What I don't get is why acting like those guys did on the plane isn't enough to get you picked up and deported, regardless of your visa status. Anyone who acts like that on a commercial airline flight and scares the hell out of the other passengers ought to be, at the least, asked to leave our country and put on a do-not-admit-ever-again list. After I read the letter in the Washington Times, I decided that jerk should be deported too. He has NO RIGHT TO BE HERE.
I think they've handled this story really well.
Moustapha's lies darken the whole episode.
Reference bump.
Bump for Annie Jacobsen.
This story gets wierder and weirder...(if that's a word.) Those "gentlemen" -- and I use the term loosely -- are here because we ALLOW it, not because they have a RIGHT to be here. Their visas can and should be yanked. And I'd say the same thing if they behaved in this manner and were whitebread looking folks from New Zealand...so again, it's not the heritage, it's the actions. The RIGHTS afforded these folks on visas are a GIFT, not something they are born into, unlike the natural and naturalized US citizens.
I can't believe the gall of this guy making up out of whole cloth something like "they have performed in the past six months in places such as the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School". Kudos to Mrs. Jacobson if only for exposing that lie.
A lot of people have taken it upon themselves to amateur-psychoanalyze Mrs. Jacobson and (without evidence at all) declare her to have been simply panicky and hysterical on this flight and thus not reporting anything accurately. But the more her concerns are waved away with cries of "racist", sloppy thinking, and out and out lies, the more I think something really was fishy on that flight.
It's never been at all clear to me why the discovery that these 14 men really did play music at a club in Los Angeles, precludes them (or at least some of them) from having been terrorists performing a dry run. For some reason the concept "maybe it was both" seems to be lost on a lot of people.
(A lot of whom are the same people who think that "Saddam sought uranium" and "such-and-such document was a forgery" can't both be true at the same time, either.)
When will a sufficient number of us grow up from this sloppy-ass thinking? When it's too late? Or sooner than that? Let's hope the latter.
Too bad no one will probably ever even try to find them, because we don't seem to have any tough monkeys left in Congress, the Justice Department, or the INS. If they have all disappeared now, they may well have been terrorists.
Bump for later.
Dr. Imad Moustapha, the United States Ambassador of Syria
the Syrian Ambassador to the United States....
not very diplomatic was he?
Bump!
Yet naive if she thinks anyone on "the hill" will actually DO anything!
ML/NJ
You go girl... I too would like to know where they are now... why they haven't been deported... and where their next gig is... hopefully not an airplane bathroom assembling a bomb. Washington agencies may have the info but their record of following up on this sort of stuff is abismal.
I think Annie's awesome.
and, of course ONCE AGAIN... the horrible crime of asking for facts or expecteding truth makes one "bigoted and paraniod".
I am glad to run into this follow-up on Annie Jacobsen's terrifying flight.
I was discussing it with a friend this morning. We both have come to the conclusion that we are a) bigots...we wonder about anyone from the Middle East and b) paranoid...because we believe these people have attacked before and will attack again.
Call it whatever you want. If you are not wary and suspicious, you have your head in the sand. These people are out to kill us. Some of us are so politically correct we are becoming downright stupid.
I don't get it. Why, when the Feds found out they were here illegally with expired visas, did they let them go instead of deporting them? What is going on?