Ask the pilot

I managed to reach Bob Flamm, executive director of the Federal Air Marshal Association, the controversial spinoff of wayward marshals spotlighted in last week's column. Flamm says the FAMA Web site, for now still brimming with combative imagery, will shortly be revised, and he's less than thrilled with any interpretation of his organization as a fringe group of trigger-happy militiamen. "Our mission statement is very simple," he explains: "to create safer skies."

He assures me that FAMA's choice of name and acronym is not meant to incite confusion with the Federal Air Marshal Service, or FAMS, the official government agency under auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. "We're a nonprofit," says Flamm, "in no way presenting ourselves as part of the government. We go out of our way to make that clear."

Possibly it's not the association's fault as much as it is the fault of those who've been citing and interviewing them. The trouble is, you've got the marshals themselves, who are not allowed to speak to the press, and FAMA, which does speak. The distinction between entities, in quotations or on camera, is not an obvious one.

One federal marshal who did go public, with the blessing of his superiors, was the one aboard flight 327, disputing much of Jacobsen's eyewitness testimonial to a reporter from Time magazine. Flamm calls the interview "a major contradiction" to FAMS policy, and like Jacobsen paints the marshal's account as somewhere between inconsistent and incompetent. Inconvenient, perhaps, is the better word.

FAMA's press releases continue to hype the purported existence of ongoing terrorist probes - those so-called dry runs -- despite assertions to the contrary from officials in Washington. "There is no question that these type of test runs and probes are going on," Flamm maintains. "And the public needs to be aware of them. When people get on a plane, they have the right to know about this."

Flamm says the government is failing to acknowledge nearly 200 reports of terrorist probes aboard U.S. jetliners over the past year or so. When I spoke with Jacobsen a few weeks ago, she broke into a rant about crews having witnessed Middle Eastern passengers peeling back the tines of forks, reading books upside down, making bluff runs at the cockpit door, etc. -- all supposed evidence of terrorists testing our reactions.

She and Flamm would like us to believe that 200 of these events have been reported, but that nobody in Washington will admit their existence or talk on the record about them. When pressed for details on where these reports are, or how I might view a copy of one, Flamm defers to the vagaries of what sounds like a conspiracy theory: "That's something you need to look into yourself. You ought to be asking the government."

The supposition of overt dry-run rehearsals is dubious on so many levels that I can hardly begin to dissect them. Terrorists have limited resources and limited ranks. It's doubtful enough, for reasons thrashed out here several times, that Arab saboteurs would succeed with a copycat Sept. 11 attack. It's absurd, in preparation for such an attack, that they would be sent to the United States amid the most extensive anti-terror intel blitz in history and make public spectacles of themselves. That's not to play loose with the lessons of Sept. 11. Surprise, after all, was that day's most effective and deadly weapon. On the contrary, it's to emphasize that we're safer and better prepared.

I asked Flamm why 14 men would be assigned to play hide-and-go-seek on a 757, brazenly risking exposure in the very theater -- civil aviation -- most heavily guarded and fortified? "You're asking me to assume the mindset of a terrorist," he responds. "And I can't do that."

Ross Johnson, on the other hand, is up to the challenge. Johnson was the director of intelligence of an aviation security company and a military intelligence officer in Canada for many years. He's been following the Jacobsen saga closely and finds the dry-run thesis badly flawed.

"Covert surveillance I can understand," he says, "but a group of 14 people in the throes of a full rehearsal makes no sense. Why would you want to tip off the authorities? Why would you risk compromising the identities of so many of your people? We should be so lucky to have terrorists act so stupidly."

What Jacobsen and FAMA seem to be saying is this: The terrorists are out there and your government is lying about it.

Next page: Oh, those darn civil liberties and that niggling lack of evidence