Word: pat
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Almost immediately after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to annihilate Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, aviation officials let fly a slew of ferocious new security regulations. Passengers were submitted to pat-downs and luggage searches, said goodbye to their in-flight Internet access and forfeited the ability to move about the cabin or rest pillows, blankets or personal belongings in their laps for the last hour aloft, among other inconveniences. But the crackdown was short-lived; by Sunday, Dec. 27, the rules had reportedly been eased, and on Dec. 30, less than a week after they were implemented, they...
Case in point: the rule that all passengers must be frisked. The alleged attacker, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, reportedly hid the explosives in his underwear - but passengers have reported that security officers who patted them down never went near their skivvies. "My guess is, if they were doing the truly intrusive pat-down designed to find even three ounces of explosives," says Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, "we probably would have heard cries of protest from travelers." The lack of furor suggests the pat-downs were probably annoying and not much...
...definition, terrorism succeeds by making us feel powerless. It is more often a psychological threat than an existential one. The authorities compound the damage when they overreact - by subjecting grandmothers to pat-downs and making it intolerable to travel. Even though the Christmas bombing suspect had been stopped, stripped and cuffed before the plane landed, we still talk like victims. "[This] came close to being one of the greatest tragedies in the history of our country," New York Congressman Peter King said on CNN, criticizing Obama for not holding a press conference sooner...
...that if he boarded in Lagos and transferred in Amsterdam, he would make his way undetected onto the Detroit-bound flight. That worked: during his layover, Abdulmutallab most likely encountered nothing more than ID checks and a metal detector at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport. He was betting that any pat-down - unlikely as that was - would not come close to the tiny bomb in the crotch of his trousers. Fellow passenger Ghonda, who transferred to Flight 253 after a flight from Ghana, reported that although he passed through a metal detector, neither his bags nor his body were hand-searched...
...think we definitely played down a little to the competition,” said senior forward Pat Magnarelli, who finished with a season-high 16 points. “They’re a good team but a Division III school. [It] probably should have been more than [a 27-point game...