She's back!

And we're all going to pay!

Okay but seriously, it looks like Annie Jacobsen-who wrote the piece on the "suspicious" Middle Eastern musicians that doing suspicious things like all wanting to use the bathroom at the same time and looking "suspicious"- simply cannot let it go. She's been doing her research, tracking these musicians down in a way she claims our government did not.

When the men from Flight 327 were identified as the backup band for a Syrian singer, the plot thickened for some time, and then it faded from the public's attention. But the story never faded from my radar, and, apparently, it never faded from our government's, either. Eight months after Flight 327 landed, four federal agents from Homeland Security's Office of the Inspector General came knocking at my door. The story kept my interest because what I experienced during that flight and what I've learned in the ensuing year make me question whether the United States can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, including non-citizens, and still protect us from terrorist threats. In theory, yes, but in practice, it is not being done.

Apparantly Mrs. Jacobson is not satisfied with the level of commitment the feds showed to investigating these mysterious Syrian "musicians."

I did not take his advice. Something happened on that flight. I wrote about it for WomensWallStreet.com and detailed what I'd seen. I ended the piece with some questions: Were the men really just musicians? If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 14 terrorists learn to play instruments? Soon, people all across the country would be asking the same thing.

To do her article justice I'd have to re-print the entirety of the rest of it and make fun of it bit by bit, but that would just be too much work. But here's sample:

"Two of Mr. Mehana's [the singer whose band was on the flight] promoters told me that the singer charges $32,000 a show. I traveled to the San Diego casino where the band played. When I asked the theater manager about the show, two security guards told me to leave the premises immediately. Instead, I located an employee who saw the band perform before a crowd she numbered at 400 (another employee gave a smaller estimate), with tickets to the show costing $24 to $30. If those numbers were correct, the casino would have lost over $20,000 on the event. What was the cost-effectiveness of flying 14 men in from Syria for a money-losing event?"

Then:

Finally, I located a photo of Mr. Mehana and his band performing at a northern California club, just two weeks before Flight 327. The men in the photograph were not the men on the plane. Two other passengers from Flight 327 looked at the photo and reached the same conclusion.

Based on this and other "evidence", she reaches a chilling conclusion:

A probe is about testing the system. A probe is about gathering intelligence to use for a future terrorist attack. In my judgment, Flight 327 was, at the very least, a probe. Operatives from a terrorist cell are often hidden within a larger group.

I have cut out a lot of her article, but really, it doesn't amount to much more then this. Based on what she says is a flat out lie by the Federal Air Marshal's Service, her inability to find out more about the band, and a photo (who's quality goes unmentioned) supposedly of the band that she's unable to match to the faces she saw on the flight, she's able to persist in her belief that at least some of the musicians on this flight were terrorists "probing" our airport security system. I happen to think if you managed to get 14 of your guys on board, that's about the time to start hijacking, but maybe they figured they'd have a hard time clubbing the passengers with scitars.

It's much more likely that Annie Jacobsen simply can't abandon her belief that something weird was going on during that flight, either because she can't bring herself to back down as a result of the "intense storm" her story created, or she still believes that it's simply impossible for a group of Middle Eastern men to want to travel anywhere together, and their activity as a group, coupled with their ethnicity, means that anything they do that's slightly unusual makes them automatic terrorists candidates. Her kind of paranoia is exactly the sort of thing we don't need when it comes to dealing with legitimate terrorists, and it would be nice if she would quit encouraging other like-minded paranoids out there to be suspicious of every Middle Eastern man who boards a flight in America. They hardly need her help as it is.