Jul

4

Holiday terror alerts are getting annoying

Dave AddisBy DAVE ADDIS, The Virginian-Pilot

Don’t touch that Bud, buddy, or it might blow up in your face.

Boiled to its essence, that’s the theme of a “lightly classified� warning that the FBI reportedly sent to 18,000 law enforcement agencies with the Fourth of July holiday approaching.

It seems that the feds have decided – with no supporting evidence whatsoever – that al-Qaida operatives or other evildoers might attack the U.S. coastline this holiday weekend with floating Styrofoam beer coolers laden with explosives rigged to detonate on contact.

Heaven knows that we all have reason to be sharp-eyed for acts of terrorism, and to take them seriously. But these baseless “alerts� every time a national holiday rolls around are beginning to get annoying. They smack of a “Cover Your Assets� mentality in the burgeoning federal anti-terror industry.

According to Time magazine, the local authorities were warned to “look out for plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam� that commonly wash up around harbors, marinas and beaches.

But the magazine also reported that officials with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that “no such devices have actually been discovered, nor is there any current intelligence that terrorists are hatching plots involving floating bombs.�

If that’s true, then why the warning? And if a warning were necessary, why keep it “classified�?

Wouldn’t it be prudent to alert the citizens most likely to encounter a bobbing beer bomb in the water?

The fishermen, boaters, beachcombers, surfers, swimmers, sunbathers, scuba divers, crabbers, Jet Ski jockeys, kayakers, canoeists and anybody else who’ll be flocking to the beaches and waterways over the weekend? That is, all the rest of us?

After all, we’re likely to outnumber waterborne law-enforcement officers by a ratio of about 10,000-to-1. But no such warning was forthcoming. Federal law enforcement kept the alert hidden under its 10-gallon hat.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they didn’t want to panic anyone. Perhaps they didn’t want scenes reminiscent of “Jaws,� with horror-stricken beachgoers stampeding for their lives every time a rubber ducky washes ashore.

I once lost a Styrofoam beer cooler when I flipped a sailboat and the current swept away my brewskies before I could get righted. I’d hate to think that such an innocent act could now lead to a terror alert and a hysterical evacuation of the shoreline if my errant cooler were seen bobbing in the surf.

The “bobbing beer cooler� alert over the Fourth of July, with no supporting evidence at all, makes about as much sense as issuing an alert before Christmas that we might be attacked at any moment by evildoers masquerading as elves or reindeer.

Any of those things could happen. But there’s a difference between a terror warning of what is possible and a terror warning of what is probable.

And that makes all the difference between a public that is rightfully cautious and a public that is simply scared out of its wits.

Contact Dave at 446-2726, or dave.addis@cox.net.

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