Word: placing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There’s no place like home...
...year-old son of a banker from Nigeria should have tripped every alarm in the global aviation-security system put in place after 9/11: He bought a $2,831 ticket for flights from Lagos to Amsterdam to Detroit and paid for it in cash. He left no contact information with the airline. He checked no bags. Seven months earlier, he had earned himself a spot on a security watch list in Britain after applying for a visa to attend a dubious English university. And when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab broke off contact with his family in October to join...
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...
...assured that we are doing everything in our power to keep you and your family safe and secure during this busy holiday season." He forgets that Americans have never really wanted the government to do "everything in its power" to keep us safe. That would make this a terrible place to live. And yet, after eight years of paternalistic bluster from President George W. Bush, we have grown accustomed to the cycle of absurd promises followed by failure and renewed by fear. Bush liked to say that the authorities have to succeed 100% of the time and terrorists only once...
...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 can't stop terrorists from smuggling explosives onto packed jetliners...