is good, scientific stuff that is typically left out of the hyperbolic reports that dominate daily cable news and fevered postings in the conservosphere. It's not enough that a bunch of yahoos in Britain WANT to blow up a plane; it's important to understand whether or not they could actually do it. We now know that 11 plotters have been charged but just as many have not been, and two were actually released. Everyone who wants to wield this plot as a political tool needs to step off the ledge and pay attention to the facts. And the facts are starting to break down quickly.