Word: flighted
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What's more, even if Abdulmutallab had succeeded in blowing up Northwest Flight 253, he would have killed only one-tenth as many people as died on 9/11. Yes, using the word only is ghoulish when you're talking about hundreds of lives. But after Sept. 11, George W. Bush warned about terrorists killing "hundreds of thousands of innocent people" in "a day of horror like none we have ever known." The conventional wisdom was that the next terrorist attack would not merely equal 9/11 but be worse. (See a special report on where the accused 9/11 plotters...
Three days after the attempted Christmas bombing of Northwest Flight 253, President Obama announced that federal air marshals would ride shotgun on more flights to and from the U.S. Armed, highly trained and unobtrusive, thousands of marshals are currently flying U.S. skies. But whether they can prevent airborne attacks is debatable...
...Army's Fort Belvoir for "sky marshal" training. But as the attacks continued unabated, critics slammed the program as ineffective. When airport security measures improved (X-ray screenings of U.S. passengers' bags began in the early '70s), the marshal program deteriorated. After the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 to Beirut by Hizballah--in which an American passenger was killed--President Reagan expanded the program, swelling the number of marshals to nearly...
...number to 4,000, but as the years passed, skepticism returned. One critic, Representative John Duncan Jr. of Tennessee, noted that since 2001, the agency has averaged slightly more than four arrests a year--at a cost per arrest of around $200 million. There were no air marshals aboard Flight 253 on Dec. 25, but that may not have mattered: civilians, after all, took down the would-be bomber themselves...
...meeting, the heads of the intelligence agencies admitted to a string of mistakes that brought Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab within a fortuitous malfunction of blowing up Flight 253 over Detroit. The National Security Agency had known from an intercept in Yemen that al-Qaeda had recruited a Nigerian to carry out a terrorist attack; another intercept had suggested some sort of attack around Christmas. The State Department had learned from the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that the son of a prominent Nigerian banker had joined extremists in Yemen. The CIA had even produced a background report on Abdulmutallab. All this...