Groundhog Day---
by James K. Galbraith
Let's see... It's August. Bush is in Crawford on a "working vacation."
His polls are in the tank. Congress is in revolt. The economy is going soft.
The next elections don't look good. Cheney is off in Wyoming, or wherever he
goes. It's 2001. No, it's 2006.
In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx reports that "Hegel
writes somewhere" that the great events of history tend to occur twice,
first as tragedy and then as farce.
On September 11, nineteen hijackers commandeered four airplanes and
succeeded in killing some 3,000 people. On August 10, we are told, British
authorities upended a suicide-murder plot aimed at destroying twelve
airplanes, killing everyone on board including the bombers, possibly with
more fatalities than on 9/11. As a senior British police official put it,
"This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
From all official statements so far, we are led to believe that August
10 was a highly developed, far-advanced conspiracy, under surveillance for
some time, which could have been put into action within just a few days. And
perhaps 8/10 really was the biggest thing since 9/11. But then again,
perhaps it wasn't. We don't know yet. And it's not too early to ask the
questions on which final judgment must depend.
Well, then. Here is a checklist of some things we should shortly be
hearing about. Bombs. Chemicals. Detonators. Labs. A testing ground. Airline
tickets. Passports. Witnesses. Suspicious neighbors. Suspicious parents.
Suspicious friends. Threats. Confessions. Let me spell this out: By
definition, you cannot bomb an aircraft unless you have a bomb. In this
case, we are told that there were no bombs; rather, the conspirators planned
to bring on board the makings of a bomb: chemicals and a detonator. These
would be mixed on board.
Exactly what the chemicals were remains unclear. Nitroglycerin has
been suggested, but it's too likely to go off on the way to the airport.
TATP, made of acetone and peroxide, has been suggested, but there are two
problems. One is that the peroxide required is highly concentrated--it's not
the 3 percent solution from the drugstore. The other is that acetone is
highly volatile. As anyone who flies knows, you can't open a bottle of nail
polish remover on an airplane without everyone within twenty feet knowing at
once. It's possible to imagine one truly dedicated and competent bomber
pulling this off. But it is impossible to imagine twenty-four untrained
people between the ages of 17 and 35 all getting away with the same trick at
once.
So, there must have been training. That means there must be a lab, or
labs. There must have been trial bombs. There must be various bits and
pieces of equipment used to mix the chemicals and set them off. There must
be a manual. There must be a testing ground. And each one of the young men
under arrest must have been to these places. Interestingly, it must have all
happened, too, without a serious accident, injury or death among the
conspirators. If so, they are a lot more competent than the Weather
Underground ever was, in my day.
Arrests were made at night, catching the culprits at home. Houses have
been raided, and are being searched. So far as we know at this point, no
bombs have been found. No chemicals. No equipment. No labs. No testing
ground. Maybe this will come out later, but it hasn't so far, even though
the authorities seem anxious to tell just about everything they know.
Now, in order to get on an airplane, even the most devout suicide
terrorist needs a ticket, and these generally must be purchased with money.
Apparently, not one ticket had been purchased by the detainees. One
little-known feature of airline security (in the United States, anyway) is
that people traveling on one-way tickets bought at the last minute get
special scrutiny at the gate. Those tickets are also (a lot) more expensive.
If you want to pass unnoticed, you will buy your ticket round-trip, in
advance, and also save money like everyone else. Actually, if you didn't
know this already, you're not fit to be let out of the house.
Further, to get on an international flight from Britain to the United
States, in these days of the modern nation-state, you need something else.
It's a document called a passport. Apparently, some of the detainees don't
have them. Someone lacking a passport can, I think, safely be excluded from
the ranks of potential suicide bombers of UK-to-US flights. They could, of
course, have a counterfeit or be operating in a support role--but so far we
are not being told of any counterfeit documents or any support operation.
And to pass security you would use a different person to carry each chemical
you needed. For twelve flights, that's twenty-four people.
As for the suspicious parents, friends and neighbors--it's technically
possible that the bombers' security was so excellent that none existed. It's
just that, in dealing with young people swept up in a fervor of religious
hatred, the odds are extremely low. Of all the Islamic groups, Hezbollah in
Lebanon is the only one that maintains effective military security, which it
does by isolating its fighters as completely as possible from the civilian
population. But these young men were picked up at home; they were well-known
and yet apparently suspected by no one at all.
As to threats: A joke going around the Manchester Airport on August 10
was that at least the IRA would remember to call. What's the point of a
suicide bombing if no one knows what it's for? The downing of twelve
airplanes would be horrific to those on them (including me, as it happened),
but it wouldn't put a dent in Western capitalism. It would have to be part
of a much larger, ongoing, unstoppable campaign. Otherwise, why bother? A
once-off attack shows the weakness, not the capacity, of the plotters, and
in the end it strengthens not them but the governments they attack. After
9/11, terrorists should know this.
Finally, confessions. Twenty-four suspects have been arrested,
according to some reports. Nineteen have been named. Happily, the detainees
were taken alive. Unlike the man arrested in Pakistan, we may presume (I
trust) that they are not being tortured. Therefore, they will have a chance
to make an uncoerced statement of their intentions in open court. By then
the authorities will have found the labs, testing grounds, airline tickets
and passports. Credible witnesses too will have emerged. By then the young
zealots will have no expectation of acquittal or mercy, and nothing to lose.
We may therefore confidently expect them to face the judges and declare
exactly what their motives and intentions were. If they do that, I'll eat my
hat.
In short: Could this case blow up? Could it turn out to have been an
overreaction, a mistake--or even a hoax? Yes, it could, and it wouldn't be
the first one, either. I'm not saying it will, necessarily. I'm not accusing
the British authorities of bad faith. I'm not suggesting the plot was
faked--at least, not by them. But dodgy informants and jumpy politicians are
an explosive mixture, easily detonated under pressure. Everyone knows that.
James K. Galbraith flew from Manchester to Boston on August 10,
enduring eleven hours without a book.
Copyright © 2006 The Nation
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G. W. Bouche, fils de poitan.
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