National Review Online explores Annie Jacobsen's new book, Terror In The Skies:

Journalist Annie Jacobsen gained a certain degree of fame last year as the woman who wrote about the strange and frightening behavior of a group of Syrian “musicians” aboard a Northwest Airlines flight. She has now written a riveting book, Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again about what happened that day and in the months that followed. Jacobsen put her investigative skills to work, and discovered that the harrowing events that took place on her flight were far from an isolated occurrence. She ends her book with a warning: If our security system does not improve, another 9/11 is almost inevitable.

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When Jacobsen decided to write about her experience aboard Flight 327, she was contacted by Dave Adams, the head of public affairs at FAMS. Adams insisted that the Middle Eastern men on her flight were “just musicians” from Syria. They’d been questioned by FAMS, the FBI, and the TSA. Their story checked out, Adams said, and none of their names appeared on the FBI’s “no fly” list. Given the evidence that terrorists had been trying to assemble bombs in airliner restrooms, why, Jacobsen asked, had air marshals done nothing about the Syrians’ bizarre behavior — much of it involving restrooms? “Our . . . agents have to have an event to arrest somebody,” Adams explained.

Jacobsen didn’t buy Adams’s “they were just musicians” story, and her gripping account of what happened on Flight 327 — “Terror in the Skies, Again?” — was posted on July 12, 2004, on WomensWallStreet. It exploded through the blogosphere, then the mainstream media, spawning intense debate. To some, Jacobsen was a courageous journalist exposing deadly flaws in America’s security system; to others, she was a racist, paranoid mommy with an overactive imagination. Jacobsen’s persistence in pursuing the story angered higher-ups in FAMS, and led to her testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

Astonishingly, Jacobsen writes, many of the federal agents who investigated the events of Flight 327 continued to insist that nothing unusual happened. In a sense, this was correct: These dry runs, or probes, apparently happen all the time. In the weeks after she posted her story, Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails — including 250 from commercial pilots, flight attendants, and other airport employees who are forbidden by their employers to talk to the press about similar “incidents.” Gary Boettcher, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told Jacobsen that she’d likely witnessed a “dry run,” and that he’d had many similar experiences himself: “The terrorists are probing us all the time.” Mark Bogosian, an American Airlines pilot, said incidents like the one she described were a “dirty little secret” that airline crew members had known about for some time. Air marshals sent e-mails congratulating Jacobsen for bringing to light “something that had been going on since shortly after 9/11 and was being suppressed.” Many airline employees expressed outrage over security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11.