The Washington Times reports that it has obtained through FOIA, and will publish next Wednesday, a redacted version of a report prepared by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general on the infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 327 of June 29, 2004. Annie Jacobsen, who was on the flight, wrote a series of articles and a book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again, relating her experiences. To quote my own summary:
Annie Jacobsen, with her husband and four-year-old son, were passengers on Flight 327. Also on board were 14 Middle Eastern males who, by Mrs. Jacobsen’s account, acted very strangely. They wandered about the plane, remained standing when the seat belt signs came on, monopolized the lavatories, exchanged odd gestures and, in general, fit her mental template of hijackers. When the plane landed safely, she felt like she had been rescued from the shadow of death. She and her husband immediately gave statements to the FBI. By her account, however, the law enforcement authorities acted as strangely as the men who had frightened her. The group was taken aside as it deplaned but was allowed to proceed after cursory questioning. It was, she was subsequently assured, a Syrian band, come to play a gig at a southern California casino. Its members had been thoroughly investigated and were innocent of any wrongdoing. Her perception of their actions stemmed from cultural differences or maybe (as was hinted after she began writing about her experience) ingrained prejudice against Arabs.
Mrs. Jacobsen’s opinion is that the Syrians on Flight 327 were conducting a “probe” to test airline security and gather information that would be valuable to future hijackers or bombers. In Terror in the Skies, she tells what she saw on the flight, quotes corroborating accounts from several (unfortunately anonymous) fellow passengers, cites other instances of terrorist probes, including one allegedly involving Mohammed Atta, and lambastes the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies for investigating Flight 327 incompetently, lying about what they found and downplaying the weak spots in airline safety. From these data points, she extrapolates that we have little but luck to protect us against a new campaign of domestic terror.
The Times prints only a few paragraphs from the IG’s report, enough to confirm, as others had done, that Mrs. Jacobsen’s description of the band’s conduct was essentially accurate; not enough to tell us whether the incident was in fact proto-terrorism. On the other hand, the excerpts hint that Homeland Security’s investigation may not have shown the highest level of alertness to potential threats:
In response [to information from the flight crew], an air marshal directed a flight attendant to instruct the cockpit to radio ahead for law-enforcement officials to meet the flight upon arrival. After arriving, Flight 327 was met by federal and local law enforcement officials, who gathered all 13 suspicious passengers, interviewing two of them. An air marshal photocopied the passengers’ passports and visas. The names of the suspicious passengers were run through FBI databases, indicating the musical group’s promoter had been involved in a similar incident in January 2004. No other derogatory information was received, and all 13 of the men were released.
The Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC) logs show no entries regarding Flight 327 on the day of the flight. Flight 327 was logged into HSOC’s database on July 26, 2004, four days after the events that occurred on the flight were reported by The Times. The suspicious incident was brought to HSOC’s attention by an inquiry from the White House Homeland Security Council.
So a second suspicious incident involving the same promoter’s employees didn’t rate inclusion in the department’s terrorism database until the White House, presumably alerted by the FBI (Mrs. Jacobsen’s articles hadn’t yet appeared), followed up. Those facts don’t instill a high level of confidence.
My hope, expressed in the book review from which I quote above, was that Homeland Security had checked the musicians more rigorously than it was willing to disclose to an inquisitive passenger. I begin to fear that I was overly optimistic, but we shall have to wait till Wednesday to find out – with the risk that all of the most interesting data are buried in the redactions.
Update (5/30/07): The Washington Times has now published its promised story, including the information that a background check of the Syrian musicians, conducted 11 days earlier in connection with their visa extension applications, found that eight had records of criminal or suspicious activity, that their employer acted suspiciously on airplanes both before and after the June 29th incident, and that the air marshals on Flight 327 singled the men out for attention even before the plane took off. Judging by the reporter’s account (I haven’t yet had time to read the full report), the events were certainly odd. If they didn’t add up to a rehearsal for a terrorist attack, their perpetrators nonetheless should have been ordered out of the country instanter. On the other hand, it is reassuring to think that, despite Homeland Security’s surface insouciance, nothing worse than this has happened since 9/11. I guess that our protectors don’t have to be supremely competent, so long as they stumble less often than our enemies.
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