The blogosphere has been all a-twitter for nearly a week in reaction to Annie Jacobsen’s story from Women’s Wall Street:
On June 29, 2004, at 12:28 p.m., I flew on Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles with my husband and our young son. Also on our flight were 14 Middle Eastern men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old. What I experienced during that flight has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats.
If you’re just coming up to speed on this story the 14 Middle Eastern men appeared to be behaving oddly, several people on board seem to believe that it was a dry-run for a terrorist attack, etc. etc. Musical band or terrorist band? Senseless panic or prudent vigilance? Opinion is somewhat divided. Donald Sensing’s blog is a great place to start to get the lowdown (he’s skeptical) see here.
For a gallows-humorous take on the incident (if there was an incident) see Scrappleface.
I don’t have an opinion on what actually happened during Ms. Jacobsen’s flight. I would be very surprised if radical Islamist terrorists weren’t doing exactly the kinds of dry-runs that Ms. Jacobsen describes. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if lots of Americans are over-interpreting the harmless but peculiar behavior of Middle Eastern between 20 and 50 years of age. Would the reaction to Ms. Jacobsen’s story be different if she were a man? Are reactions colored by sexism? Would the reaction to Ms. Jacobsen’s story be different if she were a law enforcement official? Are reactions colored by turf-battles? While a story can be given extra weight if its author is an expert in the field being reported on, that doesn’t mean it’s not true if the author is not an expert. That’s an example of the Ad Hominem Fallacy.
While I don’t know if anything untoward happened on that Northwest Airlines Flight 327, I do believe that the story demonstrates that the TSA ( Transportation Security Administration) is a bust. The TSA can have two legitimate functions: to make Americans safer or to make Americans feel safer. Ideally it would do both.
If Ms. Jacobsen’s story is true it’s a warning that whether for reasons of political correctness, bureaucratic inefficiency, lack of motivation, or scope of the task the TSA has made Americans no safer in the air than they were on September 10, 2001. Americans hardly need such a warning. We’ve put up with the increased discomfort and inconvenience and the the waits with pretty good humor. And I’d be surprised if nearly every American couldn’t tell a story about what they got through security with either deliberately or inadvertently.
I’ve flown perhaps a dozen times in the last 18 months. At least half of the time I’ve inadvertently left my pocketknife in my pocket. I’ve only been stopped for it once. Recently I found that I had completely forgotten that I’ve been carrying an Exacto knife in my laptop compter case the entire time. Yes—the notorious box-cutter. If this is happening so easily by accident can anyone reasonably doubt that it will happen deliberately just as easily?
Whether Ms. Jacobsen’s story is true or not her reactions and the reactions around the blogosphere pretty clearly demonstrate that the TSA isn’t making us feel any safer.
I disagree with some of the things the Bush Administration has done over the last few years; I agree with others. I’m no Bush-hater. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a mainstream press that was as hostile to any president as they seem to be to President Bush. And that includes Richard Nixon. But one thing that even the Administration’s friends have to admit is that Mr. Bush has done a ghastly job on atmospherics. Neither the public nor the press nor the government appear to have the attitude necessary for us to succeed in the War on Terror.
That failure in atmospherics dates from very early in the crisis. When Mr. Bush stood before us and told us to go about our everyday business he may have been right on the substance but he was wrong on the atmospherics. The public needs to be enlisted in the struggle or the struggle will not succeed. Did he learn nothing from Viet Nam?
The color coded terrorist hazard scheme is more of the same mixed message. What does it mean when the threat level is raised from yellow to orange? What change should it make in what we do? I’ve read the descriptions. What does it mean?
I believe that if we should just “don’t worry; be happy” the threat level should be reduced to green. And if a terrorist attack occurs Mr. Bush should be prepared to take the for it. Or if there really is a threat the country should be more fully mobilized and real security provisions taken in airports, the air, and in public buildings. And if the economy suffers Mr. Bush should be prepared to take the consequences of that.
I offer an alternate version of what these guys were up to: (More details on my link)
The guys got on the plane. They were part of a group, and they may have been a little nervous because they knew they were “flying while muslim” and all eyes were on them. They gave each other “thumbs-up” everything’s OK kinda gestures, and looked around to see each other’s seat locations and give each other reassuring looks. Then someone remembered that they needed to pray before take-off, so they all got up to go wash in the bathrooms. Some of the guys didn’t want to wait so they went to the bathrooms in the back. One guy read from his pocket Koran. Another guy got his “earthly object” from the overhead compartment and went to the back of the plane so he could pray disctreetly at the back of the plane while standing and facing Mecca, because he is a good muslim and wants to follow his religion properly. Other guys decided to pray in the bathrooms, which is OK, too.
That explanation had occurred to me as well. Or that they had noticed that some of the other passengers looked nervous so they decided to play along a little.
>play along a little.
Or play with the passengers a lot. That’s my current working hypothesis. The post-9/11 book Granta 77: What We Think of America presented 24 non-Americans’ essays, a few sympathetic, most quite jaundiced (briefly reviewed here. Selfish, materialistic, hegemonistic, bigoted, etc. Easy for me to imagine this as the predominant ethos among a dozen or so Arab musicians–sure, we’re attracted to America and want to visit and tour, but at the same time we are repelled by it, for Granta’s reasons and perhaps Qtub’s as well.
So when members of this group feel the unfriendly eyes of crew and passengers on them, their natural response might well be to put on a vaguely menacing ‘show’ such as Jacobsen describes, carrying a McDonald’s bag to the lav and all. And while they despise America, they still know it ain’t Syria. They would rightly anticipate detention and questioning at flight’s end, but no worse.
The thing that gets me, AMac, is that many Europeans and most Middle Easterners are like Will Rogers: they only know what they read in the newspaper. That’s extremely clear from the polls in Iraq, for example, in which 80%+ of the Iraqis have never even seen an American. So, how did they form an unfavorable impression? From what somebody told them.
A National Review staffer (though apparently not an NYT reporter) knew how to use Google. Donald Sensing reports that the Syrian Band was real and has been identified.