Flight 327's Syrian band identified
I've been at the ball game between the minor-league Nashville Sounds and the visiting Iowa Cubs tonight (Sounds killed 'em). When I got home there was an email from Michelle Malkin awaiting, pointing to her post about Clinton W. Taylor's piece at NRO identifying the band aboard the now-infamous Northwest Flight 327 of Annie Jacobsen's article, "Terror in the Skies, again?"

For the back story of why this is important, please see here.

Taylor says,

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." ...

Now, there are a couple of points here. One is that the fabled New York Times apparently has no reporters who know how to use Google. The other is that the only substantive coverage of this flight and what it might mean has been done mostly by amateurs, not professional journalists (Ms. Malkin excepted, of course).

I mean, folks, that what Taylor did is, as Sherlock Holmes would say, elementary. So why didn't I do it? Actually, the thought occurred, but I do have to work for a living, too. And I did spend a lot of time futilely trying to talk to the FBI press office about the flight. I wish I had done the Googling, though, and Mr. Taylor deserves all the plaudits that should rightfully come his way.

Taylor also adds:

June 29 was no ordinary day in the skies. That day, Department of Homeland Security officials issued an "unusually specific internal warning," urging customs officials to watch out for Pakistanis with physical signs of rough training in the al Qaeda training camps. The warning specifically mentioned Detroit and Los Angeles's LAX airports, the origin and terminus of NWA flight 327.

That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board.

If so, this would explain the presence of the (assumed) multiple air marshals aboard, rather than the usual two. (But we don't actually know how many were aboard.) It did strike me as odd also that the airliner wasn't diverted away from LAX, but I can imagine reasons why the feds wouldn't do it. As the reasons would be sheer speculation, I'll not bother writing them; suffice to say it must have been a judgment call by a senior LE official, using a decision matrix that we'll obviously never learn about.

(As an aside, I wonder what kinds of private communications air marshals have with their headquarters while in flight. I am sure it's not stuff you can go to Circuit City and buy. So I have no doubt that the marshals aboard #327 were keeping the ground side informed, and that may have influenced the decision not to divert.)

Having done yeoman's work tracking down the band, Taylor then unfortunately slides into unjustifiable conclusions:

If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did.

Jacobsen's fear was quite natural under these circumstances, and she has done us a service by pointing out some egregious shortfalls in our airline security. ...

Now, here is what agreement with his conclusion requires:

That real terrorists, carrying real, dangerous bomb components, would have passed through passenger screening with ease equal to innocent men carrying no dangerous materials of any kind.

That the air marshals aboard, who according to the Times story, inspected the lavatory thoroughly ("several times during the flight," reports USA Today), would not have detected bomb components hidden there, even though this is a task for which they are specifically trained. (USA Today seems not to use permalinks to each post; this one was 6:35 a.m. ET, July 22.)

That the marshals would not have successfully intervened before the terrorists took decisive steps.

Analogy of what I mean (it's late, work with me here):

NFL coach of losing team to winning teams coach: "If we hadn't had to use our third-string quarterback most of the game, we'd have won."

Winning coach: "If you'd been using your first-string QB, we'd have defended differently."

Folks, you just can't blithely swap out provably-innocent musicians for deadly terrorists and treat it like the equation's only variable. The entire security system is oriented toward stopping terrorists, not drummers and guitarists.

Anyway, James Cullen of Anthem Artists is right: "We should take pride in our system." For all the fear-mongering "Terror in the skies, Again," has given birth to, there were no terrorists aboard, the LE agencies did their job, the plane landed safely.

And no terrorists have seized any US airliner since Sept. 11, 2001. I think that should count for some measure of confidence building.

BTW, everyone should now understand that the Syrian band Kulna Sawa has nothing to do with Flight 327.

Update: Michelle Malkin has added:

With the exception of the sentence that refers to the dry run, I stand by my final statement on the matter. I repeat:

Better a false alarm than a flaming plane.

Which, if you have read all my posts on this matter, means that her position and mine are almost exactly the same.

by Donald Sensing, 7/21/2004 10:13:15 PM. Permalink |