Monday, August 22, 2005
Now It All Makes Sense
Among our stops in London a couple of weeks ago, my wife and I visited Westminster Palace (Big Ben, House of Parliment, eh wot?). They had a special exihibt celebrating the 400th anniverssary of the Gunpowder Plot. The security was extremely intense. Now we know why (HT: Hugh Hewitt)
SCOTLAND YARD believes it has thwarted an Al-Qaeda gas attack aimed at ministers and MPs in parliament. The plot, hatched last year, is understood to have been discovered in coded e-mails on computers seized from terror suspects in Britain and Pakistan....Right after we left there we went to visit the War Cabinet Rooms and the new Churchill Museum, which featured one of the Nazi Enigma coding machines (3-rotor style) captured during WWII and used to break Nazi codes, pretty much saving the trans-Atlantic supply lines, among other things. All this makes this part of the gas attack story even more interesting
...The discovery of the suspected Commons nerve gas plot was behind the decision to increase security around parliament this summer.
The encrypted e-mails are said to have been decoded with the help of an Al-Qaeda ?supergrass?. By revealing the terrorists? code he was also able to help MI5 and GCHQ, the government?s eavesdropping centre at Cheltenham, to crack several more plots.So, the question remains -- was I just playing around here? Never forget -- Ian Fleming was a real spy before he wrote about James Bond (and Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang)
