December 2009 Christmas "underwear Bomber" Attack Brings Déjà Vu To TSA's 2003 Security Lapses
| “ |
In July 2003, MacLean was a federal air marshal in good standing, part of the thin blue line sent to the skies in the wake of 9/11. He had been called into his Las Vegas field office for a chilling, unprecedented, face-to-face emergency threat briefing: An al-Qaida suicide plan would exploit airport security loopholes abroad by allowing terrorists to fly from countries with less-stringent screening (such as, say, Nigeria) to airports in Europe (such as, say, Amsterdam), where they would escape further security screening. Thus armed with weapons/explosives, the terrorists would catch connecting flights to their final destinations in the states or Europe -- and exact their bloody revenge. |
” |
Read more about this topic: Robert Mac Lean
Famous quotes containing the words brings, security, december, attack, christmas and/or lapses:
“And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it ... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied ... and it is all one.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (b. 1908)
“Work—work—work,
In the dull December light,
And work—work—work,
When the weather is warm and bright—
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.”
—Thomas Hood (1799–1845)
“We attack not only to hurt someone, to defeat him, but perhaps also simply to become conscious of our own strength.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term “unconditional surrender.” ... The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech—in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Over and over again, her own direct experience teaches a woman that when she does enough for herself, she feels better and better about her child. When she does too much for too long for her child, she feels harassed and drained. But over and over again, she lapses into doing too much.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)