Damn, I'm right again. :(

Another "it sucks to be right" moment for the Invincible Phantom.

Y'all may recall one of my favorite paranoid musings is the terrorist with the model airplane.  Check it:

Momin Khawaja of Ottawa [Ontario, Canada!] was devising a way to fit a remote-controlled model airplane with explosives, a London terrorism trial of seven Britons charged with plotting to bomb sites in Britain heard yesterday.

What's more, the trial was told, a senior al-Qaeda figure in Pakistan wanted the men to unleash a simultaneous wave of bombings in Britain in 2004. Potential targets, court has heard, included a London nightclub, pubs, trains and a major mall east of the British capital.

Yesterday's revelations from star prosecution witness Mohammed Babar are the first in which a witness has said the plot was directed and controlled by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.

It gets better:

Last week, the 12-member jury deciding the case heard from the Crown that Mr. Khawaja's primary role in the group was to built remote-controlled detonators to set off explosions using 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertilizer the group acquired from a British agricultural merchant.

At Old Bailey yesterday, Crown prosecutor David Waters read out an e-mail in which Mr. Khawaja allegedly said that he could supply remote-controlled detonation devices, with a range of about two kilometres, for about $8 each.

Is it still paranoia if they really are out to get you?

Ok, so match this Khawaja guy's airplane up with a bit of bang bang and a bunch of nails, you've got a nasty little flying Claymore.  Lots of places that could make a hell of a mess. 

Now expand your thinking about what a "model" airplane is to include a fifteen foot wingspan and a chainsaw engine or two.  Twenty pound payload?  Uh huh.  Maybe thirty to fifty if he's really clever.  That's a nasty BIG Claymore.  GPS robotic control too, that means launch and forget, read about it in the paper tomorow while you build another one.  Because you launched it at night and nobody saw you, and you programmed the thing to fly around for a while before it made its bombing run so nobody can track it back to the launch site.  Complex and juvenile in conception, but then terrorists like the showy stuff.

Now think about some of Saddam's "missing" WMDs and a model airplane.  Chemical weapons.  Woo.

Finally, this creep was living in Ottawa, capital of Canada, where the Parliament buildings and stuff are.  Think "model airplane" and "Parliament buildings" in the same sentence for just a second.

Kinda puts the anti-American, anti-war Liberals into rather stark perspective don't it?  Let me make it a little more stark for you.  They've know about this guy and his little airplane plans for two years at least.  Paul Martin: too stupid to come in out of the rain.

The Flyin' Phantom