UK terror plot A London jury has found 3 British Muslims guilty in a retrial involving a terror plot designed to kill 10,000 innocent civilians: “The Al-Qaeda cell plotted to cause mass murder by detonating homemade liquid explosives on board at least seven passenger flights bound for the US and Canada. The plot had the potential to be three times as deadly as the 9/11 attacks of 2001.” Apparently this plot is what led to the ban on liquids on aircraft, a ban that is still in place. The plot also involved simultaneous flights reminiscent of 9/11: “When the men were arrested, one of the plotters, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, had a computer memory stick in his pocket which highlighted seven flights from London to six cities in the US and Canada, each carrying between 241 and 286 passengers and crew. The flights all departed within 2 hours and 35 minutes of each other, to Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, San Francisco, Washington and New York and police believed there would have been no chance of stopping the attacks once all the aircraft were in the air.” The British believe the plot was within days of being implemented. This case also illustrates how dangerous terrorism can be in the West because many of those involved were home-grown. It's fortunate that Britain disrupted this attack if all it takes is a few men to recruit and lead several disaffected men. – patterico.com The case for engaging Iran The US and its allies are currently drawing the outline of new UN sanctions against Iran. US President Barack Obama should resist the pressure from those politicians and pundits who, in the name of helping dissidents and promoting democracy in Iran, would effectively torpedo a pragmatic policy of opening a dialogue with Tehran which could lead in the short term to a deal to freeze Iran's nuclear program. The conventional wisdom in Washington is that Obama's proposed initiative for diplomatic engagement with Iran is all but dead in light of the political upheaval that has followed the questionable outcome of the June 12 presidential election in Iran. The country's internal turmoil, in this view, has diminished the chances of resolving the diplomatic standoff over the Islamic Republic's refusal to freeze its nuclear program. The skepticism that has greeted the new report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), suggesting that Iran has slowed the expansion of its nuclear program is understandable from this perspective. Indeed, those who assume that the politically shaky and insecure regime in Tehran is unable to respond to Obama's overtures have concluded that Iran will now try to make temporary and meaningless gestures in order to buy time to complete its uranium enrichment. Obama should recognize that a reversal of his engagement policy, or even an attempt to slow it down, would only play into the hands of the extremists in both Tehran and Washington. It would create a diplomatic vacuum in which an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear sites would become inevitable.
