So were we lied to about liquid explosives or not?

[joevsimp]

Er, how long would it take to dry out a bottle of dissolved TATP?

quite a while, spesh if you dont have equipment like a buchner funnell ( using vacuum filtration) and the shits more sensitive than nitroglycerine

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

Psssssst, i have some good osmium tetroxide

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3604857.stm

Ooooh... you mean to make a 'Dirty Bomb'?

That BBC article contains some sound advice that should perhaps be heeded by some on this thread, tho...

...you could be permanently blinded," said Dr Simpson.

My Mum used to tell me that.

 

[Cid]

Ta for that one, good to see facts posted.

Yep, and the Bojinka test run killed one man and damaged a plane's flight controls... Had the operation been scaled up (and that was well within the capabilities of Ramzi Yousef) it could easily have been a threat (well, athreat to the pope at any rate). Dunno how many explosives experts with the er... skill of Yousef there are operating in England though. The shere ridiculousness of the recent dirty bomb idea didn't give me much um... faith (for want of a better word) in their abilities.

 

[Macabre]

Er, how long would it take to dry out a bottle of dissolved TATP?

Depends what you disolve it in but given the nature of TATP I'd imagine that disolving it in anything is likely to break it down very quickly due to it being so entropicly volatile. Also osmium tetroxide is unlikely to be used as a weopon as if costs over a grand for 10g, not something you can casually buy and if it went missing from someones lab whoever paid for it would castrate the thief for nicking such an expensive and difficult to obtain reagent.

 

[stupid kid]

But tipping it into the toilet bowl might leave some burn marks on the lid. .

Oh no!

 

[scarecrow]

So were we lied to for the sake of a bit of fear-mongering anti-alquaeda sentiment to get the whole country whipped up into a patriotic frenzy?

Michael Moore covered a lot of this in Farenheit 9/11

Lets wait for the trial for the facts around this case.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

Lets wait for the trial for the facts around this case.

Yeah, right.

Let's hope we don't have to wait as long as Danny McNamee, Judith Ward, The Birmingham Six, The Guilford Four, or The McGuire Seven did, eh?

Twat.

 

[max_freakout]

I don't want to wait i want to start moaning shrilly about it now


I despair at the British Public

 

[pk]

Jazzz et al might be full of shit 90 percent of the time...

...but that shouldn't put people off investigating the remaining 10 percent.

 

[GarfieldLeChat]

<speculation>what if they have allowed the suggestion of TATP to continue unchecked as this throws the scent off something far easier to create/use/obtain. and of coruse prejudicing the trial i can think of far more ealiy created chemical clouds which would cause far greater death and have no need for impossible to make explosives to be considered... look for example what happened in the hotel where the kids died, and that was from carbon monoxide...no big bomb, no clever chemicals just poor ventilation...</speculation>

 

[TopCat]

If someone wanted to immoliate themselves it would not be hard to soak clothes in a sodium chlorate mixture and let them dry. Just wait till our security forces realise this, then you will have to get on the plane naked.

 

[Kameron]

If someone wanted to immoliate themselves it would not be hard to soak clothes in a sodium chlorate mixture and let them dry. Just wait till our security forces realise this, then you will have to get on the plane naked.

Kameron starts booking flights too which ever city happens to be having a fashion week when that happens.

 

[Kameron]

I still don't get it though. Cars kill more people than terrorists, why the fuck doesn't Al-Qaeda start making cars and why doesn't the government ban them all? Then people really will live in fear.

 

[Backatcha Bandit]

What gets me is the hysterial bullshit we're fed regarding 'Terrorist Dirty Bombs', whilst they're simultaneously spewing literally tons of Uranium 238 (half life of 4.5 billion years) down on (in, when the aim's right) to the people of Iraq and into our own atmosphere in ceramic aerosol form.

I know what I'm more fucking worried about.

 

[White Lotus]

I reckon it was a plot by the baggage handlers. Judging from the amount of expensive kit - laptops etc. - that went missing from hold baggage while all this was going on.

 

[max_freakout]

****BUMP****

is there any update on this? Were the claims about liquid explosives actually substantiated?

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Not that I've heard.

 

[mauvais]

I've still not had to eat my hands, if that helps.

 

[Sasaferrato]

The only reliable liquid explosive is nitro-glycerine, and that is not stuff to fuck about with.

 

[laptop]

The only reliable liquid explosive is nitro-glycerine, and that is not stuff to fuck about with.

Unfortunately, there are others. That are unreliable. But I don't want to give the security services any help in building a case.

Seems two of those arrested were released on 11/01/2006 and two were bailed in 10/2006: http://www.optevi.net/newstracker/default.aspx?f=1&e=873

No clue when the trial will be.

 

[Sasaferrato]

Unfortunately, there are others. That are unreliable. But I don't want to give the security services any help in building a case.

Seems two of those arrested were released on 11/01/2006 and two were bailed in 10/2006: http://www.optevi.net/newstracker/default.aspx?f=1&e=873

No clue when the trial will be.

Um...........I did say reliable

 

[laptop]

Um...........I did say reliable

And even then not very... unless you have a Kieselguhr mine

 

[bluestreak]

well, i've checked my current security levels and they're reading "CYNICAL"

 

[longdog]

The only reliable liquid explosive is nitro-glycerine, and that is not stuff to fuck about with.

I believe liquid explosives are widely used in the mining and tunneling industries.

I agree with what you say about nitroglycerine but it's not as bad as fulminate of mercury. That goes off if you at it funny

 

[Badger Kitten]

Right, well this is all kicking off again, and the prosecutions case started today.

Those wondering how it was allegedly to be done, those who griited their teeth at the no liquids, no hand-luggage chaos, here's the deal...

Batteries, camera and a fruity drink

Peter Wright, QC, said the main explosive component was hydrogen peroxide. The chemical has many legitimate uses but when mixed with other organic materials it could become highly explosive.

In this case, he alleged, the peroxide was to be blended with Tang, a powder with a high sucrose content used to make a fruit-flavoured soft drink.

Another entry in the notebook read: “Check time to fill each bottle. Check time taken to dilute in HP . . . Calculate exact drops of Tang, plus colour. Make in HP.”

The plotters had intended, Mr Wright said, to drill a hole in the bottom of the drinks bottle and empty its contents. The bottle would then be refilled with the hydrogen peroxide and Tang mixture, using a syringe. The bottom of the bottle would be sealed with a blob of superglue.

Mr Wright said that by draining and refilling the soft drinks bottles through the bottom, the conspirators would leave the seal intact giving the impression it had never been opened.

He said that the mixture of Tang and hydrogen peroxide was “capable of making an energetic mixture which can be detonated”.

The charge would then be set off by a high-explosive detonator, allegedly made of hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD), an explosive which has been used in previous attacks. A key ingredient for it can be found in solid-fuel camping tablets.

The HMTD was to be inserted in the casing of an AA 1.5v battery and the explosion initiated by another power source, possibly a disposable camera.

Mr Wright said that the bombs would have been easily assembled from the component parts and would have the capability of being detonated with devastating consequences.

“The devices were to be smuggled on to the aircraft and detonated in flight by a suicide bomber, a bomber prepared to lose his life in this way,” said Mr Wright.

 

[likesfish]

wouldnt need much of a bang to fuck up an aeroplane from the inside

 

[WouldBe]

There was also the failed Operation Bojinka. Technically I think it was possible.

Of course it's technically possible specially back in the 70's when security was even more lax. Nitroglycerine is a liquid explosive and doesn't need anything sophisticated to set it off, a sharp shock is enough. This probably makes it too unstable for these purposes.

The info given on the news last night was they planned to fill unopened pop bottles with hydrogen peroxide and colour it with food colouring to look like pop. I suspect that the hydrogen peroxide would have reacted with the food colouring and the pop bottles would have burst well before they got to the airport.

 

[baldrick]

did anyone else see dispatches where they had some professor demonstrate how easy it would be to do this?

he refused to name the chemicals, but the result was definitely an airplane-downing explosion.

 

[jæd]

wouldnt need much of a bang to fuck up an aeroplane from the inside

But why bother...? If you can hijack an airplane you have a much larger bomb, as 9/11 showed. I'm thinking they were going to use the liquid as some kind of weapon...

 

[EddyBlack]

I’m happy to be proved wrong, but that John Reid struck me as a bit of a tit. Many of these plots are just fantasies, and whilst I am glad when they are discovered, they usually get blown out of proportion in terms of their ‘real and present danger’ as somebody said in 2006.

It became apparent to me that the public where a bit meh, it is good that people aren’t all hysterical like the govt. would seem to like us to be.

And in fact this was one of the bigger terror plot hullabuloos. Considering we are in fact at war, whether you think terrorist retaliation is legitimite or not, I hardly think we all need to be all shit scared and destroy the Magna Carta.