The Register has an article out today questioning whether or not those plotting to destroy aircraft by mixing precoursors onboard (thus making so-called "binary" explosives) had done their chemistry. As it turns out, they hadn't:
'It should be small comfort that the security establishments of the UK and the USA - and the "terrorism experts" who inform them and wheedle billions of dollars out of them for bomb puffers and face recognition gizmos and remote gait analyzers and similar hi-tech phrenology gear - have bought the Hollywood binary liquid explosive myth, and have even acted upon it.'
'We've given extraordinary credit to a collection of jihadist wannabes with an exceptionally poor grasp of the mechanics of attacking a plane, whose only hope of success would have been a pure accident. They would have had to succeed in spite of their own ignorance and incompetence, and in spite of being under police surveillance for a year.' (source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/...)
EDIT: I did find one instance of a liquid "binary" explosive being used in a real-world situation to great effect -- Korean Airlines 858 used PLX, a liquid explosive used during WWII. It should be noted, however, that in that instance the bombers possibly had lots of logisitical support and trained scientists who could mix the chemicals properly. Nevertheless, PLX is considered a "binary" explosive and so I include this here for completeness. -poserp-
I find it hard to believe that a bunch of counterterrorism experts could be taken in by a plot that was so poorly formed. As the article points out, the attackers were attempting to do the near-impossible -- mix enough TATP onboard an aircraft to bring it down in flight. It turns out that in order to do that, you'd need several hours of mixing time and a cold bath in which to mix the chemicals. The process is tricky and risky; the batch could blow prematurely which would kill you but not do much more than that. The same thing applies if the explosives were prepared before the flight -- homemade TATP is highly unstable and difficult to transport safely. Needless to say many of these are insurmountable hurdles in real life. It's not completely impossible, but the probability of success is very close to zero.
The question is, then, why is this plot getting so much hype when upon inspection it doesn't hold water? We've been through this drill too many times before to dismiss the hype as just another false alarm. The misinformation involved from the get-go is enough to give pause; the continued use of the plot (whose image in the minds of those who want to be scared will persist for some time) for political gain gives more than pause, it gives warning. Warning that something isn't quite right in the apparatus which is supposed to deal with terrorism in a nonpartisan way.
We will see, I suspect, in the coming weeks a growing call to accountability for those who raised the alarm and got everyone worked up. Hopefully people will also see that you must examine the facts of a particular case before you can draw conclusions. The psychological high of immediate justice is short-lived and ultimately unsatisfying; people constantly need more to sustain their false sense of justice being served. Not to mention that high is highly misleading and causes errors in judgement. This is a lesson that is slow, but surely, being learned.