Operations chief describes further plots by al Qaeda

Washington Times / AFP ^ | 6.16.03

[mhking]

The al Qaeda Islamist militant group once planned to demolish New York's Brooklyn Bridge, blow up grounded airliners with explosive-laden vans and derail passenger trains, Newsweek magazine reported yesterday.

Quoting federal investigators who interrogated captured al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the magazine said he told them he recruited a naturalized U.S. citizen, a truck driver from Columbus, Ohio, named Lyman Farris, to assess several terrorist attacks in the United States that never materialized.

[Dr. Frank fan]

Great, so now they know we know, and will try something else. Is it too much to ask to keep this stuff secret? I mean given all the other stuff that is probably being kept secret from us.

[Gabrielle Reilly]

Ping.

[sam_paine]

Another was the use of "torque tools" to bend railroad tracks,....[and if] acetylene torches could be used to cut the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge

Bend rail?! HA! 100-pound-per-yard rail, bent by what? A 10-foot cheater bar and 2,000,000 ragheads?

Now for burning through the foot-thick cables, maybe after a few hours of heating, but you're going to need one hell of a big tank. Acetylene is dissolved into a porous filler that can only "bubble off" so much cfm for a given volume. And you need a bunch of oxygen, too.

So I suppose it's possible, given a day or so, but you'd think someone might notice. Now you can see why those idle cops watching all the cars go over the bridge are actually quite effective, it seems.