[Infowarrior] - Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?

[Richard Forno]

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/08/mutallab_comment/

Trouser-bomb clown attacks - how much should we laugh?
Reg investigates case of the undertotally-pants bomber

By Lewis Page

Posted in Policing, 8th January 2010 14:37 GMT

Comment As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul  
Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day "underpants bomber" of Northwest  
Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us  
Westerners to take away.

First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from  
attacking airliners.

Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on  
security.

Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering  
eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators  
sometimes refer to as the "groinal area", and nobody seems to be  
laughing. What's wrong with us?

We'll look at the first part to begin with.

In order to destroy an airliner and kill everyone on board, one needs  
to do a certain amount of damage to it: a lot if it is on the ground  
without much fuel in it, not so much if it is fuelled up, less yet if  
it is flying at low altitude, and least of all if it is flying high up.

Formerly there was the option of gaining access to the flight deck -  
perhaps using the aircraft as a weapon, as on 9/11, perhaps to carry  
out a hostage strategy - but those days are gone. The 9/11 hijackers  
have seen to it that the best and most effective ways for terrorists  
to employ airliners are no longer open to them. Pilots will never open  
flight deck doors again, no matter the threat to hostages in the  
cabin; passengers will not permit themselves to be dominated; armed  
sky marshals are back. If all these fail, following the bloodbath at  
Ground Zero fighter pilots will not hesitate to shoot.

So the damage must nowadays be done by other means than crashing, most  
practically by detonating a charge of high explosives on the plane  
while in flight. This doesn't need to be too big, especially if the  
jet is at cruising height so that the explosive effects will be  
enhanced by depressurisation. This is why airliners are a favourite  
target: because a fairly small amount of explosive can potentially  
kill a large number of people in one go, which is not the case under  
most circumstances.

It is an unfortunate and pretty much unavoidable fact that the  
necessary amount of explosives can easily be carried through any  
current or likely-future airport security regime, short of universal  
strip + cavity searches and a total ban on carry-on luggage.

Let's consider, for instance, a future security check involving  
backscatter X-ray-through-clothes perv scans - much more effective  
than millimetre wave - and X-raying of carry-on bags as is already  
normal. There are several ways to beat this.

Firstly, detonators and firing devices can be disguised within  
permitted electronic equipment such that they will pass through X- 
raying without trouble. An AA battery casing full of  
hexamethylenetriperoxidediamine (HMTD) - or some similar sensitive  
primary - with a flashbulb filament in it is almost impossible for an  
X-ray operator to pick out from among others, and can be triggered by  
the flash circuits of any camera.

The difficult bit is the main charge, which needs to be a decent  
weight and volume of acceptably stable high explosive. But it's not  
that difficult. Here are just a few ideas:

	• Several terrorists - only one of whom would need to go aboard the  
target flight - could carry permissible amounts of liquid explosives  
through security, combining them later in the air-side lavatories.
	• Readily available plastic explosives can be rolled out into flat,  
uniform sheets - they can actually be bought in this form, for  
instance under the name "Sheetex" - and cut to shape with ease. Such  
sheets can easily be inserted into luggage, where they won't look  
noticeably different from normal cardboard or plastic structure,  
partitions etc under X-ray if they aren't too thick. There are many  
other ploys along these lines; a sensible and well-resourced terror  
group could probably buy an X-ray machine and develop a bag containing  
a charge, detonator and firing circuit which looked entirely legit  
under scan.
	• Reasonable amounts of main charge can be carried stuffed into body  
cavities, undetectable by any body-scan. They would need to be removed  
before use in order to escape the pronounced dampening effect of the  
human body, and probably combined with other such payloads to get a  
bang sure to do the job, but again teamwork and lavatories will see to  
this.
	• There's more scope still for the use of checked baggage. US and  
many other airports nowadays X-ray this (http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/tib/tib5201.shtml 
), but there are airports which don't. You can easily find out, as a  
terrorist organisation, routes on which a checked bag won't be X-rayed  
by packing some unexposed film and making some flights. Once you have  
identified an airport that doesn't X-ray checked bags, simply put a  
large time- or barometrically-triggered bomb into a suitcase and have  
your suicide operative check it before boarding.
The list goes on - and on. Any reasonably competent terrorist  
organisation, with access to funds, capable technical experts and a  
small number of operatives able to move about the world freely can  
blow up airliners in flight. You wouldn't even necessarily need  
suicide volunteers to carry the bombs, if you were cunning: dupes  
might be convinced that they were smuggling drugs, money or other  
contraband, or IRA-style "proxy bombers" could be forced to do your  
bidding by seizing and threatening their families.

OMG - why aren't we all already dead?
Even if a security miracle occurs and the option of sneaking a bomb  
onto planes is somehow removed, there still exists the option of  
shooting planes down. Shoulder-launched homing missiles can be had in  
some parts of the world. From those same parts of the world, huge  
tides of illegal immigrants and drugs routinely move into Western  
nations despite all our governments' efforts to stop them. It would  
not be hard to move small packages like "double-digit" (SA-14, -16,  
maybe even -18 if available) anti-aircraft missiles along the same  
routes.

So, assuming a well-funded, numerous, committed, competent terrorist  
enemy without scruples and with a broad base of support from which to  
draw numerous recruits, airliner attacks can't practically be  
prevented. Planes should be exploding every day, really: if not planes  
then trains, another situation where blast effects can be magnified.  
If neither should suit, a few men with automatic weapons can bring a  
city grinding to a halt fairly easily, as the residents of Mumbai will  
tell you.

But the truth of the matter is that there is no such enemy out there.  
Funds are occasionally available, true; the 9/11 plotters were quite  
well-backed, and even if a terrorist group has no access to oil or gas  
revenues there may be the option of dealing in heroin as the Taliban  
do. (Note that all of these sources of money ultimately come from us.)

But people who are willing to kill innocents en masse as a primary  
goal are fairly rare birds. In Afghanistan you can easily hire large  
numbers of men for quite small sums of money to do fantastically  
dangerous things like taking on the British and American armed forces  
in open combat; some will even cover their own expenses, and a fair  
few will happily mount a suicide strike against Western troops. In  
general, just like the Western troops themselves in many instances,  
these fighting men are quite willing to accept a lot of collateral  
damage to local people as a cost of doing their main business.

But an awful lot of them would no more intentionally blow up an  
airliner, nightclub or train full of peaceful folk, would no more open  
fire into a crowd of unarmed civilians, than a Western soldier would.  
The likelihood of such squeamishness goes up markedly when you're  
recruiting outside the unruly and often aggrieved warrior tribesmen of  
central Asia, as you'll probably have to do for operations against the  
West.

Assembling a team of committed, loyal mass-murderers is actually very  
difficult, then, as such people are rare and hard to find. In fact, as  
we've pointed out in these pages before, the average size of potential  
terror cells operating in the UK and known to MI5 is ten members. This  
strongly suggests that five people or so is the upper safe limit  
before there's a strong chance of a cell having an informer in its  
midst or among its acquaintance.

It's just about possible then that one might assemble a loyal team of  
five or a few more and manage to remain, if not off the security  
services' radar altogether - it normally turns out that successful  
terrorists were on file somewhere - then far enough down their list to  
give you some time before you get put under surveillance.

"The system worked" - or more accurately, it is working. Just fine
It's even remotely possible that this small, dedicated and thus  
unmonitored organisation may contain a few people with the technical  
skills or contacts to make or obtain bombs or other weapons which  
actually work. This is rare: more usually you'll get an embarrassing  
and often inadvertently-funny failure as in the cases of Richard Reid,  
the comically inept (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/02/terror_idiocy_outbreak/ 
) UK "car bombers" of 2007, Mr Mutallab this Christmas, etc etc.

Sometimes it will be 9/11, and there will be cash in good supply;  
sometimes it will be 7/7, and competent bomb-making will substitute  
for money. In neither of those cases, however, was the organisation  
capable enough to make an effective strike without the use of suicide  
tactics. Thus those two teams - two of the most serious ever seen in  
the West under the jihadi banner - wiped themselves out in just one  
operation. The Madrid bombers, another rare effective group, managed  
to avoid killing themselves during the operation but were subsequently  
caught and thus eliminated as a threat just as permanently.

So, even in the rare case where an operational jihadi terror unit is  
small and committed enough to avoid detection and yet has resources  
enough to make an effective strike, it is almost always out of play  
after just one operation. This wasn't true with the more effective  
terror groups of yesteryear, like the Provisional IRA; but their  
recruiting/commitment issues were easier, as they had a stated policy  
against mass murder of civilians (and they were riddled with informers  
anyway).

That's why planes and trains aren't blowing up every day; why people  
aren't opening fire into crowds every week (not even in Israel, quite  
a lot of the time). Because most people, even people who in all other  
respects you would describe as fanatical extremists, just aren't mass- 
murderer material - and those that are tend not to be the brightest or  
most competent buttons in the box*.

That's why the threat of terrorism in general, and airborne terrorism  
in particular, has been reduced to negligible levels by the measures  
already in place, and no more are necessary.

No, really. Don't worry about terrorism next time you take a flight.  
There is a very small risk, as an airline passenger, that you will die  
violently before you land, but it has nothing to do with terrorists.  
It is entirely down to the chance of an accident.

Consider this, if you don't believe it. The year 2001, which saw four  
entire airliners destroyed with total loss of life on 9/11, was not in  
fact a particularly dangerous year to go flying. More airline  
passengers died in the year 2000; nearly as many died in 2002. Twice  
as many were killed flying in 1972, despite the fact that many fewer  
people flew back then, because airliners were far less safe.

Terrorism simply isn't a visible factor in your chances of dying while  
flying, or indeed while doing anything else: it is insignificant, a  
problem that has been almost totally eliminated for Western citizens  
since its not-very-serious heyday in the 1970s and 80s, and you  
shouldn't worry about it. It would make absolutely no noticeable  
difference to your or my chances of violent death/injury if terrorism  
was eradicated overnight.

"The system worked," said US Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano  
shortly after the attack, and in the largest sense she was right.  
Terrorism, like polio, has been effectively stamped out in the  
developed world - had mostly been so before the Department of Homeland  
Security was even created, in fact, but that's by the by.

Napolitano was subsequently forced into an abrupt volte-face by  
sectarian US politics and cretinous media-pumped fear, but she was  
basically right first time. The free world's counterterrorism system  
as it stands is working as well as anyone could reasonably ask for.

In the end, the correct response to efforts like those of Mr Mutallab  
and his incendiary undergarments is not panic and more security, but  
laughter - much as one might also laugh at the idiotic bum-kamikaze (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/21/bum_bombing/ 
) whose efforts, erm, backfired so messily in Saudi Arabia last summer.

Mr Mutallab should go down in history not as the underpants bomber,  
but simply as the completely pants bomber. ®

*Mutallab, quite apart from having a rubbish bomb which he should have  
known probably wouldn't work (he didn't study proper engineering as  
widely reported, but "Engineering with Business Finance") committed  
several other blunders. He should have tried to blow the plane up at  
height, not at low level; doubtless the idea was to bring the plane  
down into an urban area, but if Mutallab had been a real engineer he'd  
have known his pant-bomb needed all the help it could get from  
decompression. Then, he shouldn't have triggered his device such that  
everyone could see what he was doing and that he was responsible for  
it. He shouldn't have told his family he was off to become an  
extremist and cut off contact in the first place, which is what led to  
him being on various security-services lists - much good though that  
did.

All in all, a piss-poor performance even among today's generally  
rubbish terrorists.

Lewis Page went through a lot of quite stressful training and  
preparation to battle the terrorist threat before being assigned as a  
military bomb-disposal operator in support of the UK police from  
2001-04. He has still never got over the disappointment of finding out  
just how incredibly rare it is, as a bomb-disposal man in mainland  
Britain, to encounter a terrorist/criminal bomb of any significance at  
all, let alone one which has not already either gone off or failed to  
do so.

You get a special tie if you ever do encounter such a device.

NB: Any terrorists reading this should be aware that an essential  
precaution has been left out of all the bombing plans above, without  
which any attack is 90 per cent or more likely to fail due to a  
classified security tactic in use by the UK (and presumably the US).