Word: metallism
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...ground shook and the peace was shattered, Olympic Park had been the site of a weeklong open-air party. Covering 21 acres, it was the spiritual heart of the festival, a melting pot where many thousands of visitors daily could wander without paying for tickets, or passing through metal detectors. It was the place where the kids could frolic in a misty fountain. It was also the commercial heart of the games, home to the Swatch pavilion, the Coca-Cola Olympic City, Budweiser's Bud World, and an enormous AT&T sound stage. And as the competition drew...
...civilian garb, on the lookout for anything suspicious. In addition, the Army has bomb-dismantling experts and specialists trained to deal with chemical or biological weapons at the ready in Atlanta, along with more than a dozen scientists from the Nuclear Emergency Search Team to deal with atomic terror. Metal-detection equipment is set up outside all venues, and a sophisticated security system matches live handprints to a chip on your ID badge. The Olympic Village is a virtual fortress: on city streets, manhole covers have been welded down to prevent anyone from getting access to power lines...
Three possibilities loom in the background. Either the plane went down by mechanical failure, by a bomb or, less likely, by a missile attack. If in fact TWA Flight 800 fell under its own weight because of metal fatigue or faulty engineering, then my father has it right: you'd be crazy ever to fly again. But this seems unlikely. 747s don't just plummet into the sea in a ball of flame because of technical flaws. Aviation is not a perfect science, but almost all crashes are attributable to some problem not intrinsic to the airplane...
...undercover agents from the inspector general's office reached dramatically different conclusions. In 15 out of 20 attempts to gain entry to supposedly secure areas, agents had little trouble: they got into aircraft-parking areas, baggage areas, and one agent managed to slip an unarmed hand grenade through a metal detector...
Experts caution too that what security measures do exist here drape passengers in an illusion of safety. The reality is that U.S. airports have no systematic way of screening for explosives that a terrorist might want to sneak aboard an aircraft. Metal detectors might miss plastics or liquids used to assemble a bomb, as might bored, poorly paid and poorly trained operators of X-ray machines. At some U.S. airports, including Kennedy, checked-in luggage for international flights is sniffed by specially trained dogs or scanned by electronic vapor-particle detectors that can locate explosives. But if the explosives...