Monday, August 21, 2006
Bush's hyping the terrorist threat
or so says Larry Johnson.
From the article:
The initial story out of London gave the average traveler the clear impression that Muslim terrorists were thwarted at the last minute from planting bombs made of liquid explosives aboard aircrafts. Since then, the facts about the story have shifted significantly. It is true that some of the people in the custody of British and Pakistani security forces had thought about bombing airplanes. But there is substantial evidence that the plot was far from implementation.
First, no evidence has emerged that the plotters had in hand a functioning prototype of the device they wanted to take onboard a plane. That's an important point. The Bojinka plot of 1994 - when Ramsi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohamad, Walid Khan, and Hakim Murad planned to blow up 12 jumbo jets over the Pacific - was preceded by Ramsi Yousef's December 1994 success in testing a bomb that exploded on a Philippine Air flight and killed a Japanese man. Yousef, Mohamad, and Murad are in jail. Walid Khan is dead. No one from that group is around to provide technical advice on the amount of explosive required to down a plane.
From the article:
The initial story out of London gave the average traveler the clear impression that Muslim terrorists were thwarted at the last minute from planting bombs made of liquid explosives aboard aircrafts. Since then, the facts about the story have shifted significantly. It is true that some of the people in the custody of British and Pakistani security forces had thought about bombing airplanes. But there is substantial evidence that the plot was far from implementation.
First, no evidence has emerged that the plotters had in hand a functioning prototype of the device they wanted to take onboard a plane. That's an important point. The Bojinka plot of 1994 - when Ramsi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohamad, Walid Khan, and Hakim Murad planned to blow up 12 jumbo jets over the Pacific - was preceded by Ramsi Yousef's December 1994 success in testing a bomb that exploded on a Philippine Air flight and killed a Japanese man. Yousef, Mohamad, and Murad are in jail. Walid Khan is dead. No one from that group is around to provide technical advice on the amount of explosive required to down a plane.
# posted by Raf C. @ 7:39 AM 
