Packages of doom or overactive imaginations?
Sounds like it would be easier to get all passengers on a plane to pay attention to the safety speech than create a big enough explosion using liquids smuggled on in shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes. Too many people at HS watching Die Hard movies and not talking to chemists first who know better? Or perhaps it was a ploy to make people afraid before the election (take it away, conspiracy enthusiasts!).
Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible?
We’re told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. […] Or at least that’s what we’re hearing, and loudly, through the mainstream media and its legions of so-called “terrorism experts.” But what do these experts know about chemistry? [T]he myth of binary liquid explosives dies hard.
Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you’ll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you’ll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.
After a few hours – assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven’t overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities – you’ll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.
By now you’ll be asking why these jihadist wannabes didn’t conspire simply to bring TATP onto planes, colored with a bit of vegetable dye, and disguised as, say, a powdered fruit-flavored drink. The reason is that they would be afraid of failing: TATP is notoriously sensitive and unstable.
It wouldn’t surprise me.
The article is six weeks old. Why didn’t you run it sooner?
Hey, John, aren’t you a chemist? Wouldnt you know these types of things?
It was my understanding though that you would need a lot more than what’s in say a squirt bottle. Besides blowing out a window isnt what they were after, was it?
Our government would lie to us? No way!
/Sarcasm
#2: I only ran across it today.
Others have pointed out that the security level gets goosed every time the Administration gets some bad news and wants to flush it from the public awareness. The media is only too happy to oblige, it seems.
Apparently some people have caught on to this and have formulated their own ways of counteracting this brainwashing.
I was one of those flying when this all got foisted upon us and you could hear some people in the TSA security lines at the airports calling their proscribed “liquids, gels, and aerosols” their “Liebermans”! (As in “No, sir, I have packed no ‘Liebermans’ in my carry-ons today.”)
The other comment I hear frequently is, “I’m just glad the shoebomber didn’t hide it up his ass!”
Amen!
Who would have expected planes to fly into the world trade center and knock the towers over?
Who would have expected someone to contain a bomb in thier shoes?
Anyone with a basic knowlege of chemistry will tell you its very easy to create a bomb using a combination of two chemicals or a chemical that reacts when exposed to air.
Any security expert will tell you they don’t need to cause an explosion to bring down an jet.
Thier are so many floors in the system it isn’t even funny.
But don’t take my word Ask John Dvorak, John has a degree in this stuff.
We can say politics has something to do with it or we can wake up and fess up to reality.
People on this planet just don’t know how to play nice!
There are better and more sure ways to bring down an airplane then mixing some unreliable chemicals together in the bathroom.
When I first heard about this I was suspicious, but didn’t know enough to discount it out of hand. Is it possible to do? I believe it is. Is it probable that the effort would fail? Most likely.
#7 … who could have predicted? there was a tv show about that very same thing.. lone gunmen… yeah the xfiles people..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FitEChIdiEw
Check the production date… Yeah, scarry stuff, and *YES* it was predicted.
We have some pretty smart science-nerds here on this board. Can anyone here tell us if this is possible.
I heard one woman complaining that they took away her mascara.
Could it EVER be possible to mix a mascara-sized bottle of some crap with somethign else to bring down a plane?
Hard to imagine! But does anyone here know?
By the way… if you didn’t mind a little jail time, this is where you could have some real fun.
Hatch some scheme where you use underwire bras and pantyhose to hijack a plane! It seems more likely than using mascara or nail clippers
Get caught, and then the government, of course, would overeact and ban those “possible weapons.” That would make for some great chaos at the airports.
Then, reveal it as a prank and exploit your 15-minutes of fame like that red paper clip guy is doing..
ANYTHING potent enough for a serious explosion is unstable and you’d probably blow yourself up before you got in the air. We shouldn’t be worried about carry-on explosives. We should be worried about checked bags. You can fit a lot more stuff in and I’ll guarantee you that anything remotely unstable will go off when the baggage handlers fling it into the hold.
Look,
Its easy, and it dont have to be more then 1 and Stable.
You could wear a fat suit and carry on enough gun powder to bolw a GOOD hole.
Or even fulminated murcury and some Zip cord.
I wont get to spacific, but other things CAN be made, just that the Gov has made it SEEM that it takes a science speeialist to do anything.
Dont forget, that 90% of ALL science, was a mistake, that someone tried to make happen AFTER someone blew themselves up. Look up the history of Niro and 18th century farmers. Do you think it took a Sci major to do it?? NOT…
#7 Who could have predicted that anyone would fly planes into the world trade centre and pentagon?
Why the joint chiefs of staff when they wrote Operation Northwoods and the people involved in operation Vigilent Guardian 2 weeks before 9/11 and on 9/11 itself.
I challenged people to come up with a plausible way of doing this in the cage match. So far nobody has.
http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php/topic,386.0.html
Nitroglycerin for one.
And I’m not talking about the heart medication.
Acids,
Some chemicals explode into flames when exposed to the air.
And then thier are theirs radio active stuff like uraranium…Now that gets kind of costly.
Oh and did anyone forget about anthrax???? There are thousands of toxins that can be carried around in a half dram container…
The government was informed of the attacts prior to 911 and did not tell the American people trying to prevent a panic.
The fact of the matter is the government dosn’t give the public play by play details of whats going on.
Now look at all the screeners they have at the airport then think about all the drugs that have been smuggled into the country.
Do you really think we are safe?
Are we better off being informed or should we just trust that people are looking out for our safety?
How many people think that we wil never be attacked again?
So in other words RB doesn’t know aht he’s talking about.
#14: Probably because if someone knows how to do it and posted it, they’d be afraid of a visit from HS.
Any hacker knows that vulnerabilities are proportional to the complexity of machinery, if terrorist want to blow up a jet, in reality, nothing is stopping them. Fact: blowing up an airliner will not generate the same reaction as before 9/11 and any idiot who attempts to hijack a plane, at this point, will be defeated by the passengers.
#7: In Tom Clancy’s 1996 novel “Executive Orders”, Jack Ryan becomes chief executive as a result of Japanese terrorist crashing a 747 on the Capitol during the State of the Union address; obliterating the President, most of Congress, and all the Supreme Court Justices.
Extremest must employ new thinking if they want to draw attention to a cause. Perhaps in the form of several dirty bombs targeted at blue states, inevitably generating a greater complacency on the part of a bureaucratic faction, i.e.“What did we, the US, do to cause them to attack us?”
The bureaucracy is a very large beast, there is always a reflex prior to a rational response. There is no conspiracy on the part of the bureaucracy (Republicans & Democrats). They are merely opportunist. The central of today’s bureaucracy is how to control and regulate a large number of people. The terrorist are simply hacking the bureaucracy. The answer lies in simplicity, not complexity.
Milo, how much more information do you need than that?
I’m not saying anything the general public doesn’t know.
The scare was posted in the media so its public information.
The nut jobs plan where to bring in perioxide in water bottles and mix it with another chemical while on the plane. Since peroxide h2o2 is very similiar to water h2o it was very easy to sneek on.
I think the terrorists are planning on something much bigger than 911.
http://www.syft.com/index.html?id=87
The above site gives full details, cost, availability of a ‘sniffer’ using REALLY tested techniques for finding explosives of all kinds – including liquid – but, and here is the real life bit, so called ‘security businesses make fortunes from upping the scare level whilst at the same time employing thickos at low wages like the Orlando Fl 18 year old who told me to ‘…move that trolley (full of luggage and small kids’ Why? “don’t argue with me, it’s in my line of sight’ I was in the queue for luggage search at the time. by the way we are both in our late 70s, white etc, hardly the profile of the terrorist I think.
norman speight