Trouser-bomb clown attacks – how much should we laugh?

Lewis Page
The Register
Friday, January 8th, 2010

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,
  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.

Full article here