You can't pull off a major terror attack if:
1. You don't have any money to buy explosives
2. You don't have access to explosives (or to the facility you're trying to target)
3. And even if you had both 1 and 2 above, your plot is physically impossible:
US authorities said Saturday they had averted an attack that could have resulted in "unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction," and charged four alleged Islamic radicals with conspiracy to cause an explosion at the airport.
But according to the experts, it would have been next to impossible to cause an explosion in the jet fuel tanks and pipeline. Furthermore, the plotters seem to have lacked the explosives and financial backing to carry out the attack.
John Goglia, a former member of National Transportation Safety Board, said that if the plot had ever been carried out, it would likely have sparked a fire but little else, and certainly not the mass carnage authorities described.
"You could definitely reach the tank, definitely start the fire, but to get the kind of explosion that they were thinking that they were going to get... this is virtually impossible to do," he told AFP.
The fuel pipelines around the airport would similarly burn, rather than explode, because they are a full of fuel and unable to mix with enough oxygen.
"We had a number of fires in the US. All that happens is a big fire," he said. "It won't blow up, it will only burn."
Even if the attackers had managed to blow up a fuel tank, the impact would be limited, he said, citing the example of North Vietnamese forces attacking US fuel dumps during the Vietnam war.
"They hit the fuel tanks with pretty big rockets. You would get a big fire but not a big explosion other than the rocket." ... Stay tuned for more major terror arrests of poor, decrepit, elderly, non-al Qaida wannabes who pose a grave non-existent threat to the "honmeland" as we get closer to the 2008 election, or any time the Democrats are set to debate or otherwise get news coverage.
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Labels: Bush administration, terrorism, war on terror |
