Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day: Paying the Dane-geld

That sixteen innocent Westerners, most visibly Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, have been released from Russian captivity is a happy occasion for them, their families and their countries, but it is not, as Jim Geraghty points out this morning, an untainted diplomatic triumph:

 

The message is clear to every Russian spy, assassin, operative, hacker, or criminal: If you get caught, don’t talk. Sit tight. Be patient. Vladimir Putin can and will get you out eventually. He can get anybody out, from an arms dealer so notorious he inspired a Nicholas Cage movie to a guy who’s executing dissidents in front of horrified kids in a German park. There is no monster so heinous and wicked that Putin can’t strongarm a foreign government into releasing him.

 

We should expect additional wrongful arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and abductions in the future, because the U.S. government had made clear that the tactic works; if you arrest our people on nonsense charges and throw them in prison, we will give you back the worst of the worst, the ones who required Herculean efforts to bring to justice.

 

As the price paid for the prisoners’ release sinks in, expect to see this Rudyard Kipling quotation “again and again”:

 

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

   But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

   You never get rid of the Dane.

 

If you have travel plans in Russia, it might be prudent to reconsider.

Back from the Mountains

Places yet remain in the continental United States to which news of the world barely penetrates. Paradise Inn, 5400 feet up the south slope of Mount Rainier, has no Internet connections. The rooms have no radios or TV’s. There used to be a television in the bar, but the bar has been demolished to make way for handicapped-accessible guest rooms (vide infra). The only newspaper is the Tacoma News-Tribune, which arrives late in the day and rarely covers events farther away than Seattle. Yesterday’s front page was filled with a story about the worst local traffic intersections. Neither civilization nor the Obamamessiah cult has collapsed, I presume, since last Thursday. Of finer levels of detail, I am at the moment unaware.

Paradise Inn was built 92 years ago, before the Americans with Disabilities Act, and pottered along perfectly well, with occasional refurbishment and expansion, till 2005, when someone realized that it didn’t accommodate wheelchair users. That is obviously an important priority at a location where the only recreations are hiking mountain trails and climbing a 14,000 foot peak. Hence, it became necessary to shut the Inn down for the 2006 and 2007 seasons while ADA-compliant rooms were added.

To be fair and balanced, other useful work was done, such as shoring up the foundations and repairing the ornate but visibly cracked lobby fireplaces. And I’ve seen a couple of guests in wheelchairs!

The Inn is open seasonally, from mid-May to mid-October. My custom has been to arrive on opening weekend, before the winter snows are gone. This year, global warmenists will be annoyed to hear, the snowfall at this level was over 900 inches, with 180 inches remaining on the ground as of May 15th. Both figures are well above average. On the other hand, they might be heartened by the distinctly unseasonable 70-plus degree daytime temperatures. By contrast, during my last visit, in 2005, the snowpack was about six feet and the thermometer barely got above freezing. One night, the electric heat went out for a couple of hours, and my room cooled to 45 degrees; this year, I didn’t bother turning the heater on.

Anti-globalizers should keep away. (Harry Truman once stayed here, but I doubt that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would want to visit.) A large proportion of the staff are college students from Singapore. It’s hard to imagine two locales more different than a warm, sea level, overcrowded city-state and a (usually) chilly, hard-to-reach mountainside inhabited only by bears, mountain lions, beavers, foxes, miscellaneous critters, and tourists.

Between bouts of hiking (my legs are definitely three years older), I started reading Douglas Feith’s War and Decision. Already I can see why the elite media want to consign it to oblivion. To begin with, Mr. Feith, a genuine realist rather than the faux variety that have adopted that moniker, doesn’t suffer from the delusion that perfection is the world’s default state. As he writes in his introduction,

Critics commonly suggest that every problem is the result of some policy maker’s error. But policy making often involves choosing to accept one set of likely problems over another. . . . Historical events look different before the fact: Once one knows how a story turns out, it is easy to sift the record for telling comments and actions that can be connected to grand outcomes. But before the fact, we cannot know which potential problem or opportunity might become the hinge of fate.

The pro-mufsidun Left and the media (if I may indulge in pleonasm) have constructed a “narrative” of the War on Terror, “narrative” having become the progressive antonym of “fact”. According to the “narrative”, George W. Bush’s administration, particularly the Jews neoconservatives (of which Mr. Feith, who served from 2001 through 2005 as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, is one), took office determined to pursue an aggressive agenda abroad and seized on 9/11 as an excuse to implement it. They then forsook the business at hand, punishing the perpetrators on the attack, in favor of a distracting sideshow in Iraq, for which their plans were optimistic and superficial.

The “narrative” has been largely constructed by journalists who have filtered selected officials’ recollections through an ideological sieve. Mr. Feith counters with a chronicle based not just on his memory but also on contemporary documents, many only recently declassified. Most are posted on his Web site.

I quote extensively from these written sources, with attention to accuracy and context. Some of the documents I rely on remain wholly or partially classified. But if I have been inaccurate or unfair, I know that people in the government (including members of Congress, who have access to many of the relevant documents) will quickly call me on it.

Perhaps the purveyors of the “narrative” will take up this challenge.

The first and most crucial strategic decision in the War on Terror was to give first priority to preventing future attacks rather than exacting retribution for al-Qa’eda’s atrocity. That decision was uncontroversial at the time. Now it lies at the heart of the debate over American policy. The Democratic Presidential candidates call for ridding ourselves of “distractions” and making the capture of Osama bin-Laden our principal objective, for the sake of which they say they are willing to pour more troops into the wilds of Afghanistan. Once bin-Laden is “brought to justice”, normalcy will return. At least, neither Slick Barry nor the Lioness of Tuzla has proffered any anti-terrorist program that looks further into the future.

The set of problems that arose from the decision to break up the international terror network is easy to perceive: a long war against an amorphous foe, with all of the friction and frustration that war entails. War and Decision presents the other side, the alternative set of problems that an Obama-Clinton strategy would entail.

From the standpoint of September 2001, effective retribution against al-Qa’eda was not a simple task. The U.S. had little intelligence about the group’s hideouts in Afghanistan. We could fire missiles at guesstimated targets, which might luckily kill bin-Laden and his top lieutenants or unluckily make us look impotent. The first potential problem, then, was that attempted but unsuccessful punishment might encourage terrorists to bolder actions.

The second problem was that destroying al-Qa’eda would not eliminate the multitude of other anti-Western terrorist organizations, many of which received aid and comfort from foreign governments and might in the future gain access to chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. If they were left undisturbed, the only way to prevent a repetition of 9/11 would be a massive heightening of internal security.

Much of what makes America happy – our self-governance, economic prosperity, domestic tranquility, and opportunity to better ourselves – derives from the liberal and democratic nature of our society and the degree of mutual trust . . . that such a society engenders. . . . And this is what terrorism has the potential to undo. Beyond the cost in lives and property, the 9/11 attack – or, rather, our reaction to it – could have far-reaching consequences, especially if it were followed by more such attacks. To protect ourselves physically, we might have to change fundamentally the way we live, sacrificing our society’s openness for hoped-for safety.

Of course, no anti-war liberal advocates the slightest diminution of openness, but maximum civil liberties and minimum action against terrorism are not compatible policies. We can accept recurring 9/11’s as “the price of freedom”, or we can construct a quasi-police state as “the price of safety”, or we can find ways to appease the mufsidun as “the price of normalcy”. President Bush’s aim was to avoid that array of choices. If his critics are honest, they will declare that they prefer them to war – and will tell us wish option strikes them as least abominable.

Fundamentally, the current debate is not about whether the Iraqi campaign has been handled well or badly but about whether Americans can live safely, freely and happily in a world where hostile governments can “outsource” their enmity to increasingly adept bands of murderous fanatics. President Bush’s answer was that we can’t. For six and a half years, the policies that flowed from that answer succeeded at the most vital level: There have been no significant terrorist attacks on American soil, and our way of life has suffered only the most minimal level of disruption. It will be “interesting”, in the sense of the proverbial Chinese curse, to find out whether “yes, we can” is a more successful idea.

Noted in Passing

■ I promised not to fill this blog with blather about my recent travels, and I won’t, but I was interested to see that David Frum, in the course of writing about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sums up my reaction to Paris:

It is very weird to think that the Paris of 1831 [the year of Hunchback’s publication] looked much more like Paris of 1482 – the year in which the novel is set – than the Paris of today.

There was of course no Eiffel Tower, no Grand Palais, no Pont Alexander III. There were no Belle Epoque apartment houses, no Metro signs, no Opera, no Haussman boulevards. The Arc de Triomphe was begun - but abandoned unfinished.

Ile de la Cite was still a jumble of ancient houses and shops. The area around the Beaubourg, the old marketplace, was still one of the most densely inhabited in the city. Montmartre was a semi-rustic village, covered with vineyards and windmills. The Tuileries marked the westward end of the built-up city, with the Champs Elysees a long suburban promenade spotted here and there by palaces new and old.

The city would change more in the next 175 years than it had in the previous 350. . . .

It’s a very striking thought that a modern tourist can see much, much, much more of the scenes and surroundings of the American Revolution than of the French. The Bastille: gone. What was the National Assembly: gone. The Jacobins and the Cordeliers: gone. The prison in which Louis XVI was held: gone. The Champs de Mars: changed beyond all recognition.

You can stand where Patrick Henry gave his oration, visit old North Church, tour the hall in which the Constitution was written, and of course see the homes of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Madison, and so many others. Let nobody talk of the European sense of history and American neglect!

■ I’m reminded, by his linking to one of my posts, that I ought to call attention to Nicholas Whyte’s series of reviews of works that have won both the Hugo and the Nebula. He is currently up to number 28 (Kelly Link’s “The Faery Handbag”) and has about 30 to go. It’s a worthwhile project, illustrating the breadth and vagaries of taste within the SF community, and Nicholas’ comments are readable and perceptive. In fact, he deserves a Best Fan Writer nomination for them.

As a completely separate interest, fantastical in its own way, Nicholas maintains a site devoted to election results in Northern Ireland from 1885 to the present.

■ Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal carried a remarkable story about a new twist in Koranic studies [link may work only for subscribers].

Before World War II, German scholars compiled a huge photographic record of early manuscripts of Islam’s sacred book, with the aim of bringing modern scholarly methods to bear on the text. The effort ground to a halt under the Hitler regime, which had other priorities for men who knew Arabic. Then, on April 24, 1944, British bombers devastated the Bavarian Academy of Science, where the collection was housed. Its custodian, Anton Spitaler, reported that it had been destroyed.

Mr. Spitaler was lying. The cache of photos survived, and he was sitting on it all along. The truth is only now dribbling out to scholars – and a Quran research project buried for more than 60 years has risen from the grave.

“He pretended it disappeared. He wanted to be rid of it,” says Angelika Neuwirth, a former pupil and protégée of the late Mr. Spitaler. Academics who worked with Mr. Spitaler, a powerful figure in postwar German scholarship who died in 2003, have been left guessing why he squirreled away the unusual trove for so long.

Since contemporary Moslem governments show little inclination to grant Western scholars access to documents, the rediscovered archive is a vital resource for Koranic studies. Not surprisingly, some Moslems feel threatened.

Modern approaches to textual analysis developed in the West are viewed in much of the Muslim world as irrelevant, at best. “Only the writings of a practicing Muslim are worthy of our attention,” a university professor in Saudi Arabia wrote in a 2003 book. “Muslim views on the Holy Book must remain firm: It is the Word of Allah, constant, immaculate, unalterable and inimitable.” . . .

In the early 1980s, when the archive was still thought to be lost, two German scholars traveled to Yemen to examine and help restore a cache of ancient Quran manuscripts. They, too, took pictures. When they tried to get them out of Yemen, authorities seized them, says Gerd-Rüdiger Puin, one of the scholars. German diplomats finally persuaded Yemen to release most of the photos, he says.

Mr. Puin says the manuscripts suggested to him that the Quran “didn’t just fall from heaven” but “has a history.” When he said so publicly a decade ago, it stirred rage. “Please ensure that these scholars are not given further access to the documents,” read one letter to the Yemen Times. “Allah, help us against our enemies.”

Berlin Quran expert Ms. Neuwirth, though widely regarded as respectful of Islamic tradition, got sideswiped by Arab suspicion of Western scholars. She was fired from a teaching post in Jordan, she says, for mentioning a radical revisionist scholar during a lecture in Germany.

For some perhaps fathomable reason, I suspect that there will never be much enthusiasm for finding layers of redaction in the Koran. The rediscovered archive is a valuable tool for scholarship, but tools are useless without the will to make use of them.

Quranic scholarship often focuses on arcane questions of philology and textual analysis. Experts nonetheless tend to tread warily, mindful of fury directed in recent years at people deemed to have blasphemed Islam’s founding document and the Prophet Muhammad.

If mere cartoons can give rise to murderous rage, what will happen when and if the Germans produce “the first ‘critical edition’ of the Quran – an attempt to divine what the original text looked like and to explore overlaps with the Bible and other Christian and Jewish literature”? It’s hard to be extremely optimistic.

The Semi-Last Word on Flight 327?

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.

The Flip Side of Professor’s Murphy’s Conspiracy Theory

This afternoon I had a flight from White Plains to Chicago on an Embraer 140, a rather small aircraft that isn’t great for foul weather flying. The forecast the night before was for a savage Nor’easter and none of my friends thought I had a chance of getting home. I waved aside their apprehensions. Nor was I fazed to arrive at the airport and find it swept by heavy rains and gusty winds. (The bad weather was a side effect, naturally, of anti-Global Warming rallies, the most efficient weapon against high temperatures yet devised.)

Nonetheless, my flight took off on time and landed 20 minutes early. What possible explanation is there other than my tireless shilling for the Bushitler regime? While Walter Murphy is forced to wait an extra ten minutes to check in, the President’s friends aren’t delayed even by bad weather. Shows you the depth of the Conspiracy, doesn’t it?

BTW, Orin Kerr has a chain of posts on Professor Murphy’s paranoia. The discussion proves two things:

1. Law professors do a lot less flying than I’d imagined. Some of their statements can only result from unfamiliarity with check-in procedures, security screening, etc.

2. Whatever his merits as a legal scholar, Professor Murphy is, on this particular subject, either thoroughly dishonest or stark raving bonkers.

Professor Kerr summarizes with a pretty devastating insult: “I realize that Professor Murphy honestly and genuinely feels targeted.”

The Imams’ Congresscritters

If there was ever a topic calling for a Congressional investigation, it is not the eight U.S. Attorneys whom President Bush dismissed at the end of their terms of office but the six Minnesota Moslem preachers who alarmed passengers on a U.S. Airways flight last November by acting like about-to-be highjackers. For those who haven’t been following the story:

Muslim religious leaders removed from a Minneapolis flight last week exhibited behavior associated with a security probe by terrorists and were not merely engaged in prayers, according to witnesses, police reports and aviation security officials.

Witnesses said three of the imams were praying loudly in the concourse and repeatedly shouted “Allah” when passengers were called for boarding US Airways Flight 300 to Phoenix. . . .

Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks – two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin.

“That would alarm me,” said a federal air marshal who asked to remain anonymous. “They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane.”

A pilot from another airline said: “That behavior has been identified as a terrorist probe in the airline industry.” . . .

Three of the men asked for seat-belt extenders [which can function as weapons], although two flight attendants told police the men were not oversized. One flight attendant told police she “found this unsettling, as crew knew about the six [passengers] on board and where they were sitting.” Rather than attach the extensions, the men placed the straps and buckles on the cabin floor, the flight attendant said. . . .

A flight attendant said one of the men [who had taken a first class seat] made two trips to the rear of the plane to talk to the imam during boarding, and again when the flight was delayed because of their behavior. Aviation officials, including air marshals and pilots, said these actions alone would not warrant a second look, but the combination is suspicious.

“There are certain behaviors that raise the bar, and not sitting in your assigned seat raises the bar substantially,” the pilot [from another airline] said. “Especially since we know that this behavior has been evident in suspicious probes in the past.”

The imams insist that they are the innocent victims of religious bigotry and have filed suit – not just against the airline but also against the passengers who reported their strange conduct to the airplane crew.

Since passengers are the first line of defense against future 9/11’s, discouraging them from telling flight attendants and pilots about suspicious activity is obviously a very bad idea. To head it off at the earliest possible moment, House Republicans have proposed legislation to protect informants against lawsuits. Yesterday, they won a procedural vote by a 304–121 margin. What’s interesting about that lopsided total is the party breakdown: Republicans: 199 yeas, zero nays; Democrats: 105 yeas, 121 nays.

In other words, a majority of Congressional Democrats, having balanced the risk of terrorism against the risk that other flying imams will be inconvenienced by fellow passengers’ erroneous statements, think that the latter is the more serious concern.

This is an issue that has nothing to do with Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, Guantanamo Bay, wiretapping, torture or any of the other favorite Democratic shibboleths. It is a simple matter of taking elementary precautions at a time when terrorism remains an active menace. Do we have a glimpse of Nancy Pelosi’s way of fighting a “smarter” War on Terror?

Further reading: Debra Burlingame, “Libs: Lawsuits 1st, Safety 2nd”

Flight 327 Flies Again

For a short while last year, the June 29th leg of Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles was the biggest story in the blogosphere, and the credibility of Annie Jacobsen, a young writer for a little known financial Web site, was a topic of fierce controversy. Ultimately, Mrs. Jacobsen produced 13 articles on Flight 327 and its aftermath, which she has now reshaped into a book, ominously titled Terror in the Skies: Why 9/11 Could Happen Again. The book was released, with obvious attention to symbolism, on September 11, 2005.

As I feel obliged to disclose (transparency and all that), the publisher sent me a review copy – not because this site draws a vast and influential readership but because it played a tiny part in the blogswarm. I was, it should be noted, a bit of a skeptic regarding the author’s story, as should be evident from my long post and addenda about it. Slowly it became evident, thanks mostly to the reporting of Stanford graduate student Clinton Taylor, who did the work that the big media are supposed to do (vide his “The Syrian Wayne Newton” and “Rashomon in the Skies”), that the discoverable facts didn’t justify either dismissing Mrs. Jacobsen as a delusional loon (a popular stance among left-wing bloggers) or accepting sine grano salis her insistence that she had witnessed a rehearsal for a repeat of 9/11.

After its allotted fifteen minutes, the excitement faded. The incident is by now probably very hazy to those who remember it at all. In very brief 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.

Is she right? Much of what she recounts sounds alarming, or at least worth worrying about. On the other hand, terrorists haven’t (knock wood) succeeded in hijacking or destroying an American airliner since 9/11. Of the possible explanations for that record, neither luck nor loss of interest on the enemy’s part is believable. Maybe the Homeland Security chieftains who impress Mrs. Jacobsen as insouciant and bureaucratic, more interested in how air marshals dress than what they can do to protect traveling public, aren’t hopelessly ineffective.

This book is far from furnishing enough data to allow readers to make an intelligent evaluation of Flight 327 and its broader implications. It’s clear, as Clinton Taylor independently confirmed, that the Syrians roamed the plane in a discourteous and disorderly manner, ignoring the directions of the crew. I’d always assumed that anybody who acted that way in the air, whether a suspected terrorist or just a jerk, would be arrested at the airport and, if he was an alien traveling on an expired visa (as the Syrians apparently were), promptly deported. If the only consequence of bad behavior is a mild talking-to, can we expect decorum on aircraft?

What isn’t clear is that the unruly passengers in this case were anything worse than jerks. As a thought experiment, let’s hypothesize that Homeland Security was doing its job quietly and efficiently. In that case, passengers traveling on Syrian passports would have been vetted when they entered the country. If they appeared to be harmless, it would still have been elementary good sense to post air marshals on their flights. In fact, there were two marshals on Flight 327. (Mrs. Jacobsen doesn’t think much of their usefulness, complaining that they sat in first class, where they couldn’t see what was going on. Yet one of her own corroborators also sat in first and claimed to have seen everything.) The post-flight investigation might then have seemed perfunctory, because there was nothing new to investigate, while what the writer interprets as the investigators’ duplicity could be reluctance to publicize their methods.

Far be it from me to sound like an apologist for a federal agency. In the middle of a war, fog lies heavily over events, and Mrs. Jacobsen’s nervousness may, alas, be vindicated. The questions that she raises are certainly worth attending to. At the moment, though, I think that the greatest danger to our safety lies in elite journalists’ and liberal politicians’ blindness to the existence and malignity of Islamofascism, not in the quality of the government’s response to that threat.

Thoughts on London

The last time that I was in London was ten years ago, and my principal memory is the dire sore throat that the smog inflicted on my delicate ear, nose and throat system. (The ailment vanished the instant I left London for Bristol.) Aside from that, I recall that plays were better, cheaper and more numerous than in New York (or a fortiori anywhere else in America), that the restaurants belied my prejudices about English cooking, and that prices were the same as in the U.S., except in pounds rather than dollars.

This time I have a place to record impressions contemporaneously. While I forswear any intention of writing a vacation narrative (the itinerary in the extended entry will interest only my mother), here are a few notes:

• To get politics out of the way first, the Underground closures occasioned by the 7/7 attack and the 7/21 squib are inconvenient, but I doubt that this degree of terrorism will bring Britain to its knees. The best indicator is not the gripes about how British participation in freeing Iraq “caused” the bombings; it is the public reaction to the Metropolitan Police’s “shoot-to-kill” policy. (Let me note, BTW, Clinton Taylor’s top-notch “Prometheus, Deterred”, which tells why the Police are right.) By that measure elite public opinion here is in better condition than in the United States. Our policy of “torturing” the Gitmo prisoners with excessive food, pretty girls and boring tropical weather is roundly condemned by our media. Their U.K. counterparts mostly shrugged when the first shoot-to-killee turned out to be an unarmed, probably innocent Brazilian (innocent of terrorism, that is; his aversion to law enforcement personnel hints that he was guilty of something). That sang-froid perhaps stems from a long colonial history and early reading of Kipling (“If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”). Whatever the cause, America badly needs the same realistic attitude toward our enemies.

• Reading about “Londonistan” doesn’t match seeing it. In principle, I’m not bothered by a plethora of women in dark, all-enveloping garb. If that distinctive clothing were evidence only of rejection of modernity, as it is among the Amish and the chasidim, I would be tempted to mild applause, for modernity breeds many evils. Those evils are not, however, a sufficient excuse for violence, and doubly not an excuse for violence without a realizable goal. More and more, I incline to the view that the Islamofascist brand of terrorism is motivated by sheer nihilism, its religious veneer a fraud. If per impossible the Caliphate were restored and the Western nations paid head tax to Mecca, would the terror abate, or would al-Qa’eda and its ilk simply unveil new demands pursued by the same means? I’m confident that I know the answer.

• The U.K. price situation hasn’t changed, leading me to puzzle over how average Englishmen, with two-thirds of an average American’s income (and higher taxes, too), scrape along. Some prices are grotesque. Yesterday I took my dirty laundry to a laundromat, where the washers charged £3 ($5.21), £4 ($6.95) or £5 ($8.69) a cycle and dryers were 20p. (35¢) a minute. The one exception to the general rule was U.S.-branded household goods. I saw shampoo that I had heard of priced only a few pence above a drug store chain’s house brand.

• A week in England reinforces one’s fondness for the dollar bill. It’s a good thing that the English are comparatively poor, because, if they had lots of money, they couldn’t lift it. The one nice thing about the solid one and two pound coins is the engraved mottos around the edges, a relic of the age when coins were made of gold and coin clipping worried the Exchequer.

• One of the most striking contrasts between the two sides of the Atlantic, from a tourist’s point of view, is the degree of accommodation to foreigners. My first day in Britain, I discovered that the electrical adaptor that I’d brought along was defective. Within ten minutes, I located a shop that sold me a replacement. How long would it take, I wonder, be for a Briton in Chicago to find a place that sold U.K.-to-U.S. adaptors? Another indicator: Many crosswalks are painted “Look Right” or “Look Left”. In the U.S. we just assume that everybody knows which way the cars come from. And then there are the ubiquitous foreign exchange shops, though that is an ambivalently useful service; their rates are noticeably less favorable than an ATM’s.

• Speaking of ATM’s, they don’t charge fees. The corollary is that there are not two or three on every block. In the U.S., machines scattered so thinly would sprout block-long lines. Here hardly anyone seems to use them. I’ve yet to see more than two people in a queue.

• I expected plenty of traffic in London. The city is famous for congestion, isn’t it? What I didn’t expect was that even light traffic would be so noisy. Cornwell Road during a non-rush hour was as loud as the Kennedy. An Englishwoman whom I asked blamed the road surfacing, though I’m fairly sure that noise standards for mufflers must be more lenient here. In any case, the phenomenon has a virtue: When one looks the wrong way, despite the crosswalk warnings, it’s nonetheless easy to hear approaching cars. Back home, they can sneak up on you.

• British newspapers complain incessantly about the deterioration of rail service since the breakup of the government monopoly. If only Amtrak could deteriorate to this extent! I’m composing this entry on the Virgin Trains run from London to Glasgow. When I arrived at Euston Station with more luggage than I could manhandle, a porter with a motor cart appeared, whisked me to the platform and loaded my bags onto the train, which was enough to endear VT to me forever. Admittedly, the train is now running late – seven minutes late. On an American railroad, that’s called “early”. It’s also a remarkable fact, though I don’t benefit personally from it, that the first class food carts give out Scrumpy Jack Cider free of charge.

• The air quality evidently has improved. In 1995 my sore throat arrived within hours. In 2005 it barely got a foothold in a full week.

Flight 327 Mystery (Partly) Solved

A Stanford graduate student and part-time disk jockey appears to have outdone the massed forces of American journalism is getting to the bottom of the mysterious Flight 327. National Review Online has just posted ”The Syrian Wayne Newton” by Clinton W. Taylor.

Well, I am nominally the “news director” for Stanford University’s student radio station, KZSU, and I figured I’d help the Times out. There aren’t that many casinos in southern California, so I had my research assistant, Mr. Google, take a look at some. An hour later I was talking to the nice folks at Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego. Unlike most casinos where it’s all Elvis impersonators, Paul Anka, and Linda Ronstadt — oh, wait, scratch that last one — Sycuan books the occasional “ethnic music” show, too. In August, for example, they’ll have a Vietnamese night.

”Oh, do you mean Arab music?” inquired Angie, who answered Sycuan’s phone. Yes, they had had an Arab act perform on July 1, an artist named Nour Mehana. Terry, Angie’s supervisor at Sycuan, confirmed that he was there and that there was probably a backup band brought in, since there’s no house band at Sycuan. In fractions of a second, Mr. Google found a website for Sycuan’s event promoters, Anthem Artists, whose archive confirms Nour Mehana performed at Sycuan on 7/01/04. . . .

I talked to James Cullen of Anthem Artists who confirms that Nour Mehana’s large band did arrive on Northwest Flight 327. Some of them came in from Detroit, and some from Lebanon. Cullen says they never said anything about a disturbance on the flight to him, even though “I stayed in the same hotel, they were nice, they stayed right above me.” He said that they were fine musicians, put on a great show, and he would work with them again in the future.

Cullen did receive a follow-up e-mail from the Department of Homeland Security, asking him to confirm that the band had played their gig at Sycuan. He had read Jacobsen’s article and concluded that some “people are just paranoid.” A pilot himself, Cullen insisted that the patterns Jacobsen perceived wouldn’t occur to him. “We should take pride in our system. We’ve got to trust our system.”

Mr. Taylor isn’t quite so sure about that last sentiment. The fellow expressing it is, surprisingly, hostile toward the occupation of Iraq and President Bush.

Still awaited are interviews with other passengers on Flight 327. Having been scooped by a student radio station, perhaps Big Media will be shamed into doing what is supposed to be its job. Or are its so-called “reporters” incapable of unearthing a story that hasn’t been wrapped in a package and leaked to them?

Update (8/5/04): More reporting from Mr. Taylor, who seems to be the only reporter (as distinguished from processor of leaked information) in America.

"Terror in the Skies, Again" — But Is It True?

If Annie Jacobsen underwent the experiences described "Terror in the Skies, Again?", she has every right to be frightened, and so do we. She relates a series of extraordinarily suspicious incidents on a June 29th Northwest Airlines flight, to which the crew reacted with strange passivity. The rather obvious moral is that, almost three years after 9/11, air travel remains insecure.

Before drawing conclusions, however, I should like to enter a caveat. Elements of Mrs. Jacobsen's story do not have the ring of truth. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily false; real life does not have to be probable. On the other hand, hoaxes, exaggerations and misunderstandings do occur. Here are points that need, I believe, further explication:

First, despite all of the suspicious activity, nothing dangerous occurred. Mrs. Jacobsen suggests that the 14-man group that she observed was rehearsing a future action, such as the in-flight construction of a bomb, but their reported movements — successive visits to the lavatories, ignoring "fasten seat belt" signs and congregating in the aisles — scarcely fit that or any other hypothesis. It doesn't take fourteen operatives to smuggle bomb parts on board an airplane, and calling attention to themselves in the obvious way that these men allegedly did would truly be a "stupid terrorist trick".

Second, we have these less than credible anecdotes of stewardess behavior:

Approximately 10 minutes later, that same flight attendant came by with the drinks cart. She leaned over and quietly told my husband there were federal air marshals sitting all around us. She asked him not to tell anyone and explained that she could be in trouble for giving out that information. She then continued serving drinks.

The Federal Air Marshal Service has only a few thousand personnel to cover (IIRC) roughly 40,000 domestic airline flights a day. The marshals work in two-man teams. How likely is it that they were "sitting all around" the cabin on this particular flight? Of course, the stewardess could have been telling a reassuring, but stupid, lie.

About 20 minutes later the same flight attendant returned. Leaning over and whispering, she asked my husband to write a description of the yellow-shirted man sitting across from us. She explained it would look too suspicious if she wrote the information. She asked my husband to slip the note to her when he was done.

How hard is it for a stewardess to slip out of sight of a passenger? What would have been the point of obtaining a written description? (The suspicious-acting men were all, we are later told, detained upon landing, at which point there was ample opportunity to inspect their appearance.) Wouldn't the incessant note passing that Mrs. Jacobsen describes have tipped the suspects off to the fact that the passengers and crew were aware of their behavior?

Third, the description of the exit from the aircraft and detention of the 14 men doesn't fit well with what normally happens as passengers disembark from a crowded aircraft. In my pretty extensive experience, nobody "hurries off" any but the emptiest of flights.

The plane landed. My husband and I gathered our bags and quickly, very quickly, walked up the jetway. As we exited the jetway and entered the airport, we saw many, many men in dark suits. A few yards further out into the terminal, LAPD agents ran past us, heading for the gate. I have since learned that the representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the Federal Air Marshals (FAM), and the Transportation Security Association (TSA) met our plane as it landed. Several men — who I presume were the federal air marshals on board — hurried off the plane and directed the 14 men over to the side.

I have been on a couple of flights from which passengers were taken upon landing. The doors were kept closed, and we were instructed to remain in our seats. Medical or law enforcement personnel then came on board and escorted the targets off. It beggars belief that, in a case as strange as this, similar procedures would not have been followed.

Finally, while I have never been interviewed by the FBI, I doubt that the process involves "sworn statement after sworn statement" or "[writing] down every detail".

I have no way of knowing what happened on Mrs. Jacobsen's flight and apologize if I have mistakenly cast doubt on her recollections. Nonetheless, they do not sound credible.

Addendum: Just after posting this item, I discovered a fellow skeptic.

Update: Hi to visitors from Instapundit, and thanks to the Professor for the link.

As noted in a comment, Michelle Malkin has received confirmation from a (named) source at the Federal Air Marshals Service that "there were 14 Syrians on the flight; they were questioned by the Los Angeles Police Department, FBI, FAM, and so on; they were a musical band". Hence we know that Annie Jacobsen did not invent out of whole cloth. But did the Syrians engage in the bizarre rituals that she attributes to them? The anomalies in her account remain. I'll be interested to see whether other passengers come forward to confirm them.

Update II: Rod Dreher, an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News, offers the reassuring information that, "I'm hearing from a trusted source that the federal air marshals have thwarted quite a few domestic hijacking plots since 9/11, but haven't told the public about them, presumably (this is my interpretation, not my source's) because they don't want to unnerve the public."

President Bush said in his first speech after 9/11 that we were entering a war in which many of our victories would go unreported. That's worth bearing in mind.

Incidentally, this blog is a spinoff from a site whose principal original purpose was to discuss science fiction, wargaming and Shakespearean authorship theories. Any visitors who are interested in those areas might want to look at the pertinent links in the left hand column. (The Shakespeare material is under "Literature".)

Further Reading: Donald Sensing, "Casing Northwest #327 — Threat or Hoax?", goes over problems with the Jacobsen account in detail from the point of view of someone with investigative experience (but vide counterpoints from a professional). His conclusion:

Annie Jacobsen was indeed scared witless by predisposition to be scared, and this fact affected how she understood and reported everything. Lots of embellishments, psychologizing and dramatic reporting here.

He links to me as a fellow skeptic, for which I thank him.

Update III: Iraq Incognito chimes in for the skeptics:

I'm a Federal Law Enforcement Agent and I think the story by Annie Jacobsen does not indicate a "dry run", rather it is a well written story by a woman who was terrified when normal actions by Arab males confirmed her pre-conceived notions. I have flown on commercial flights in the Middle East on many, many occasions. The behavior of the Syrian group was not unusual, IMHO.

More importantly, he calls for an e-mail campaign to book the Flight 327 Syrian Band on the National Review Post-Election Cruise.

Update IV: Further thoughts from Donald Sensing (still skeptical but not unconcerned).

Addendum II: A commenter writes, "The real moral of all this is that our airline security today is still not what it should be, and that the Bush admin could have better spent our Iraq war money on internal defenses. THAT'S how to fight terrorism."

No, that's how to transform America into a police state. Passive defense leaves the initiative to the enemy and requires a steady escalation of surveillance and control as terrorists learn to counter existing protective measures. When I was growing up, metal detectors were for ultra-high security, not an accessory to every airport, government office building and inner city high school. And I didn't have any need for a photo ID until I was over 40 years old. If ever another generation is going to know that kind of freedom, this generation will have to burn the terrorist vipers out of their nests.

Addendum to Addendum II: I just noticed this Daniel Drezner post, from which I took away the same message as one of the commenters:

There is no realistic defense for homeland security. Our only option is to kill the existing cells, deter terror sponsors, and drain the swamps.

That doesn't mean, as another commenter notes, that we should neglect prudent security measures, but we can't depend primarily on them, unless we are willing to put up with much more government than ever before.

Update V (7/19/04): Annie Jacobsen has published a follow-up, the major point of which is that fear of appearing to be prejudiced against Arabs hampers airline secruity. I certainly agree and am happy to see that third rail touched by someone who evidently is not a conservative of any stripe. (Incidentally, if you go to the story via the WomensWallStreet home page, you'll get a popup poll asking whether you believe that the airline security should racially profile passengers. When I looked at it, the responses were 85 percent "yes".)

Mrs. Jacobsen offers a good round-up of media reaction to her original piece and prints e-mails that she has received from people who work in the airline industry. Unfortunately for our curiosity about what really happened on Flight 327, she provides no confirmatory statements from other passengers. Were the Syrians' actions really as strange as she reports, or did her understandable apprehension lead her to exaggerate the extent of the suspicious activity? The fact that the Syrians were questioned by law enforcement authorities does indicate that they didn't stay innocently in their seats for four hours, but it may take only a fairly small quantum of unusual behavior to gain a post-flight FBI interview, and the fact remains that the authorities let all 14 go. Until further information emerges, I'm not going to assume that they were wrong.

Update VI (7/20/04): This story has grown too many branches for any one person to count, much less comprehend, but these two items impress me as significant:

1. A reasonable grumble from John Derbyshire:

The astonishing thing about this story is the laziness and incompetence of this country's journalistic establishment. Annie Jacobsen's story has been out there a week now. By this time we should know all sorts of things: the name of this Syrian band, the place where they played their gig (or certainty that there was no such place), interviews with other passengers who were on Annie's flight, and so on. The NY Times, the nation's other broadsheet newspapers, and the big Network and cable TV outlets all have highly-paid staffs of reporters who should be digging these things out. So... where are they? The piece in today's Times is pathetic, telling us nothing we didn't know. Any London tabloid could do better investigative work than this. Perhaps the National Inquirer will come up with something?

Also, let me add, reporters should by now have tracked down and interviewed other passengers on Flight 327. Can't these bozos find any information that isn't prepackaged and leaked to them?

2. An e-mail received by National Review from someone who identifies himself as an airline ticket agent:

Have you ever checked in at the airport and ever got the dread SSSS on your boarding pass? That of course will direct you to secondary screening. Now for most people that's a "random" thing.

I have checked many of the rich and famous and of course many of the poor and obscure. I have seen a retired astronaut as well as Sir Richard Branson get the SSSS on the boarding pass I handed to them. They were the "randoms".

However there is one other condition that will guarantee SSSS on the boarding pass. That is that the traveler presents identification from a state sponsor of terrorism. Syria and Iran among others appear on that FAA list. There is an entry I can make that will guarantee the SSSS. For passengers that have state sponsor of terrorism identification I am required to make this entry.

Needless to say to Syrian passports are very,very rare but I have seen them along with the others on the list. So anybody presenting a Syrian passport checking in with Northwest Airlines would have to get SSSS on their boarding pass and get the secondary screening. This is an FAA requirement and failure to do so is considered a security violation.

So everyone of those "Syrians" if that is indeed what they were should have had secondary and there is no PC way or not for that to have not occurred. Even if they did not check in with same agent they would still wind up in secondary all 14 of them. A group of "musicians" with a lot bags and equipment would have to see an agent.

The mystery deepens. Where are the other passengers? If they all die strange deaths over the next three weeks, I'll know that I've slipped through a reality warp into a Jasper Fforde novel.

Update VII (7/21/04): A Stanford graduate student and part-time disk jockey has scooped the major media by identifying the Syrian band and locating the place where it played.

Update VIII: Scrappleface discovers that there are two sides to every feeling of terror.

Update IX (8/5/04): The Stanford DJ, who is starting to look like the only real reporter in America, has uncovered more information about what really happened on Flight 327. As often happens, more data do not produce greater clarity.