"...A senior congressional source said it is believed the plotters planned to mix a British sports drink with a gel-like substance to make a potent explosive that could be ignited with an MP3 player or cell phone. (Watch how news of the plot prompted rigid carry-on rules at airports -- 2:39)

The sports drink could be combined with a peroxide-based paste to form a potent "explosive cocktail," if properly done, said a U.S. counterterrorism official.

"There are strong reasons to believe the materials in a beverage like that could have been part of the formula," the official said..."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/10/us.security/index.html

Hey - Any chemists out there? Any basis to this, or is OUR government putting us on?

All fear, all the time.

Fair and Balanced.

We distort

You decide.

No chemists out there?

Well, I dug this one up on Wikipedia:

"Hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD is a high explosive organic chemical compound, first synthesised in 1885 by Legler[1]. The theorised structure lent itself well to acting as an initiating, or primary explosive. While still quite sensitive to shock and friction, it was relatively stable compared to other initiating explosives of the time, such as mercury fulminate, and proved to be relatively inexpensive and easy to synthesise. As such, it was quickly taken up as a primary explosive in mining applications.[2] However, it has since been superseded by even more stable compounds such as tetryl.

Despite no longer being used in any official application, it remains a fairly popular home-made explosive and has been used in a large number of suicide bombings throughout the world, including the 7 July 2005 London bombings.[3]

The easiest synthesis of HMTD involves unrestricted ingredients including hydrogen peroxide, citric acid or dilute sulfuric acid as a catalyst and Hexamine Fuel Tablets, which are available from camping supply stores or with military rations. Like other organic peroxides such as acetone peroxide, HMTD is an unstable compound that is sensitive to shock, friction, and heat. HMTD degrades too quickly for modern commercial and industrial applications, becoming useless in a matter of weeks. The compound is frequently suggested as a homemade explosive formulation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexamethylene...eroxide_diamine

I am not smart enuf to know if this is what AMERICAN COUNTERINTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS were describing.

I am starting to think Tom Friedman was right, when after 9/11 he proposed that we be required to FLY NAKED.

Naked Air
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN (NYT) 860 words
Published: December 26, 2001

In the wake of the attempted bombing last week of the American Airlines flight from Paris by a terrorist nut with explosives in his shoe, I'm thinking of starting my own airline, which would be called: Naked Air. Its motto would be: ''Everybody flies naked and nobody worries.'' Or ''Naked Air -- where the only thing you wear is a seat belt.''

Think about it. If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would keep many potential hijackers out of the skies. It's much more civilized than racial profiling. And I'm sure that it wouldn't be long before airlines would be offering free dry-cleaning for your clothes while you fly.

Well, you get the point: if the terrorists are just going to keep using technology to become better and better, how do we protect against that, while maintaining an open society -- without stripping everyone naked? I mean, what good is it to have a free and open America when someone can easily get on an airplane in Paris and bring a bomb over in the heel of his shoe or plot a suicide attack on the World Trade Center from a cave in Kandahar and then pop over and carry it out?

This is America's core problem today: A free society is based on openness and on certain shared ethics and honor codes to maintain order, and we are now intimately connected to too many societies that do not have governments that can maintain order and to peoples who have no respect for our ethics or our honor codes.

Remember the electronic ticket machines that were used for the Boston-New York-Washington shuttles? Ever use one? Not only were you automatically issued your ticket with a credit card by pressing a touch-screen, but they asked you -- electronically -- ''Did you pack your bags yourself?'' and ''Did any strangers give you anything?'' And you answered those security questions by touching a screen! Think about the naïve trust and honor code underlying those machines.

If I had my way they would now take all those machines and put them in a special room in the Smithsonian museum called: ''Artifacts From America Before Sept. 11, 2001.''

We're not alone. I just flew in and out of Moscow, where you now have to fill out a detailed customs form. It asks the usual questions: Are you carrying any fruits, plants, large amounts of foreign currency, special electronics or weapons? But there was one box that unnerved me a bit. It asked: Are you carrying any ''radioactive materials?'' Hmm, I wondered, how many people (i.e. smugglers) are going to check that box? Can you imagine going through Moscow customs and the couple in front of you turning to each other and asking: ''Dear, did we pack the nuclear waste in your suitcase or mine?'' Or, ''Honey, is the plutonium in your purse or the black duffel?'' I don't think so.

Which is why we are entering a highly problematic era, one that we are just beginning to get our minds around. We are becoming much more keenly aware of how freedom and order go together (see the Ashcroft debates). For America to stay America, a free and open society, intimately connected to the world, the world has to become a much more ordered and controlled place. And order emerges in two ways: It is either grown from the bottom up, by societies slowly developing good democratic governance and shared ethics and values, or it is imposed from the top down, by non-democratic, authoritarian regimes rigidly controlling their people.

But in today's post-cold-war world, many, many countries to which we are connected are in a transition between the two -- between a rigid authoritarian order that was imposed and voluntary self-government that is being home-grown. It makes for a very messy world, especially as some countries -- Afghanistan being the most extreme example -- are not able to make the transition.

''The problem with top-down control is that more governments around the world are fragmenting today, rather than consolidating,'' said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. ''At the same time, America's technologies are being universalized -- planes that go faster and faster and electronics that are smaller and smaller -- but the American values and honor system that those technologies assume have not been universalized. In the hands of the wrong people they become weapons of mass destruction.''

So there you have our dilemma: Either we become less open as a society, or the world to which we are now so connected has to become more controlled -- by us and by others -- or we simply learn to live with much higher levels of risk than we've ever been used to before.

Or, we all fly naked.

http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricte...DAB0994D9404482

And continuing this discussion with myself (I feel like livyjr),

TATP is suicide bombers' weapon of choice
By Philippe Naughton, Times Online

In the occupied Palestinian territories, you can tell who the 'engineers' are: they are the ones covered in burn marks who might be missing fingers, or even a whole hand.

The engineers are the bomb-makers for the young suicide bombers sent to kill Israelis by the Islamic militant organisations such as Hamas. And their explosive of choice, triacetone triperoxide or TATP - named today as an explosive used in last week's London bombings - is the reason for their disfigurement.

TATP's base ingredients - drain cleaner, bleach and acetone - can be bought easily and without attracting suspicion; its chemical composition is simple; and in its finished form it is almost undetectable by sniffer dogs or conventional bomb detection systems.

For the same reasons that Hamas uses TATP to send suicide bombers undetected into Israel, the al-Qaeda network has adopted TATP for its terror missions abroad. The substance was included as the trigger in the shoe bomb that Briton Richard Reid tried to detonate on a flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001, and in the identical device given to Reid's fellow bomber Sajid Badat, who aborted his mission.

But as the Palestinian bomb-makers will attest - 40 Palestinians are thought to have been killed making or handling the explosive - it is highly unstable and sensitive to heat and friction. Not for nothing is it known as "Mother of Satan".

As one British explosives expert said today of the news that TATP was involved in the four London blasts: "Frankly, I wouldn't like to be wandering around with 10lb of TATP on my back."

That expert suggested that TATP - which does not need sophisticated detonating devices - might have been used only as the trigger for the London bombs, but it could have been the main explosive. "It would be surprising, but then the Jihadis, and al-Qaeda, are always capable of surprising us," he added.

In Reid's case, there was a small thread of TATP running through 100 grammes of PETN, a high-grade military plastic explosive, attached to a powder-fuse running through his shoelace. That combination surprised bomb experts - TATP is not the trigger normally used for PETN - but was seen as a sophisticated mixture for avoiding detection.

Although discovered as far back as 1895 by a German scientist, Richard Wolffenstein, TATP's instability meant it was never taken up militarily or commercially. But it was rediscovered in the West Bank in the early 1980s and soon became an extremists' staple.

Instructions for making TATP can be found relatively quickly on the internet. Anthony Loyd, a Times reporter, found similar instructions in documents abandoned in an al-Qaeda safe house after the fall of Kabul in November 2001.

TATP is thought to have been used in used in various bomb attacks outside the Middle East, including on a Philippines Airlines flight to Japan in December 1994. It was also used as the trigger in two car bombs detonated in London in July 1994 outside the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish philanthropic institution. Two Palestinian students were later convicted of conspiracy over those bombings.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22...1695442,00.html

More still.


Science Takes on the Mother of Satan

Erik Schechter, Worldpress.org contributing editor, Tel Aviv, Israel, February 21, 2005
Ehud Keinan displays a working prototype of his pen-shaped Peroxide Explosive Tester (PET)

Ehud Keinan displays a working prototype of his pen-shaped Peroxide Explosive Tester (PET). Photo courtesy of Erik Schechter.

Ehud Keinan, a chemistry professor at Haifa’s Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, faced airport security at its most vigilant when he flew into Baltimore/ Washington International just three weeks after the 9/11 tragedy. Personnel rummaged through Keinan’s luggage; had him turn on his laptop to make sure it was really a computer, and even confiscated his nail clippers. Yet a vial holding two grams of triacetone triperoxide (TATP), an improvised plastic explosive, went completely undetected.

First employed by Palestinian bomb makers, the highly unstable TATP — also known as the “Mother of Satan” — is difficult to detect by dogs and conventional hi-tech methods, such as nuclear quadrupole resonance. If the mild-mannered scientist had been a terrorist, and if he had whipped up a larger batch of TATP, he could have downed his connecting flight to Los Angeles, killing hundreds of passengers. Fortunately, Keinan has devoted many years of research to combating such threats.

At the McDonald’s in the terminal, the professor poured the white explosive powder on a table, and, as oblivious patrons lunched on Happy Meals, he demonstrated for an American government official a working prototype of his pen-shaped Peroxide Explosive Tester (PET). Three and a half years later, PET is ready for use by police and security agents; all Keinan needs now is a company to manufacture the device.

Though a former infantry officer and Yom Kippur War veteran, bomb detection technology has never held much interest for Keinan, who is now dean of chemistry at the Technion. “Most of my research has nothing to with explosives,” he says. “I work on drug discovery to treat asthma, cancer and ventricular fibrillation [an electrical disorder in the heart].”

Another passion is biomolecular computing, an interdisciplinary field of science emerging in 1994 which views biological systems like a PC — composed of hardware, software, input and output, except all four components are made of molecules instead of electrons. “It sounds like science fiction,” says Keinan, “but my dream is to make a dynamo of one molecule.”

Nevertheless, in 1987, the Technion professor got an urgent, midnight call from Yitzhak Kirson, now deceased, who was then chief chemist for the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. Kirson knew Keinan from their days at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, and trusted that, if called upon by his country, he would not refuse. The Shin Bet lab official proceeded to tell him of a new, worrisome explosive in the hands of Palestinian militants.

First discovered in 1980 in Hebron, TATP is made by mixing hydrogen peroxide, which can be bought in disinfectant form at the neighborhood pharmacy, and acetone, commonly found in paint thinners. The compound is helped along by an acid catalyst. “The liquid from your car battery or even lemon juice will do the trick,” notes Keinan. The easy recipe is not lost on the bomb makers: In just one raid in 1998, Palestinian Authority security personnel uncovered 800 kilograms of TATP in a Nablus garage.

However, Tal Hanan, security expert and C.E.O. of Demoman International Ltd., notes that TATP is hardly military grade. An unlucky tap or nearby cigarette can set it off, leading to fatal “work accidents” among terrorists and explosive ordinance disposal officers alike. Outside of Israel and the territories, the peroxide-based explosive is used — if at all — only as a detonator, and not the main charge, like in the hollowed out heel of “shoe bomber” Richard Reid.

Indeed, Ivan Oelrich, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Strategic Security Project, wonders if pure TATP’s relative rarity is the only reason why security missed Keinan’s vial at the airport. If operating personnel are trained to look for it, existing portable technologies — such as ion mobility spectrometry, which identifies an explosive by its molecular mass, and nuclear quadrupole resonance, which looks for signature radio frequencies — should theoretically be able to pick up TATP, contend advocates.

“There are commercial detectors out there, but they have to pick up eight, very different types of explosives,” says Yehuda Zeiri, a chemist at Beersheba’s Ben-Gurion University who has worked with Keinan. “The question is one of sensitivity. How good are these devices at picking up TATP?” (As for dogs, they can be trained to pick up the scent of acetone in TATP, but in an urban environment, the animals can be distracted by household items that contain the chemical, says Hanan.)

For seven years, since the time Kirson first called him, Keinan volunteered his time to finding a cheaper and faster way to identify TATP than shipping off suspected material to the lab for analysis. Then, in the mid-1990’s, the Technical Support Working Group (T.S.W.G.), an umbrella organization comprised of 80 different United States agencies, including the F.B.I., C.I.A., and Federal Aviation Authority, made a welcome contribution of $100,000 to his research.

“The Clinton Administration wanted to help Israel deal with the increasing threat of suicide bombers,” notes Keinan.

Finally, in 2001, he created the first prototype of his Peroxide Explosive Tester, and just last month, he got an American patent on the third prototype. The device looks like an oversized pen with three levers at one end and a removable rubber cap at the other. The cap has a sticky surface designed to collect material; the levers release three solutions that wash over the cap when it is re-attached to the PET.

“The first solution is an acid that breaks down TATP into acetone and hydrogen peroxide,” explains Keinan. “The second contains a pigment that turns green when oxidized, and the third solution contains an enzyme that, when exposed to hydrogen peroxide, catalyzes oxidation in the pigment.”

The idea came from chemical immunology, says Keinan. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) uses hydrogen peroxide and pigment reactions to detect antibodies that are chemically bound to a specific enzyme.

PET is meant to be a cheap, disposable device. Keinan predicts that it will only cost $10 to $15, and once on the market, it will soon find its way into the pouch of every police officer or agent who deals with explosives: “We’re taking about hundreds of thousands of kits in the U.S. alone.”

The device already has some professional enthusiasts.

“A police officer reporting to an unidentified package is not going to be carrying a $10,000 device,” says Jimmie Oxley, a chemist at the University of Rhode Island. “That’s what’s so exciting about having a relatively inexpensive kit.”

Keinan is now negotiating with three companies that want to produce PET. The next step is to produce, together with Ben-Gurion University’s Zeiri, a long-range TATP detector. The two scientists, along with Ronnie Kosloff and Joseph Almog of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published an academic paper in January on the peroxide explosive. It turns out that TATP does not release heat when it detonates but rapidly decomposes into a gas whose force of expansion is lethal.

While such a discovery has no direct impact on detection, Keinan notes that “TATP becomes less of a threat the more we know about it.”


http://www.worldpress.org/print_article.cf...d=2153&dont=yes