We're at war

Story: "A plot to blow up planes in flight from the UK to the US and commit "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" has been disrupted, Scotland Yard has said.

It is thought the plan was to detonate explosive devices smuggled in hand luggage on to as many as 10 aircraft.

Police are searching premises after 21 people were arrested. Home Secretary John Reid said they believed the "main players" were accounted for. High security is causing delays at all UK airports.The threat level to the UK has been raised by MI5 to critical after the arrests in London, High Wycombe and Birmingham.

Critical threat level - the highest - means "an attack is expected imminently and indicates an extremely high level of threat to the UK".

Three US airlines are believed to have been targeted. Mr Reid said had the attack gone ahead it would have caused a loss of life of "unprecedented scale".
He said they were "confident" the main players were in custody, but neither the police nor government are "in any way complacent"."

Thats what I woke up to this morning, as did other Americans and British. But the attack was stopped, and many lives were saved.

Who was this? "The scope or the magnitude of this attack is much larger than previous attacks," said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert at Singapore's Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies.

He added that everything known so far points to involvement by Osama bin Laden's terror group.

"It is a classic al-Qaida tactic. It is a hallmark of al-Qaida to carry out coordinated, simultaneous attacks, and the aviation domain is certainly known to al-Qaida. They have obvious experience in working around that system and extensive knowledge of the aviation domain."

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff echoed those sentiments, saying the attack "was sophisticated, it had a lot of members and it was international in scope." He added that: "It was in some respects suggestive of an al Qaida plot," but cautioned that the investigation was still under way.

There have been dozens of thwarted plots around the world since the Sept. 11 attacks, and several that were murderously successful. Suicide bombers killed 52 people in London on July 7, 2005, 58 in two attacks in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2003, and 202 in Bali in 2002. Islamic radicals killed 191 people in Madrid on Mar. 11, 2004, then blew themselves up days later when police were closing in."

So, it maybe al-queda, or some wannabe group. Also, look at the number of thwarted strikes in recent years.

The result of all this? Britan on highest alert, and the US is on RED alert for the first time.

And here is the best round-up I've seen.