weaponry of mass death.

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/11/us/11mood.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print
August 11, 2006
Mood
Liquid as Weapon? For Many, a Scary Thought
By JIM DWYER

The dread was in the details.

The scheme, the authorities reported, was to transform ordinary things — like energy drink bottles and medicine jars and MP3 players — into the weaponry of mass death. No one had to learn to fly a giant airplane, and just about everyone owns something that could hold a liquid or deliver a small but cataclysmic electrical charge.

With so many foiled plots fading into a blur of alarms, this one penetrated, people said in interviews across the country.

The familiar had become sinister, just as when a man boarded an airplane with explosives hidden in his shoe five years ago.

“I thought, oh, my God, people can carry cans of what appears to be soda and blow up a plane,” said Marcy Scott Lynn, 34, a recent business school graduate in San Francisco. “Who doesn’t walk onto an airplane with a bottle of water? It’s a staple because drinks at the airport cost like a thousand dollars and the airlines no longer serve food.”

In their homeliest particulars — mothers were being asked to take sips of infant formula before boarding flights yesterday — the plot and the response seemed to deliver a fresh jolt to people who had grown numb to the subject of terrorism. Many reflected on their own movements and vulnerability, seeing futility in hoping to evade an attack that could be launched at the moment they closed their eyes on a plane or train.