Exploding beverages

Wow. They've released the video that tipped Scotland Yard off to the plot to use liquid explosives to take down U.S. airliners.

Seriously, though, it is nice that there are some reporters covering national security who aren't simply mouthing Republican talking points about "defeatocrats."

WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 — The Department of Homeland Security has taken significant steps since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to make it much harder to turn a plane into a flying weapon. But a nearly obsessive focus on the previous attacks may have prevented the federal government from combating new threats effectively, terrorism experts and former agency officials say.

The arrests overseas this week of people accused of planning to use an explosive that would be undetectable at airports illustrates the significant security gaps, they said.

While the department has hardened cockpit doors and set up screening for guns and knives, it has done far too little to protect against plastic and liquid explosives, bombs in air cargo and shoulder-fired missiles, the experts say.

The nation is still at risk from the same “failure of imagination” cited by the 9/11 commission as having contributed to the success of the 2001 attack, several argued.

“They are reactive, not proactive,” said Randall J. Larsen, a retired colonel in the Air Force who is chairman of the military strategy department at the National War College in Washington.

Although one might argue that it was the obsessive focus on Iraq that has most seriously made us increasingly vulnerable, not to mention the administration's wild imaginings of Iraqis showering us with flowers and sweets rather than RPGs and IEDs.