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?"

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.