“… gasoline is not a high explosive. If we were talking 50 pounds of Semtex or the Al Qaeda standby, TATP, I would be impressed. Those are real high explosives with a detonation rate in excess of 20,000 feet per second. Gasoline can explode (just ask former owners of a Ford Pinto) but it is first and foremost an incediary. If the initial reports are true, the clown driving the Mercedes was a rank amateur when it comes to constructing an Improvised Explosive Device aka IED. Unlike a Hollywood flick the 50 gallons of gas would not have shredded the Mercedes into lethal chunks of flying shrapnel.”
His observations on the next day’s Glasgow incident are even more cutting:
… we need to stop equating their [religious fanatics’] hatred with actual capability. If today's events at Glasgow prove to be linked to the two non-events yesterday in London, then we should heave a sigh of relief. We may be witnessing the implosion of takfiri jihadists — religious fanatics who are incredibly inept… Propane tanks and petrol (gas for us Americans) can produce a dandy flame and a mighty boom but these are not the tools for making a car bomb along the lines of what we see detonating on a daily basis in Iraq.”
As Thomas Greene further observed, absent an oxidiser, the devices, if one could call them that, would simply have been unable to detonate. The implication that they could have detonated, then, is precisely state propaganda. No wonder ex-CIA terror expert Johnson described the weekend incidents as “non-events.” Thus, concluded Peter Lehr, a research fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, St. Andrews University: “Just using petrol canisters, nuts and bolts and a cell phone to trigger the explosion, the London bombing attempt would probably not have worked.” He continued about the Glasgow fiasco: “If you take a look at most al Qaeda attacks, they did a lot of work on reconnoitring. Now they got stopped by some bollards. They didn’t seem very familiar with the airport, then they would have known that the bollards would have stopped them or they overestimated the thrust of the Jeep Cherokee.”
For those tracking the recent round of terror plots against the US and Britain, the dire lack of expertise is a familiar pattern. On the August 2006 “liquid bomb plot”, similarly discredited as simply unworkable, former British Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. (ret.) Nigel Wylde pointed out: “Not al-Qaeda for sure. It would not work. Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure.”
The Propaganda War
Rather than reassuring the public of these facts and implications, the government did the opposite. The UK terror alert was raised to “critical”, and the citizens were urged to remain “alert” and “vigilant”. “If it moves to critical, you should worry”, a senior Whitehall source told the BBC when asked to explain the alert level system.
Rachel North, a survivor of the July 7th 2005 London bombings, comments:
“Oh for heaven’s sake. We ‘should worry’. That’s the suggestion is it? The official advice is: to be afraid and stay afraid? And what pray, does being told ‘to worry’ do to help aid the fight against terrorism? Terrorism being of course designed to worry, nay, terrify and terrorise people, using terror: the state of being afraid? ...What is the ‘critical - attack imminent’ stuff then, if not intimidating, and likely to make people anxious and therefore stop them getting on with their lives? … like most of the new anti-terror intitiatives, all it does is sound scary and ramp up the fear without actually doing anything practical to tackle the situation… We didn't have this during the IRA campaign or during the Blitz, so I don't see why turning the adrenalin dial up to eleven is going to help now. We can all see the news, thank you. We don't need to have our strings pulled like this.”
So we have established that there is, indeed, a sharp disparity between the reality of these plots as utterly amateur co*k-ups by people with no idea whatsoever of how to actually pull off a terrorist attack, and the official propaganda from the state that these attacks could have killed hundreds – which they simply could not have done.
Perhaps it is cynical to recognize that these doomed-to-fail plots coincided with the British government’s new counter-terrorism proposals. Days before these incidents, on 27th June, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee announced it was planning to hold a short inquiry into the new proposals for extended anti-terror powers, originally set out on 7th June by the Home Secretary.
Ironically, the Home Secretary’s announcement for new anti-terror legislation followed hot on the heels of revelations that a purported spectacular al-Qaeda terrorist plot unearthed in the United States may well have been nothing more than Bush administration propaganda. Such was the accusation from Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown show ‘The Nexus of Politics & Terror’, who further noted that this was consistent with a history of such pronouncements:
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