Measuring The Threat

Monday, Nov. 12, 2001 By DANIEL EISENBERG

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They were, in some small way, supposed to make us feel more secure and informed, perhaps even confident in our leaders. But by the time officials had ringed nuclear power plants with armed roadblocks and West Coast commuters had begun detouring around some bridges, the latest round of terrorist-attack warnings--from Washington's vague bulletin to California's detailed advisory--left many people feeling quite the opposite: confused, afraid and in some cases downright angry. "We're drinking all the coffee we can," Tela Mange, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said with a large dose of black humor. "How alert can we get?"

Barely two weeks after Washington sounded a similarly opaque alarm based on nonspecific information, no one seemed to have a good answer. Just as we were getting used to what the Bush Administration is calling the "new normalcy," civilians and law enforcement alike braced for what they feared might be another horrifying strike on the home front. Before, they had trained watchful eyes on the weapon of the week, from crop dusters to haz-mat trucks; cops and civilians now had to view anything and everything with suspicion. The new normalcy was being redefined every minute.

That may be fine for lots of people who would rather be treated as adults than as children and be left to make up their own minds about how to react to government warnings. But with no solid information to divulge about the terrorists' possible methods, targets or timing, Washington risked either crying wolf one time too many or sending a nation from low-grade anxiety into full-blown panic. As a retired FBI counterterrorism official put it, "If you start warning about everything you hear, you become part of the terror, as opposed to part of the solution."

It's no wonder, then, that a number of cops and other public safety officials all over the country are so grumpy. They have been on the highest levels of alert and are being forced to deal with more false alarms than real information; something may be better than nothing, but not by much. Though the FAA did impose a limited no-fly zone for private planes around nuclear power plants, the government did not counsel many other specific measures to the 18,000 law-enforcement agencies that received the advisory. "I wish I could say the FBI is doing a better job of communicating with us," says a state law-enforcement chief in the South. "It's frustrating because I can't tell my people what to look out for."

There was no better example of the confounding, Keystone Kops approach to security than California Governor Gray Davis' decision to go public on Thursday with an uncorroborated threat targeted at suspension bridges in eight Western states. "The best preparation is to let terrorists know, 'We know what you're up to. We're ready,'" Davis said Thursday. But what exactly did he know? In this case, the threat to attack bridges at rush hour between last Friday and this Wednesday, based on a raw, overseas tip to the U.S. Customs Service, wasn't considered credible by the FBI--despite Davis' characterizations to the contrary. Like countless other reports that go out every day over the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (NLETS)--the authorities' national Intranet tip sheet--this one was never supposed to be made public.