AA,
unfortunately, all of the examples you cited in your last post have always been deamed acceptable. Nothing on that score has ever changed. Security up untill now was simply a visual bandaid, but the realities were that even if a plane was blown up a couple of times a year with a loss of all on board flying would still be considerably safer than driving. So it was considered acceptable.
Infact, there is a monetary formula that is used by the FAA when deciding whether to implement a new rule or safety check that explicitly looks at the the number of lives at risk with the problem vs the number of people that would drive instead of fly because of the increase in ticket price vs. cost of the change and weighs the two figures to decide whether or not to implement something like fuel tank inerting... Tony Broderick once explained it over on AVSIG (he was the highest non political person in the FAA for the better part of a decade)
What changed on Sept 11, was the ability to use aicraft to attack targets on the ground. That was like trying to divide by zero and threw the equations all out of whack and was deamed unacceptable, and so here we are today. STill nobody really cares about a bomb on an aircraft, afterall the only people at risk are actually on the airplane.
As to catching the people at the airport... Yeah, in a perfect world the terrorist would be the only passenger to board the airacraft. Every other seat would be filled with SAS and green berets. Of course its not a perfect world, and AA denied Richard Reid boarding and kicked him back to the french authorities who cleared him for flight and made AA carry him the next day... After all, he was just a brit, not a terrorist...
Cheers
Wino