The Odyssey of Flight 685

It's part of the routine for air travel since 9/11. Fifteen minutes after KLM Flight 685 took off from Amsterdam for Mexico City on April 8, Mexican authorities forwarded the names of all the passengers to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The reason: the flight was scheduled to pass through U.S. airspace after making a long swing over Canada. The information was then passed on to the U.S. National Targeting Center, based at a secret address in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. That's when the routine became extraordinary: by the time the Boeing 747 had finished its three-hour crossing of the Atlantic, Homeland Security screeners were on high alert. The names of two Saudi passengers aboard the KLM flight had begun producing "hits" on the screening center's lists of 70,000 suspect foreigners.

One of these hits—from an FBI database of terror suspects known as TIPOFF—smacked investigators right between the eyes. The two Saudis, the database reported, were brothers and pilots who had attended the same Arizona flight school as 9/11 hijacker Hani Hanjour. Soon the multiplicity of U.S. terror databases started pumping out similar hits. Fearing that Flight 685 might be a 9/11-style plot in the making, U.S. authorities refused the plane overflight rights, and Canada rejected a request to land. Much to the chagrin of its 278 passengers, the KLM jet made an exhausting odyssey back to Amsterdam.

I don't care if the Dutch were inconvenienced. It would be a major blow to al Qaeda if our "allies" would make it impossible for known terrorists to take commercial flights. Why don't they? Because they're weak and pathetic.

Al Qaeda may not be plotting to ram a jumbo jet into The Hague, but you can rest assured if they could take a couple hundred weak-kneed Dutchmen with them when they hit a nice juicy American target they wouldn't care.

It would be nice if the sissy little bureaucrats in Amsterdam cared more for the safety of their own citizens than Wahabbist terrorists do.