British and American government officials have described the operation which resulting in the arrest of 24 mostly British Muslim suspects, as a resounding success. Thirteen of the suspects have been charged, and two released without charges.

According to security sources, the terror suspects were planning to board up to ten civilian airliners and detonate highly volatile liquid explosives on the planes in a spectacular terrorist operation. The liquid explosives -- either TATP (Triacetone Triperoxide), DADP (diacetone diperoxide) or the less sensitive HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamine) -- were reportedly to be made on board the planes by mixing sports drinks with a peroxide-based household gel and then be detonated using an MP3 player or mobile phone.

But Lt. Col. Wylde, who was awarded the Queen's Gallantry Medal for his command of the Belfast Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in 1974, described this scenario as a "fiction." Creating liquid explosives is a "highly dangerous and sophisticated task," he states, one that requires not only significant chemical expertise but also appropriate equipment.

Terror plot scenario "untenable"

"The idea that these people could sit in the plane toilet and simply mix together these normal household fluids to create a high explosive capable of blowing up the entire aircraft is untenable," said Lt. Col. Wylde, who was trained as an ammunition technical officer responsible for terrorist bomb disposal at the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Sandhurst.

After working as a bomb defuser in Northern Ireland, Lt. Col. Wylde became a senior officer in British Army Intelligence in 1977. During the Cold War, he collected intelligence as part of an undercover East German "liaison unit," then went on to work in the Ministry of Defense to review its communications systems.

"So who came up with the idea that a bomb could be made on board? Not Al Qaeda for sure. It would not work. Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure," Wylde stated.

"This story has been blown out of all proportion. The liquids would need to be carefully distilled at freezing temperatures to extract the required chemicals, which are very difficult to obtain in the purities needed."

Once the fluids have been extracted, the process of mixing them produces significant amounts of heat and vile fumes. "The resulting liquid then needs some hours at room temperature for the white crystals that are the explosive to develop." The whole process, which can take between 12 and 36 hours, is "very dangerous, even in a lab, and can lead to premature detonation," said Lt. Col. Wylde.

If there was a conspiracy, he added, "it did not involve manufacturing the explosives in the loo," as this simply "could not have worked." The process would be quickly and easily detected. The fumes of the chemicals in the toilet "would be smelt by anybody in the area." They would also inevitably "cause the alarms in the toilet and in the air change system in the aircraft to be triggered. The pilot has the ability to dump all the air from an aircraft as a fire-fighting measure, leaving people to use oxygen masks. All this means the planned attack would be detected long before the queues outside the loo had grown to enormous lengths."

Government silent on detonators

Even if it was possible for the explosive to have been made on the aircraft, a detonator, probably made from TATP, would be needed to set it off. "It is very dangerous and risky to the individual," Wylde said. "As the quantity involved would be small this would injure the would-be suicide bomber but not endanger the aircraft, thus defeating the object of bringing down an aircraft."

Despite the implausibility of this scenario, it has been used to justify wide-ranging new security measures that threaten to permanently curtail civil liberties and to suspend sections of the United Kingdom's Human Rights Act of 1998. "Why were the public delicately informed of an alleged conspiracy which the authorities knew, or should have known, could not have worked?" asked Lt. Col. Wylde.

"This is not a new problem," he added, noting that 'shoe-bomber' Richard Reid had attempted to use this type of explosive on a plane in December 2001. "If this threat is real, what has been done to develop explosive test kits capable of detecting peroxide based explosives?" asked Wylde. "These are the real issues about protecting the public that have not been publicised. Instead we are going to get demands for more internment without trial."

Lt. Col. Wylde also raised questions about the criminal investigation into the 7th July terrorist attacks in London last year. He noted that police and government sources have maintained "total silence" about the detonation devices used in the bombs on the London Underground and the bus at Tavistock Square. "Whatever the nature of the primary explosive materials, even if it was home-made TATP, the detonator that must be used to trigger an explosion is an extremely dangerous device to make, requiring a high level of expertise that cannot be simply self-taught or picked-up over the internet," Wylde stated.

The government's silence on the detonation device used in the attacks is "disturbing," he said, as the creation of the devices requires the involvement of trained explosives experts. Wylde speculated that such individuals would have to be present either inside the country or outside, perhaps in Eastern Europe, where they would be active participants in an international supply-chain to UK operatives. "In either case, we are talking about something far more dangerous than home-grown radicals here."

Spy slams police inaction against terrorists

Wylde's concerns are echoed by others familiar with British terrorism-related intelligence operations, such as Glen Jenvey, who is profiled in the bestselling book, The Terror Tracker, by terrorism investigator Neil Doyle. Jenvey worked for several military attaches monitoring terrorist groups in London and obtained crucial video and surveillance evidence used by British police to arrest radical cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was convicted last February.

"I've been closely monitoring the internet communications of extremist Muslim groups inside the UK both before and after 7/7, and they are intimately interconnected," said Jenvey, who is affiliated with the London-based terror watch group VIGIL. "We've identified a coordinated leadership of at least 20 and up to 60 people, extremist preachers with blatant international al-Qaeda terrorist connections."

Jenvey noted that even though they are known to the authorities and are monitored while breaking the law with impunity, particularly in their private sermons, the police have failed to take appropriate action against them. "The police don't need to round up and detain thousands of British Muslims. If they only arrested, charged and prosecuted these 20 key terrorist leaders, they will have a struck a fatal blow against the epicentres of al-Qaeda extremism in the UK. But they're sitting on this."

Jenvey points to Omar Bakri Mohammed, a colleague of convicted terrorist Abu Hamza who headed the now-banned Islamist group al-Muhajiroun in the United Kingdom. Despite being exiled to Lebanon, Omar Bakri continues to communicate with UK-based extremist groups which are believed to be successors of al-Muhajiroun operating under new names, including the Saved Sect and al-Ghurabaa. British security sources have confirmed that the 7/7 bombers were associates of Omar Bakri's network, and Bakri himself publicly boasted a year before the London bombings that an al-Qaeda cell in London was planning a terrorist strike.

An investigation by the counterterrorism unit in the New York Police Department found that Bakri's al-Muhajiroun had formed 81 front groups and support networks in six countries, most of them based in London, the home counties bordering London, the Midlands, Lancashire and West Yorkshire. By the time Home Secretary Dr. John Reid moved in July to proscribe the latest incarnation of al-Muhajiroun, al-Ghurabaa, this sprawling interconnected network was fully functioning and continues to operate namelessly, despite proscription. Bakri's network has recently adopted the name "Al Sabiqoon Al-Awwaloon".

Jenvey complains that, despite the arrest in early September of radical cleric Abu Abdullah, convicted terrorist Abu Hamza's successor at the Finsbury Park Mosque, a "hardcore group of 20 or more extremists operating around Omar Bakri" remains at large. "The police have every reason to act, and they know who these people are. Their failure to do so has only exacerbated unjustified demonization of Muslims. These extremists are not Muslims in any meaningful sense, they are simply terrorists obsessed with violence."

MI5, MI6 recruiting extremists?

Even the arrest of Abu Abdullah only occurred after his support for terrorism was widely reported in the British and American media in late August. On 23rd August, he justified the killing of Westerners and told CNN correspondent Dan Rivers that Tony Blair is a "legitimate target" of jihad. The Sunday Times remarked that he "is apparently being allowed to operate unchecked by the authorities five months after a law was passed making it a criminal offence to glorify terrorism."

Torture may have been used to extract evidence for the weekend police raids which resulted in the arrest of 14 British Muslims, including Abdullah. Sources confirm that information came from detainees at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, where interrogation techniques classified as torture under international law are routinely used.

The reluctance to take decisive action against the leadership of the extremist network in the UK has a long history. According to John Loftus, a former Justice Department prosecutor, Omar Bakri and Abu Hamza, as well as the suspected mastermind of the London bombings Haroon Aswat, were all recruited by MI6 in the mid-1990s to draft up British Muslims to fight in Kosovo. American and French security sources corroborate the revelation. The MI6 connection raises questions about Bakri's relationship with British authorities today. Exiled to Lebanon and outside British jurisdiction, he is effectively immune to prosecution.

Other London-based radical clerics with terrorist connections also had a relationship to the security services. Abu Qatada, described as al-Qaeda's European ambassador, was, according to French sources a long-time MI5 informant. Pakistani government insiders similarly believe that Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed, the British al-Qaeda finance chief from Forest Gate, not only worked with the ISI, Pakistani's military intelligence service, but was also recruited by the CIA as an informant. Saeed, who reportedly wired several hundred thousand dollars to alleged chief 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, is currently in Pakistani custody for the murder of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl.

Omar Bakri regularly uses the internet to communicate from Lebanon with his followers in Britain. On Sunday evening, 3rd September, Omar Bakri told participants in an online chat forum that he had been pulled in by the Lebanese authorities at the request of the US and British governments and questioned in relation to the "terror plot". Although he denied involvement in the plot, he claimed that some of the 24 British Muslim suspects were known to him. When asked to confirm or deny whether Bakri had indeed been arrested at the request of the British, the Foreign Office had no comment. Bakri said that he was regularly questioned by Lebanese officials on behalf of the British government.

The official reluctance to act against Bakri and his active associates in the UK does not match the government's willingness to act pre-emptively to foil a plot of doubtful reality. Official reluctance to acknowledge the significance of the detonators used in the 7/7 terrorist operation suggests that the threat is far more sophisticated than authorities have admitted, and that emphasis on home-grown amateurs is mistaken. Lt. Col. Wylde's observations would seem to indicate that the terror-threat narrative is being manipulated for reasons of political expediency.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Graham Ennis, Nigel Wylde and Glen Jenvey for their research assistance and contribution to this story. They bear no responsibility for any errors therein. An abridged version of this story will be printed in The Muslim News, UK on 29th September 2006.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, £9:99) and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism (Arris, £12:99). He testified in the US Congress about his research on international terrorism in July 2005. He teaches International Relations at the University of Sussex, Brighton.

"The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar's case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion," O'Connor wrote. "They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar's case in a less than forthcoming manner."

The U.S. is already under intense criticism from human rights groups over the practice of sending suspects to countries where they could be tortured.

U.S. and Syrian officials refused to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry.

The commission found the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shared information about Arar with American anti-terrorist agencies both before and after he was detained.

The RCMP asked the U.S. to put Arar on a watch list as an "Islamic extremist individual" suspected of links to the al-Qaida terrorist movement, the report said.

The request was issued after Arar met with another man who was under surveillance, a meeting Arar has said was about how to find inexpensive computer equipment.

"The RCMP had no basis for this description, which had the potential to create serious consequences for Mr. Arar in light of American attitudes and practices," the report said.

The RCMP described Arar as the "target" of a domestic anti-terrorist investigation in Canada when in fact he was a peripheral figure who had come under suspicion only because he had been seen in the company of the man who was under surveillance, the report found.

O'Connor said that much of the material shared with U.S. authorities had not been double-checked to ensure its accuracy and reliability -- a violation of the RCMP's usual rules for divulging information to foreign agencies.

O'Connor concluded that the inaccurate information passed by Canadian police to U.S. authorities "very likely" led to their decision to send Arar to Syria.

"It's quite clear that the RCMP sent inaccurate information to U.S. officials," Arar said at a news conference in Ottawa. "I would have not have even been sent to Syria had this information not been given to them."

"I have waited a long time to have my name cleared. I was tortured and lost a year of my life. I will never be the same," Arar said. "The United States must take responsibility for what it did to me and must stop destroying more innocent lives with its unlawful actions."

The commission concluded there was no evidence Canadian officials participated in or agreed to the decision to send Arar to Syria. But O'Connor recommended that in the future, information should never be provided to a foreign country where there is a credible risk that it will cause or contribute to the use of torture.

Most of the judge's 23 policy recommendations centered on the RCMP and emphasized the need to improve the force's internal policies for national security investigations and the sharing of information with other countries.

Arar's case has been regularly featured on the front pages of Canadian newspapers and public outcry led to the government calling an inquiry. Canada's federal government established the inquiry in 2004 to determine the role Canadian officials played.

O'Connor also found "troubling questions" about the role played by Canadian officials in the cases of three other Canadians of Arab descent -- Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin. All claim they were tortured in Syria after traveling there on personal business, and all suspect that the RCMP, Canadian intelligence or both collaborated with their captors.

O'Connor said he could not get to the bottom of those cases because of the limited nature of his mandate. But he urged the government to appoint an independent investigator -- something short of a full-fledged public inquiry -- to look into those cases.

O'Connor sifted through thousands of pages of documents and sat through testimony from more than 40 witnesses. He delivered two versions of his report to the government: one classified, the other public. But portions of even the public edition of the long-awaited document were withheld due to security concerns.

He went to a hospital, where a nurse called police to report what happened. A sergeant showed up and told the Cuellars' what had happened.

"He told me the dispatcher gave police the wrong address," says Lupe.

The real domestic violence call was two houses down. Officers arrested another man for assault. Lupe says his daughter is now frightened by police.

NEWSCHANNEL 5 tried to talk to the Brownsville police chief. We're told he's gathering information and will comment tomorrow.

The department is reportedly investigating the incident.

A formal plea of not guilty was entered in front of senior district judge Timothy Workman at London's City of Westminster Magistrates Court today, the police force said in an e-mailed statement.

The case was adjourned until the next hearing on Jan. 16 at the Central Criminal Court, commonly known as the Old Bailey. The force faces an unlimited fine if found guilty.

At the time of the shooting police were operating a controversial policy called Operation Kratos, which was developed after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. and authorized officers to shoot suspected suicide bombers.

De Menezes was shot seven times in the head by anti- terrorist officers at Stockwell Tube station in south London. The incident was investigated by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The Crown Prosecution Service then decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute any individual police officer and to pursue the health and safety case against the police force as a whole.

The mistaken shooting happened in the "extraordinarily difficult circumstances'' of July 22, 2005, and there were "compelling evidential grounds'' to defend the case, the Metropolitan Police said following its Not Guilty plea today.

It also questioned whether a law drafted more than 30 years ago, to protect employees in the workplace, was the right way to evaluate the actions of police officers in an emergency situation.

Last week Commander Cressida Dick, a senior officer who was involved in events on the day of the shooting, was promoted to Deputy Assistant Commissioner, the Metropolitan Police Authority announced Sept. 12.

Several of those techniques chime with information gleaned about interrogation methods used against some serious terror suspects. The New York Times recently reported that Abu Zubaydah, the first al-Qaida member captured after the September 11 attacks, was kept in a freezing cell until he went blue, and later assailed with loud Red Hot Chili Peppers music.

The debate on how far the CIA should be allowed to go in aggressively questioning suspects has divided the Republican party after prominent senators led by John McCain of Arizona rebelled against the administration's plans to change Geneva Convention to meet the CIA's demands. Mr McCain told ABC television yesterday that "there is a war we are losing in some ways and that's our standing in the world because of our treatment in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo".

The British attorney general warned the US that its plans would face international condemnation. Speaking to lawyers in Chicago at the weekend, Lord Goldsmith said he had thought hard about interfering in a "sensitive, domestic political debate", but had concluded that the Geneva Convention was "an international standard of very considerable importance and its content must be the same for all nations". Guantánamo Bay had become "a symbol" which "the long American tradition of justice and liberty deserves to see removed at the earliest moment".

Khyam, said to be a member of an al-Qaida-related terror cell, was arrested in March 2004 after more than half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that could be used as an explosive was found in a London storage facility.

Khyam has denied charges of conspiracy to cause an explosion.

In earlier testimony he described how he had traveled to Pakistan to receive military training and how he had raised money through fraud for Islamists in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, the coup's leader, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, said that he had acted "to bring back normalcy and harmony" and that he intended to "return power to the Thai people as soon as possible."

That, in so many words, was the hope of Thailand's elite, who had accused Thaksin of corruption and of destroying democratic institutions, even as he continued to enjoy the overwhelming support of rural voters, who had given him Thailand's first outright majority in Parliament.

But whatever the hopes and intentions, Thailand is in a dangerous limbo as the generals work to consolidate control in a fragmented political field and Thaksin, now with his family in London, considers his next moves.

And one more Southeast Asian nation has reinterpreted democracy in undemocratic terms, either manipulating or sidestepping constitutional processes to achieve political ends.

"The crisis in the immediate term has been resolved," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University.

"Thaksin is out of the picture for now," he said. "We can move forward with political reforms. But in the medium and longer term he is still around and his supporters are still around. We have been put back at Square 1. We've got to get out of this vicious cycle of constitution, election, corruption and coup."

It had seemed that Thailand had left behind its long era of repeated coups, slowly consolidating constitutional rule over the past 15 years. Sonthi himself said in March, "Military coups are a thing of the past."

Now both Thailand and the Philippines, the region's two exemplars of democracy, have removed democratically elected leaders in coups that followed popular uprisings.

Other Southeast Asian nations are ruled with varying degrees of authoritarianism, while staying close to the rules of the democratic playbook.

In a turnaround, it is Indonesia that has the most thoroughgoing, though fragile, democracy, following 32 years of dictatorship under the former president, Suharto, who was ousted in 1998.

Each nation argues that its adaptations of democracy are necessary responses to local conditions.

Singapore, for example, points to its precarious position as a tiny mainly Chinese nation squeezed between two much larger Malay neighbors, and to the combustible mix of a multiethnic population.

Myanmar, the former Burma, says it must maintain its repressive military rule to keep ethnic tensions from bursting into civil war. But it is nevertheless going through the motions of democratic process, with plans to reopen a constitutional convention next month.

Vietnam and Laos are thoroughly communist nations, following what they call the democratic structures of regular parliamentary votes and five-year plans.

The Philippines, like Thailand, has argued that democratic processes had broken down when President Joseph Estrada was facing impeachment on corruption charges and that only the military could clean house and set the country back on course. The military "withdrew its support" from Estrada, clearing the way for his successor, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

Calling the coup Tuesday a hiccup, Kavi Chongkittavorn, a political commentator at The Nation daily newspaper, said, "It was a necessary evil, if you look at it. There were no other options to end this political cul-de-sac."

But he conceded, "It is a contradiction in terms to have a military coup that calls for political reform. That's the dilemma."

The Asian Center for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group, raised the obvious objection in a statement Wednesday.

"If the latest coup d' état in Thailand is justified, similar military interventions in a situation of political flux such as in Mexico will also be justified," it said. "The coup d' état in Thailand is a threat to democracy all over the world."

On Wednesday, Sonthi offered both good news and bad news for those who seek a quick return to democratic rule.

He said he would choose an interim civilian prime minister within two weeks and then, "We step out."

But he said that interim government would have the task of drawing up a new constitution, putting it to a referendum, and then holding parliamentary elections, a process that would take more than a year.

By that time, Thailand's political scene will have changed in unpredictable ways, analysts said.

They said Thaksin himself was unlikely to return to Thailand in the near future, where he could face lawsuits, trial and even prison on various charges of corruption.

But he is a stubborn man and his presence, even abroad, is likely to shadow Thai politics as it goes through its difficult transition.

He still has powerful allies in Thailand, but the analysts said his party, Thai Rak Thai, could well disintegrate without the forceful leader who created it.

One effect of his five years of overwhelming dominance, though, is the absence of any obvious alternative. The main opposition party, the Democrat Party, has been notable in its inability to capitalize on Thaksin's difficulties.

A main task of the interim government will be to heal the rifts that Thaksin has created, avoiding vendettas that could devolve into what Thinatin called "an endless revenge and recrimination cycle."

There is also an urgent need to address a spreading separatist insurgency in the largely Muslim south of the country, where at

least 1,500 people have been killed since January 2004.

Experts attribute much of the growth in violence to Thaksin's no-compromise, militarized policies.

Sonthi, himself a Muslim, has clashed with Thaksin over the handling of the conflict. He recently proposed negotiations with the separatists, and the change in government could lead to a more successful counter-insurgency.

At the same time, Thinatin said, new governments should embrace one of Thaksin's positive legacies, a focus on the needs of the poor, with programs like village development funds, debt forgiveness and low-cost health care.

These populist measures, however calculating and paternalistic, did address long-neglected needs of the majority of the population.

"He did have a positive legacy with the grass roots," Thinatin said. "The mistake will be to reject everything Thaksin did."

Ukraine has the support of several nations and Tarasyuk will use the two-week annual UN General Assembly event now under way to canvass dozens more, he said in an interview with The Associated Press Tuesday. The resolution would accuse Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's regime of deliberately instigating what Ukrainians call the Great Famine.

"We expect that the delegations here at the United Nations will deplore this artificially made famine as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people," Tarasyuk told The Associated Press. "We would like that the international community pay tribute to those who perished."