Word: attackers
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...Passengers later said there was something curious about the spare young man who had tried to bring down their plane: he was silent throughout the attack. He didn't panic. He didn't yell any last-second religious slogans. He was calm and methodical as he set himself on fire. It was as though he had been trained...
Probably not - because experts doubt the measures did much to boost safety in the first place. "You can imagine someone whispering into the ear of an official at Homeland Security and saying, 'If we don't do something and there's another attack, then we're going to get hammered," says Jim Walsh, a research associate in the Security Studies Program at MIT. "That logic has a certain appeal to it if you're trying to protect the reputation of the organization you're employed by, but it doesn't do much for the traveling public...
...Consider the record: First, passengers on United Flight 93 prevented a further attack on Washington on 9/11. Then, three months later, American Airlines passengers wrestled a belligerent, biting Richard Reid to the ground, using their headset cords to restrain him. In 2007, almost a dozen passengers jumped on a gun-wielding hijacker aboard a plane in the Canary Islands. And this past November, passengers rose up against armed hijackers over Somalia. Together, then, a few dozen folks have helped save some 595 lives. {See the top 10 inept terrorist Plots...
...story of Flight 253 exposed a raft of glaring flaws in the global aviation-security network. Almost all are well known to aviation experts. Yet what President Obama eventually called a "systemic failure" caught his Administration flat-footed for the first 72 hours after the attack, as officials initially tried to play down the weaknesses of the web Abdulmutallab slipped through. More than eight years after 9/11 and 21 years after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded in midair over Scotland, the attempted Christmas bombing revealed that the array of protective measures put in place around the world still...
...attack reverberated beyond airport security lines, though those have already become longer and more complicated. The airline scare represented the second time in the past 12 months that purported Islamic terrorists have tried to launch a strike on American soil - and may be the first time that such an assault was directed from Yemen. That's a reminder that the struggle against jihadism is not confined to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where U.S. forces are now concentrated. In its provenance and near catastrophic outcome, the story of Flight 253 is a reminder that the war on terrorism is far from over...