Another terrorist plot to blow up airliners flying from UK to America!

Those terrorists never sleep.

Scotland Yard announced, in urgent tones yesterday, that they had smashed a plot to plant bombs (concealed in carry-on luggage) on commercial airliners flying from airports in the United Kingdom to the United States.

The Metropolitan Police, after weeks of surveillance, the report revealed, had cracked down on several neighborhoods in London and its suburbs in the Thames Valley, as well as industrial Birmingham, and arrested 21 persons in connection with the murderous conspiracy. Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson has said the identities of those arrested would not immediately be released.

In the meantime, police searches are ongoing in other locations. The threat has been assessed as a highest-level crisis situation. Flights, of course, have either been disrupted in Europe’s busiest international airport, Heathrow in London, as well as in Gatwick airport, and no doubt Luton and other airports in Britain and Scotland.

In reaction to the threat, the United States has also raised its level of alert to Red, the biggest threat warning to all aircraft and commuters. After 9/11, 2001, nothing is being discounted.

Although no announcement has by this writing been made as to whether the suspects nabbed were British citizens or foreigners, the public has jumped to the immediate conclusion that Islamic terrorists are involved.

Homeland Security in the US, in contrast, has not been as discreet. A senior US counter-terrorism official revealed the authorities believe dozens of people, as many as 50, were actually involved in the plot, which "had a footprint of al-Qaeda."

The plan was for airline passengers hiding masked explosives in their carry-on luggage to board, possibly intent on suicide-bombing the selected aircraft. Since this is the peak season for travel – being a vacation month in both Europe and the United States – the scale of murder would be horrendous. Sanamagan. That Osama bin Laden and his bomb-crazy fundamentalists have changed the way the world travels, crimped lifestyles, and thrown the world into chaos and doubt – which was, of course, what that Saudi-born millionaire fanatic intended. This week, score another one for old Osama and his bully boys!

In Heathrow and Gatwick, naturally, everything is in turmoil. Flights are being cancelled by the dozen. No airline can afford to have its jets stranded in any airport. Planes must be kept productively flying to destinations in order to make money, or even break even, for each airline firm. As for stranded passengers, it must be hell in the airport at the height of summer heat.

The rule now is that absolutely no hand-luggage is to be brought on board – except essential medicines (for those under medical care and supervision) and travel documents. Everything else must be checked in after rigid inspection. This includes the requirement to place into checked-in baggage all cellphones, laptop computers, iPods, remote control, liquids such as hair care products (just in case they could be liquid explosives).

Aircraft bound for Heathrow are being waved away, but have received clearance to land in Germany’s Frankfurt-am-Main airport, mainland Europe’s busiest hub; Schipol in Amsterdam; the Charles de Gaulle (CDG) in Roissy, near Paris; and other French airports like Le Bourget. A skittish Brussels, however, home of the European Commission, has banned all London flights.

Confusion galore: But better safe than sorry.

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The Brits take the threat very seriously owing to recent experience. It was a wake-up call for Britain, when, on July 7, 2005 – a bit more than a year ago – four suicide-bombers who were British citizens (actually born in England) of Pakistani origin set off bombs in those ill-starred London underground trains – the Tube. The fourth bomber, running late, exploded his bomb instead on the bus he was riding. The bombs killed 56 commuters, and injured more than 700 others.

How could these British-educated young men have turned Islamic fanatics? That question continues to haunt the British public. There are 1.64 million Muslims living in Britain, which comes up to two percent of the population.

There was a second attempt on July 21 in which four bombs were planted in three subway cars and a bus. But the attack failed when the bombs’ detonators fired, but didn’t trigger off the explosives.

This time the four bombers had not been of the suicide-variety, but had merely left the bombs in the knapsacks they brought on board. The Muslim would-be bombers were identified later by closed circuit images on the security cameras. (London has the largest city-wide closed-circuit camera network).

In any event, it was unsettling for Londoners to realize their public transit system is at risk. Three million people ride the subway daily, while another 6.7 million ride above ground in those familiar red double-decker buses.

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It might be well for us to beef up our airport security, too. We’re the bahala na type when it comes to security, and unauthorized persons could come and go, I fear, through a number of carelessly unguarded areas.

A bomb implanted in an aircraft is no joke. (What about the baggage handlers as a source of danger owing to laxity or deliberate intent?)

The most lurid example is that of Pan-Am Flight 103 which was enroute to New York on December 21, 1988. It exploded at 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all on board – 259 passengers and crew. The crashing aircraft and its debris, in addition, killed 11 people on the ground.

It was established later that shocking lapses in airport security allowed an unaccompanied suitcase containing a bomb to be placed onboard flight 103 in Frankfurt, Germany, checked through from Malta, where the flight had originated.

If you want to know, Libya’s leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, now America’s "friend" and taken off the terrorist list (whom our Presidenta GMA visited so cheerfully recently), heavily bankrolled attempts to prevent the prosecution of two Libyan agents who were indicted for the crime – despite meticulously assembled forensic evidence pointing to their guilt. The two terrorist suspects were finally handcuffed and brought to the Hague in the Netherlands to be tried there under Scottish law. Pan-American, in the meantime, had gone bankrupt.

The tragic saga of Pan Am 103, and the anguish it caused the bereaved families (many of the dead passengers had been rushing home for Christmas) is a cautionary tale of what a bomb placed in aircraft can do.

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Then there was the young Korean woman who smuggled a bomb aboard a South Korean Airlines plane in 1987 and blew it up over the Andaman Sea of Burma. Kim Hyun-Hui, now repentant about having callously murdered 115 persons aboard the doomed KAL Flight 858, said in an interview after fleeing to seek asylum in South Korea that she lives in constant remorse, and that it is not easy to wipe that guilt away. "I am aware," she wept, "that the sufferings of the (bereaved) families are still there."

Asked why she had committed that awful deed, Ms. Kim said she had been ordered to blow up the Korean commercial jet by "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il himself (at that time still the heir apparent to his father, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung). Why had she acted without logic and reason? Ms. Kim’s explanation is revealing. She asserted: "In my case, from the time I was born I was taught to repeat, ‘Thank you Great Leader Marshal Kim Il-sung . . . It is glory to die on his behalf. I remember when I was young going out to join the parade and shouting with tears in my eyes for Kim Il-sung."

Mind you, it is the same nutty Kim Jong-il, now leader of North Korea himself (having inherited the throne from old dad), who has been nuke-rattling in the current crisis over Pyongyang’s missile-delivery systems. The test missile intended to reach Alaska and the United States proved a flop, but Kim demonstrated that his other missile could get as far as to splash into the Sea of Japan. The Japanese, alarmed and irritated, are now grumbling about amending their Constitution (striking off Article IX) and speedily rearming. The Self-defense forces they now maintain are capable mostly of "defense," but don’t tell me the world’s former foremost shipbuilding nation cannot retool in a flash and produce the aircraft carriers (like the Akagi whose aircraft clobbered Pearl Harbor), missile-firing cruisers and super-frigates, which can easily take the battle to any enemy.

In the case of Tokyo, Japan is the sleeping dragon now being shaken awake.

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The Arab world is incensed at the United States for so obviously backing Israel to the hilt in the fight against the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Neither the Islamic world, nor Western Europe can understand the American trauma.

Can the Americans, who in a recent poll said they support Israel in the Lebanese "war", be fully faulted for not being sympathetic to Muslims?

In the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor (December 8, 1941, our time), twelve American warships were destroyed or damaged, 100 aircraft destroyed – and 2,405 American servicemen killed, plus 68 civilians.

In the September 11, 2001, assaults on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, no less than 3,400 were killed or injured. Confirmed dead were 2,645 – more than had perished in Pearl Harbor.

And the 19 airplane hijackers who had crashed those United Airlines and American Airlines jets into their targets – with the terrified passengers onboard, too – were all Muslims. Of the 19, ironically, 14 came from Saudi Arabia, ostensibly America’s ally owing to relationship over oil.

Do the Americans distrust Muslims? I’d be amazed if they did. Jews, contrary to popular misconception, may be tremendously influential in the US, but they comprise only two percent of the American population. Hispanics, of which my Cuban-American son-in-law is one, by now comprise 14 percent of the US population.

When all is said and done, most Americans consider Israel not just a client, but their only friend in the Middle East. And the Israelis are cruel and relentless in their fight, because they don’t want another Holocaust or genocide to be inflicted them. They know they are hated – and know full well that Hezbollah, and its major patron Iran (aside from Syria) have vowed to wipe the Israelis off the face of the earth.

The Israeli War Cabinet has just voted 9-3 to expand the land offensive in Lebanon. Betcha they’ll go all the way to Beirut. Will that solve anything? It didn’t last time in 1982, when they did just that. And perhaps it won’t be effective today either. Yet the Israelis have no choice. For them, it’s a question of "fight to the finish," or die. Not easy, di ba?

Now, one of the leading authorities on the Mid-East, Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis, author of so many bestsellers on the problem of Islam, Arab nationalism and the history of the Middle East, has just come out with a dire warning. Lewis has said that it is possible Iran could pick August 22, the anniversary of one of Islam’s holiest events, for a cataclysm Shiite Muslims believe will forever resolve the battle between "good and evil." Or the problem of Big Satan (America) and Little Satan (Israel)?

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Lewis recalls that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been urging his people to prepare for the coming of an Islamic "messiah", raising concerns that a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would trigger the kind of global conflagration he envisions will set the stage for the end of the world.

Sanamagan, Bernard. I hope you’re hallucinating, and not reading too much into the Book of the Apocalypse.