London Bombers Sped to Glasgow, Authorities SayBy SERGE F. KOVALESKI and ALAN COWELL
Published July 6, 2007
The New York TimesHOUSTON, Scotland, July 5 — British investigators have concluded that the two men who carried out an attack at Glasgow’s international airport last Saturday had sped there after a failed attempt to bomb a nightclub in central London, a British security official said Thursday. [...]
A week after the intended bombings in London and Glasgow — with the potential to kill scores of late-night revelers and travelers — law enforcement officials say that the evidence emerging is that the two doctors were the main operatives, if not the leaders, of a network of other medical professionals. [...]
Much still remains unknown about the plot, including whether it was planned inside Britain, in Iraq or elsewhere. Altogether, eight suspects are in police custody in the
case. [...]A British security official, who spoke anonymously under government rules, said investigators now believed that Dr. Abdulla and Dr. Ahmed had also tried to set off two car bombs in London a day before the fiery airport attack in Glasgow.
In the early hours of last Friday, the police discovered a silver green Mercedes outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in London’s Haymarket. An ambulance crew saw what was thought to be smoke in the vehicle and called the police. A police officer removed a detonation device that used a cellphone, police officials said at the time. The Mercedes was packed with gasoline, gas canisters and nails.
A short time later, a second Mercedes laden with the same dangerous cargo was discovered in a “no parking” zone near Haymarket and towed away. Afterward, the police said that this vehicle, a navy blue Mercedes, had also been primed to explode but had failed to detonate, [for reasons that have not been made public...]
How stupid do you have to be to fail to cause gasoline and cylinders of natural gas to explode ?!?
All it takes is a spark or open flame...
And, what does it say about the British NHS that both of these certified morons were working as doctors in the UK ?
Possibly more lives were saved simply by ending these buffoons' medical careers, than by the failure of the bombs to explode.
posted by Oroborous at 6:22 AM
11 Comments:
I think the application forms for doctors from other countries applying to work in Britain now have a special set of multi-choice questions:
1. Are you a religious fanatic? Yes/No/Could be persuaded
2. Are you affiliated to a terrorist group?
Yes/No/Could be persuaded
Actually, it is much harder than you might think.
Unlike explosives, both gasoline and natural gas require an oxidizer -- air.
Unless one has found a way to thoroughly mix, say, air and gas at a ration of roughly 14.3 to 1 (IIRC), then there will be no explosion, although there might be a heck of a fire.
The natural gas is even harder, since, unlike gasoline, it won't just lay around vaporizing.
My guess is that they were so convinced that Allah would be willing, that they assumed he would take care of all those fussy details for them.
While it may be difficult to get a true "explosion" using gasoline or nat. gas, it's not hard to get an inferno that burns so quickly that it's pseudo-explosive.
(Indeed, the trick is in getting away before the fire gets started, as many would-be pyro's have learned to their sorrow).
Depends, depends. You can throw lit matches in a bucket of gasoline and watch 'em fizzle out. Most of the time.
Foggy day in London town?
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence showing how difficult it is for medieval minds to operate modern inventions, even if they have absorbed 'cookbook' instructions.
For Arabs, the classic example was in the 1967 war. The Egyptian army had excellent Russian tanks. It just neglected to put oil in the engines, many of which burned out in the Sinai before the Israelis had a chance to destroy them.
I am here blogging today because the Japanese did not really understand how to bolt stuff together.
Back in the '70s, it was a matter of much joking among me and my drinking buddies that Palestinian bombs hardly ever went off, while Irish bombs always seemed to work.
Problem is, even a blind sow finds an acorn once in a while.
I think this incident shows that Al Quaeda is getting desperate to carry out some kind of big attack in England. These doctors are like the "second string", or even third maybe. They only recruited doctors because they are given less scrutiny than other immigrants. These guys obviously didn't pass the full explosives course at the Al Quaeda academy, maybe they took the correspondence course.
But it also shows that they can't import or lay their hands on real explosives. The anti-terror campaign must be working better than we thought.
Or maybe that's just what they want us to think.
They didn't say whether the doctors were wearing adult diapers during their car trip to Glasgow.
Duck: that's a really English style way of dealing with the terrorist threat; our black-humourists are having a great time at present.
'But it also shows that they can't import or lay their hands on real explosives'
Not can't. Didn't.
Doesn't mean couldn't.
If they could've, they would've.
This lot.
It doesn't work as a general premise.
Further to my comment about medieval people, a poster at Tim Blair pointed out that even an uneducated (but quite modern) lout like McVeigh understood you had to add an oxidizer.
That this group were fools does not guarantee that the next group also will be fools, any more than George Bush's performance as president ensures that the next president also will be an appeaser.
McVeigh constructed and set off A LOT of practice bombs before he attempted his final attack.
That's what got Terry Nichols put away, he helped McVeigh with the practice bombs.
George Bush is an appeaser only by uber "hard guy" standards.
To almost everybody else, he's either actively trying to reform the Arab states, (effectively or not), or he's an over-reacting warmonger.
Thus, the next President will be an appeaser by your standards, even more so than Bush, and the next, and the next, and so forth, until whenever the next attack with a 9/11 level of atrocity occurs in America, or at least to Americans.
(Blowing up four planes mid-Atlantic would probably do it. Attempting that attack did not).
Isn't it your premise that Romney is positioning himself to be the "hard guy" America turns to, should such occur ?
Well, practicing instead of just going ahead is a modern attitude, so I don't see any problem there.
Yes, it is my impression that Romney is positioning himself to be a non-appeaser president. And yes, again, the way things stand today, the next president is likely to be even more of an appeaser than Bush.
Maybe even an outright defeatist.
But our enemies should not consider they have a guarantee of a spineless next administration. Even Chamberlain rejected appeasement, and well before fighting started.
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