Bombers likely hoped to maximize terror

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

Rather than blow up airliners in midair, the suspected terrorists arrested Thursday in Great Britain likely hoped to create smaller explosions that would breach the hulls of the planes and send them into long, terrifying crashes, heightening the psychological impact on the public, U.S. officials and terrorism analysts said.

British police arrested 24 people who they said planned to simultaneously blow up several aircraft heading to the United States using explosives smuggled in carry-on luggage. The alleged plot suggests that the suspects knew they could not create an explosive large enough to destroy an airliner immediately, the analysts said.

However, the plotters would have been able to smuggle aboard small quantities that, alone or in combination, could blast a hole in an airplane far enough out over the Atlantic Ocean that its pilot could not return safely to land.

“This means that they think that whatever they did would not be catastrophic to the aircraft immediately,” said retired Army Col. Jack Jacobs, a former instructor at the U.S. Military Academy and a military analyst for MSNBC.

Instead, as the world watched, the planes would crash into the ocean, killing anyone on board who had not already been incinerated as the aircraft burned.

“The idea of multiple explosions on multiple airplanes is designed to strike fear not only into those who are flying that day, but to the whole worldwide aviation system,” said Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security.

“And that is really the point,” Chertoff said on MSNBC TV’s “Hardball.” “These kinds of big terror plots are not merely about killing innocent people, although that is bad enough; but it’s about striking at the foundations of our Western society. Travel, tourism, trade, that's what binds the world together, that’s what promotes peace. And these people want to destroy those bonds.”

Common household items
Experts said that with the appropriate training, even an unsophisticated terrorist could destroy an airliner with an explosive concealed in a few dollars’ worth of ordinary products sold at every grocery and drug store. More sophisticated terrorists could even make the explosives themselves from those products, including nail polish remover.

Such components are unnervingly difficult for security officers to detect, Chertoff said.

“Now, it is one thing if someone comes in with an obvious bottle of some liquid with duct tape and wires sticking out of it,” he said, “but when someone separates the bomb into components, and each of the components is benign and appears to be very similar to an ordinary beverage someone might bring on an airplane, then you are really dealing with a very sophisticated challenge.”

Another MSNBC military analyst, Rick Francona, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, said there are “several different liquids that you can use to make a bomb on board an aircraft that would not be detectable by any of the current methods that they’re using.”

Possible explosives would most likely take the form of a powder or a gel that would be easy to mistake for a variety of common household and grooming products, most notably shampoo, hair styling gel, talcum powder and baby formula.

The information known so far indicates a plot similar to the one that ended in the destruction of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. In that attack, which was blamed on Libya, conspirators managed to bring down the Boeing 747 with less than a pound of explosive materials.

“When you’re dealing with an aircraft flying at high altitude in a pressurized environment, you don’t need a whole lot of explosives to bring a plane down,” said Francona, who founded the Defense Department’s counterterrorism intelligence branch. “In fact ... two or three people could easily bring enough of this material to make a device that could cripple an aircraft.”

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