Suddenly every jogger in the park seems suspicious.

God, MacGyver is so dreamy, they don't have that kind of luscious man-meat on camera anymore.

Geez, why didn't they use plain mentos and diet coke instead?

This is so harebrained that it sounds like a unilateral hoax. How can a half full gatorade container of gel and a simple electronic device pack enough firepower to even blow a hole in an airplane seat, let alone blow a hole in a jetliner?

Who are their specialists?

Who are the brains of these robots?

Have you read "Madmen and Specialists" by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka?

God bless.

Yeah, the greatest thing about this latest "terror alert" is that we as a nation are now afraid of "liquid."

I never liked liquid anyway. Too slippery.

Yes, I can just see Snow at the next White House press briefing:

"We now have conclusive evidence that Saddam did in fact stockpile large quantities of dihyrodgen oxide, cleverly hidden in rivers, lakes and municipal reservoirs, which he intended to mix with other substances to create WMD's. So, we were right all along."

oh give me a break, this is basic combat field engineering training in the Army. heck, you can learn to do it off the Net.

why is it a surprise they would do this when we all grew up with James Bond movies set right after WW II with him doing the exact same thing: MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AGO!

Face it, Homeland Insecurity is just plane incompetent. Like all the feds nowadays.

and yes, a full gatorade bottle of gel could easily contain enough explosive to get thru the cabin door, as a shaped charge. but again, this was true during WW II - and we had liquid explosives then.

I'm not sure I buy the "bombs" theory so much as this much more sinister possibility... (From Andrew Sulivan's blog http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/)

"Liquids". That's, to me, the most interesting aspect of the foiled terror plot in London. Why liquids? What were these weapons? One possibility is hydrogen cyanide. Ron Suskind's book revealed the terrorist breakthrough in a device called a "mubtakkar" that can be easily concealed in a carry-on bag and once detonated, kills everyone in a confined space within minutes. It's a variant of the Zyklon B innovated by the Nazis. Money quote:

U.S. intelligence got its first inkling of the plot from the contents of a laptop computer belonging to a Bahraini jihadist captured in Saudi Arabia early in 2003. It contained plans for a gas-dispersal system dubbed "the mubtakkar" (Arabic for inventive). Fearing that al-Qaeda's engineers had achieved the holy grail of terror R&D — a device to effectively distribute hydrogen-cyanide gas, which is deadly when inhaled — the CIA immediately set about building a prototype based on the captured design, which comprised two separate chambers for sodium cyanide and a stable source of hydrogen, such as hydrochloric acid. A seal between the two could be broken by a remote trigger, producing the gas for dispersal. The prototype confirmed their worst fears: "In the world of terrorist weaponry," writes Suskind, "this was the equivalent of splitting the atom. Obtain a few widely available chemicals, and you could construct it with a trip to Home Depot — and then kill everyone in the store."

The device was shown to President Bush and Vice President Cheney the following morning, prompting the President to order that alerts be sent through all levels of the U.S. government. Easily constructed and concealed, the device ensured that mass casualties would be inevitable if it could be triggered in any enclosed public space.

I wonder if this was the intended device for the U.S-U.K. airplanes. Think of them as having the smallness and ubiquity of an iPod, but with the impact of an instant gas-chamber. It's their iGod. Sending them to paradise and the rest of us to oblivion.

I used to do electroplating, which can easily involve cyanide gas. Look, the whole problem is you somehow think you're "safe" by checking for certain things, while ignoring safety vulnerabilities that are immense.

Now, are you safer on a plane than in a car? yup. But the idea you're going to "catch them" with these searches is laughable at best. If they're trained - which they are.

YGBKM, if the bomb thing is just a theory, then why did the British police confirm that bombing the jetliners was the intention?

LONDON - British police said Thursday they thwarted a terrorist plot, possibly just days away, to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners over the Atlantic and kill thousands.