http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/07/whose-bombs.html"Whatever those attacks “appeared” to be, they were clearly planned and conducted by people with absolutely no real idea of what they were doing. Despite official attempts to ratchet up the fear-level by insisting that the police had pre-empted a spectacular bombing plot that could have slaughtered hundreds, a number of experts have pointed out the obvious...
Larry C. Johnson, a former senior US counterterrorist official for the CIA and State Department who works as a consultant to governments on terrorism issues, described the Friday episode as a “crock of crap”:
“… gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapnel.”
...As Thomas Greene further observed, absent an oxidiser, the devices, if one could call them that, would simply have been unable to detonate. The implication that they could have detonated, then, is precisely state propaganda. No wonder ex-CIA terror expert Johnson described the weekend incidents as “non-events.” Thus, concluded Peter Lehr, a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University: “Just using petrol canisters, nuts and bolts and a cell phone to trigger the explosion, the London bombing attempt would probably not have worked.” He continued about the Glasgow fiasco: “If you take a look at most al Qaeda attacks, they did a lot of work on reconnoitring. Now they got stopped by some bollards. They didn’t seem very familiar with the airport, then they would have known that the bollards would have stopped them or they overestimated the thrust of the Jeep Cherokee.”
For those tracking the recent round of terror plots against the US and Britain, the dire lack of expertise is a familiar pattern. On the August 2006 “liquid bomb plot”, similarly discredited as simply unworkable, former British Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. (ret.) Nigel Wylde pointed out: “Not al-Qaeda for sure. It would not work. Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure.”
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