The news coming out now is that the would be bombers in the UK were going to use a binary liquid agent. Whether this was going to be a poison or an explosive is still a matter of some debate.

Via Andrew Sullivan, I find this story about a plan to gas the NYC subway system. Which makes a compelling case that the agents to be used in this most recent attack would be poison. Since the ventilation system in commerical airliners are the same for both passengers and flight crew, it is likely the jets would have crashed into the sea after killing everyone on board. It would likely require several autopsies before recognizing the passengers were killed not by the plane crash but rather by gas.

Conversely, Donald Sensing points the finger at North Korea as they used a binary liquid explosive to destroy a South Korean airliner in 1987. Given the repeated stories of the DPRK shopping missile technology to Iran and others, it's not unlikely they wouldn't sell or even give designs for such a weapon to Iran who would then pass it along to whichever lunatic they could find willing to kill themselves in service of the Religion Of Peace (TM).

Early reports in the news spoke of a plot to "blow up" airlines which points more towards Sensing's scenario than Sully's. Given how frequently the MSM gets things wrong I put zero value on their use of that phrase.

This is not the first time they've tried this, or even the second. They appear to have found a model that worked in the past and are now seeking to replicate that same attack again. This is a triumph of persistence of intelligence.

The TIME article above gives no indication of why the NYC subway attack was called off. Why would it be? Was it an operational problem or a logistical one? Perhaps something else. We may never know.

I dont' know which side of the debate I favor but al-Qaeda has a history of using explosives rather than gas and given they've gone back to the same well (attacking airplanes) you could logically conclude they'd use the same methods as before.


UPDATE: ABC News is reporting that the plan was to use an explosive gel concealed in a sports drink and ignited with the flash from a camera.

This is not good news.

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