Terrorist Dry Run, or Band on the Run?

Blogs have been chattering since last week about a woman named Annie Jacobsen, who wrote a terrifying account of flying Northwest Airlines 327 from Detroit to LA on which she was convinced she saw either an aborted terrorist attack or a dry run for a terrorist attack. Several bloggers have now published rebuttals, one from the federal air marshal quoted in her article, confirming that the men were interviewed, and turned out just to be members of a musical band.

However, the two bloggers most frequently cited, Michelle Malkin and Donald Sensing, are both (to simplify things) right-wingers. Malkin is a contributor to Fox News who refers to pro-choice people as “pro-death”. Meanwhile, Sensing links approvingly to Reagan propaganda and believes that “much of the impotence of the modern North American churches in wider society is rooted in the presentation, theologically and visually, of a ‘sissified Jesus.'”

They also misidentified her as a psychic (Malkin corrected herself by publishing a note Jacobsen’s parents wrote her). So it’s not really clear what’s going on, nor is it clear whether the right is approving (of the racial profiling Jacobsen espouses) or disapproving (of the portrayal of a dangerously lax homeland security policy). But the bloggers do raise some good questions.

Update

Snopes has labeled this a hoax, and links to a blistering column by Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” columnist, Patrick Smith.