British authorities said Thursday that they had thwarted a terrorist plot to blow up multiple airliners traveling between Britain and the United States, creating "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
The police said they had arrested 21 people in connection with the plot, which apparently involved plans to smuggle explosives onto aircraft in hand luggage. In response, flights into London Heathrow Airport were canceled and airlines banned hand luggage on departing planes, causing chaos and long delays.
The police did not identify the suspects or their origin, though Paul Stephenson, the deputy metropolitan police commissioner for London, said "community leaders" had been alerted about the police action, using a code word for the British Muslim community.
The authorities did not say how many aircraft had been identified for attack. Sky News put the number at six, while other reports said between three and 10.
"We think this was an extraordinarily serious plot and we are confident that we have stopped an attempt to create mass murder on an unimaginable scale," Stephenson told reporters at Scotland Yard.
He said the people had been arrested in and near London and Birmingham, and added that the searches would continue.
Predictably, Michael Chertoff, continuing to play the fear card in the aftermath of the Connecticut Primary, warns:
"We believe that these arrests have significantly disrupted the threat, but we cannot be sure that the threat has been entirely eliminated or the plot completely thwarted," Michael Chertoff, the U.S. homeland security secretary, told reporters.
Translation: Shut up about pulling out of Iraq. Be good little sheeple, hide under the bed, and don't pay attention to us rifling through your personal records. And by all means, do NOT wonder why this is still going on four years into the Iraq War that was supposed to be about "fighting the terrorists there so we don't have to fight them here."
UPDATE: Bob Orr just said on The Early Show on CBS that the U.S. government has known about this for a few days. He wonders why, if knowledge of this plot is a few days old, additional safety measures to protect travelers have not been put in place until today.
Why indeed. Why, if you know that travelers are at risk because of a plot to blow up airliners in midair, do you not advise travelers the minute you know? Did the British announcement thwart a plan by the once again beleagured Administration to once again allow terrorist attacks to play out to serve its own political agenda?
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