April 4th, 2008
Could I get a show of hands in the studio?
Seven hands. Six people, but only seven hands. What’s wrong with this picture? Can anybody follow directions these days?
I said a show of hands. How about a show of hands?
Twelve, thirteen. Thirteen? Whatever, that’s more like it.
Following directions is hard, but listening isn’t. That’s a good thing, because you’ve discovered the Timothy Jordan Show News for the Fourth day of the Fourth month in the Eighth year of the century.
——
Two years ago there was a group of guys following their directions in London. They followed their directions to the letter and caused a brainless panic among security officials all over the world.
This week the team of eight short-bus terrorists went on trial in a London courthouse. According to The Guardian, one of the men was caught a flash hard drive that contained, “… details of flight timetables, baggage information, security advice about what items could be taken on flights as hand luggage and which were restricted…”
Their plan was to board seven airliners bound for the U.S. from London and near-simultaneously blow them up with a potent liquid explosive manufactured onboard the flights.
They followed their directions to the letter, but thanks to court transcripts we now know that those directions were crap.
Once again the officials charged with providing security to the general populace have managed to catch a bunch of short-bus terrorist all-stars.
The plan, as anyone who has tried to go through security in the last two years with a bottle of water knows all too well, was to use a liquid explosive. But not just any liquid can be used. Their secret?
That’s right, Tang. These brilliant criminal masterminds were going to use everyone’s favorite astronaut-endorsed orange-flavored citrus drink as the catalyst for a liquid explosive.
Sound far-fetched? Well, incredibly someone had done their research. It is possible to make explosives with highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. It’s much, much more difficult to make reliable explosives.
The developing consensus, based on the court testimony, is that an intelligent and well practiced individual could create a dangerous liquid explosive. Like the Ft. Dix plotters, the La Guardia fuel tank plotters, the Chicago Seven skyscraper plotters, and dozens of others before them, the Heathrow Eight were nitwits.
The Heathrow Eight, by all accounts, weren’t intelligent and well-practiced. Nothing to date indicates that they’d gotten a hold of the concentrated hydrogen peroxide crucial to all of the known liquid explosives in question. Evidence previously cited by police reports indicates that the group was experimenting with TATP, a peroxide and acetone-based explosive that’s highly unstable in its liquid form and slow to assemble.
The more recent court testimony points toward a simpler solution of High-Test Peroxide, or HTP, a 90% or higher concentrated hydrogen peroxide mixed with acid and sugar, the two main components in concentrated Tang powder.
The plan was to inject their HTP mixture into plastic drink containers, dyed to match the original drink, and then detonate them with a jury-rigged camera hooked up to a fake battery. They were going to try and distract the security guards with stacks of porno mags in their carry-on baggage. No, really. Their second secret weapon was going to be porn.
That’s the point where, on August 10th, 2006, British police swept up and charged the eight men in court this week, along with nine others in England and another seven in Pakistan. Law enforcement officials in the U.S. and England, who’d been watching the group for months, believed that they’d been ordered to put the plan into motion.
Now here’s where our interpretation of the true danger diverges from the story being told by law enforcement officials. By all accounts the men had been practicing making TATP, which wasn’t to be used in the plot, and HMTD, another peroxide-based explosive that was to be an initiator for their bombs.
We’ve been told time and time again by law enforcement officials that the explosives in question can be made out of relatively innocuous household chemicals, but that’s not quite true. How many of our listeners out there store 90% hydrogen peroxide around the home? The peroxide sold over the counter as hair bleach is only 50%, still well under what would be needed to make a real explosive.
The same is true in England. Concentrated hydrogen peroxide isn’t just sitting around on store shelves. There’s no evidence that the Heathrow Eight actually had access to the concentrated hydrogen peroxide needed to make any of these explosives, and no evidence that they’d gone as far as making any of the HTP that was to be the main explosive in their cocktails.
Practice makes perfect in this case. Simply following a recipe wouldn’t be enough. This would have been homebrew chemistry, likely to produce explosives that were unstable, insensitive, or impotent.
These guys were discussing their plans in public, as well as openly over the phone and email. They’d been infiltrated by a British informant, and had yet to actually even make any of the explosive that was central to their plans. They were rank amateurs, which makes it all the more troubling that our professional security services were so up in arms about them.
• The Guardian, Batteries, Lucozade, and a syringe full of explosive
• Schneier on Security, The Liquid Bomb (informative comments)
• wikipedia, 2006 transatlantic airliner plot
• NYT, In Tapes, Recipts and a Diary, Details of the British Terror Case
——
Looking over all this information one might get the impression that those security officials were pursuing an agenda of their own that’s unrelated to accurately representing the terrorist threat to our country.
Just what might that agenda be? Well it most certainly doesn’t involve the 4th Amendment.
A crucial document at the heart of the Global War on Abstract Nouns was declassified earlier this week, the so-called “torture memo” of Berkeley law professor John Yoo. The memo, written in March of 2003, lays out the official Department of Justice policy on interrogations of people swept up by the GWoT.
Many details of the memo, like how it granted near-total permission for acts normally considered torture and removed detainees from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, were already known. There was a lot of new information provided as well, but none of it more revealing than a footnote making reference to an even earlier memo by John Yoo, written just one month after the 2001 attack, which states that, “… our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations. ”
Well that’s interesting.
The 4th Amendment doesn’t apply to domestic military operations? Wha? Now it all makes sense. Of course the Bush administration wasn’t in violation of the 4th Amendment, because they believed that the 4th Amendment didn’t apply to them.
No, this wasn’t an April Fools’ joke, and it wasn’t written on Backwards Day, although either one would be more appropriate. This was for over a year and a half afterwards the governing legal opinion of the Bush Administration.
The October memo has been referenced several times by Administration officials as related to the warrantless wiretapping program, although White House spokesman Tony Fratto told the Associated Press earlier this week that a different set of legal opinions was the basis for that program.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice also told the AP that the memo was no longer a current basis for the wiretapping program.
So then what was this memo about? It’s not as if Pentagon asks for legal opinions just for the hell of it. They must have had a good reason to ask the Department of Justice about something. Whatever it was, the DoJ came back to let them know that the 4th Amendment didn’t apply to whatever they were doing.
Which doesn’t make me feel any better at all.
• March 2003 Yoo Torture memo PDF (17.8MB)
• EFF, Administration Asserts No Fourth Amendment for Domestic Military Operations
• Mercury News, Memo linked to warrantless surveillance
——
There is one thing that always makes me feel better. That one thing is excellence. We feature it at the end of each and every show, and this is…
There’s a new public interest group up and running in the Bay Area. It’s called the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco.
They’re working towards a singular goal, and one that we believe to be excellent. Their mission statement says that,
“As we near the end of George W Bush’s presidency, we think it is important to select a fitting monument to this president’s work. On matters ranging from foreign relations to fiscal and environmental stewardship, no other president in American history has accomplished so much in such a short time. To honor George W Bush for his eight years of honorable public service, the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is sponsoring a ballot initiative this November in San Francisco. It reads…
‘Should the City and County of San Francisco rename the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility the George W. Bush Sewage Plant?’”
Our listeners up in San Francisco will have a chance to show their support this coming November, and we think that’s excellent.
The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is this week’s winner of the Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence.
• Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco
And that’s the News for the 4th day of the 4th month in the eighth year of the century.