Terror Flight

Today's hot post in the blogosphere has to be Annie Jacobsen's "Terror in the Skies -- Again?." [Also posted at Women's Wall Street.com] Jacobsen's story is terrifying. You really should read the whole post:

About 20 minutes later the same flight attendant returned. Leaning over and whispering, she asked my husband to write a description of the yellow-shirted man sitting across from us. She explained it would look too suspicious if she wrote the information. She asked my husband to slip the note to her when he was done.

After seeing 14 Middle Eastern men board separately (six together, eight individually) and then act as a group, watching their unusual glances, observing their bizarre bathroom activities, watching them congregate in small groups, knowing that the flight attendants and the pilots were seriously concerned, and now knowing that federal air marshals were on board, I was officially terrified. Before I'm labeled a racial profiler or -- worse yet -- a racist, let me add this. A month ago I traveled to India to research a magazine article I was writing. My husband and I flew on a jumbo jet carrying more than 300 Hindu and Muslim men and women on board. We traveled throughout the country and stayed in a Muslim village 10 miles outside Pakistan. I never once felt fearful. I never once felt unsafe. I never once had the feeling that anyone wanted to hurt me. This time was different.

[. . .]

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. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves and to the man in the yellow shirt sitting nearby. One of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down. I watched as the man in the yellow shirt, still in his seat, reached inside his shirt and pulled out a small red book. He read a few pages, then put the book back inside his shirt. He pulled the book out again, read a page or two more, and put it back. He continued to do this several more times.

I looked around to see if any other passengers were watching. I immediately spotted a distraught couple seated two rows back. The woman was crying into the man's shoulder. He was holding her hand. I heard him say to her, "You've got to calm down."

Michelle Malkin offers some confirmation for and some caveats about Jacobsen's story. You can also visit Jessica's Well and offer suggestions on what you would do.

I have felt secure about flying post 9-11 because of the "General Militia of Flight 93," the reaction of the passengers and crew to the “Shoe Bomber,” and the assurance given to a friend who is a flight attendant that several pilots have said they will not allow their plane to be commandeered by hijackers. Even though everyone lived happily ever after in Jacobsen's story, it still shook my feeling of security.

Thanks to Betsy Newmark of Betsy's Page for bring Jacobsen's story to my attention. And thanks to Stephen Green at VodkaPundit for the link to the post at Jessica's Well.

UPDATE: Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping is skeptical about Jacobsen's story for some good and well articulated reasons:

One of the things I learned in the years I have spent in law enforcement at both the federal and local level is that witnesses of traumatic events relate few details. When people are frightened or otherwise psychologically shocked, their minds don't record movies, but snapshots, and not many of them, either.

Annie's story has a wealth of detail, so much that I find myself disbelieving that she could have been as afraid as she says she was. Since she nowhere indicates that she took contemporaneous notes, I have to conclude her story was written from memory, and written at a minimum many hours after the flight landed.

in a later post Sensing points out several questions that neen to be answered about Jacobsen's story such as:

who hired the Syrian musicians, did the feds in fact authenticate their gig, did the Arab men actually fly back on the Jet Blue plane for which Annie said they had return tickets, how long were the men detained by the authorities

These questions leave me wondering why the authorities don't issue a statement adressing those questions.

Red State posts that the story seems like a hoax.