The Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, has been indicted by a US grand jury on a charge of “attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction”. Yes, that’s right, a pair of loaded underpants is now officially a WMD.

Marks and Spencer, maker of 25% of the UK’s underpants, were hammered on the stock market earlier this week. Now we know why. Their premier product has been exposed as having a “dual use” and the company is facing an embargo on exports to many failed and failing states around the world.

A small amount of “conventional” explosive is certainly a weapon capable of destruction, but it is hardly “mass destruction”. It is nowhere on the same scale as the nuclear, biological and chemical devices we were looking for in Iraq. (Perhaps we should simply have lined up the populace and done a strip search. Then we would have found them!)

It will be a sad day for truth, justice and the American way when Uncle Sam disappears up his own hyperbole.

See also:

• US charges Nigerian suspect over plane bomb plot, BBC report of the grand jury indictment of Abdulmutallab, 7 January 2010
• Discussion elsewhere on this site on the probability that WMD would be found in Iraq