Word: abdulmutallab
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...stood up, in defiance of the seat-belt sign, and looked to his left. Ghonda remained upright another minute and soon saw thick, dark gray smoke coming from the man in seat 19A. He pointed across the cabin and yelled, "Fire!" As he did, flames began to shoot from Abdulmutallab's lap. (See pictures of the life of privilege of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab...
...bottles and blankets his way. Other passengers screamed; some ran to other cabins. "I don't want to die! I want out!" yelled one. Two flight attendants, alarmed by the smell of smoke, rushed past the dozens of passengers out of their seats to find fire extinguishers. They doused Abdulmutallab and Schuringa as well as the burning seat, the floor, the walls and the surrounding area. Abdulmutallab, his pants torched, naked from waist to knees, was hustled by Schuringa and crew members to the first-class cabin, where he was restrained. The whole thing had taken less than 10 minutes...
...flaws in the global aviation-security network. Almost all are well known to aviation experts. Yet what President Obama eventually called a "systemic failure" caught his Administration flat-footed for the first 72 hours after the 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...
...methods for tracking terrorists still aren't working It turns out that Washington's way of ranking likely terrorists, which was overhauled after Sept. 11, still resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. There are four different U.S. terrorism databases, and yet Abdulmutallab's name never rose above the least threatening...
...after his father visited the U.S. embassy in November and told the CIA of his son's growing radical nature, U.S. officials from at least four agencies met to share the information. But exactly what, if anything, happened next is unclear. Abdulmutallab's name was added to the more than half a million others on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) list. A spot on that roster means ... well, not very much. Abdulmutallab's open visa to visit the U.S., granted in 2008 and valid through June 2010, wasn't revoked once he made that list. Only more-damning evidence...