Word: hijacker
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...every tongue last week; the most unsettling focused on Sept. 22. Because Dr. Al-Badr Al-Hazmi, 34, a Saudi national who is being held as a material witness, had made three reservations to fly to San Diego via Denver on that date, people worried that terrorists would hijack another aircraft. (As it turned out, Al-Hazmi's two extra tickets were in the names of his wife and child.) More ornate scenarios had the bad guys finishing off New York City with a suitcase nuke or poisoned water supply. But the day passed, mercifully, without incident...
...agents are delving into the training logs and financial records of four Florida flight schools and others around the U.S., compiling a list of other pilots who could form the nucleus of fresh hijack teams that might be scrambling for jet seats even now. A U.S. intelligence official told TIME he believes some 30 terror operatives were deployed on the Sept. 11 mission. "There's more," says the official. "More than we have accounted for." And the hit squads were backed, officials now believe, by a network of financial, informational and logistical support. "There's a concern that there...
...Israelis do it? For one thing, El Al puts at least one armed, plainclothes sky marshal on all its flights. One such agent foiled a hijack attempt over Holland in 1970. During El Al flights, the cockpit door, made of reinforced steel strong enough to repel fire from a handgun, remains locked...
...chances of such an attack happening anytime soon are remote, most of the terrorism experts consulted by TIME agree. For starters, it takes a lot more money to build, research or steal a weapon of mass destruction than to hijack a plane or unleash a truck bomb. It also takes a lot more brainpower. Says Amy Smithson, a chemical and biological weapons expert at the Henry Stimson Center in Washington: "I can sit here and dream up thousands of nightmare scenarios, but there are a lot of technical and logistical hurdles that stand between us and those scenarios...
...many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself...