Experts: limitations on handluggage hardly useful

2 May 2007 |

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Experts: limitations on handluggage hardly useful

Fact: liquid bomb plot is nonsense

UPDATE: Read all the details of the impossible Liquid Bombers bomb plot in this extensive article by DeepJournal: The phantom terrorists of the War on Terror - Part 1 - The Liquid Bombers.
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By Daan de Wit

Experts: limitations on handluggage hardly useful headlines the Dutch newspaper Telegraaf today. One of the experts is professor Carel van Eijk, speaking in a hearing in the European Parliament today, headed by Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert. Already on 19 February media professor Cees Hamelink said to DeepJournal in an interview: 'It's idiocy anyway, to not be allowed to take more than 100 ml onboard a plane. It suggests that you can take 100 ml of nitroglycerin in your bottle with which you blow up a whole bloody airplane. So it's absolute rubbish. It's meant to scare the living daylights out of us, it's meant to keep us alert and to keep alive a notion that terrorism is really dangerous and it is necessary to spent an enormous amount of money.'

The cause of the limitations on handluggage is Rashid Rauf, the so-called Liquid Bomber. The charges against him have been dropped a long time ago, because there was no evidence against him. 'In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. [...] Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical', is the final conclusion of Craig Murray, a man who is able to write: 'Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.'
Murray writes: None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time. In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms. What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. [...] The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.'
Salon writes: 'There's plenty of blame to be divvied up among obvious suspects: a shortsighted airline industry, the TSA and its welter of pedantic foolery, and a strangely recalcitrant press. But these are symptoms and not the disease. The disease has a name, and that name is fear. I'm generally not a conspiratorial sort but I urge you to reevaluate just who, exactly, is responsible for terrorizing the American public over the past month? Was it the failed London cabal, or your own government, with an eye toward elections and beholden to pollsters and those who stand to profit from billions of dollars poured into the gullet of the Homeland Security beast? America has been scare-mongered into submission, and it's tough to tell who is more pleased, the foreign evildoers in their caves and distant laboratories or America's own leaders with their upcoming elections and color-coded instruments of control. Have we become a nation run by a faction of war profiteers, exploiting the fears of its own citizens? I don't know about you, but I'm starting to feel had.'

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