Unbelievable. Remember the liquid bomb “plot” from 2006? You know, the one that has forced us all to follow asinine airline regulations involving our hand creams and toothpaste tubes? The one that was shown almost immediately after the threat to be unbelievably difficult to actually pull off? (A brief snippet, because I looove this article:)

Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you’ll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you’ll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else.

After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven’t overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you’ll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an hour or two.

Well, apparently the suspects involved in this fiendish plot stated in court today that he had no intention of blowing up a plane, but that he was planning on using the explosion to publicize his movie:

Abdulla Ahmed Ali, one of eight British Muslims charged with plotting to detonate liquid explosives aboard passenger jets, denied ever thinking about blowing up an airplane. He told Woolwich Crown Court he wanted to give Londoners a jolt — and attract attention for a movie he was making — by placing a small bomb at London’s Houses of Parliament.

“We did not want to kill or injure anyone,” Ali, 27, told the southeast London court. Ali said he wanted “something small enough to cause a large bang, maybe some smoke. Something that would be considered serious and credible, something to generate that mass media attention.”

Prosecutors accuse Ali of being one of three ringleaders of a plot to kill hundreds of airline passengers by detonating bombs concealed in soft drink bottles as the flights crossed the Atlantic Ocean, or over North American cities. They say Ali drew up a blueprint for building the crude bombs, suggesting the explosive mixture should be injected into bottles using a syringe to keep them factory sealed.

…Jurors were also played footage of what prosecutors say was a suicide video intended to be seen after Ali’s death.

In it, Ali says he wanted to “punish and humiliate” unbelievers and “teach them a lesson they will never forget.”

Ali dismissed the video as propaganda, saying he wanted to combine it with footage from the Internet to make an anti-government documentary, which would then be distributed on YouTube. The bomb blast, he said, would help publicize the movie.

“We thought: If we make a documentary, how are we going to get everyone to see it and know about it? That is when we thought we would do a publicity stunt,” he said. But he also said he wanted to make the bomb serious enough to cause “general concern.”

I have no idea what to say about this.