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."
They did NOT conclusively identify the "musicians". This is just speculation in the other direction that they were musicians.
Does that make them go to the bathroom all at the same time?
"Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his carry-on in the overhead bin. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the cabin with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Middle Eastern men began using the forward lavatory consecutively. In the back, several of the men stood up and used the back lavatory consecutively as well.
Suddenly, seven of the men stood up -- in unison -- and walked to the front and back lavatories. One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. "
Actor James Wood noticed suspicious behavior and it turned out, those were the 9-11 hijackers doing dry runs.
http://www.thedossier.ukonline.co.uk/Web%20Pages/FOX%20NEWS_transcript%20-%20Actor%20James%20Woods.htm
WOODS: Well, first I have to back up and tell you about the flight that I took. The flight I took was actually on August 1st. And I have not talked about this in the press until this day because there was a lot of misinformation that came out about it.
I was on a flight, without going into the details of what made me suspicious of these four men, although it would have been blatantly obvious to the most casual observer, I took it upon myself to go to the flight attendant and ask to speak to the pilot of the plane. The first officer came out. I reported to him that I felt that the four men, and I said, "Can you look over my shoulder and see who I'm talking about?" And he said, "Yeah." I said I think they're going to hijack this plane. I mean, everything they're doing, and I explained to him these details, which I've been asked to keep private, until whatever jurisdiction, you know -- whatever trials may take place, their behavior was such that I felt that they were going to hijack the plane.
This "debunking" by some college student is about the weakest thing I've ever seen. All he did was determine that one Arab singer played in California around the time of the scary airline flight. Period.
He did not determine that the singer *had* a backup band at all (his source only said "probably"), or that if he did it consisted of 13-14 people, who were actually Arab, who were not local, and who flew in for the gig.
Nor did he determine whether the singer in question had flown in on the particular flight, or any flight at all -- he may have been in the area previously doing part of some tour.
Etc., etc., etc.
One Arab singer in California hardly qualifies as a "debunking" or any sort of proof that this singer and his hypothetical background band is in any way connected to the people who raised fears on the flight in question, or that those people on the flight were actually musicians.
Sheesh.
Imagine that, a group of middle easterners getting on a plane in Detroit.
The hyping and the hysteria surrounding this story was so over the top!!!!
It's always "Ooops! We made a mistake..." three days after every suspicious event.
The "authorities" don't want to disrupt commerce; they want the democrats to win; and they instinctively fall back on their training to obscure the facts.
Musicians. Yeah, right. All of them playing a dirge, no doubt.
Thanks for the info.
Still, nobody has explained their actions and why they were not unusual.
They went into bathrooms almost at the same time, they gestured to eachother, they came out with less stuff than they came into the bathroom with. They all got up at the end of the flight in clear violation of the rules.
Nor has anybody explained the nice guy outside the plane turning into a menacing man on the plane who did not give a nice look to the observor like off the plane.
Oh, well never mind then. Just a former Koran reciter and a backup band of 14 Syrian nationals, with one-way tickets and expired visas, moving around the airplane abruptly in groups intimidating the passengers. Nothing to worry about.