Terrorism Threat ::: PETN explosive and airliners - Security breach identified

[vets74]

-- THIS IS ANOTHER PIECE ON THE "GRAVE MISTAKES, THEN PROMOTIONS" THEME. --

PETN is a simple explosive. Pentaerythritol trinitrate is also one of the more powerful commonly known explosives.

PETN makes a wonderful detonator for nuclear weapons. The numbers on PETN explosions come in at 8,500 meters/second and a temperature of 4230 centigrade.

Point is, terrorists found out about PETN. That was easy. PETN had been used for military destruction since the First World War. Blowing up a commercial airliner might take 100-grams of PETN. 20-grams if you get cute about it.

Ruin your whole afternoon.

Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid tried to use triacetone triperoxide for a detonator. He didn't quite get it right. Move his game to the restroom/water_closet and there would have been scant evidence to dope things out.

Another PETN attack featured an ass-full of the duty explosive. Abdullah Hassan al Asiri had his rectum pumped full of PETN, then barely failed at his assassination effort.

Gotta love that guy.

"Al the Asswipe" wouldn't have been so funny if the assassination had succeeded.

Umar "Underwear" Farouk Abdulmutallab and his support team used information off an unclassified part of the Internet to figure out that Amsterdam did not have means to detect PETN.

Google < PETN terrorist threat > and the vulnerability fell right out.

http://www.hsaj.org/?fullarticle=5.1.5">The Terrorist Threat to Inbound U.S. Passenger Flights: Inadequate Government Response
M. Anthony Fainberg
Homeland Security Affairs -- January 2009
The Journal of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security

Copyright © 2009 by the author(s). Homeland Security Affairs is an academic journal available free of charge to individuals and institutions. Because the purpose of this publication is the widest possible dissemination of knowledge, copies of this journal and the articles contained herein may be printed or downloaded and redistributed for personal, research or educational purposes free of charge and without permission. Any commercial use of Homeland Security Affairs or the articles published herein is expressly prohibited without the written consent of the copyright holder. The copyright of all articles published in Homeland Security Affairs rests with the author(s) of the article. Homeland Security Affairs is the online journal of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS).

My, my. HSA ran an article that told anyone and everyone that PETN was a free walk through security at specific airports. No bloodhounds. No scanners. Took these attackers till December 25, 2009, to hit Amsterdam to Detroit, Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

That leak demonstrates one piss-poor way to run a counterterrorism operation. Information on PETN vulnerability at airports should have been a Top Secret plus tickets level information asset. (Maybe it was, but nobody cares.)

The author has a long history. Many political contacts, including the crew that formed The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997. This group included Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, James Bolton, and Donald Rumsfeld.

"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

This Dr. Fainberg had been chairman of the FAA Security and Counterterrorism Committee in the middle 1990s. That was the group that willfully ignored the Air France and ICAO responses to the first al-Qaeda suicide-hijacking from Christmas 1994.

Enough with the Pearl Harbors.

Enough with allowing Americans to out life-and-death information. This guy Fainberg is still inside the loop, working on "superterrorism" threats. FBI and CIA went decades ignoring their willful fools and their traitors -- DCI can do better.

Comments welcome :::