# Terror in the Skies, again?



## seabass (Sep 26, 2002)

Interesting article:

http://www.womenswallstreet.com/WWS/art ... icleid=711


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## Militant_Tiger (Feb 23, 2004)

you wouldnt happen to be a member of faol would you?


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## seabass (Sep 26, 2002)

google search "FAOL" results:

Fly Anglers On-line (although this one sounds interesting)
Film Archives On-line

No, not a member of FAOL. Whats up?


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## Militant_Tiger (Feb 23, 2004)

fly anglers online, it was posted by one of the admins a few days ago.


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Seabass thats a great article thanks for posting it. :beer: It really highlights the idiocy of our goverment and the politically correct bs of not profiling middle easterners. Political correctness is going to kill a lot of Americans one of these days. I think that all middleeasterners and anyone that looks like them should be carefully scrutinized and any that can't understand why we have to take that measure are not interested in cooperating and helping America defend ourselves from terrorism and should be permanently deported. This is an entirely different issue than the profiling of blacks or mexicans although I belive profiling makes sense in many of those cases as well. Whether we will admit it or not everyone of us profiles everyone we look at and makes a decision about their potential for any number of activities both good or bad.


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## zogman (Mar 20, 2002)

Thank you Seabass. This is why I will never, I repeat NEVER vote for a Democrate for a national office. the flipping PC crowd will destroy our country. Let's use profiling. If the shoe fits. :******: :******: :sniper:


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Heres the follow up about it. I am amazed that everyone sat there and watched. I would of been up directing traffic so to speak.... :sniper:

Read the whole thing the meat of its toward the end.

July 21, 2004, 7:21 p.m.
The Syrian Wayne Newton
The man inadvertently behind a scare in the skies.

By Clinton W. Taylor

Annie Jacobsen's recent piece for WomensWallStreet.Com made waves. Her account of flying with her family while 14 Middle Eastern passengers acted in a threatening and apparently coordinated manner makes for a terrifying read. Her article captures her sickening sense of both uncertainty and inevitability as what might possibly have been the next 9/11 unfolded around her.

Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened. On June 29, Northwest Airlines Flight 327 landed safely in Los Angeles and a phalanx of law enforcement greeted the suspicious passengers, whisking them away for some intense interviews. Jacobsen noted a pile of Syrian passports in the hand of a law-enforcement official.

But the men checked out, and Jacobsen was told that they were "hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert." She was not told the name of the band, nor the name of the casino. And as her story made the rounds through the Internet and beyond (the Dallas Morning News printed a condensed version earlier this week), a note of skepticism about her story crept in. Had she imagined the whole thing? Or was the government covering up a "dry run" for another terrorist attack?

Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin confirmed some of the details of Jacobsen's story with the Federal Air Marshal's service, but the identity of the band remained the subject of much speculation. For a while the blogosphere settled on a Syrian band called Kulna Sawa as a likely candidate, but the gents at Powerline received a note from that group's tour manager explaining the band was still in Syria when all this happened. Even the mainstream media began to notice the story: New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey confirmed some of the details of the story today but admitted he, too, was unable to identify the band.

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.

And then I noticed something that was truly terrifying, something linking Nour Mehana to a figure of such repulsive evil that I felt a rush of prickly fear not unlike Jacobsen's: Just one week later, the same company that arranged Mehana's performance, also booked Carrot Top!

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." (Cullen made it clear that he opposes "this crazy Bush Iraq war sh*t," but it is important to bear in mind that Cullen also admitted to booking Carrot Top.)

Nour Mehana (a.k.a. Noor Mehanna, or Nour Mhanna, plus various permutations of those spellings) is, in fact, Syrian. He performs both "new-agey" hits and old sentimental Middle Eastern classics in a style called Tarab. In this catchy ten-minute video of Mehana on stage, (scroll down; the name is rendered Noor Mhanan this time ) you can see he has a rather large backup band helping him out. (The resolution is low, but Jacobsen might recognize some of the band members Mehanna is interacting with.) Followers of news from Iraq may have heard about the U.S. tour of the "Iraqi Elvis." Well, Mehana comes across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton.

Anyway, this is good news. Nour Mehana's band might have acted like jerks on the plane, but it appears safe to say they were not casing Northwest Airlines for a suicidal assault, and we can quit worrying about this being a "dry run" or an aborted attack. And if Jacobsen was wondering why one man in a dark suit and sunglasses sat in first class while everyone else flew coach, well, it seems pretty clear that this was the Big Mehana himself.

*Which is definitely not the same as saying Jacobsen was wrong to worry*. The proven existence of this band confirms one of the last details of her story, and her story confirms some of our worst fears about airline security. *The mindset of passengers, of the crew, and even of the law-enforcement personnel (Jacobsen said a flight attendant reassured her husband by pointing out that air marshals were on the flight), and decision makers higher up the ladder was reactive, not proactive.*


> (Bobm would of got arrested for attempting to raise some "awareness" :lol: )


Now, by that I certainly don't mean that the interceptors should have scrambled or the passengers should have started swinging Chardonnay bottles as soon as the oud player took too long in the john


> .( like I said I would of been arrested)


 But evidently no one even engaged these guys in a conversation, and no one, not the flight crew, and not the air marshals, challenged their egregious violations of protocols about congregating near restrooms or standing up in unison as the plane started its descent. Nothing was done to alleviate the terror Jacobsen, and probably a lot of the other passengers, felt.

Liberals will likely decry the suspicion and interrogation the musicians faced on Flight 327. And the principled Right will regret that that was necessary. If the band's English wasn't very good they might not have understood the instructions. But a polite word and some helpful gestures earlier on, rather than a guilty PC silence, might have saved them some embarrassment. In any case, the police-state parallels fade quickly: In a real police state, like, oh, Syria, you are not even allowed inside the country with an Israeli stamp in your passport.

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. It certainly wasn't. 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. * :beer: 
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. Danke Schoen, Darling. Let's hope the right people are listening.

- Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford. He's also news co-director and an intermittent classic-country DJ for KZSU, Stanford.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/t ... 211921.asp


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## Militant_Tiger (Feb 23, 2004)

"Thank you Seabass. This is why I will never, I repeat NEVER vote for a Democrate for a national office. the flipping PC crowd will destroy our country"

indeed, because the republicans are getting the job done, thats why this article was written while mr bush is in office....


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Come on now, could this possibly be true?

No ... I haven' t read the entire 9/11 Commission Report yet ... just excerpts, summaries and various articles penned by those that have a team of readers hard at work turning pages and making notes. I have been paying attention to the statements made by various members of the commission, and one by John Lehman really stands out. Lehman talks about profiling. More specifically ... TSA screeners actually crossing the bounds of political correctness and paying special attention to Middle Eastern men who travel by air. _*Lehman says that under current rules and regulations any airline that pulls aside more than two Middle Eastern-looking passengers for some extra screening at one time faces fines for discrimination.*_ Oh come on now. Can this be true? Surely the choking atmosphere of political correctness hasn't brought us to this level of absurdity ... yet. Can't you just imagine a cell of Islamic terrorists lounging around with a few bottles of Camel Drool beer laughing their turbans off as they speak of this ridiculous rule? :eyeroll:

Questions: How in the world can the American people take their government's anti-terrorism efforts seriously when the people who are charged with protecting us have to abide by asinine rules such as this? Last Saturday TSA agents at the Denver airport manhandled an old man with a cane as they groped, wanded, shoved, pushed, pulled and harassed him for almost ten minutes ... allowing him to fall at least three times. *Now you tell me that these same agents can't pull more than two Middle Eastern men aside at any one time for fear of legal action?*

Government. Only government.


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Can you believe almost all these Syrians involved in this incident flew with expired visas. Its just a matter of time before we get hit again. :eyeroll:

Article By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

*Almost all of the Syrian musicians who were questioned by law-enforcement officials after exhibiting suspicious behavior aboard a Northwest Airlines flight were traveling on expired visas*. :******: 
The 14 men in the band were questioned by several agencies that make up the Joint Terrorism Task Force after the pilot aboard Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29 radioed for law-enforcement assistance.

A spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed that 13 of the 14 musicians entered the country May 30 and the visas expired June 10, but the men were not detained. The 14th musician is a U.S. resident and citizen. 
The backup band was hired to play with Nour Mehana, widely referred to as Syria's Wayne Newton, and were flying on one-way tickets with a return trip on JetBlue. 
"The bottom line is there should have been an ICE agent called in to participate in the questioning, but there wasn't," spokesman Dean Boyd said. "We believe if an ICE agent were there, they could have detected the visas had expired." 
The Washington Times reported last week that flight crews and air marshals say terrorists are testing airline security and conducting probes, and cited several incidents including the one involving the musicians that set off alarms with security officials. 
Since the report, several other pilots and marshals have come forward and confirmed that groups of men are conducting what looks like dry runs for a terrorist attack. 
*"We are being constantly surveilled and probed" by terrorists, one air marshal said. *
A spokesman for Homeland Security disputed reports from crews and marshals and said they had "no intelligence that terrorists are conducing test flights on airlines." 
"We are aware of suspicious incidents around the country and all sectors of the economy, each of these incidents are being examined," spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said. 
The musicians, whose in-flight antics caused alarm among the flight crew and drew the suspicion of air marshals, had P3 entertainment visas and performed at a number of different venues across the country. They departed the United States on dates between July 10 and July 15. 
"Everything that we and other agencies have found indicates, and we are very confident in saying, these individuals were not terrorists by any means," Mr. Boyd said. 
The legality of the band and travel dates has not eased the concerns of air marshals, pilots and some plane passengers, who saw their behavior. 
Before September 11, the hijackers were "just flight students," said one U.S. air marshal. "Everything boils down to creativity and resources. And the more creative you are, the less resources you need." 
*None of the 19 hijackers who carried out September 11 attacks were on terrorism watch lists and all had legally entered the country on tourist or student visas.* Three overstayed their one-year visas. 
The September 11 commission report criticized the CIA for not placing hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi on the watch list prior to the attack even after the men were linked to the August 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. 
Similar activity was reported by flight attendants on American Airlines Flight 1732 from San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Feb. 15 to New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. The six men involved worked for a cruise ship and were carrying musician's cases with instruments. 
"The best way to travel is in large groups, no one would give it a second look," the marshal said. 
However passengers and the flight crew aboard Flight 327 were closely watching the Syrian musicians. 
According to passengers Annie and Kevin Jacobsen, the men sat throughout the plane pretending to be strangers, then stood nearly the entire flight in congregations of two and three and consecutively fielded in and out of bathrooms at intervals. 
One took a McDonald's bag into the lavatory, then passed it to another Syrian. The musicians also carried cameras and cellular phones to the bathroom. 
When the pilot announced the landing and to fasten safety belts, seven of the men jumped up in unison and went to the bathroom. Upon returning to his seat, one man mouthed the word "no" as he ran his finger across his throat. 
Syria is one of seven countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism by the State Department, but Damascus has cooperated with the United States in the fight against al Qaeda, according to the State Department report for 2003, issued April 29. *
"They came from a country known to support terrorism and no one noticed their visas had expired?" one pilot asked*. 
Air marshals and pilots say terrorists are actively testing airline security and the behavior of the musicians mirrors a test run. *
"Organized terrorists have been and are doing probes," a second air marshal said. The Jacobsens' account is credible "because it is eerily similar to previous incidents that have happened on planes." *
The Jacobsens have become the subject of ridicule on some blogs and criticized in one media report by an unnamed government source, but the Federal Air Marshals Association (FAMA) issued a statement Sunday backing the family. 
FAMA also called on the government to release the recording of the pilot's call to air traffic control for law-enforcement assistance. 
The unnamed source suggested Mrs. Jacobsen was hysterical and was the reason that law-enforcement officials were called to the airport. 
Pilots and marshals say the flight crew and onboard marshals were obviously concerned and the Joint Terrorism Task Force would not be deployed in routine cases of upset or unruly passengers. 
"Dealing with upset plane passengers is not exactly new," the pilot said. 
The second air marshal said the Jacobsens did exactly what President Bush and Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge have asked U.S. citizens to do: Be vigilant and report suspicious behavior.

*Our political correctness will get a bunch of us killed, we should be scrutinizing middle easterners very carefully and any non-residents that complain should have the Visas revoked and be permanently deported that day.* :sniper:


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## Militant_Tiger (Feb 23, 2004)

9/11 - majority of hijackers were saudi

this incident - majority were syrian

the united states attention - iraq???

something seems amiss....


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## Southwest Fisher (May 14, 2004)

Nice points on all sides, but you can't deny MT's.


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## Bobm (Aug 26, 2003)

Using MT's logic and yours we should attack the Saudi's and the Syrians. I like it..... :beer:


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