[BRIEF NOTE] Plus ça change

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star is one of many, many news sources to report on the acts of hyperterrorism that, apparently, were averted today.

Britain was plunged into a full-scale terror alert today after police foiled a plot to blow up passenger jets headed for the United States.

In a bid to prevent attacks, anti-terrorist police squads carried out simultaneous pre-dawn raids in both London and Birmingham and arrested at least 21 people.

Early news reports in the U.K. singled out Continental, American and United airlines as the targeted carriers for the waves of simultaneous attacks, nine of which were allegedly planned in total.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the terrorists planned to use liquid explosives disguised as beverages and other common products and detonators disguised as electronic devices.

In response, many world airports - including those in Canada - banned carry-on luggage and all liquids save baby formula.

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 cancelled all its flights between the airport and points in Britain, Europe and Libya. Numerous flights from U.S. cities to Britain were cancelled.

There were also serious delays at Toronto's Pearson International Airport as new security measures forced back-ups in loading passengers.

Tony Douglas, Heathrow’s managing director, said the airport hoped to resume normal operations Friday, but passengers would still face delays and a ban on cabin baggage "for the foreseeable future."

British Home Secretary John Reid made the dramatic announcement about the terror arrests in a televised early morning address, an extremely unusual step for a British cabinet minister.

"Overnight, the police have carried out a major counterterrorism operation to disrupt what we believe to be a major threat to the U.K. and international partners," a stone-faced Reid told reporters. "The police, acting with the security police MI5, are investigating an alleged plot to bring down a number of aircraft through mid-flight explosions, causing a considerable loss of life."

The deputy commissioner at Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson, went even further, saying that the plans amounted to "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

"We believe that the terrorists’ aim was to smuggle explosives onto airplanes in hand luggage and to detonate these in-flight," Stephenson told reporters.

This sort of coordinated mass attack on planes has been considered before, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2004.

The mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks originally conceived a two-part plan that included hijacking airliners in South-East Asia and blowing them up in mid-air as planes crashed into their targets in New York and Washington, US investigators say.

Al-Qaeda leaders also considered crashing hijacked planes into American targets in Japan, Singapore or South Korea as part of a "scaled-up" version of what became the September 11 strikes, according to a staff report to the US congressional committee investigating the attacks.

Osama bin Laden rejected the Asian part of the plan because it would be too hard to co-ordinate with the US side, says the document, one of two reports into al-Qaeda's operations and the September 11 plot released on Thursday in Washington and posted on the internet.

The report, citing information gleaned by US interrogators from alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, reveals a much wider role for Asia in the 2001 attacks than was previously known.

Mohammed, a Kuwaiti who claims to have first proposed flying commercial airliners into high-profile US targets to bin Laden in 1996, is in US custody at an undisclosed location after being captured in Pakistan last year.

In the mid-1990s, Mohammed was based in the Philippines and was a key figure in the so-called Bojinka plot to blow up 12 US airliners over the Pacific. The plot fell apart when Philippine authorities discovered the bomb-making equipment in January 1995.

Mohammed told his US interrogators that in 1996 he pitched several ideas to bin Laden to attack the United States, including a "scaled-up" version of the September 11 attacks, the report says.

The US-based part involved suicide hijackers, 10 planes and targets on both coasts. The second part was a revived and modified version of the Bojinka plot.

"Operatives would hijack US commercial planes flying Pacific routes from Southeast Asia and explode them in mid-air instead of crashing them into particular targets," the report says.

"An alternate scenario, according to [Mohammed], involved flying planes into US targets in Japan, Singapore or Korea.

"All planes in the United States and in South-East Asia, however, were to be crashed or exploded more or less simultaneously, to maximise the psychological impact of the attacks."

As always, Wikipedia has more on the Oplan Bojinka plot in the mid-1990s.

Yes, I would still feel safe in flying. They got them this time, didn't they?