Actually the along with the media refuse to acknowledge it for the most part. Snopes.com has the Jacobson story as false. Despite the fact that others have similar stories (such as the mirror to the cockpit). Don't want to scare us (we might stop flying or spending money), who cares if we might become vigilant (oh, year perhaps that is bad now too :-)
darn clumsy fingers.
The govt along with the media
year=yeah
Snopes also has John Kerry's purple hearts as real.
Not the story, which it confirms, but rather the interpretation.
Snopes.com (Urban Legends debunking site) says:
Origins: The "Terror in the Skies, Again?" article written by Annie Jacobsen and published on WomensWallStreet.com, in which she details her experience with passengers (whom she viewed as terrorists) on a 29 June 2004 flight from Detroit to Los Angeles, caused quite a stir, to say the least. That article contained a good deal of supposition, and a follow-up article, identified as an "Opinion Piece," didn't offer much to validate author's assumptions.
As things turned out, although the events Ms. Jacobsen claims to have witnessed on her flight did occur (more or less), her interpretation of them (that they involved a group of terrrorists making a dry run for building a bomb in-flight) was erroneous. The men she observed on her flight were exactly what authorities told her they were: a group of Syrian musicians who had been hired to play at the Sycuan Casino & Resort near San Diego. Like any other group of passengers, the men in musical ensemble talked to each other, moved around, ate food, and used the restrooms while the flight was in progress.
A number of writers have thoroughly analyzed Ms. Jacobsen's article, trying to separate fact from supposition (and, perhaps, fact from fiction), and we really don't have anything to add that hasn't already been said by someone else. A few of the many available resources we'd recommend reading on this topic are:
The National Observer: "The Syrian Wayne Newton."
Salon.com: "The Hysterical Skies"
http://www.snopes.com/politics/crime/skyterror.asp
Snopes goes too far in calling Jacobson's interpretation false.
A cover story of "musicians" seems easy enough to accomplish. Even to the point of hiring real musicians to double as terrorists.
Jacobson has a plausible interpretation, and Snopes doesn't dispute her narrative of what happened in a single particular.