Scary Subway.

In case you haven’t seen it already, I wanted to draw your attention to the article in Time magazine that everyone is talking about today and which is an excerpt from the book 'The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11.'
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1205321,00.html

This new book by Ron Suskind has revealed a foiled Subway terrorist attack in 2003. The Time excerpt is fascinating and chilling –I could literally feel my heart pounding faster as I read it and I can’t wait to get my hands on the book…but the news is grim as this type of news always is. In case you don’t have the chance to read the article, the gist of it in 3 sentences is:
---A chemical dilemma has been solved-the bad guys have figured out how to mix hydrogen and cyanide into a gas form that has a faint odor like bitter almonds and when inhaled is lethal.
---‘Mubtakkar’ which means invention in Arabic, is the delivery system for Hydrogen Cyanide. The deadly device is small and portable, easily fitting into a small backpack and be triggered with a cell phone.
---An attempt to take Mubtakkars into the New York subway system in 2003 (into 10 subway cars at rush hour) was stopped in its tracks by a top Al-Qaeda leader. This leader is then killed and a deadly mystery remains unsolved and buried in a complex spiderweb of politics and power.

I wish I could say this was a Bollywood movie plot and it certainly sounds like one. But sadly it isn’t. For millions of subway riders like me who can’t even hear the conductor announcements about what the next station is (is the R or W train suddenly going express?) and the cause of subway delays (stand on the E train platform and tell me you can hear any of the station master’s announcements over the din of the A and C train whizzing by above) and who spend a good part of every single day down there in the dismal public transport system that is New York City’s beloved subway, stories like this don’t make for a fun morning commute.