LONDON - British authorities said Thursday they thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up several aircraft heading to the U.S. using explosives smuggled in carry-on luggage. Security was raised to its highest level in Britain, and carry-on luggage was banned on all flights. Huge crowds backed up at London's Heathrow airport as officials searching for explosives barred nearly every form of liquid outside of baby formula.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the terrorists planned to use liquid explosives disguised as beverages and other common products and set them off with detonators disguised as electronic devices.
The extreme measures at a major international aviation hub sent ripples throughout the world. Heathrow was closed to most flights from Europe, and British Airways canceled all its flights between the airport and points in Britain, Europe and Libya. Numerous flights from U.S. cities to Britain were canceled.
Washington raised its threat alert to its highest level for commercial flights from Britain to the United States amid fears the plot had not been completely crushed. The alert for all flights coming or going from the United States was also raised slightly.
Two U.S. counterterrorism officials said the terrorists had targeted United, American and Continental airlines. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Police arrested 21 people, saying they were confident they captured the main suspects in what U.S. officials said was a plot in its final phases that had all the earmarks of an al-Qaida operation.
First, I will say that I find it interesting that the British busted this supposed al Qaida operation a day after Ned Lamont soundly beat Bush administration supporter Senator Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic primary. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it just seems too neat that we now have another supposed terror cell, planning a major attack against the US, being broken up just as the Republican right-wing noise machine started pushing their own propaganda at how the Lamont anti-war liberal activists have taken over the Democratic Party, defeating an "honest," war and terror fighting Democrat Joe Lieberman. It is almost like this terror plot was made-to-order for the Republicans and independent Joe Lieberman to say, "See--I told you so," to the Democrats.
My guess as to what really happened here is that the British police had probably been watching this terror cell for weeks, or even months--gathering intelligence and information regarding the size and scope of the operation. The British would have been certainly passing this information on to the Americans, which probably went up the chain of command to the Bush administration. After Lieberman's defeat to Lamont, and his subsequent announcement to run as an independent, the Bush White House pressured the British to move in and bust up this terror cell, so that the Bush administration could use the story as a PR story, showing the Republicans and independent Joe Lieberman as fighting against the war on terror--do you really want the Lamont anti-war wing of the Democratic Party to surrender to the terrorists?
I'll admit that this is all speculation--I have no proof! I don't even know where I could get proof on this. I just find this story coming out at this time to be too neat for a coincidence. It plays right into the Bush PR-spin machine with their war on terror.
It is interesting that Keith Olbermann noted 13 such incidents, where "a political downturn for the [Bush] administration, [was] followed by a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." And Olbermann certainly lists 13 such incidents--with some of them quite famous, such as Homeland Security issuing terror alerts after Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate, or the terror alerts issued after the Democratic National Convention. And lest we not forget Osama bin Laden's video tape surfacing four days before the 2004 presidential election? I'm not saying that the Bush administration had a direct involvement in releasing the Osama tape (or did he?). I'm saying that there's a number of convenient patterns of terror warnings, alerts, and arrests that seem to occur just after the Bush White House is hit with some nasty news or scandal. There is a pattern here. Olbermann saw it back on October 12, 2005. I'm wondering what other such incidents occurred afterwards? What is the "coincidence" between the Bush administration and the June 22nd 2006 FBI bust of the Sear's Tower terror plot? I've looked back over my own blog posts, and have noted that the Bush administration was under pressure with a Senate debate on Iraq that week. The bodies of two American soldiers, who were kidnapped by al Qaida insurgents, were found mutilated. And finally, former Bush administration official David Safavian was found guilty of lying and obstruction of justice in connection with the Jack Abramoff scandal. So it really wasn't a good week for the Bush administration PR-spin machine.
Why not go back to the old "war on terror" story? Coordinate an FBI bust on some incompetent home-grown terrorists fantasizing about blowing up the Sear's Tower as a means to reassert Bush White House spin control on news and media events in the U.S. Just as we are seeing today, where the news events of Lamont's victory, and the speculation of political damage to the Bush administration, are spinning beyond the control of the White House propaganda-machine.
Time to spin out another terror bust.
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