Atta was an architect.
What makes you think that musicians can't also be terrorists?
There was some rather suspicious behavior there -- did you read the detailed description of their actions?
Wayne al-Newton
Clinton Taylor, a doctoral candidate and campus radio journalist at Stanford, seems to have solved the mystery of the 14 Syrians on Annie Jacobsen's flight (we noted Jacobsen's story Friday). The Federal Air Marshals service had told Jacobsen that the men were "hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert":New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey confirmed some of the details of the story [Wednesday] 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. . . .
"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.
Nour Mehana, according to OrientalTunes.com, "was a reciter of the Holy Koran before he chose to become a singer." According to Taylor, the musician "comes across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton."
But although Jacobsen's fears appear to have been unwarranted, Taylor is critical of the response of the flight crew and law enforcement:
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 [Northwest] 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.
Concludes Taylor: "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."
You are undoubtedly right that we all need to be careful and alert- and to err, if err we must, on the side of survival.
But the case of the 13 musicians seems to have been a case of overreaction on the part of some of the passengers, even if, as you say, some of the actions of the men were suspicious.
You need to know that the individuals in question were taken into custody and questioned on arrival in Los Angeles, as were several of the passengers.
You can be that the aircraft too was gone over with a careful eye. If these guys had left anything in the bathroom, as was intimated by at least one of the passengers, surely it would have been found.
But, what happened is this: the thirteen men established their credentials as musicians and went on their way.
Can musicians also be hijackers and terrorists? Surely that must be so. But it does not seem to have been the case here.
So why not do what is right, First inform the public that indeed these terrorists want to attack and kill many more of us, next kill these bastards once and for all. Bomb bomb bomb.