A quote:
"But complaints about rudeness aren't the reports at issue, and they're certainly not the ones pilots are going to phone home to the TSA. As reported by WomensWallStreet.com, The Washington Times, the Christian Science Monitor and others, there have been a number of recent, suspicious incidents involving groups of Middle Eastern men acting strangely on aircraft -- spending extended amounts of time in the bathroom, trying to access the cockpit by removing bathroom fixtures, videotaping the cockpit, photographing the cabin, suddenly rushing toward the front of the plane and then backing off -- all incidents that deserve the TSA's immediate and real time attention. Kudos to the people who have paid attention to the reports and enacted change. Word on the street (or rather in the air) about this new reporting procedure is optimistic."
From today's WWS:
Excerpt from Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again, Spence Publishing
That terrorists want to build bombs in aircraft bathrooms is not news. The tactic dates from at least 1994, when Ramzi Yousef, along with his uncle, Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), set out to blow up eleven or twelve U.S. passenger jets over the Pacific Ocean, simultaneously, by building bombs in the aircrafts' bathrooms. The terrorists
involved in the plot were not to be suicide bombers. Instead, they would each build a bomb on one leg of the eleven or twelve flights, set the bomb's timer for later, and then deplane. If the plan seems overly ambitious, its two masterminds were certainly capable of pulling it off. Ramzi Yousef was the terrorist who tried to bring down the World Trade Center (WTC-1) in 1993 with a truck bomb. Yousef's co-conspirator, KSM, would go on to mastermind the 9/11 attack.
The plot was called Operation Bojinka (bojinka being slang in many Arabic dialects for explosion), and it was Yousef's next big operation after WTC-1. Yousef had been a kind of one-man terrorist show, barely funded and not very well organized. After his success with WTC-1, that changed. Yousef became respected as an international terrorist. The U.S. government wanted him so badly that they put a $2 million bounty on his head and air-dropped 32,000 matchbooks with Yousef's photo on them in rural Pakistan, hoping to find him. Yousef was able to evade authorities as he traveled extensively throughout South East Asia. He was now funded by his wealthy uncle, KSM, as well as his uncle's wealthy business partner, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, -- Osama Bin Laden's brother in law.