The Annie Jacobsen Rorshach test

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe — just maybe — ideology is affecting people’s responses to the Annie Jacobsen story. From the right: Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Shaunti Feldhahn. For her, this is a story about civil liberties run amok:

When I checked out this story, I was troubled to find both that this was not an isolated incident, and that a fear of racial profiling, fines and lawsuits is weakening our air security system. According to Senate testimony, airlines are fined by the government or sued by individuals or the American Civil Liberties Union if they veer from “random screening” policies to question more than two people from any ethnic/geographic group before allowing them to board. That would mean 12 of those Syrians couldn’t be questioned. In other testimony, the Transportation Security Administration announced it was reconsidering its long-awaited customer-screening system, due to civil liberties complaints. All this must be good news to the terrorists, who will willingly exploit our commendable desire not to discriminate. I asked a senior pilot for a major airline whether the airlines felt unable to properly screen passengers. His answer: “That is probably true. They are having so many financial issues already, and if one screener is rushed and doesn’t use just the right words, or pulls aside too many people from one group, the company is out $10 million from a racial profiling lawsuit.”…. At the moment, we seem unbalanced. Unlike some, I believe fragile grandmothers should be questioned too: Evildoers can hide weapons in Grandma’s walker. But screening should not be “random.” Most countries rigorously screen anyone from higher-risk categories, which, unfortunately, includes a higher percentage of young, Middle Eastern men.

I’ve already said why I think this is a bad idea. Although the fear of litigation is a worthy topic, most conservative commentators are eliding the fact that the system appeared to work in this case. Contrary to Jacobsen’s assertions, the Syrian passengers were searched prior to boarding the initial leg of their flight. The air marshalls (FAM) and FBI investigated and found nothing untoward. Jacobsen was clearly rattled — but the first priority of homeland security should be about, you know, protecting the homeland. Releiving the anxiety of passengers would be a nice dividend, but it’s not the primary goal. From the left: Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” columnist Patrick Smith. He thinks Jacobsen’s account is bigoted and hysterical:

[Jacobsen’s story is] six pages of the worst grade-school prose, spring-loaded with mindless hysterics and bigoted provocation…. Fourteen dark-skinned men from Syria board Northwest’s flight 327, seated in two separate groups. Some are carrying oddly shaped bags and wearing track suits with Arabic script across the back. During the flight the men socialize, gesture to one another, move about the cabin with pieces of their luggage, and, most ominous of all, repeatedly make trips to the bathroom…. Intriguing, no? I, for one, fully admit that certain acts of airborne crime and treachery may indeed open the channels to a debate on civil liberties. Pray tell, what happened? Gunfight at 37,000 feet? Valiant passengers wrestle a grenade from a suicidal operative? Hero pilots beat back a cockpit takeover? Well, no. As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Turns out the Syrians are part of a musical ensemble hired to play at a hotel. The men talk to one another. They glance around. They pee. That’s it? That’s it.

Actually, no, that was not it, and Smith is being disingenuous in the extreme to suggest otherwise. A Federal Air Marshal Service spokesman confirmed that marshalls met the plane in Los Angeles and questioned the Syrians — a fact that Smith abjectly fails to mention in his essay. Maybe the behavior was innocent, maybe not — I’ll never know. But the FAM’s interest in the flight suggests at a minimum that something suspicious was going on, and for Smith to blithely dismiss Jacobsen’s account as racist stuff and nonsense is absurd. I’m perfectly happy to have airline professionals say that this was much ado about nothing — like Michelle Catalano, I want to hear that this was much ado about nothing — but Smith’s half-assed efforts at snark don’t cut it. UPDATE: Clinton W. Taylor has a fact-filled report over at NRO that clears up a lot of confusion. The highlights:

1) The Syrians were in a band — the lead singer is Nour Mehana. 2) Taylor provides another source of concern about the Feds’ reaction:

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.

Thanks to Taylor for doing the digging. I knew those Stanford poli sci Ph.D. candidates were worth something!!