If you can imagine the scene, a bunch of youths are standing around with a hatchet daring each other to do some damage to that cherry tree. Finally George cuts it down, perhaps gets a few points with his peers, but as he is getting ready to tell his father the truth he must be thinking what a bad idea that was.
That story is possible, but it is also possible that when the biography of George Washington was written after his death there were a few things that were added for flavor. I can only imagine that in some police in the bomb squad were sitting around thinking that exact same thought – wow what a bad idea that was. You would need to go back a couple of days to get to the beginning of the story.
The police wanted to test out their security so they planted some plastic explosives in some suitcases to see if the bomb dog could find the explosives. Planted explosives doesn’t mean that it was a coordinated event where the passenger knew what was happening but rather that the authorities secretly placed actual plastic explosives into his suitcase.
Why place the explosives into a suitcase that is arriving when we can put it into one that would actually be departing. It is not completely clear if the dog failed find all of the explosives, they were not all removed or if the police simply lost them.
What would be the worst possible place for that explosive to show up in? If you were thinking somebody headed for Dublin, Ireland you would be correct. You would have thought that the police would have had one of their officers with the best grasp of the English language contact with Ireland immediately.
It actually took about three days, a bomb squad cordoning off of two blocks of the city, and locking up an innocent man for a few hours.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovak_Police_training_explosives_incident