Warning! Warning! If you don’t believe in terrorists or that we are still at high risk of being attacked on our own soil, then stop reading this column right now; because you won’t like what I think today. Now, if you get all hot and bothered about the current politics surrounding our safety and well being then by all means, read on.
This idea for this column started forming Saturday after we made a trip to Columbus to bring home all the ‘stuff’ that our college kid needed to move home for the summer. We took a little detour to Aberdeen Lock and Dam so our exchange student could see how an interstate waterway system functions. We discovered that civilians can no longer go to see the locks or dams up close. There are concrete barriers and chain linked fences and locks and gates and more gates with no admittance signs everywhere thanks to 9-11.
As we drove around the rest of the area and saw all the beautiful beaches and picnic areas and boat docks for the fishermen and on into the serene stillness of the camping area, I thought how sad it was that a place a such beauty was held hostage by some goof ball somewhere. THEN I heard the news on the radio about a suspicious vehicle being found in Time Square.
The Smoking Vehicle was seen by your Average Joe working class street vendor who noticed that a white male had parked that older model SUV, left the motor running and then took off down the alley. That was certainly suspicious behavior so the street vendor went to investigate and alerted the authorities about smoke emanating from the vehicle and, after pedestrians had been cleared from the area, a bomb squad discovered that the SUV was packed with what was intended to be lethal incendiary materials.
The device inside the SUV was described as "at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to explosives." The large amounts of fertilizer surrounding the gas and propane tanks in the car was good for growing plants but bad for explosions; BUT if the propane and gas had ignited, the SUV would have exploded in half, spraying shrapnel with enough force to kill innocent pedestrians enjoying a warm summer evening in a busy Times Square.
Now I am not a bomb disposal technician but I do think things through and puzzle through things and if that device "was" pretty crude and wasn't going to work the way they wanted it to” the first thing that crosses my mind about this is this was the one they wanted to be found. Unless Al Queda's bomb making skills have really gone down the toilet it was just too obvious and amateurish to have been their best shot.
It was the everyday entrepreneurs on the sidewalks that spotted the suspicious vehicle. The plot was foiled by sheer luck and quick-thinking civilians.
Now to my way of thinking, a vehicle packed with propane tanks, nestled inside some bag of fertilizer with timers attached , parked right in front of the Viacom building which is home to that highly irreverent Southpark cartoon that depicted Mohammed in a bear suit or something is pointing some racial profiling fingers.
This isn't rocket science people! This might have been a lone wolf act; it might have been a decoy. But it was still an act of terrorism against the American people and we all need to be as vigilant as that American Street Vendor who happened to be a Viet Nam Veteran. We need an active public who will never be intimidated or dependent on government protection. That street vendor in NYC ACTED and the police reacted....we need 300,000,000 active citizens to be more like him. That Patriot acted!
The cavemen with guns are NEVER going to stop and we must beware of the wolf we DON'T see.
