The lion still has a few teeth

From The Washington Post:

British authorities said today they had disrupted a "major terrorist plot" to blow up passenger flights between the United Kingdom and the United States with liquid explosives, prompting a full-scale security clampdown at U.S. and British airports and a cascade of delays in trans-Atlantic flights.

London's Deputy Police Commissioner, Paul Stephenson, said 21 people had been arrested in London and in Birmingham, England, after a months-long investigation into what he said was a plan for "mass murder on an unimaginable scale." Peter Clarke, chief of the London police department's anti-terrorism branch, said the investigation reached a "critical point" last night, requiring immediate disruption of the plot, the arrests and the imposition of heightened security measures.

British Home Secretary John Reid said the conspirators planned "a wave of attacks" on aircraft in flight. "Had this plot been carried out, the loss of life to innocent civilians would have been on an unprecedented scale," he said.

U.S. officials raised the "threat level" for air transport to red, the highest alert. The terrorists had intended to target flights to Washington, New York and California operated by American Airlines, Continental Airlines and United Airlines, a U.S. official said.

[Snip]

British authorities said the threat involved terrorists who aimed to smuggle liquid explosive material aboard airplanes in hand baggage, including timers and detonators that could be assembled in flight. In July 2005, terrorists attacked London's subway and bus system with bombs made of acetone and peroxide mixed in plastic containers. Those attacks claimed 52 lives and injured hundreds of others.

Chertoff said the attackers planned to carry explosive material and detonation components on planes "disguised as beverages, electronic devices and other common objects."

Good for the British!

Let's look at a few details. First of all the Brits were able to crack this because they used "sneak and peek" warrants (this detail is from Fox News, not the WaPo). These warrants allow law enforcement to enter and search then leave without informing the suspect. The ACLU hates these types of search warrants and would deny them to US law enforcement.

Next, remember all the incidents over the past few years where groups of young Arab/Middle Eastern looking men have caused fear on airliners by acting in a suspicious manner? How they would cluster in groups whispering in Arabic or Farsi and casting furtive glances at fellow passengers? When questioned on the ground by law enforcement they would say that they were offended by their fellow passengers looking at them like they were potential terrorists and just having a bit of fun by scaring them. When the men would be checked out they would have clean backgrounds without connections to any known terrorists and would always have legitimate reasons to be flying.

In my opinion these have been recognizance missions by terrorists new to the Jihad who could not possibly have been identified by Western law enforcement. The purpose of these recognizance operations was to gain intelligence on what in-air security measures would be taken on an airliner in flight. The data from these probes was, in my opinion, an integral part of the planning for this latest terrorist plot. The terrorists learned that a group of Arab men can do just about anything on an airplane and the only thing that will happen is that their fellow passengers will stare at them in fear and some of the women will cry. Upon landing they will be questioned by the police or FBI, but these terrorists never planned to land, at least not in one piece.

Also the London subway bombing last year was carried out with liquid explosives indicating that operation was, at least in part, a trial run for this plot. Any even halfway competent organization would want to text a technology that they had never worked with before.

Another lesson from this is that even a failed attack can cause large scale disruption to Free World air travel. The delays and inconvenience associated with air travel will now be increased for the foreseeable future.

What I am hearing right now on Fox News is that the terrorists were native British Muslims. If true I will lay odds that they are the children or grandchildren of immigrants from some Islamic nation. This incident can be added to the long list of European nations failing to assimilate Muslim immigrants down to the second and third generation.

Not only failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants but failure to even blunt the hatred that devout Muslims feel for any culture that is even one tenth of a degree more free, more tolerant or less ignorant their own.

The government of the United Kingdom is almost certainly too far gone into political correctness to do what must be done, that is treat Islam in the same manner as Nazism was treated by the post WWII West German government. But that is what needs to be done and not just in England but all over the Free World.