Obsolete: That New York Times article.

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

That New York Times article.

You've probably already read it elsewhere, but the New York Times article on the alleged terror plot is available in full on Pickled Politics.

The most interesting thing is that the article suggests the liquid explosives were HMTD, not TATP as we’ve been led to believe by the press over here, although they are both made with similar ingredients. The arrested 17-year-old was charged with having a book on explosives. Wikipedia suggests that there are recipes for creating HMTD in the Anarchist’s Cookbook, that incredibly inaccurate and freely available manuscript. This may be a major leap, but that it’s possible they’re charging him with having that seems utterly ludicrous.

In short, the government yet again hyped it out off all proportion. They’d been watching these men for months. They knew actually what they were doing, or were planning to do. There’s widespread agreement that it would have been near impossible for them to mix these chemicals and create a bomb once aboard an aircraft. Some of them didn’t have passports. It seems incredibly likely the supposed ringleader in Pakistan has been tortured, hence the almost laughable claims of top-level al-Qaida involvement, and to top it all, we have to read the reality about it from an American newspaper, with blogs having to do the leg work in getting hold of a copy. Long live freedom!

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8/30/2006 06:41:00 pm | Permalink |