Confessing Evangelical

I'm sure many of you will have come across this story before, but I hadn't, and in any event it is a fascinating example of acute observation of people's behaviour (from this article by Mark Steyn):

On August 1st [2001], James Woods, the motion picture actor, was flying from Boston to Los Angeles. With him in the first class cabin were half-a-dozen guys, four of whom were young Middle Eastern men. Woods, like all really good actors, is a keen observer of people, and what he observed as they flew west persuaded him they were hijackers ... [Woods] asked the flight attendant if he could speak to the pilot. After landing at LAX, the crew reported the incident to the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA did ... nothing. Two of the four were on board the September 11th planes. Woods turned out to be sitting in on a rehearsal for the big day.

So what made Woods clock these men as hijackers? It turns out Osama bin Laden's team of hijackers were far from master criminals, blending into the scenery:

The four men boarded with no hand luggage. Not a thing. That’s what he noticed first. Everyone going on a long flight across a continent takes something: a briefcase, a laptop, a shopping bag with a couple of airport novels, a Wall Street Journal or a Boston Herald.

But these boys had zip. They didn’t use their personal headsets, they declined all food and drink, they did nothing but stare ahead to the cockpit and engage in low murmurs in Arabic. They behaved like conspirators. And Woods was struck by the way they treated the stewardess: "They literally ignored her like she didn't exist, which is sort of a kind of Taleban, you know, idea of womanhood, as you know, not even a human being."

It apparently never occurred to them to act natural, read Newsweek, watch the movie, eat a salad, listen to Lite Rock Favourites Of The Seventies, treat the infidel-whore stewardess like a human being. Everything they did stuck out. But it didn’t matter. Because the more they stuck out, the more everyone who mattered was trained not to notice them. The sort of fellows willing to fly airplanes into buildings turn out, not surprisingly, to be fairly stupid. But they benefited from an even more profound institutional stupidity. In August 2001, no-one at the FBI or FAA or anywhere else wanted to be seen to be noticing funny behaviour by Arabs.