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Despite the news-channel talk of a fresh threat, people have been trying for almost 20 years to blow up planes with liquid explosives packed in carry-on baggage. Terrorists, like movie studios and toddlers, don't like to try new things. In 1987 two North Korean agents posing as father and daughter put a radio packed with plastic explosives and a whisky bottle full of liquid explosives in a bag in the overhead bin of a South Korean airliner. Then they got off on a layover. The subsequent explosion sent the plane spinning into the jungle near the Thailand...
...Qaeda foreshadowed the London plot almost exactly when Pakistani terrorist Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who went on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks, drew up a scheme to bomb 12 planes over the Pacific during a 48-hour period. They nicknamed the plan Bojinka. They intended to have five terrorists take liquid explosives in carry-on bags onto planes and then assemble the bombs onboard. All but one of the planes were to be U.S. bound. On Dec. 11, Yousef ran a dress rehearsal on a Philippine Airlines jet. He carried the explosives onboard in contact-lens-solution bottles...
...copy of the Bojinka plan with all the targeted flights and explosion times in his bag on the Philippine Airlines test run. Nobody noticed. Today someone might--just as a flight attendant noticed Richard Reid trying to light his shoe in a failed attempt to blow up a transatlantic plane. "We're lucky the people we're up against are so incompetent," says Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official...
Regular people are often more comfortable assessing risk than officialdom expects. They may not be perfect at it, but they do it every day. Nancy Bort of Arlington, Va., landed at Washington's Dulles International Airport on the first flight from London Heathrow after the arrests. The plane arrived nearly two hours late, and the passengers emerged clutching plastic bags for their passports and not much else. But Bort was unfazed. "I still think I have a greater chance of being hurt in a car accident than getting killed by a terrorist," she said...
...With the higher terrorism alert,] the only fluid now being allowed onboard a plane is baby formula. The passengers took a vote and said they'd rather be blown up than hear a baby scream for six hours." BILL MAHER...