They're still out there.

And it was quite disturbing to learn that, contrary to what the press had so smarmily assured us about a supposedly disgruntled aircraft mechanic who got caught trying to disable a Boeing 737, the guy had ISIS video on his cell phone.

"American Airlines Mechanic Accused of Plane Sabotage May Have Ties to Terrorists, U.S. Says," the New York Times headline reported.

Up until now, the press had been assuring us that the whole thing was a labor issue, citing officials. According to the New York Times:

"Alani stated that his intention was not to cause harm to the aircraft or its passengers," the criminal complaint said. "Alani explained to law enforcement that he was upset at the stalled contract dispute between the union workers and American Airlines, and that this dispute had affected him financially. Alani claimed that he tampered with the target aircraft in order to cause a delay or have the flight canceled in anticipation of obtaining overtime work."

Doesn't everyone with labor beefs against his boss have ISIS video murders on his cell phone?

As Jim Treacher (hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit) notes, "Weird Coincidence."

It's all but certain that mechanic-from-hell Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani might just have been motivated by ISIS's brand of Islamism, not a woikin' man's desire for more overtime.

The gullible media reported it otherwise, always eager to look the other way on Islamist terror.

But this one sentence from Treacher's report stands out:

Oh, and Alani's phone also had a news story about a plane crash in Indonesia last year, with specific information about the plane's airspeed control system. The same thing he was caught tampering with.

This rather raises the question of whether those aircraft were also disabled in this manner — one in Ethiopia, the other in Indonesia, both of which have suffered from Islamist terror or been in the vicinity of it.

The two crashes not only killed hundreds of innocent people, but also wrought havoc on the airline industry, with some airlines having to ground planes, and sent Boeing's stock into a tizzy, cutting it 15% after the crashes, and wrought havoc with its orders.

Now, it's possible that the freak took note of the crashes and tried to re-engineer some more of them for himself as a guy who saw the accidents and got ideas.

But it's just as likely that he or his confederates might have engineered those 737 crashes of the past year as terrorist-admiring aircraft mechanics. Boeing up until now has been blamed for the crashes, and called a heartless, wicked, incompetent corporation, with faulty manufacture of equipment, and has since been trying to argue that crew error was the real problem.

Now, the issue of tampering by malevolent insiders is a distinct possibility. And it must be investigated, because the lawmen have caught one of them in the act. This Alani case, is an indicator that this sort of thing can and almost did go on. Alani, after all, never expected to get caught, and unlike many terrorists, he didn't announce to the world his bad deed as soon as the aircraft got off the ground. No bulletin boards, no crazy manifestos, no chatter, so far as is known. Just someone who wanted to destroy the Western world through its own mechanisms and leave it blaming itself.

It's seems to be a case for reopening these aircraft crash cases, doing intensive background checks on the mechanics who worked on these aircraft, and looking for evidence on the dark net of this kind of "inspiration" getting around.

They're still out there, and this seems to be the latest risk from these monsters, worth looking at, getting to the bottom of, and taking action on.