Attempted Terrorist Attack on a Flight to U.S.

[Sigma]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/12/25...ers/index.html

The flight left from Amsterdam and was about to land at Detroit, MI. The guy who is from Nigeria tried to detonate the device right before landing and was taken down by passengers. He claims he got the device from an extremist group in Yemen and was told when and where to set it off. The White House is now coming out and saying this was an attempted terrorist attack.

Even if this was just a nutjob acting alone and the bomb turns out to be a homemade firecracker (funny noticing the link name has firecracker in it) this was to close for comfort. How did he get this far?

[Angrychris]

Wont be the last

[S-te-Fan]

Wont be the last

Jup,

The guy who got the terrorist down is a dutch that doesn't live that far from here .

[alhoon]

It's not easy to stop someone that is willing to sacrifice himself in the explosion. I'll ask you a different question:

How could they stop him?
Dogs to smell the explosive? There are easy ways to confuse them.
Scans? How can you know what's the liquid in that bottle in the luggage? Or that in fact this small rubber-like thing along with the pensils is a high explosive. It's not that you need a whole lot to blast open the side of an airplane.

[Sigma]

How could they stop him?
Dogs to smell the explosive? There are easy ways to confuse them.
Scans? How can you know what's the liquid in that bottle in the luggage? Or that in fact this small rubber-like thing along with the pensils is a high explosive. It's not that you need a whole lot to blast open the side of an airplane.

Indeed it is getting harder to check for these things, it is one of those things that will take alot of people to come up with the solution to. :/ One side advances and the other side catches up to match.

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@Monarchist-The U.S. also has the largest Jewish population in the world, so of course we would have a large target on us no matter what we did or didn't do.

[Rapax]

@Monarchist-The U.S. also has the largest Jewish population in the world, so of course we would have a large target on us no matter what we did or didn't do.

Israel has the largest number by now but like Redleg said, that's hardly relevant. It comes down to actions, not whether a lot of Jews happen to live in the US.

[Monarchist]

The problem is they've all been so radicalised over the past 30 years that they will bomb America even without any American presence in their homelands. If it isn't over "occupation", then it'll be over U.S. support for Israel; if not Israel, then U.S. political negotiations with Muslim leaders; if not politics, then U.S. corporations selling movies with scantily-clad women on the cover, etc. Their own insane, evil morality is so warped and their values so degenerate that they will find an excuse to attack the West regardless of what goes on. Obama could order all Americans out of the Middle East for the rest of his presidency, and they'd still attack over U.S. operations against Somali pirates, or they'd attack over the sale of Coca Cola.

It's ridiculous, and I have no idea how to stop it; invade Afghanistan, and they simply move elsewhere. It reminds me of my first French campaign in Medieval II; the Mongols just kept moving their capital 300 miles away.

[PacSubCom]

The problem is they've all been so radicalised over the past 30 years that they will bomb America even without any American presence in their homelands. If it isn't over "occupation", then it'll be over U.S. support for Israel; if not Israel, then U.S. political negotiations with Muslim leaders; if not politics, then U.S. corporations selling movies with scantily-clad women on the cover, etc. Their own insane, evil morality is so warped and their values so degenerate that they will find an excuse to attack the West regardless of what goes on. Obama could order all Americans out of the Middle East for the rest of his presidency, and they'd still attack over U.S. operations against Somali pirates, or they'd attack over the sale of Coca Cola.

So George Bush, after 9/11, asked, "Why do they hate us?" and went on to explain that they hate our freedoms, and so on. You remember that. But what the press should have reported is that he was just repeating a question that President Eisenhower asked in 1958. President Eisenhower asked his staff why was there "a campaign of hatred against us" among the people of the Middle East? And the National Security Council, the highest planning agency, had provided an answer:

They said that the perception of the people of the Middle East is that the United States supports brutal tyrannies, blocks democracy and development, and does so because we want control of their oil. And then they went on to say, yes, the perception is more or less correct and that's the way it ought to be. And so therefore there is a campaign of hatred against us. And so it continues.

After 9/11, The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, conducted some polls in the Middle East. They didn't care about the general population, what's demeaningly called "the Arab street." They polled what they called "moneyed Muslims"—bankers, managers of multinational corporations—y'know, the kind of guys we like. And they found pretty much the same thing as 1958. There's a... They don't have any objection to neo-liberalism or any of this stuff. In fact, they love it. But they condemn the United States for supporting harsh, tyrannical regimes (which it does) and opposing democracy and development (which it does) because we want to control their energy resources.

[Didz]

It's ridiculous, and I have no idea how to stop it; invade Afghanistan, and they simply move elsewhere. It reminds me of my first French campaign in Medieval II; the Mongols just kept moving their capital 300 miles away.

This guy was not from Afghanistan he was from Nigeria, although he had just finished an Engineering degree course at the University of London.

According to the news in the UK, he was on a terrorist threat list, and yet managed to pass successfully through the anti-terrorist checks both in Lagos and at Amsterdam where he had to change planes. The only thing that saved the passengers on the flight was the fact that his bomb failed to go off. Making me wonder whether he was indeed a trained terrorist or simply an independant nutter.

Apparently, neither Lagos nor Schiphol airports have body scanners, which is amazing considering we are serveral years into a supposed war against terror. The Dutch Interior Minister Guusje Ter Horst said Mr Abdulmutallab did not raise any concerns as he passed through Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to board the flight, but promised that the airport would have body scanners in place within three weeks, at least for flights to the US. Nigeria has promised to start using body scanners sometime next year. Nigerian Information Minister Dora Akunyili told the BBC: "We are not disorganised and our airports are very safe." [Yes! love, what you forget to add was....] "We let terrorists walk on our planes every day and none of them has blown up at our airport."

Overall, the guys on that plane were damned lucky, if Umar had taken a chemistry degree at UCL he might have got the mix right.

[Jingles]

The passengers who took him down should get some sort of medal, in my opinion. This could have potentially have been a real tragedy for the relatives of those on board.

[Admiral Piett]

Kinda like the guys on United 93, only these guys reacted much sooner.

[Sher Khan]

Kinda like the guys on United 93, only these guys reacted much sooner.

The device he was carrying already exploded, and the suspect was apparently on fire. The passengers didn't stop a terror attack, rather they were very lucky the attack was a failure.

[Farnan]

Muslims hate Jews?

Since when?

The US became a major target in 1991-1992 after the Persian Gulf War.

[Ó Cathasaigh]

Moron terrorist. Can't even do his job right. I love when they light themselves on fire like that.

[Central Asian Qaghan]

Bah, who really cares. Not me for one, glad it was stopped but I will not give into fear mongering due to a couple of westerners having poor to week to no consitiution at all. If you hate Muslims so much, either eject them from your land and send them back alive where they came from or shut up about it.

[SwiftBlade]

Bah, who really cares. Not me for one, glad it was stopped but I will not give into fear mongering due to a couple of westerners having poor to week to no consitiution at all. If you hate Muslims so much, either eject them from your land and send them back alive where they came from or shut up about it.

how is muslim hate even related?
have you seen anyone on this thread say "i hate muslims" or anything similar?
you seek hate where there is none to be found.

on topic: lets be glad that he failed and hopefully anything similar to that will be prevented in the future

[bomberboy]

how is muslim hate even related?
have you seen anyone on this thread say "i hate muslims" or anything similar?

I hate Islam, I'm not a racist not my thread but there has been hate shown towards them on this site since I first came here.

[Gromovnik]

Bah, who really cares. Not me for one, glad it was stopped but I will not give into fear mongering due to a couple of westerners having poor to week to no consitiution at all. If you hate Muslims so much, either eject them from your land and send them back alive where they came from or shut up about it.

Dude, what does that mean?

[Katsumoto]

Bah, who really cares. Not me for one, glad it was stopped but I will not give into fear mongering due to a couple of westerners having poor to week to no consitiution at all. If you hate Muslims so much, either eject them from your land and send them back alive where they came from or shut up about it.

Yeah nobody cares about an attempted terrorist attack.

[13lackGu4rd]

this was just another signal sent towards the Western world, showing hatred on the 1 hand and nonacceptance on the other. unfortunately it was only an "attempted terrorist attack" so besides the security agencies that are now investigating it and the usual aftershock of the public within the next few days this story will die very soon. this is unfortunate because such attempts are numerous, its just that various security agencies manage to stop most of them, so the ones that do get through send a shock wave(or a minor one in case of failure such as here).