Airport Chaos across Britain

You are still allowed to have hand luggage between the UK and ireland, though.

Early start, Porky?

Well, previously when the government was having a bit of a wobble, he shipped out tanks to patrol Heathrow Airport to remind us all how dangerous the world is. So it's not an unreasonable suggestion.

No possibility of a slight exaggeration, then.

At Heathrow Airport, BBC presenter Fiona Bruce said there were "ranks of people" unable to get into the terminal.

"Terminal One is completely at a standstill. Nobody is being checked in at all."

She said it was "jam-packed", but passengers were managing to remain "good natured".

Actually, the quotation marks may be from a jealous colleague deliberately trying to make her look stupid.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4778747.stm

Didn't Blair cancel his holiday? Perhaps this is his revenge.

Costs will depend on how long delays last and how many flights in and out of the UK are cancelled, analysts said.

Ministers are in an emergency meeting now, presumably with Blair on the speaker phone.

Because of contingency plans and not knowing if you've uncovered the whole plot.

f they foiled the threat with the powers they have at the moment why do they need more? If the threat has been foiled why is Heathrow still not accepting incoming flights

It seems like they are afraid that a few members of the 'plot' may have escaped arrest last night, and that there may have been a backup plan. Expect higher security on the tube today as well.

Fiona Bruce was on the phone from Heathrow to Today, while queuing for her summer holiday flight. She said it was 'you know, really very busy' at one point iirc.

as with the 21 july attacks last year, maybe.

i am somewhat shamed to say that when i went to the bbc site to get information, the justin timberlake article beneath it completely distracted me and i forgot all about it for half an hour.

i'm on the flighpath (all of west london is!) and there are still planes heading that way, albeit not at the usual one-per-minute rate. maybe they are internal flights.

is kinda spooky actually.

am not convinced that luggage in the hold is any safer than hand luggage.

Ooh you vacuous scumbag etc.

Heathrow accepting flights that are in the air already, which could mean flights will be coming in for hours, so I wouldn't worry too much. (vicky x-post!)

"We hope that these measures, which are being kept under review by the government, will need to be in place for a limited period only," the statement said.

"We hope. I mean, they might be in place forever. Maybe. Who knows?"

I'd much rather see a news item about airport chaos and long delays than a news item about the aftermath of something bad having happened.

the one immediately afterwards was refreshing. "how has your journey been so far?" "oh, alright, traffic was good on the m6?" "how are you feeling now?" "not bad, the weather's ok and we've got some good books to read and everyone's in the same boat"

Sorry, this is what I meant, but I phrased it kinda badly. The whole media comment could quite safely have been dropped out of my post (I was trying to make two seperate points, clumsily).

Up to ten jets, flying between London and the US. Liquid explosives. Thousands of deaths planned in biggest terrorist operation since 9/11.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1841140,00.html

What's been blacked-out on that road sign?

What's been blacked-out on that road sign?

Arrivals I think.

i think they think a bit bigger than that!

Damn me and my lack of ambition.

xpost

xpost

And the only thing to read will be the instructions on your baby's bottle. Oh the humanity!

Baby bottle?

Yes

You win again.

Bomb?

Yes, infidel!

i haven't been watching the news

BESIDES THE MOVIES ON BA ARE USUALLY GOOD ITS JUST THE EFFING ADVERTISEMENTS FOR THE HEATHROW EXPRESS EVERY 15 FUCKING MINUTES FROM SINGAPORE TO LONDON!!

xpost

i doubt he went that far, to say there's no connection.

but anyway saying this is not the same as saying "Terrorism [...] is not a question of one religious or ethnic group against another".

But for now I'm waiting for the headline, "THOSE SMALL CANS OF COKE YOU GET ON PLANES IN SHORT SUPPLY"

I'm getting terribly cynical because my immediate reaction was 'here we go again' not because I thought it was another 9/11 but another fck-up like Forest Gate, Menezes or the Red Mercury thing (not, admittedly, wholly down to the police that last one) which is terrible because I really don't want to be blown up but I have little faith in the police and/or MI5 preventing it. Let's hope this time they did, it might restore some confidence in them.

xpost

any government that relies on the police foiling massive terror attacks for its credibility is severely fucked.

die hard 2?

someone on bbc said 7th July bombs were 'liquidish'. weren't there bottles found in the abandoned car?

Nevertheless, one of the foiled tube plotters last year made the link explicit: these plans were formed as a response to Iraq. And Al Qaeda recently announced it would avenge Israeli deeds in the current Lebanon crisis. The last thing the government wants is to take more of a hammering than it already is on its response to the Lebanon incursion. Delink! Delink!

FYI Chris and Vicky some London arrests are in Forest Road E17.

I meant the credibility of the police but you're right of course also. I cannot imagine anything that might restore credibility to this government.

Is that near Forest Gate? Don't tell me they've arrested those two brothers again? The Sun will implode with suppressed glee/rage/righteous indignation.

All you're saying here is that you too want all this delinked from culture. But what John Reid hopes to achieve by reference to "evil" you hope to achieve by reference to "complexity".

Really? I practically live and work there.

Is that near Forest Gate?

No, Walthamstow.

Linkage that will lead to delinkage. In other words -- in Blair's words, in fact -- let's be tough not just on crime, but on the causes of crime.

I'd move, if I were you.

The causes of crime are off the menu now, apparently.

"Terror" == intangiable, sprawling, uncontrollable thing that requires keeping George in power for EVER AND EVER to protect you from

I suppose if they'd uncovered the plot two months ago the BBC could have splashed TERROR IN JUNE across their screen, thus tying in nicely with UK Gold reruns.

well yes -- not exactly simple though. we should not have invaded iraq. we should not have invaded afghanistan.

maybe if we never had there wouldn't be people trying to blow everybody up, though -- ech, maybe not.

but either way it's a profoundly bad way to devise policy! we shouldn't have invaded those countries for pragmatic reasons, not because someone might invoke it in their pre-suicide video.

Terror plot, or terrible plot?

George and the drag-on.

"Which political party -- the Democrats or the Republicans -- do you trust to do a better job handling the U.S. campaign against terrorism?" Options rotated

Democrats Republicans Both (vol.) Neither (vol.) Unsure
% % % % %
8/3-6/06

46 38 1 11 4

The Evening Standard is getting very excited indeed about all this, predictably.

George with the drag on.

Eh? There may be many reasons for not moving to Walthamstow but the fact that alleged terrorists might come from there is not one.

i love how cavalier everyone is when something doesnt happen. whats weird is i read the old 9/11 threads yesterday. all oddly dated sept 10, 2001 7:00pm.

by car though.

There are four takeaway lessons from this incident:

First, while there obviously remains a threat from those not only
sympathetic to al Qaeda, but actually participating in planning with
those in the al Qaeda apex leadership, their ability to launch
successful attacks outside of the Middle East is severely degraded.

Second, if the cell truly does have 50 people and 21 have already
been detained, then al Qaeda might have lost its ability to operate
below the radar of Western -- or at least U.K. -- intelligence
agencies. Al Qaeda's defining characteristic has always been its
ability to maintain operational security. If that has been
compromised, then al Qaeda's importance as a force has diminished
greatly.

Third, though further attacks could occur, it appears al Qaeda has
lost the ability to alter the political decision-making of its
targets. The Sept. 11 attack changed the world. The Madrid train
attacks changed a government. This failed airliner attack only
succeeded in closing an airport temporarily.

Fourth, the vanguard of militant Islam appears to have passed from
Sunni/Wahhabi al Qaeda to Shiite Iran and Hezbollah. It is Iran that
is shaping Western policies on the Middle East, and Hezbollah who is
directly engaged with Israel. Al Qaeda, in contrast, appears unable
to do significantly more than issue snazzy videos.

Does he mean 'since July 7th 2005' and that precedent (homegrown Al-Qaeda sympathisers)?

Often it is v difficult to see how that couldn't easily happen again, in spite of everything.

Also you'd think Al-Qaeda would've moved into DVDs now.

getting a bit previous here, stratfor.

I find this sort of reasoning cowardly.

If England should call for a ceasefire, it should do so because it's the best and most right thing to do, not because it would avoid terrorist threats. Terrorist threats should never be the basis for any foreign policy decision.

but otoh what planet is momus on re. blair "calling for a ceasefire" meaning fuck all?

olmert: face, bothered.

By which of course you mean threats by terrorists not the threat of terrorism which obviously does lead to foreign policy decisions, yes?

Why do terrorists always make these complicated plans? They do things differently in Iraq.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4778849.stm

It's also not cowardly reasoning to link UK and US Foreign Policy to the actions of domestric militants, if the link is there. It's either right or wrong, not cowardly. Most who have looked at the issue say they are linked, so it would stupid not to examine it when considering your policy.

Cowardly is a weasel word which adds nothing whatsoever, unless you like metaphors of strength, big dicks, macho posturing and other thyings which aren't helpful ata ll.

"If England should call for a ceasefire..."

England?

If Israel's actions in Lebanon are wrong, which I think they are, they should be stopped. Period. But I would find it a bit disconcerting if any politician changed their position just out of fear of further terrorist attacks.

Yes, that's what I mean. Specific terrorist threats should not be the basis of foreign policy. Obviously terrorism in general is a foreign policy consideration in a more complicated sense.

Iraq has no security it is a lawless area.

One of the advantages of a stable non-recently invaded country is its pretty hard to carry out a terrorist act.

Really? Why?

Hence the politicians here deny linkage at all, as this would somehow be caving in. The main problem we have is that Blair will not countenance the idea that he has blundered on a grand scale, and so since he has done the right thing throughout, anyone who differs is WRONG and this cannot be allowed at all. So even by admitting it is a by-product cannot be conceived of, because these people are really Stalinist by inclination, who think that the troublesome world can be made in the image of how they would like it to be if only they all hold the line and stamp on critics.

I didn't say you should rule out an objective because some terrorists want it. I said you should not take terrorist demands into consideration when making foreign policy decisions.

or soemthing

Let's take the word terrorist out of that, shall we? Let's assume -- just humour me now -- that terrorists are only terrorist, only need to use desperate and asymmetrical measures, because they represent the viewpoint of the weak, the poor and the disadvantaged. Which gives us:

you should not take the demands of the poor into consideration when making foreign policy decisions.

Which brings us back to "the demands of the poor" and whether foreign policy should take them into account.

(And of course, in the case of Hizbullah and Hamas, are in the course of becoming their politicians, which makes the "terrorist" label all the more dubious.)

the problem with "terrorist" demands in this day and age is that it's so easy for a country (Isreal, for example) to deem someone like Hezbollah a proper terrorist organization, even though they've negotiated with them before. It hasn't really worked in the way they wanted, but they could still call them "terrorists" and the U.S. would run to join the fight becasue we love buzzwords.

In some cases, yes. In other cases they represent the bigoted and the fanatical.

"Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israelis in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004."

Even a dead Israeli, it seems, is worth a great many Palestinians in these exchanges. Suicide bombing is hardly a surprising tactic in these circumstances of dire inequality.

As Josh Marshall said recently...

for all the discussion of how targetted or not targetted Israel's attacks in Lebanon are, there's pretty little discussion of the fact that all of Hizbullah's rockets are intentionally aimed at civilian areas. Every one.

right, that's why the blew the hell out of that israeli warship.

Quite how we didn't see anything this morning I'll never know. I was half asleep though

Fort Greene?

how many are intended to inflict casualties? (hint: all of them)

maybe move your ues lawyer friends to the baghdad suburbs and maybe you'll become less of an apologist for war criminals.

how many are intended to inflict casualties? (hint: all of them)

how many israeli bombs are intended to inflict casualties despite ridiculous propaganda claims to the otherwise?

sorry uk'ers, but i'm really sick of this bullshit apologist crap masquerading as "humanist." this shit shouldn't be on this thread anyway, but while it's here: gabbneb, you continue to amaze me daily with your sophmoric bullshit. get one set of, say, human emotions and empathy, quit the lawyer job and grow organic vegetables or something. seesh.

XPOST - i'm attacking those who would attack israel's acts and ignore hezbollah's acts.

NO ONE HERE IS DOING THAT YOU SHMUCK

Fuck me. I must have gone right past it twice without noticing.

now that's humour.

indiscriminately killing people on public transport... for the weak, you understand.

kind of off-topic, though

hstencil, you sure sound like you're doing so. You sound like you're defending Hezbollah.

"To be fair, whilst the Israelis' acts are deplorable etc. Hezbollah have been lobbing large numbers of explosive-tipped rockets into their country you can't realy argue with applying the label terrorist to them."

As Josh Marshall said recently...

for all the discussion of how targetted or not targetted Israel's attacks in Lebanon are, there's pretty little discussion of the fact that all of Hizbullah's rockets are intentionally aimed at civilian areas. Every one.

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), August 10th, 2006 1:35 PM. (gabbneb) (link)

gabbneb, I read Stone Monkey's post as saying that it is *appropriate* to call Hezbollah a terrorist organization.

I don't understand while you are being defensive here.

maybe raise some llamas

you want me to get into the tax shelter business? i prefer not to withhold my money from the govt, and to make enough to give the limit to fight BushCo.

i'm not crazy about the state of UK politics; all the same, these burghers of leeds, high wycombe, birmingham, walthamstow -- not sure if they really belong to the "arab street", or how poor they are tbh -- but, well, do terrorists really represent them better than politicians? will terrorism work? it's hard to say, what with the "total lack of concrete demands" problem.

I'm sure this isn't the right place for this, but maybe it is. Hope Heathrow isn't fucked up when I fly in on Tuesday.

it's not "ignoring" anything to point that out.

xpost heh yeah what he said!

clearly you've been awol for the past month or so. i certainly do not defend hezbollah's actions, but it takes an abject moron to think that their capabilities and actions are anything near to being as brutal as the idf's.

*hint: the "defense" forces are doing an awful lot of offensive shit.

ps. yeah, i know, squirrel police, yadda yadda.

which scares the shit out of me, because it is absolutely humiliating for israel

xpost: i don't think that's nude spock!!

Sorry.

That post smelled, I only wanted to post wrt the term terrorist, apologies.

Those transatlantic flights fly over my house.. I don't want to be the next effin' Lockerbie. *sigh*

The worst aspect of all of this to me is that the terrorist acts mostly appear to be a way, not to cripple our economies or even to bring us out and start a war, it seems to be a pathetic attempt at retaliation for what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as our misused and disproportional power. It's bad enough that sometimes people have to be killed for a greater good, but we understand and even excuse that a likely lethal attacker may be killed or that sometimes, the death of large numbers of soldiers may benefit a country in the long run, as was arguably the case in, say, the Confederacy or Nazi Germany, but to espouse wanton killing for the mere sake of airing grievances or for exacting anonymous revenge is pathological, or at least childish, and no amount of my sympathy for the poor, the downtrodden, the exploited, and abused, will ever lead me to the condescending point of 'understanding' when their actions are reprehensible or, to paraphrase Talleyrand's bon mot (really Fouché's, btw), worse, blunders. They won't improve conditions one jot for most Arabs or Muslims. As to religious nuts, who don't care about terrestrial, human issues, eschew reason, and believe that their chiliastic agendas justify random murder, they can all kiss my ass, anyway.

I think Hizbollah are assholes but I also think the Israelis have blundered here. Since they have hardened positions on whether to negotiate with terrorists, how firmly to respond to attacks, and what front to show to their unanimously hostile neighbors, they have ended up in the position of providing actors like Hizbollah with a kind of trigger or switch, forcing them into action regardless of the timing. That may largely be true of many countires and institutions but as Israelis often point out, Israel has the existential question of its very existence at stake should it lose a war, and getting tricked into Iran and Syria's proxy struggle/distraction with a guerrila force, while the Middle East is seething generally with discontent and the world largely condemns them, may not have been the wisest choice, especially as their intelligence gathering has been surprised by the quality and quantity of missiles available to Hizbollah and the Tsahal doesn't look as invincible as it usually has.

Just saying.

then you quantify it to 9 747 planeloads = approx 4000.

9/11? iraq civilian loss? hiro-fucking shima?

ham-fisted hyperbole drops into the 24 hr newspond and ripples outward. someone put this doughnut on a leash.

Neighbors identified one of the suspects as Don Stewart-Whyte, 21, from High Wycombe, a convert who changed his name to Abdul Waheed.

"He converted to Islam about six months ago and grew a full beard," said a neighbor, who refused to be identified. "He used to smoke weed and drink a lot but he is completely different now."

Uh, great?

but that statement was coming from someone who was briefing the world media and really ought to have known better. 'massive', 'appalling', 'atrocious', 'shocking', 'unprecedented' (in context) etc. would have worked. i dunno, something just smelt bad the moment i heard it.

"It is the FT's leader that makes the most explicit connection between the planned attacks and British foreign policy. "It should not be necessary to remind either the US or the British government that it is not possible simply to kill or catch all the terrorists until there are none left," the paper says, "a pointless strategy based on what one might call the 'lump of terror' fallacy."

I also seem to overlap (though with no doubt totally different conclusions) with Richard Littlejohn of the Mail, who picks up the inconsistency I spotted in John Reid's claim to be reaching out to the communities involved, while denying that any one community is involved: "I don't remember Knacker of the Yard phoning the Bishop of Stepney before he arrested the Kray Twins," says Littlejohn, in an echo of my point about crofter elders in the Shetland Isles waiting in vain for a phonecall from the home secretary.

But my opinion on terrorism being weakness and poverty, and on the need to be "tough on the causes of crime", doesn't seem to be represented anywhere in the UK press this morning. Which is a bit worrying, amongst all the photos of paramilitary police with machineguns and boots.

What paper gets closest to what you think?

hitchens strikes again.

the view that terrorists are the best hope of the world's meek is indeed a minority view, because it's fucking insane.

Yes, where did I say "the best hope"? Despair, more like.

-- Momus (nic...), August 10th, 2006.

ok, not "best hope"; still way fucking off-base.

if we're taking the 7/7 guy's pre-suicide video as proof of his intentions (which i wouldn't, particularly, but you seem happy enough doing it), i don't recall a mention of the demands of the poor.

as for the guys arming him...

What they often do is feed, clothe and educate them better than their politicians do, doesn't mean they represent their viewpoints

That's because it's largely bollocks. The terrorists' leaders - not the actual suiciders themselves - are generally educated, middle-class people, if not downright wealthy (O. bin Laden, for example).

anyway:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,1855222,00.html

glass jars, check.
hydrogen perozide, uh, check.
The Great Escape, check.
3 computers, 2 mobile phones, and ok yeah about 8000 computer media items.

fearmongering pieces of shit.
have a pakistani cop shove some broken glass in my privates, I'll come up with a ludicrous plot for you too, how about it.