Shrewd as serpents

The Daily Mail has a lengthy piece today on the beginning of the trial for the gang of British Muslims charged with plotting to blow up as many as 7 airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean. The details are horrifying, both in terms of the sheer carnage that would have occured had the terrorists been successful and also due to the ingenuity of the would-be terrorists.

On the making of the bombs:

Plastic Oasis and Lucozade bottles were to be used by the plotters to make their liquid bombs.

A hypodermic syringe would be inserted into the base to draw out the drink and the bomb mixture would be injected in its place.

A homemade detonator called hexamethylene triperoxide and also known as HMTD would be made from a mixture of household and commercial ingredients and disguised in AA batteries.

Bulbs and wires would connect the bomb mixture with disposable cameras to trigger a charge to set it off.

On getting through security:

A bomb plot "blueprint" scrawled in a diary was seized by police from one of the alleged masterminds, the jury heard.

It set out in chilling detail how mid-air carnage was to be achieved using everyday objects.

And it revealed that the fanatics hoped to hoodwink airport security officers by putting pornographic magazines and condoms in their hand luggage to indicate that they could not be Muslim zealots, the court was told.

As if we needed another reminder, these guys are as shrewd as they are evil. Stories like this inevitably stregthen my occasionally shaky support for McCain. He is wrong on a great many issues (as I was reminded watching CSPAN the other night when a speaker introducing McCain at an event lauded him for his "courage" in enacting campaign-finance reform) but he is right on the biggest issue of the day: The long struggle with terrorists depraved enough to kill thousands of people and crafty enough to do so by fooling airport security with a few dirty magazines.