The Heathrow Plot

This evening, I was questioned by Friar Dave (who's put up a post of his own on the subject regarding my take on the plot to bomb a number of planes bound from London Heathrow Airport to the United States. Rather than writing up a brand new post about it, I may as well post the conversation I had with Friar Dave. Interestingly enough, of all the news links, CNN's is the best.

CNN

Fox

BBC

And here's the transcript, which includes a couple of links.

Friar Dave: what do you make of today?

Auto response from The Fly: Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you.

Friar Dave: (i suppose you just want to post it so you dont have to answer that question 50 times)
The Fly: Actually, I was in the shower.
The Fly: We're going to have this sort of thing regularly for years to come.
Friar Dave: agreed
The Fly: I think it's pretty telling that they were caught during their dry run. After 7/7 and 7/14 last year, British security and intelligence agencies developed an even greater degree of skill and knowledge about detecting this sort of thing before it happens.
The Fly: And let me give you a link real quick, hold on.
The Fly: http://kallinibrothers.com/index.php?/forums/viewthread/598/
The Fly: Read the first bits and pieces of that, then let me know when you've done it.
Friar Dave: ...sure this is the right link? the posts are from june....
The Fly: Positive.
Friar Dave: k
The Fly: Let me get Sports Night started, then I'll explain the relevance.
The Fly: Okay, so they collected intelligence after Zarqawi was dead that led to hundreds of raids, right?
Friar Dave: right. im familiar with everything that was said on that thread
The Fly: Okay. Well, this happened in England, on MI-5's home turf. YOu may remember that shortly after the 7/7 bombings, they'd broken through and collected enough intel to backtrack through the whole group. Then with the botched bombings a week later, it took them what, a week to track down those guys?
The Fly: In this case, they caught all the guys, alive. They're breaking through the entire network, unraveling their entire plot, their entire organizational structure. MI-5 is working directly with MI-6, and probably the FBI and CIA as well. They've already figured out where the mastermind of the attacks is, vaguely at least, and this just happened today.
The Fly: I'm reading an article now that says that Pakistan tipped off the Brits, too.
Friar Dave: i've heard that
Friar Dave: which saves P-stan some since all those arrested were pakistani in descent
The Fly: Think about it, Dave. They got 9/11 in under our noses, but there hasn't been a single terrorist attack against America since then. We've busted them all.
The Fly: They got 3/11 in on the Spanish, and the Spanish haven't been the victims of any other attacks because they've been coordinating with us.
Friar Dave: (and they went lib)
The Fly: They got 7/7 in on the Brits, and the next week there were some amateurs who tried to do the same thing, and the Brits, who already (yes, they did, but the intelligence infrastructure doesn't change that much) had a reputation for being one of the best intelligence agencies in the world, got even more experience in this particular kind of intelligence.
Friar Dave: ok
The Fly: And security's going to be so tight at those airports for the time being that there's no chance that anything else could happen.

[...]

The Fly: People like to think that al Qaeda is this huge international conglomerate. They look at it like Nike, or Microsoft. It's not Nike or Microsoft. al Qaeda is more a system of affiliations than anything else. al Qaeda in Iraq isn't bin Laden's network, it was Zarqawi's, with help from the professionals.
The Fly: al Qaeda is sort of like a franchising agency, if you will.
The Fly: The article I'm reading right now claims that the American government is claiming this could be the central franchising agency, the real deal; and if Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States can bust this sort of thing in the practice stages, that's pretty damn good.
Friar Dave: right
Friar Dave: some pundits are making a big point of how close it was, that they could have been ready today
Friar Dave: but the fact is, they didn't have tickets for the real thing, they had tickets (and weren't yet on the planes) for a practice
The Fly: You know a couple of years ago, American officials intercepted information that was a couple of years old, and liberals tried to make a point of how out of date the information was. But the 9/11 attacks took something like five or seven years to plan; so if we'd had this concrete information four, five, six years after, it still would have been in time to stop the attacks. Same here.
Friar Dave: yeah.
Friar Dave: brb. i put up a short post on the matter if you have a minute
The Fly: k

[...]

The Fly: There's another piece of information on the London thing.
The Fly: "An undercover British agent infiltrated the group, giving the authorities intelligence on the alleged plan, several U.S. government officials said."
The Fly: Infiltration takes time. The fact that they knew far enough ahead of time to infiltrate is an even better sign.
Friar Dave: right
Friar Dave: and it parallels the bust a few weeks ago in Miami (?) (florida at least)
The Fly: "The suspected terrorists had been under surveillance in Britain since last December, Channel 4 reported."
Friar Dave: infiltrating is bcoming standard it seems
The Fly: Also, another thing.
The Fly: This "peroxide-based liquid explosive" they were supposedly using? That's not the way you want to take out a plane. In fact, I wouldn't use a liquid-based explosive, period. It might damage a few seats, but honestly, the most damage you'll likely do, unless you somehow penetrate the floor, would be to break a window and depressurize the plane, and if that happened you're not necessarily going to crash it.
Friar Dave: hm
Friar Dave: you say so
Friar Dave: i wouldnt know
The Fly: You need more fluid than you can fit in a sports beverage bottle to make a big enough explosion. Maybe give some people some burns, but really, anything other than that with liquid explosives is asking to be caught, not martyred.
Friar Dave: all right

If any of you have thoughts or questions on the subject, please post them. I am, after all, a counter-terrorism specialist, a foreign policy analyst, and an aspiring intelligence analyst. Researching and discussing this sort of thing is my specialty.