Homeland insecurity

Darn, just when she was starting to sleep naked again. This is my friend “Minna” talking, on the phone early last week, after she called to inform me “a friend of a friend” heard a local Philly radio report about a live bomb removed from a nearby Kmart.

I didn’t quite get the connection between nudity and terrorist threats, but these are complex and troubled times we live in.

So she explains.

Since 9-11, worried it might be necessary to be evacuated from her house in the middle of the night because of further terrorism, she made herself wear her jammies to bed, just in case.

Until she began feeling safe again. Which, of course, was short-lived.

Meanwhile, this rumored “bomb” incident was attached to murky details about two “Middle Eastern-looking men” sitting in a car near the shopping mall, hanging around waiting for the bomb to go off, except that neighbors called the police after seeing these “suspicious” interlopers, who then were arrested and found to have drawings of the New York subway system in their car.

What, Minna wondered, would they be doing in a car at 5th and Oregon near a South Philly shopping center, waiting for hours for a bomb to go off in a Kmart, with those drawings of the New York subway system?

Good question, I said. Maybe it’s just another urban rumor. You know, “friend of a friend,” yadda-yadda-yadda, untraceable, yet ubiquitous, like the TV newscaster and the hospital emergency room and the small furry animal, um, gerbil?

I spend the better part of that evening trying to track that alleged bomb situation down. The police weren’t saying. Nothing in the papers or on the net. Though when I went to the grocery store down the street at 9:30 p.m. to pick up something for my first meal of the day, the assistant manager had heard the radio mention the arrest of two men in a car.

Later that evening, on a local TV-radio website, I find a small news item making no mention of a bomb, but indicating those same two men with New York subway drawings indeed had been arrested at that location, supposedly checked out by police and FBI, and later released, since their names did not appear on any terrorist lists. They told police they were lost or had car trouble, and one claimed to work laying subway tracks in Manhattan, hence the drawings. I thought it was crazy to release the pair on such a cockamamie bunch of excuses, but, hey.

So I call my friend Minna back, read her the item, and tell her I can find no mention of a bomb at Kmart.

Listen, she replies, getting annoyed, do you think the police are telling us everything? No. Would Kmart let the public hear such frightening news? No. They are too important a company, too influential, business-wise, to create a panic like that. No one would ever shop there again. Ever!

Let me talk to this “friend of a friend” of hers, I ask Minna, and find out the true story – but she says no. No, Minna says, even more annoyed, this poor “friend of a friend” was shaking after the police told her there was a live bomb where she worked.

They told her that, Minna insists.

The next day, Thursday, Three Mile Island goes on high alert after some unspecified threat. This was especially comforting since I had read just the night before that the Pennsylvania nuclear power plant was running out of money for round-the-clock security protection against terrorism, so they had just thrown up their hands and said they would check sporadically.

Apparently no one had considered calling in the National Guard to patrol.

That afternoon, another friend tells me she had gone to mail something at the main Philadelphia post office at 30th and Market, but was not allowed to enter, so she left without making a fuss. Must have been, she shrugged, an anthrax scare.

When I immediately call the police to inquire about this, they say, we don’t give reports, we just take them. Times like this, a Rumor Central Hotline would come in handy.

They direct me to contact local post office security. Which I do. And the unthinkable happens: Someone answers on the first ring, reassuring me no such thing has occurred. “We’re open,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve been open. No anthrax.”

Friday, a real chunk of C-4 explosive – the same powerful stuff that blew a huge hole in the battleship Cole – plus 1,000 feet of blasting cord, were actually found in an unclaimed suitcase at the Greyhound bus terminal downtown, close to City Hall and only a few blocks from my poor defenseless little rowhouse. Naturally, a terrorist expert from academia says he doesn’t think Philadelphia is a target at this point.

That’s a relief, buddy. You sure could have fooled me.