Here’s an excellent piece by Annie Jacobsen, who observed a terrorist dry run on a Northwest Airlines flight three years ago, about the six flying imams and CAIR’s attempt at legal intimidation: From King Sifax to John Doe: Reporting Suspicious Behavior.

During a terror raid in Manchester, England, British police officers searched an Al Qaeda member’s home and discovered a manual outlining terrorists’ tactics for jihad. The manual, available through the Department of Justice’s Archive, is particularly interesting in its behind-the-scenes revelations about how terrorists gather intelligence about their enemy and conduct espionage in the enemy’s camp.

The manual offers by-example reconnaissance tactics, citing spies doing fieldwork in such diverse situations as the Tel Aviv airport in the 1970’s and a British post office during World War I. My favorite is the episode involving ancient Roman spies who got the better of a King named Sifax by using a decoy in the form of a horse.

They [The Romans]…freed one of their horses and started chasing him around the [King’s] camp. After they learned about the extent of the [King’s] fortifications, they caught the horse.

In other words, because King Sifax mistook the horse for being just a horse the spies were able to figure out how the King’s security system worked. According to the Al Qaeda training manual, a little while later the spies returned to the King’s camp and burned it to the ground.

I think about King Sifax being duped by that horse every time I read about the flying imams. The flying imams, in case you don’t follow news from the aviation domain, are the six Muslim clerics who acted suspiciously during the boarding process of a November 20, 2006 US Airways flight, were escorted off the plane, missed their flight and subsequently filed a federal lawsuit over it.

The imams’ federal lawsuit is particularly cunning in a King-Sifax-and-the-horse kind of way because the suit names the passengers on the flight as defendants, not just the deep-pocketed airlines — as has been the case in every airline/racial-profiling suit since the enemy flew planes into our buildings and the metaphorical camp burned to the ground.

And at FrontPage, Patrick Poole reminds us that this isn’t the first time CAIR has staged this kind of stunt: CAIR’s Grievance Theater, the Flying Imams and 9/11.

Seven years earlier in November 1999, two Saudi students on an America West flight from Phoenix to Columbus were detained after landing because they had made repeated attempts to enter the cockpit area of the plane during the flight.
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In both cases, CAIR rose up to defend the offenders in question and engaged in their now standard grievance theater protest politics. In the most recent case, CAIR has tried to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the incident by backing the “Flying Imams” and supporting their lawsuit against the airlines and passengers for responding to their bizarre behavior. The lawsuit is being handled by a Muslim attorney associated with CAIR.
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When it comes to the November 1999 incident, any mention of CAIR’s involvement or defense of the Saudi students has been scrubbed from the organization’s website. It’s no wonder, as the 9/11 Commission Report (page 521, footnote 60) explains that the FBI now considers the incident as a “dry run” for the 9/11 hijackings. And the two men involved? As the 9/11 Commission Report explains, Hamdan al-Shalawi was in Afghanistan in November 2000 training at an Al-Qaeda camp to launch “Khobar Tower”-type attacks against the US in Saudi Arabia, and Mohammad Al-Qadhaieen was arrested in June 2003 as a material witness in the 9/11 attacks. Both men were friends of Al-Qaeda recruiter, Zakaria Mustapha Soubra, who drove them to the airport that day in Qadhaieen’s car. Another friend of Shalawi is Ghassan al-Sharbi, another Al-Qaeda operative that would later be captured in Pakistan with high-level Al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida.
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There is a connection between these two incidents, as the leader of the six “Flying Imams” this past November is none other than Omar Shahin, the former imam of the Islamic Center of Tucson, where the two Saudi students from the November 1999 incident attended. Counterterrorism expert Rita Katz told the Washington Post in September 2002 that the mosque served as “basically the first cell of Al-Qaeda in the United States; that is where it all started”. (Len Sherman’s Arizona Monthly November 2004 article, “Al Qaeda among Us”, provides greater detail about the connections between the Saudi pair involved in the November 1999 event and the Al-Qaeda cell that operated in Tucson and Phoenix.)
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Their current silence and website purge notwithstanding, immediately after the November 1999 “dry run”, CAIR was not shy about publicly speaking on the incident. “It seems like they single out some individuals because of their name, the way they look or their national origin,” huffed current CAIR National Vice Chairman Ahmad Al-Akhras (who was then president of the CAIR Ohio chapter) in an interview with the Egyptian daily, Al-Ahram. That same article quoted Nihad Awad, Executive Director and Co-Founder of CAIR, who explained, “the hysteria around [the crash of] EgyptAir [Flight 990] has created a negative atmosphere that leads to such incidents.”