Posted on 11/04/2006 9:58:09 AM PST by meg88
A group of alleged terrorists arrested in London in August planned to blow up airliners over U.S. cities to maximize casualties, rather than over the Atlantic Ocean as many intelligence officials originally thought, according to recent remarks by a senior FBI official.
The comments by Mark Mershon, head of the FBI's New York field office, indicate that U.S. and British intelligence officials now think that the airliner plot was aimed at maximizing the potential loss of life and economic impact.
"The plan was bring them down over U.S. cities, not over the ocean," Mershon said Oct. 24 at the Infosecurity 2006 conference in New York, according to Government Security News, which first reported the remarks this week.
Authorities had previously said it was unclear where the alleged terrorists intended to detonate liquid explosives, which they planned to smuggle onto as many as 10 transatlantic flights. Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said shortly after the plot was thwarted that while the conspirators appeared to be targeting nonstop flights to the United States, "the real focus was to blow up airliners and the people on them."
Christine Monaco, a spokeswoman for the FBI in New York, declined to comment on Mershon's speech.
Mershon told cybersecurity conference attendees that representatives of MI5, the British intelligence service, briefed the FBI on the liquid explosives case in recent weeks. "It would make your hair stand up to be in the room to hear that presentation," Mershon said, according to GSN.
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and Georgetown University professor, said the case indicates that Islamic extremists remain focused on attacking U.S. cities.
"They were clearly desirous of exceeding 9/11," Hoffman said. "The loss of life on the air and ground would be significant."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Aw, heck. Let's vote for the Democrats.
We all know they know how to handle these guys...NOT!
I sure hope that the government did not violate the terrorists' "reasonable expectation of privacy" in their telephone calls. That would make our governmnet as bad as the terrorists. ----- sarcasm tag
The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Violate these suckers' rights, round them up and stick 'em on Guantanamo 'til they rot.
Maybe they wanted to win a few battles during the Clinton era. They had to have some sort of military victory then, so that Hillary could run for president.
Kosovo.
The MSM and the Dems try to make people believe that there is no threat and Bush is just using "scare tactics".
This article is yet another sobering reminder that very serious threat is still out there and this is no time to allow the weak-on-terror Dems to take over and surrender to the terrorists.
CNN is running a "Broken Government" special, which is a free, nonstop ad for the Dems, with nonstop bashing of Bush and Republicans.
The democrat party and its media mouthpieces (i.e. NY Times and Washington Post) have done every thing in their power to put America in harm's way and demoralize the American people.
A horrific attack is sooner or later going to succeed. And the democrats will once again have the blood of innocents on their hands.
The joker in the deck will be when the Rats realize that the terrorists have come to kill them too. Terrorists don't really care what political party you belong to.
"The plan by the Islamic Facists (I/F) appears to have been well thought out and was insidious in so many way. It wasn't just the people on board the planes who were endangered, it was citizens on the ground, and passengers on others planes as well. Consider this scenario:
"The plan was for detonations one hour apart. Suppose that there were twelve planes targeted, but they were divided into groups of four, each group leaving approximately an hour from each other.
As the first group of four approached an airport they detonated would detonate, either clogging up a runway, or raining fire and debris down on populated areas.
The air traffic controllers would probably stop incoming planes until something could be figured out, and planes would stack up.
If they were diverted like on 9/11, maybe more would detonate, clogging up the diverted runways of the other airports they were diverted to. The air traffic controllers would be in a real trap. Then, they would have to keep planes orbiting to save lives on the ground, thus using up fuel of orbiting planes, or they would have to let planes land and take the chance that more wouldn't blow up. Also, they wouldn't know if places on land like New York, Washington DC or the Pentagon were being targeted.
The final result might have been that hundreds of planes may have been forced to ditch in the waters or some may have simply run out of fuel, or some might have been shot down by the military.
In any event, however it was planned, it had the potential to be worse in terms of lives and chaos than 9/11."
If there is any justice in the world the New York Times or Washington Post main office will be destroyed in the forthcoming attack.
I'm trying real hard to make sense of this.They (the terrorists) have a constitutional right to destroy us but the same constitution doesn't give us the right to protect ourselves?
Vote dem and it'll all come clear.
Concentrate all of the damage at one airfield so that planes with reduced fuel could not land
That's possible, but I couldn't cover all scenarios. One might have been that they would clog up multiple airport runways, thus diverting more and more planes to more and more airports, with the intent of clogging up as much as possible and creating an impossible situation for the air controllers. They may have created so much fear that airplanes may have run out of fuel or may have been forced to ditch, thus dramatically driving up casualties. One thing I didn't take into account was that it would have been quickly learned that all the planes were coming from one airport in England, thus any flights from there would have been the most suspect, and they would have been diverted to more isolated runways if possible.
I am sure the terror plotters just told police investigators what they were planning. Certainly there could not have been any other "persausive" means employed because the terrorists rights supercede the rights of all of us put in their danger. The democrats have taught us that if nothing else.
Any one of your scenarios makes far more sense than what we were being fed at the time. It was ridiculous to think the jihadists would have wasted their efforts over the water. I chalked those reports up to a combination of official panic control and vapid journalism.
Regardless of what the precise scenario was to be, the given is that muslim terrorists intended the carnage to be massive. And the U.S. was the target.
Thanks!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.