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Underground > Switchboard >

Could it happen again?

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08:08 / 28.07.04

Annie Jacobsen writes about some suspicious activity on a 4 hour flight.

"After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together, eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre lavatory activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned, and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified. "

"Mineta fired off a letter to all US airlines forbidding them from implementing the one security measure that could have prevented 9/11: subjecting Middle Eastern passengers to an added degree of pre-flight scrutiny. He sternly reminded the airlines that it was illegal to discriminate against passengers based on their race, colour, national or ethnic origin or religion."

So the article leans towards supporting racial profiling at airport security. I can't ever imagine that this could legally be put in place.

Regrettable Juvenilia

10:17 / 28.07.04

"As boarding continued we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact with each other. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel anxious."

OH MY GOD THE SCARY ARABS ARE NODDING AT EACH OTHER!

This is a hysterical piece of racist, paranoid scaremongering. There's a great response written by Patrick Smith for Salon which you can read in its entirity here. An extract:

I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover?

Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee.

That's it?

That's it.

...

Jacobsen is trying to portray a scene of angst and fear, but she inadvertently scripts out a parody. I half-expected her to tell me that one of the men wore a cardboard sign labeled "TERRORIST."

...

She concludes... by insinuating that the men were terrorists, despite every shred of evidence, not to mention common sense, arguing to the contrary. And with that her article, and her credibility with it, plummets from merely sensationalist to inexcusably offensive.

I have to agree wholeheartedly.

11:19 / 28.07.04

Yea a huge pile of scaremongering bollocks. I liked her closing paragraph though...

'So the question is . . . Do I think these men were musicians? I’ll let you decide. But I wonder, if 19 terrorists can learn to fly aircraft into buildings, couldn’t 14 terrorists learn to play instruments? '

WWHOOOO! Sends a big band tinged shiver down my spine!!

A fall of geckos

11:57 / 28.07.04

Yeah, this is complete racist bullshit. The nice thing is that even the air marshals have piled into the argument - in this report.

"The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsen’s actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves.

Air marshals' only tactical advantage on a flight is their anonymity, the source said, and Jacobsen could have put the entire flight in danger.

"They have to be very cognizant of their surroundings," spokesman Adams confirmed, "to make sure it isn't a ruse to try and pull them out of their cover.""

I love the way they identify her actions as those of a potential terrorist.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

13:35 / 28.07.04

As “aware” Americans, my husband and I exchanged glances

That's my favourite bit. Possibly of anything ever.

15:46 / 28.07.04

When I first read this article in the paper I really didn't know whether it was supposed to show just how paranoid/racist the american public has become or whether it was trying to make a point a about "lax" security on flights.
Then I realised she was serious and got really worried. I mean the entire article was just flipping ludicrous, especially the bit where she says something like "I noticed they were carrying a number of instrument cases, and I began to worry" Why? have you a pathological fear of trumpets? Bad experience with a trombone? What?

16:05 / 28.07.04

I'm so pissed off at my country for being full of racist, paranoid bigots. On the night of 9/11 I was watching the news and there was a live call from a viewer urging everyone watching to "kill an arab." Mind you, this was before we even knew that it was a group of arabs that had flown those planes. Scary... fucking horrifying.

01:24 / 29.07.04

This article was such a pile of yellow journalism that I had sincere doubts that the flight in question actually took place. I was kind of disturbed when the article from the sky-marshal appeared because it meant that the flight happened somewhere other than this woman's imagination.

ONLY NICE THINGS

15:27 / 29.07.04

And no one checked the limping man’s orthopaedic shoe.

This is both very funny and very depressing. I particularly like her suggestion that actually these people *were* terrorists, despite the whole her-still-being-alive, them-not-having-any-explosives-or-weapons thing (so, shit terrorists). So, she has in effect libelled every single one of them. Niiiice.

Tryphena Absent

16:01 / 29.07.04

A month ago I travelled to India to research a magazine article I was writing. My husband and I flew on a jumbo jet carrying more than 300 Hindu and Muslim men and women on board. We travelled throughout the country and stayed in a Muslim village 10 miles outside Pakistan. I never once felt fearful. I never once felt unsafe. I never once had the feeling that anyone wanted to hurt me. This time was different.

So racist that she assumes Muslims only want to blow up white people. This is a person who is only suspicious when racially she's in the majority and can afford to behave like this. I wonder if she would panic in the same way if she heard some Irish men on the tube in London. Utterly disgusting.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

16:06 / 29.07.04

This was an almost insanely annoying article. The only valuable part of it seems to be the issue of airline security in the U.S., which many feel is still pretty haphazard. Other than that it was just total crap. Could it happen again? Yes. Would the outcome be the same? Probably not. With the example of the WTC in everyone's mind, I suspect it's unlikely any group of passengers would sit quietly through a hijacking.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

16:17 / 29.07.04

Incidentally, lest anyone wonder: I was thinking of the guy walking around the edge of the metal detector.

Security links:

CNN: Air security still lax

Security ignores staff

USA Today panel: inc. 'ID no longer required at some airports

Security is expensive. Companies hate costs.

21:35 / 29.07.04

Airport security IME is widely variable, and much much laxer on internal flights, but then internal flights are really like taking the bus for a lot of people, and to add delays would be to really piss off corporations, let alone the money aspect. It wouldn't be politically sensible to insist on it, even for the purposes of propaganda.

22:18 / 29.07.04

Security is lax and they seem to be concentrating on the wrong things. Checking everyone's shoes isn't going to stop terrorism it will only stop terrorists from putting bombs in their shoes but they will find another method instead.

Is it better for Air Marshalls to be anonymous on the Plane or for them to be conspicuous?

If they are obvious then it might stop a hijacker from trying something and put the passengers at ease and prevent scenarios like this from happening.

Are they truly anonymous anyway or is it obvious which guys are the Air Marshalls. Like you can spot an unmarked police car as it will be a recent model saloon without any of the optional extras such as metallic paint or chrome hubcabs.

22:40 / 29.07.04

I've never noticed any, but then I try not to look at other passengers too much in case they think it's a sign that I like them, and decide to talk to me throughout a six hour overnight body-clock-murdering flight.

The fact is that really, given the volume of flights and the massively overplayed status of terrorism, nobody flying in the US is in that much danger anyway. Higher than it used to be, but not by much. I'm certainly not campaigning for tougher regulations; I think the decidely cynical attitude of most airline staff is quite appropriate.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

15:44 / 30.07.04

In the general spirit of the thing:

The Ministry of Vague Paranoia has produced a leaflet to help you sort out what to do in the event of a terror attack..

It's not entirely serious. But then, I laughed a lot when I read the real one.

01:53 / 31.07.04

haha, that's awesome

Foust is SO authentic

19:10 / 05.08.04

Oh, the story isn't over yet! Head back to Women's Wall Street to hear more from Ms. Jacobsen!

Heather explained to me that she noticed suspicious activity from the men in the airport waiting area. She said that some of the men appeared to know each other, while others acted as if they didn't know each other. She also noticed some of the men exchanging glances and changing seats frequently (in the waiting area). She said she boarded the plane and took her seat in first class feeling uneasy.

I love it: "others acted as if they didn't know each other." Doesn't it occur to Nancy Drew here that maybe they didn't know each other?

19:37 / 05.08.04

a friend of mine does data mining and info theory stuff and was doing security design work of some kind for a while. he made an excellent point that always leaves people in his field scratching their heads when people scream about the need for racial profiling.

as far as airport security goes, you can set civil rights issues aside entirely by simply pointing out that racial profiling is statistically less effective than random searches.

here's why: if you're using any kind of planned selection criteria, terrorist organizations can game the system like so:

1. send a bunch of people with widely different demographics and other potential search criteria on a bunch of flights with nothing suspicious on them at all. no bombs, no guns, nothing that looks like a bomb or gun.
2. observe who gets stopped and searched and who doesn't.
3. repeat steps 1 and 2 a bunch of times.
4. collate the data from all of your attempts and use the data to reverse engineer the security criteria. after a few tries, it's pretty easy to figure out that they're looking for Arab males between the ages of 18-30, or whatever.
5. now that you know who they're looking for, send an operative who doesn't meet the description.

doing this pretty much guarantees that you can get something through. the chance of stopping an Asian female from carrying a concealed weapon on board is dramatically lower when everyone's looking for Arab males, so once terrorist groups figure out who you're looking for, the effectiveness of stopping people based on a profile or even a set of profiles becomes much lower than random selection.

so, in a nutshell, people who are arguing for racial profiling aren't just racist, they're fucking stupid.

22:11 / 05.08.04

My God. I just read her "rebuttal", which is nothing of the sort - it just quotes a couple of other passengers who were equally paranoid, and continues to make the same charges that these guys were actually terrorists, without making any reference to the criticisms.

No wonder we have, at the end, an email from another writer who says:

Elie, who was on the plane, disputes everything about your story except the McDonalds bag and the guy with the limp. According to him, the band was tired and slept most of the flight. He says he's going to take legal action against you when he comes back to the States in a month. He doesn't remember the guy in the suit--neither does Atef Kamel, who met the plane at LAX.

No shit he's going to take legal action.

This made me laugh though:

Over and over again, Adams and other officials have explained that 14 Syrian men were checked against the terrorist watch lists and nothing came up. He has said they were questioned and their stories were consistent -- they were a Syrian band playing at a casino outside of Los Angeles. Adams says authorities called the promoter and went out to the casino to make sure they were playing. They went to the hotel where they were staying and verified they had reservations. They then followed them to make sure they flew back on the flight they had booked, a JetBlue flight from Long Beach to New York.

To all of these officials I must repeat the question I've been asking all along: How do our government agencies define "thorough"?

The FBI has maintained from the get-go that they did a "thorough" investigation of these men. Is their definition of "thorough" the fact that these men played instruments, had a gig booked at a casino, had reservations at a hotel, and didn't have an immediate match against any current terrorist watch list? If the answer is yes, shouldn't we be scratching more than the just the surface?

Well, that's "laugh" in the "you gotta laugh or else you'll cry" sense. Clearly, checking out who they were, where they were going, what they were doing and following them to make sure that was correct isn't quite "thorough" enough.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:06 / 06.08.04

Yeah, diiz... I'm constantly amazed that people don't grant international terrorist conspiracies the same kind of common sense as low-level drug smugglers, or kids coming back in groups from Amsterdam... do they really believe these people are stupid and just get lucky occasionally?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

08:39 / 06.08.04

Perhaps next time Jacobsen should take over the plane herself to make sure no filthy 'eye-rabs' do it first?

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

19:12 / 06.08.04

Oh yes! She could do a really stirring speech, with music and stuff, as she planted a flag in the gangway and pre-emptively retook the plane!!!

And Bruce Willis could play her in the movie!!! ...hang on a minute...

Or she could just elope with Robert Kilroy-Silk and they could start a colony of orange ubermenschen...

Sorry to repeat myself... but "as aware Americans" still makes me chuckle.

11:49 / 07.08.04

And, from an Air Marshal on the flight

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,676558,00.html

The FAM never saw — nor was he told — of any example of the men interfering with the flight crew (which is a federal crime). He never saw any activity that caused him to ask the pilots to turn on the seat belt sign (which he can request) and keep people in their seats. "Nothing my main partner or I saw on Flight 327 brought us anywhere near a conclusion that we considered breaking our cover or deploying as we've been trained. And we never came close to drawing our weapons."

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:42 / 07.08.04

It's amazing, isn't it? Rather than simply admitting, "OK, I lost my shit, I panicked, there's a lesson in that for all of us", she is now insisting, in effect, that these men are investigated further and further until the poof that they are terrorists comes to light, since because she was frightened by them they must by extension be terrorists.

Jesus.

18:19 / 07.08.04

FWIW, one of the regulars at conservative site National Review Online positively identified the band in question last month simply by Googling around for an hour or so, something apparently beyond the abilities of any of the many journalists investigating the story or the thousands of emailers breathlessly forwarding Jacobsen's account along...

20:58 / 09.08.04

Ahhh, but is Google any more "thorough" than verifying their identities, where they were going, where they were staying and following them there? We need to do more than just scratch the surface, y'know - maybe send them to Guantanamo for a couple of years, just to be sure? If it stops aware Americans from becoming fearful (which is, after all, the very definition of terror), it's gotta be worth it.

01:19 / 10.08.04

On, the plus side, she’s very frightened. With all her bleating about this one utterly innocuous incident, I would guess she’s still very frightened, in a nostril-flaring, mad horsey-eyes kind of a way: she probably lives in a near-constant state of low-level fear. Stress like this is supposed to be a real killer, isn’t it? I’m sure her life will be shortened by a considerable amount for her having caused the world so much irritation. And a similar doooom awaits any idiot who follows her wittering lead. So ultimately, there is a positive spin to this news item. Just not this electoral cycle.

08:55 / 10.08.04

Gah. I just read her follow-up story. Once again that old enemy political correctness is standing in the way of protecting decent clean living americans and there god given right to mistreat foreign types. The really worrying thing is the fact that people are taking her seriously, instead of laughing at her stupidity.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:32 / 10.08.04

When we had the seperate 9/11 forum didn't we have a discussion about whether Americans were psychologically unprepared for living under the threat of terrorism unlike the UK with the IRA, France with Etta and most of the rest of the world in recent history?

13:13 / 11.08.04

When we had the seperate 9/11 forum didn't we have a discussion about whether Americans were psychologically unprepared for living under the threat of terrorism unlike the UK with the IRA, France with Etta and most of the rest of the world in recent history?

Americans are unprepared for a lot of things based on their recent history. the last time we had an actual sustained shooting war on our own soil was in 1865. that's not the experience of the 20th century most people on this planet had.

we're also relatively isolated culturally, and as a result, pretty xenophobic. we border Canada and Mexico. Canada is virtually culturally identical to the US, and Mexico is a topic of immigration scares and such. the xenophobia also plays off the relatively priveleged history of the US in the 20th century as far as being exempt from all the wars and such: the outside world is a scary place where there are weird dictators and bombings and revolutions, and America is an oasis of peaceful stability.

plus, well... we're the dominant military and economic power on Earth right now. we're at the peak of our power, and we've got nowhere to go but down. combine that with the xenophobia, the isolation, and the lack of experience with large-scale violence in one's own homeland, and you have a population which jumps at every shadow.

17:09 / 12.08.04

until the poof that they are terrorists comes to light

My God, are the gays in on it too???

Foust is SO authentic

20:21 / 12.08.04

She still hasn't ended her crusade. I gave Jaconsen's site my address, so they've been updating me.

She's going to contact Robert Mueller now, see if something can be done about the evil Arabic musicians.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

10:17 / 13.08.04

Foust, is that womenswallstreet you signed up with or somewhere else?

Foust is SO authentic

10:41 / 13.08.04

Yes, Women's Wall Street. They're on Part V now!

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