Thanks for posting your response with links so quickly, gsoltso—just now viewed after a routerless weekend. I do appreciate your posts and contributions; however my concerns on this issue, as detailed below, still stand.

It's not a demonstration, it's a narrative. As the video is not continuous, a viewer can have no confidence the process "shown" was. (Try watching it with the sound off. Without that distraction, it's more obvious how many cuts are made, how many assumed actions are not shown.) It's been edited in contemporary media style to hold the viewer's attention, which we are so used to it's easy to watch uncritically.

It is not the visual equivalent of the voiceover. That would require unbroken video showing the integrity of the fuselage, the bottles being filled, placed the fuselage, apparent absence of other apparatus to produce a similar result, how it's made to go bang, and the bang.

I'm no explosives expert, but I've served on criminal trials which utilzed evidence tapes. They were handheld, tedious, with shifting light, background noises, dull stretches, and low production values, but uncut, because they needed to be. In contrast these clips are the CSI version: their purpose is to tell a story, not establish unbreakable links between processes or locations. If what's on those links was exactly what the jury saw, I can only suppose the rules of evidence between the two systems differ more than I thought.

Tech used against possible, probable threats—agreed.

Journalism, like all professions, is motivated by the need to stay in business, as well as its higher callings. Journalists are as often frightened and fooled by propaganda as their readers. (If you disbelieve this, take a look at West Coast newspaper archives during the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.) Occasionally, as with the "exploding" GM truck gas tanks, there is outright fakery.

Journalistic ethics also must weigh the balance between complete, factual reporting and saying, in an article on teen suicide, "Cutting the ulnar artery is actually quite difficult. To be effective..." Maybe that's what they're doing here, or what they think they're doing.

Dr Alford may be absolutely legitimate; I have no information that he's not. His website provides no vita, no list of past clients. In similar businesses I deal with, I expect those.

I concede that routines may have changed since my academic forays into chemistry. (One undergraduate exercise required literally liters of carcinogenic benzene, my first summer grant had a $60/mo expense stipend.) However, I noted gloves worn inconsistently, no apparent protective clothing, and no eye protection. My lab work used explosive substances only incidentally to other syntheses, but protection was standard. We mixed flammables at the bench, often in a fume hood—not over the floor of a room filled with containers of other chemicals.

And finally, if these compounds are so easily created, transported, and effective, why isn't this incendiary equivalent of the greatest thing since sliced bread widely used for more common applications?

So I'm not saying I disbelieve the liquid-explosives-plot potential; neither have I seen anything to make me believe.