18 Comments

1. Charlie (Colorado):

And rightly so, I think. We can’t let this become a situation in which the Authorities are paralyzed by the recognition that no matter what happens, they’ll be criticized. One way to do this is to start saying “they operated on the best information they had.”

Oct 11, 2005 - 10:09 am 2. Ed Poinsett:

There is no reason for the mayor or our host to feel chastened about this presumed hoax. We are woefully inexperienced in handling these kinds of threats, so to err on the side of caution is always appropriate. I look at it as a fire alarm drill at elementary school. Practice may not make it perfect, but it can uncover a lot of weakness and eliminate a lot of confusion. Down the road we can worry about the outcomes of crying wolf .

Oct 11, 2005 - 10:11 am 3. RogerA:

Concur with all–The Mayor did the responsible thing and as Ed Poinsett notes, even though it might have been a hoax, the system got tested.

Oct 11, 2005 - 10:43 am 4. Bruce Wechsler:

As an NYC resident and fairly frequent subway user, I concur with Roger.

Some from the LLL have accused Bloomberg of forcing the escalation for political purposes with the election coming up. I actually started wondering (still wondering a little) about that when, lo and behold, Bloomberg re-election spots appeared on TV the next day stressing security, vigilance and not losing focus for even one second. Though I do watch more TV than I like to admit, it’s possible that they had been run already, but improbable.

While I don’t think that he decided to raise the alarum to make himself look better for the election, his decision process may well have included weighing how he’d be treated electorally if he had failed to do so and something terrible indeed did happen. Although it feels weird, it’s no an illogical consideration. After all, what would all of the MSM be doing right now if he did nothing and the animals attacked? The “10-9 Comission” would already be sworn in to find out why he didn’t take the semi-credible threat seriously. It would be his version of the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” memo all over again.

So, erroring on the side of caution can be rephrased as “If you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t…then DO.”

Oct 11, 2005 - 12:25 pm 5. Bruce Wechsler:

I erred with “erroring” instead of “erring”.

Oct 11, 2005 - 12:27 pm 6. Kevin P:

Roger:

For those who attack Bloomberg for raising the alarm on a tip that we now know is false they must answer this question. Will they accept the judgement of the “experts” when the experts are wrong? This is not science. There is no formula. Intelligence on terrorism is iffy at best, and we often have to rely on people whose integrity and motivations are impossible to know until after the fact.

Sometimes the people of this country act like babies. We don’t accept the fact that we can’t controll every aspect of this war. We don’t want our life disturbed by warnings unless we can know for sure that the warnings are 100% accurate. Yet if someone makes the judgement that the warnings are questionable and withholds them the very people who bitch about being reminded that we are in a war will rage that the government killed the victims because they withheld info.

99% of the time I don’t have to wear my seatbelt. But because I have no idea when that 1% need will happen I put it on everytime. I prefer to know and if I lived in NYC I would want to know even rumours that had a 10% propability of being on target.

Oct 11, 2005 - 12:28 pm 7. Knucklehead:

I’ll concur with the others above. Take such threats seriously until such time as they are discredited.

I’ll even go one step farther and say it wouldn’t bother me in the least if they periodically siezed upon such unconfirmed threats to run security sweeps and exercise the repsonse system.

The downside of this, of course, is the cost to NYC and the strain on their overstretched police forces.

Oct 11, 2005 - 1:18 pm 8. Davebo:

There seems to be a bit of revisionist history going here about what we knew of the threat at the time.

We knew that the person providing the information had provided bogus information in the past.

And given our intelligence services past screwups dealing with questionable informants we should have been much more skeptical regarding this instance, given our history with the informants.

Finally, can anyone provide any justification for Bloomberg making the threats public?

Did he offer advice such as don’t carry backpacks on the subways or expect delays?

Did his announcement result in anything useful other than to scare some users from the subway and make sure he got adequate press coverage when he road the subway the next day?

This may not have been a patently political pre election ploy. But it has all the markings of one.

Oct 11, 2005 - 2:03 pm 9. ahem:

Davebo: Lucid thinking there, fella.

If New York had been attacked and Bloomberg hadn’t acted on previous knowledge, you would have been the first in line to throw bricks at him. A word in your shell-like ear: if you don’t stop spewing incredibly brain-dead, knee-jerk conspiracy trash, people of good will may stop listening to you.

Surprising, but true.

Oct 11, 2005 - 2:54 pm 10. jerry:

Roger:

As a member of the warning community, I think the time has come to bring in state and local officials and train them how to evaluate and deal with warning information. I agree theat the Mayor would have been derlict in his duty had he not taken some action given the information that he received. However, as I said before, his response was too public and as a result he has squandered a lot of capital. The City of New York needs to develop better plans to respond to potential threats. The Governor has in the New York National Guard (42nd ID) an instrument with combat experience that he can designate as his planning agency. The Mayor and the Governor should work together on this.

Bloomberg’s action confirmed many of the fears the warning community about the advisibility of passing sensitive intelligence information to the state and local level.

Oct 11, 2005 - 3:01 pm 11. Syl:

I question the timing.

There’s another level to Bloomberg’s actions. I blame Katrina. If I were in Blooomberg’s shoes I would have acted much as he did, to show my city that we have things under control..not like in NOLA.

Local response and preparation for disasters has been one of the top topics recently. On everyone’s mind. Houston officials made sure their citizens were evacuated, yet Rita mostly passed them by.

Hopefully our complacency is a thing of the past, though I suspect it won’t take long before we go back to our casual ways.

Oct 11, 2005 - 3:18 pm 12. RogerA:

Jerry–I am what I consider to be a member of the local warning community–I work in local public health and work closely with a rural county’s emergency management department–whenever we undertake any warning, it costs the county lots of overtime dollars–county commissioners are loath to spend those dollars; but I can assure you that mobilizing early, whether for an influenza or meningitis outbreak, or for a bioterrorism incident, is money well spent for public safety.

And I will always advocate for early mobilization and activation rather than waiting for confirmation from a CDC lab or other law enforcement capability.

Oct 11, 2005 - 4:44 pm 13. jesse:

So…does this mean that Chuck Schumer isn’t evil, or does that still stand because accuracy is the tool of the liberal devil?

Oct 11, 2005 - 7:11 pm 14. jerry:

RogerA:

Mobilizing early for a false alarm destroys warning credibility for a real event. There are a lot steps short of total mobilization that can be effective when the warning is vague and uncertain.

I doubt you will calling for a state emergency after the first normal influenza case this year.

Oct 11, 2005 - 8:14 pm 15. gumshoe:

maybe jerry can comment on this article…

it’s relevant to the discussions of the past week:

The CounterTerrorism Blog

October 11, 2005

The Challenge and Divisiveness of Information Sharing in Today

Oct 12, 2005 - 12:50 am 16. gumshoe:

better(functioning)link:

http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/10/the_challenge_a.html#more

Oct 12, 2005 - 1:00 am 17. jerry:

Gumshoe:

In the military, each major formation has an intelligence capability. It is natural and a good idea for police departments to develop the same capability. However, the problem becomes information sharing. Law enforcement organizations need to develop a network to share information across jurisdictions and with the feds. They already have a template for doing this in the various national crimminal information data bases. The problem is not in sharing data with the Federal LE an IC organizations. We will keep secrets and confidentiality. The reverse is not always true.

Oct 12, 2005 - 5:46 am 18. gumshoe:

jerry-

thanks for your reply.

“In the military, each major formation has an intelligence capability. It is natural and a good idea for police departments to develop the same capability. However, the problem becomes information sharing.”

do you think,perhaps it’s fair to say

that’s the major problem when identified

on a “domestic” level??

what happens when the major cities EACH run their own foreign intelligence services??

how can that(redundancy of personelle,decision-making,organizations,

authority,etc) be beneficial

to the nation as a whole?

isn’t that redundancy,at some point,

less of a safeguard,and more a waste of resources??

________________________________

“We will keep secrets and confidentiality.”

in the journalist-as-hero world,

there is no room for this mindset.

it’s “sunshine laws” 24/7,

as though everyone in the world

has the same values and shares the same ends.

imo,that’s the definition of naieve.

i have no concrete proof,

but anecdotal evidence suggests

political science

is no longer taught at the university level.

Oct 12, 2005 - 8:32 pm

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