This is really frightening. However, I doubt very much if the air marshalls would have hesitated to kill eveyone of them if an overt act occured. I agree it may have been a dry run. but, at least now the authorities KNOW their MO.
If they were assembling an explosive device in the lavatory and exploded it, what effect would air marshalls have had on the incident?
They were lucky to have air marshalls on the flight. Then again, perhaps the air marshalls were called in BECAUSE of the manifest. The only problem with this, is had these guys actually built a bomb onboard, air marshalls aren't of much use once it detonates...
This didn't read to me like a tinfoil account. Authorities are concerned about this type of scenario, but if the safeguards are not in place (or implemented if they are), history will repeat itself.
This was probably not a dry run ... the idea, it seems, was to blow the aircraft up over a heavily populated area like LA. For whatever reason they were unsuccessful ...
Put 14 guys on one flight, and you don't screen or search them, you limit your options.
It depends on the threat too.
Let's say you want to build something lethal, biologically or chemically.
It wouldn't be far fetched to have each guy carry a component, and have redundancy too. I specifically wouldn't know what simple things you could use to build something really lethal, but I would think those things exist.
What's with the one way tickets too?