Plane plot thwarted, threat level raised

August 10, 2006

This doesn’t appear to be one of those cry-wolf situations.

The United States on Thursday raised its terror threat level after British police said they had arrested more than 20 suspects in a major terrorist plot to blow up passenger jets flying between the United Kingdom and the United States.

The foiled plot was “intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson said.

The intelligence that uncovered the plot “makes very strong links to al Qaeda,” a senior U.S. administration official told CNN.

As of now, the threat warning has been raised to “red” for commercial flights from Britain to the United States, marking the first time the warning system has reached this level (it designates a “severe risk of terrorist attacks”).

“To defend further against any remaining threat from this plot, we will also raise the threat level to high, or orange, for all commercial aviation operating in or destined for the United States,” Chertoff said.

A statement issued by Chertoff said “currently, there is no indication … of plotting within the United States.”

The emphasis appears to be on liquids as a means of carrying explosives onto a plane through carry-on luggage, and then mixed in-flight, suggesting a new area of scrutiny for air travelers.

Officials were requiring passengers to check everything except personal items like keys, wallets, and passports, which they had to carry in plastic bags. Drinks and other liquid items were banned.

Travelers were required to remove spectacles or sunglasses from their cases, and those traveling with infants were required to taste any baby milk in front of security officials.

Britain’s Department for Transport said it was requiring secondary searches of travelers headed for the United States, with a particular eye to removing any liquids they might have with them.

A U.S. administration official said the terror plot targeted Continental, United, and American Airlines. British Home Secretary John Reid said the plotters planned loss of life on “an unprecedented scale.”

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more throughout the day.

See, the British using law enforcement methods and paying attention, stopped a terrorist plot.

Or is that pre-9/11 thinking? I wonder if Gonzales will claim we only found out about because we tortured someone in Egypt and General Michael V. Hayden will claim we only found out about it because we spied on Americans and Donald Rumsfeld with claim that we stopped them by fighting them in Iraq?

Just a minute, the terrorists were in Great Britain. Not Iraq.

Does that mean that Tony Snow is wrong (of course) and fighting ‘terrorists’ in Iraq is not making us safer at home?

$300,000,000,000 dollars and counting. 2588+ American lives and counting, Tens of thousands of dead Iraqi and counting. America’s reputation trashed and all the post 9/11 good will lost. And still we are not stopping plots from being aimed at the United States.

Thank God we have the British to keep us safe. Imagine if we had to rely on Chertoff and Homeland Security. Brrrr!

  • Although it may not be a “cry wolf” situation, I am skeptical because of the timing.
    Granted the timing would have been better for BushCo, Inc. for this to break prior to Holy Joe’s spanking in CT, it still fits in the every other year (just before elections) pattern of TERROR!!!! alerts.
    Or am too cynical?

  • Maybe the terrorists don’t know they have to be in Iraq. I mean hasn’t the Bush administration been telling us that we’re fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here?

  • Yeah, yeah, yeah, even if this is real, the timing is a political event. (9/11 redux.) I’m both skeptical and jaded. Bojinko!

  • “Obviously, we need to invade Britain. That’s where the terrorists are.” – Farinata X

    The sick truth about that is that the British 2nd generation Muslims from Pakistan and so on don’t speak their grand parents languages, and their Imans don’t speak English. So the only place they can get information about their religion is from radical Islamic web sites. Any wonder they are a breeding ground for terrorists?

  • Damn Brits. They weren’t supposed to run this op until two weeks before the election!

  • From the latest AP story, he’re the key line:

    “Officials said the government has been aware of the nature of the threat for several days.”

    In other words, instead of warning people a few days ago when they would have been out of harm’s way, they created maximum inconvenience at a time of maximum danger for maximum effect after setting the whole thing up with tony snow’s press conference yesterday.

  • Can’t help channeling The Rude Pundit here: I’ll bet this news caused an eruption of volatile liquids on Karl Rove’s and Tony Snow’s pants!!

  • If Blair and Bush have been “consulting” about this plot discovered months ago, why is the US terror alert raised only when it’s announced?

  • If Blair and Bush have been “consulting” about this plot discovered months ago, why is the US terror alert raised only when it’s announced?

    That’s a very good question.

  • I need to disagree with the significance of the delay in announcing it. I’m as cynical as anyone else, and I don’t put it past the Administration to hype the threat and to immediately overturn whatever civil liberties we have left.

    However, it is actually good law enforcement practice to wait until the very last possible moment to make and arrest and go public. It allows for capture of the most participants, and decreases the chance that key member of a plot like this will get away.

  • These comments are scary. You sound like a bunch of high school kids who get sick of their teachers saying “Don’t have sex because you might get an STD” and who therefore, when you decide, rightly, to have sex, think that STDs don’t exist and don’t bother with condoms.

    Yes, Bush has lied about Al Qaeda, yes he’s used it as an excuse to do all sorts of unconstitutional and disgusting things, but there are still people out there who are terrorists, who hate us, and who do things like 9/11 and the earlier bombing of the WTC, the attack on the Cole, etc. (I will ignore any 9/11 denialists for the same reason I ignore Holocaust Deniers and ID/Creationist babblers.)

    We can’t throw out the Constitution, or torture, or the like. But we can’t ignore them either. I live in Brooklyn, close enough to have seen the smoke, and my sister-in-law worked in the area and is still suffering from the anxiety of seeing the fall. Don’t throw out the dirty bathwater, but keep the baby, please.

  • I agree with NYCmoderate (maybe because I’m a moderate). Good police work is the only thing that can protect us against terroist plots — and the Europeans do it well. Particularly the French, who Americans love to irrationally hate.

    Europe has fought such terrorism for decades. Americans think it began on 9/11/ 2001 (or therebouts). Europe knows invading countries is more than useless. And Europe knows the difference between Sunni and Shia.

    I doubt the Bush administration had any political designs regarding the plot, possibly because it may not have known much about it. Our intelligence system has been shown to be unintelligent and leaky. I doubt foreign intel agencies communicate with ours as much as they did before Bush. Or before Plame.

  • This is a prime example of what a local police department can do when they’re given the funding that US local police departments were promised—and have yet to receive—from Herr Bush’s Reich. But giving money to local police departments would require having the money, as a prerequisite to giving it—and one cannot give money to local police departments when it has already lined the pockets of wealthy friends….

  • You’re absolutely right, Prup. I was shocked to see this terror threat being linked, to all things, Lieberman’s defeat on one liberal blog and now in the comments here.

    I’m sitting here a few miles away from Heathrow, watching helicopters hover over a neighboring town, waiting for news my daughter’s American flight from H’row has taken off, after which I’ll be waiting to get a phone call when she lands in Chicago in the middle of our night.

    You can bet Lieberman’s defeat is the farthest thing from my mind, and from the minds of British officials who’ve been working on this for months.

    If they’d released the news yesterday, or last week, or tomorrow, or next week, would the reaction have been any different? There were lots of reasons, many we may never know, why today was the day they arrested the suspects. But I can say with certainty that what Tony Snow says in a press conference wasn’t one of them.

    Please, keep your tinfoil hats in the closet, since you only look silly wearing them.

  • I guess the elections are finally upon us. They’ve cried wolf so many times, especially leading up to elections. I’m not sure how seriously to take this.

  • The fact is, it’s easier to operate in Europe, so it makes sense to state attacks from there. And GB sends a lot of Brits and Americans across the pond, so that makes sense, too. But do you honestly believe, had the terrorists started in the US, that our security would have figured this out? Unfortunately, I don’t. Homeland security is a joke, they simply hired all the guys that were already screwing up security, and then they had debacle after debacle (remember the security thefts, the expensive parties, the felons on the payroll?). That’s what our government has been doing.

    Again, thank God the Brits weren’t that dumb and corrupt.

  • KathyF, Prup

    For five years now we’ve been told the sky is falling on America whenever it is, in fact, falling on the Bush Administration.

    With Tony Snow coming out yesterday in the White Hosue and saying that a vote for Lamont is a vote for terrorism, Cheney saying it as he done before about voting for Democrats in general, Bush implying it, and all the rightwing loonies on TV, radio and the web parroting the notion, while simultaneously saying that a Lamont victory is actually a long term Republican victory because it shows Democrats are cowards, appeasers, etc.; then, surprise surprise, there’s a big terror alert the Bush Administration knew would be coming, having been in discussion with Blair for months, according to David Gregory this morning on the Today Show, and intensively over the last few days; and once again, as with the Miami yahoos, there are no real details, just confusion, smoke and bluster (this time the catch phrase is “real deal”); please forgive me if I don’t think this is bullshit.

    It’s a shame people like you haven’t yet realized that the War on Terror, as promoted by the Bush Administration, is just a marketing campaign to keep people in fear and voting Republican, not a campaign to keep people actually safe.

  • I put immediate credence into this one, simply because it was MI5 who did the heavy lifting and rounded up the suspects, and because the US DOJ and DHS seem not to have been involved until very late in the game. Sad.

  • These comments are scary. You sound like a bunch of high school kids who get sick of their teachers saying “Don’t have sex because you might get an STD” and who therefore, when you decide, rightly, to have sex, think that STDs don’t exist and don’t bother with condoms. -Prup

    First, analogies are the recourse of a weak argument that cannot stand on it’s on. Second, that has to be about the worst analogy I’ve ever heard. Most of my high school teachers didn’t give me several solid years of evidence that I should not trust them. Comparing the Bush Administration to teachers is insulting to teachers.

    No one is denying the existence or terrorists. What I am cynical about is the timing. Three months before an election? Immediately after a major neocon defeat? What makes this so different than the previous foiled terror plots that the threat level has to change? The last time a terror plot was foiled it wasn’t changes.

    So forgive the skepticism, but I will not swallow a single word from this Administration or the British as truth without questioning it.

    If you and KathyF want to fall in line and believe, that’s fine, you can join the 50 percenters who still think Iraq had WMD, but I for one feel it is my duty as an American to question the actions and motives of a corrupt Administration on everything, not just when it suits you.

  • People like me HAVE realized this (and blogged about it). People like you haven’t realized that every time a terrorist goes boo in the night it isn’t a propaganda ploy by Bush and Blair.

    Meanwhile the rest of the world goes “Lieberman who?” and goes on with their hatred of America, which I do lay at Bush’s door.

  • First of all I do not doubt that this is real. It is sad that I trust the British government so much more than my own but I do. Second, the BCC is reporting that the British police are reporting this as a “home-grown” terrorist cell. However CNN is reporting how Al-Queda is really expanding its methods and that this is an Al-Queda style attack (everything but thie was Al-Queda). So which is it?

    KathyFm, here is the problem with your otherwise reasonable comment; we are talking about Bush/Cheney/Rove. They will spin this every which way for their political advantage. It does not matter if it was or was not a real terrorist plot because the important part is not the news event but the coverage of the news event. You have to appreciate that 5 years of nothing but spin have basically removed all credibility from the leadership.

  • MNProgressive

    Exactly. The American people are finally beginning to understand what the Russians have known for a century: When all you get from the Republican government is propoganda, then nothing they say can be trusted and you have to go to different sources for information.

    My instinct would be to trust the British too–except for the fact that Blair has remained on vacation himself, just like our own Dear Leader. Blair would have gone home if this were anything more than a stunt.

  • The Bush Crime Family seems determined to bring on a new Dark Ages. In the old one, people were (justifiably) afraid to travel beyond their own village (typical population: 300). Strangers had to be brought before the village elders to explain what they were doing there (this practice continued into Colonial New England). When fear and suspicion are everywhere it makes it easy for uninspired thugs to govern.

  • I know we manipulate the terror levels, but so do the terrorists. “Scare the Americans so they vote hawkish, then they will increase their destruction and our number will increase.”

    It’s sick on both side, their power is far more important then actually finding harmony. I am so tired of it.

  • I’m reminded of the comment of a friend who grew up in Bulgaria. She said that the propaganda from the Communist government had gotten so awful and pervasive in its last days, that when they saw news reports of actual events in the west– i.e. the XS1989 San Francisco earthquake– the Bulgarians would just laugh and shrug and say, “It’s a lie. Of course there was no earthquake.”

    I think we’re there now.

  • I find the news entirely credible, since it was released by the Brits, not US. Nor do I find the timing peculiar. Brits have been working on the case, quietly, for months. They decided on the arrests (and coming out into the open) now, because the attacks were to begin in days and because they’ve already lost track of one or two conspirators and couldn’t risk losing any more. WH has been informed not months ago, but days ago (read the WashPo article); again, not surprising, given WH’s record on using such intelligence to suit their political needs, not the security needs of the nation.

    Now, if it turns out that none of the 21 arrested is, in fact a terrorist and that they were arrested as a distraction from some previous bumblings by the same intel gatherers, *then* I’ll revise my opinion 🙂

    Re: goatchowder’s: […] when they saw news reports of actual events in the west– i.e. the XS1989 San Francisco earthquake– the Bulgarians would just laugh and shrug and say, “It’s a lie. Of course there was no earthquake.”

    I think we’re there now.

    We should have been there years ago; the reason I didn’t believe in the existence of WMDs was because I mistrusted the source of that info, not because the idea was totally impossible. Poland was very much like Bulgaria in preparing us to deal with the BS coming down from the official sources — the only items we believed to be true were either unimportant ones, or those which appeared as a “denial of a rumour”.

  • There’s a difference between exploiting a genuine threat for political ends and engineering a bogus one for similar purposes. Neither is very commendable. One thing is for sure, though: the British police were not remotely interested in local American politics when pursuing such a critical investigation. It’s also inconceivable that they would pay the slightest attention to American political wranglings in choosing their moment to strike. It’s obvious that NYCmoderate (#15) is correct when he says that sound law enforcement practice and optimum containment and security are the sole criteria upon which the UK anti-terrorist branch would operate.

    Bush may want to squeeze every ounce of justification for his terror campaign out of it, but that doesn’t mean the likes of us need to be taken in by it. Maybe this once the US of A is not entirely at the center of the Universe.

  • After reading this thread, I feel my party needs to split into two different parties.

    The democrats will be those of us who can clearly see how bad the bushies have ruined the country but can also notice a threat when it presents itself.

    The demorats can be those of you that are so angry (cough) that you are blinded by your hate and cannot see the world as it is.

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