This was a dry run. It was obvious at the time. Why these twelve “musicians” are not entertaining their bretheren at Gitmo, I will never understand.
Nah.
/sarcasm
All joking aside.... they are coming again....
BTTT
It couldn’t be reported because they had already checked two muslims on the flight. If they questioned this many more, it would have been viewed as “profiling”, and we can’t have that /sarc off
~snip~
“Agency management was not only covering up numerous probes and dry-run encounters from Congress and other federal law-enforcement agencies, it was also hiding these incidents from their own flying air marshals,” said P. Jeffrey Black, an air marshal stationed in Las Vegas.
Homeland Security officials initially denied the complaints and blamed passengers who reported the incident to the press as behaving hysterically. However, the inspector general report shows that air marshals had the group of men under surveillance before they boarded the plane.
... “This report is evidence of Homeland Security executives attempting to downplay and cover up an unmistakable dry run that forced flight attendants to reveal the air marshals and compel the pilots to open the flight deck door,” said Robert MacLean, a former air marshal who was fired last year for revealing that the service planned to cut back on protection for long-distance flights to save money.
....The men were briefly detained, but only two were questioned.
“The Federal Air Marshal supervisor examined the visas, but did not notice the visas had expired on June 10, 2004,” the report said. One of the air marshals assigned to the flight noticed the expiration, but “erroneously believed he was not legally entitled” to run a background check.
According to the report, the marshal’s “primary concern, at that time, was not whether the visas expired, but to copy the visa pages so that Customs and Border Patrol could later run a database check on these individuals.”
~snip~
And THESE are the folks who are going to be responsible for carrying out the comprehensive border control???
God help us.
Our officials may turn a blind eye but I a single American will not. And I will act if neccessary.
Women’s Wall Street did an extensive series on it called “Terror in the Skies.”
Also I recall having posted about a flight I had taken on a Northwest from Orlando to ...Detroit and having had my suspicions aroused to the point of trying to figure out what could be used as a weapon to bring down the suspects.
There were a lot of reports coming out around that time for about 6-9 months of folks being suspicious.
"...including failure to file an incident report until a month after the matter became public."
Our overseer's will do nothing until the heat is applied, so keep up the heat.
I remember a lady writing extensively about this incident (she was onboard). Happy to see she is vindicated but disturbed that everything played out like this!
June 2004?
Why are we receiving stale news?
Just incredible. Our elected representatives and appointed officials spend their time posturing and bickering over nonsense while ignoring these critical issues. It's at times like this when one has to fear for the future of this nation.
The members of that band are some of the most popular wedding singers in Syria. Granted, wedding singers don’t get much respect in the mainstream American culture, but in an Islamic country where weddings and social gatherings are some of the most prominent venues for live musicians, they are pretty popular. TV appearances, live performances at some of the poshest weddings in Syria and Syrian/Lebanese diaspora weddings, and decent record sales in Syria.
Even back during the Women’s Wall Street expose on this story, it just doesn’t sound plausible these idiots were terrorists. They’re real musicians, you expect them to be fighters? They’re real musicians, acted eccentric and were probably hung over.
It really doesn’t make any sense. They never made the news immediately after the incident cause even the people who detained them couldn’t find any way to consider them suspects.
The fear mongers are waving them about though, trying to scare us into further budget increases for the department.
Stop all travelers from the middle east. Subject them to intense scrutiny. Limit the number who may enter the USA. Track their movements while they are in the USA.
save
Is Syrian music more like German Oompa Polka or Country and Western?
Flash: TSA spokeswoman on Fox now (8:26AM ET) says the report did NOT find it was a terrorist dry run. Is the TSA on our side or on the side of politically correct America haters?
Fortunetly, we can read the report ourselves: