Report confirms terror dry run
By Audrey Hudson
Download the inspector general report (PDF)
A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 and reveals several missteps by government officials, including failure to file an incident report until a month after the matter became public.
According to the Homeland Security report, the "suspicious passengers," 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended the visas one week after the June 29, 2004, incident.
The report also says that a background check in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced "positive hits" for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.
In addition, the band's promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier. He was detained a third time in September on a return trip to the U.S. from Istanbul, the details of which were redacted.
The inspector general criticized the Homeland Security officials for not reporting the incident to the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC), which serves as the nation's nerve center for information sharing and domestic incident management.
The report comes three years after the incident, which was not officially acknowledged until a month later, after The Washington Times reported passenger and marshal complaints that the incident resembled a dry run for a terrorist attack. After reviewing the report, air marshals say it confirms their earlier suspicions. ...
Video: Annie Jacobsen and Audrey Hudson on Flight 327
Allahpundit
Here’s the woman who started it all and the woman who’s been covering it ever since for the WashTimes, each turning up on Fox today in the wake of the Inspector General’s report on the flight finally being released. The Foxies want to know if it was a dry run or not, which no one can say for sure, but Jacobsen astutely steers towards the larger issue — the breakdown within DHS agencies in failing to report the incident to Homeland Security’s operations center, precisely the type of function which they’re expected to perform after 9/11. As you’ll see, the TSA spokesman who appears here to answer Jacobsen doesn’t do much better by way of explanation than “it wasn’t a dry run.”
I guess we’ll take her word for it. Don’t miss the boss’s lengthy critique of the report from yesterday.
