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| Home Front: WoT |
| Annie Jacobsen Gets a Visit from the Feds |
| 2005-04-25 |
The call came a little over a month ago, on my cellular phone -- which is not listed. It went like this:"Hello Annie, this is [name withheld, and name withheld, and name withheld and name withheld]. We're from the Department of Homeland Security."They came anyway. To my house in Los Angeles. By plane from Chicago. Look Who's Coming for Coffee The four federal agents showed up exactly on time, in a rented green mini-van, carrying briefcases and wearing suits (it was 75 degrees). They came to discuss the events of Northwest flight 327, the now notorious Detroit-to-Los Angeles plane trip I took last June. My husband led them to our house through the garden and, from where I sat in my kitchen, I could hear their comments: nice garden, pretty plants, too bad palm trees don't grow in Chicago. So, I thought, federal agents are people too. In truth, I was excited that I hadn't gone into labor before the meeting. I was, after all, meeting with the big boys (actually three men and one woman). In the nine months that I've been working on this series, my access to the government has been through mid-level bureaucrats and agency mouthpieces. So here I was, suddenly meeting with agents who have real access to the truth -- and at their request. On the telephone, the agents explained to me that the Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Inspector General, has been investigating flight 327 and flying DHS agents around the country to talk to various parties -- the flight attendants, pilots, federal air marshals and the passengers. They had saved me for last. Here's what I find fascinating: while one arm of the government (the Federal Air Marshal Service) has vehemently maintained all along that "nothing happened on flight 327," the other, more muscular arm (the Department of Homeland Security) has been conducting a rather large investigation about it. Based on my 4 œ hour meeting with the agents, I can tell you that not only have they been investigating what did happen during the flight, but they've also been investigating who botched the subsequent investigation as well as how it got botched. So what do you say to four federal agents at your kitchen table on a bright Tuesday morning? The first thing I clarified for the agents was that, prior to my experience on flight 327, I had never heard of a "probe" or a "dry run." For the record, I explained, I had never heard of the James Woods incident either. [In case you're not aware, the actor James Woods flew on an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles one month prior to 9/11. Alarmed by the behavior of a group of four Middle Eastern men, Woods summoned the pilot and told him that he was "concerned the men were going to hijack the plane." A report was filed with the FAA on Woods' behalf but, tragically, no one followed up with Woods or the men. A few days after 9/11, several federal agents showed up in Woods' kitchen. Woods can't talk about what was said -- he believes his testimony will be used in the trial of the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui-- but, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Woods revealed that his flight "was a rehearsal [for 9/11] with four men."] Standing in my kitchen, one of the agents said, "What I can tell you is this: Mohammed Atta was one of the passengers on that flight with James Woods." (Apparently, this information has never been made public.) With that, the agent pulled out his chair, opened his notebook and started in with his questions for me (at which point the other three agents opened up their notepads almost simultaneously). During my meeting with the agents, what was not said was often as revealing as what was said. Naturally, the agents "were not at liberty" to tell me anything about the 13 Syrian men aboard flight 327, but they asked a lot of questions regarding my "intuition" about the situation: Intuition told me something was not right. Intuition is why I began noting the men's actions from the get-go. And it was exactly these details in which the agents seemed most interested. One of the agents commented on the fact that I took a lot of hits in the press -- that I was called a racist and a bigot simply for sticking with my gut instinct. To me, the agents' story that Mohammed Atta had been on James Woods' flight was a wink and a nod to the fact that it's fine to trust your intuition. If you're wrong, you can always stand corrected. The Devil Is in the Details Each agent carried a thick document (30-40 pages) filled with questions. All four took copious notes. After about three hours, they excused themselves, saying they were going to pow-wow privately in the garden for a little while. When the agents returned, they continued with what seemed to be the same line of questioning. They continued to ask my husband and me question after question but, in the course of the morning, here are some additional details I gathered -- things that I didn't otherwise know: So What Really Happened on Flight 327? The agents who sat with me all morning going over the events of flight 327 seemed sincerely committed to getting to the bottom of what happened on that flight. It seemed obvious that they believe something happened. Was it a probe? A dry run? A training exercise or an intelligence gathering mission? My sense is that the jury's still out on a hard and fast answer. But flight 327 was far from a situation involving 13 hapless Syrian musicians and a case of bad behavior. Since 9/11 the Justice Department has been widely criticized for one particular tactic it uses in fighting the War on Terror: it detains suspicious persons for long periods of time and puts them under heavy questioning before they are ever even charged with a crime. Flight 327 seems to have had an extreme case of just the opposite. There were 13 men on a domestic flight acting in such a way that many passengers felt their lives might be in danger. And yet not one of the individuals responsible for that threatening behavior was detained. Only two were put under light questioning, let alone medium or heavy questioning. Two individuals from a terrorist-sponsoring nation were allowed to speak on behalf of the other 11 men. In this War on Terror, whatever happened to a middle ground? Can a democratic nation fight a War on Terror and at the same time bend over backward so as not to offend a few visitors' rights? Perhaps these answers -- or at least some of them -- are forthcoming. According to the agents, once the investigation wraps up, the Office of the Inspector General will generate two reports on flight 327: one for DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff (Tom Ridge's replacement), which will be classified, and one for public consumption, which you and I will be able to read (this DHS report is different than the document Congress is working on). Whether the version we get will be a mere press-conference account or an actual glimpse into what went wrong during and after flight 327 is anyone's guess. As they stood to leave, one of the agents shook my hand and said, "Thank you for writing those articles." The most senior agent asked if he could touch my very pregnant belly. Then he said, "As a fellow American I can say you did your duty." A third agent borrowed a line from my original article: "If 19 terrorists can learn to fly airplanes into buildings, couldn't 13 terrorists learn to play instruments?" Anyone who's read my Terror in the Skies Series knows that I have not been writing with an eye toward approval from any government agency. But I really appreciated the agents' tip of the hat. ~ Annie Jacobsen |
| Posted by:Sobiesky |
| #3 I'm surprised that there hasn't been an incident of a suspicously acting/looking plane passenger being beaten to death by panicked fellow passengers. It may happen yet. |
| Posted by: SC88 2005-04-25 10:39:47 PM |
| #2 Notice how the FBI "blew" it? That is a result their focus on CRIME not on INTEL and counter-terror. The domestic intel and counter-terror needs to be removed from the FBI and given to a different agency. DHS might be the way to do it. Put the FAM there too. And make the Coastguard available for thier use (port security). Get the FBI out of the business - they dont care about it, are nto set up for it, and have the wrong temperament for it - and they are jsut as resistant to change and failure prone as the CIA, if nto more so. Imagine what woudl have happned had the FBI done what a good intel agency would do with the info from James woods. Followed up on Mohammed Atta, gathering intel, instead of looking for a crime and finding none... YET. The FBI is still dropping the ball, as shown by this incident. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-04-25 9:35:00 AM |
| #1 I always liked James Woods as an actor. Glad to hear he did the right thing. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-04-25 8:42:32 AM |