Untitled Document

26 May 2004

Low Level Alert

Time flies when you are having fun. It just doesn't seem like ten years ago today that Pop star Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley were married in the Dominican Republic. That should have alerted us to something, even then.

They would prefer those days were back. The rains are continuing on the gentle island of Hispaneola, which is shared by Haiti and the DomRep. I like it there. But what with the raining, the hills are eroding fast. There are hundreds missing and presumed killed in the landslides.

It has been raining here too by the Potomac, raining since last night, still thundering in the morning. It is unusual for that level of energy to continue overnight. But this is the weather system that ravaged the Heartland from Central Michigan down to Missouri, and apparently it has soaked the people of the Caribbean as well.

It is worse in Haiti, where all the brush and cover has been slashed to make charcoal for cooking. It is all just mud, since there is nothing to hold the dirt in place. It is true that poor places have bigger disasters than rich places. We have the floods and we have the locusts visiting us between their decades-long slumber.

There are also some very determined people who would like to turn around the paradigm of the poor suffering the most. They would like to bring a third horseman to us, with the hope that if they are successful the Fourth will join of his own accord. Not that bad guys haven't investigated the food chain, too.

I have the oddest feeling at the moment- it is a sort of foreboding combined with resignation. I remember feeling the ominous presence of something that was not right in the summer of 2001.

I thought something awful was going to happen, all the signs were there, and no one seemed to be doing anything about it. I felt like I wanted to scream sometimes, and then August came and the bureaucrats of the capital went on vacation just like normal.

Of course, I was going through a divorce then, and the urge to scream in terror was perfectly understandable. The feeling I have now is different. There is foreboding, to be sure, but with it is a certain resignation.

The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI are going to have a press conference today to talk about the foreboding they share with me. They cannot point to anything specific. There is no smoking gun, and no amount of duress has provided the critical clue to the plot that is unfolding as I write this, and as we prepare for the first major holiday of the happy season.

I have been saying for a while, and with greater certainty since the Madrid bombings, that the bad guys are going to try to smack us before the election this fall. But I don't know anything special, not any more, and all I can issue is the same sort of low-level alert that Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller are going to later today.

They are not even going to raise the alert condition. I have been through that drill in three of the Cabinet Departments since the airliners began crashing. We cannot sustain that, not for the months of vigilance that are going to be required.

I take a certain cold comfort in the fact that there are high-profile targets other than those in this self-important little town on the broad river. The G-8 conference in Georgia is one, and the Center for Disease Control is located there, too. They have a Level IV bio facility and are next to a big city. There are the two political conventions, and I think the election itself is the pivot point for the timing.

I don't think it will be early in the summer, probably within a week of the polling would be optimal to have the sort of Spanish effect the bad guys expect to pull off.

The kicker is if the low-level alert rolls someone up, and the leaders of the terror cells that are already here feel they must act ASAP. We are unlikely to know of that, but if there is a sudden triumphant press conference in Washington, start looking over your shoulder.

It could cause a "use it or lose it" scenario like the aftermath of the arrests that foiled the plot to attack the Intelligence and Security HQ in Amman, Jordan, last month.

Associated cell members in Damascus knew they were going to be compromised once the Jordanians finished torturing the guys they captured, so they initiated their attack in Syria. Ready or not, here they come.

Both of those plots featured some chemical substances that were to be spread by the blast of the truck bomb. I don't know if these were intended as trial runs or not. The Madrid bombing was an evolutionary advance in tactics, taking the multi-access attack to a new level.

So, the Feds and I are in agreement and they have assigned a special task force and life will probably look a lot like the TV show "24" this summer. I just wish there was someone like Keifer Sutherland on the case. We shall see what is going to go down.

So long as the angry men who are studious shaving and keeping their haircut don't have the wildcard actual warhead from the old Soviet inventory, we will get through this just fine.

But who knows. I will make the necessary preparations. I have enough canned goods to get by for a while, though I need to remember to lay in some water and keep the vehicles fully-fueled. I work downtown and have, on some level, to be prepared for that contingency, too.

I have a sensible pair of shoes under my desk in case I have to walk out, and we have plenty of bottled water in case we have to stay. That is life in the big city.

Which is sort of ironic. I bought a Mercedes 350SL as a "bridge" car to get through the summer, while my boys are home from college. My new office is located in a sparkling new facility recently completed behind what had been the Greyhound Terminal downtown, a marvelous 1940 building with a heroic art-deco mullet that juts proudly from the graceful curved roofline. I'm glad they saved it, and the history it represents. They are doing a nice job re-building the capital city after the decades of decay.

You would be proud to see all the activity. There is a lot of confidence in town, despite the low level alert.

But working as I do for a successor company to AT&T, I can honestly say that I am entering the middle of my sixth decade on the planet in style: I get up too early in the morning, and then drive my 30 year old car to the Bus Station to work for the Phone Company.

Does life get any better?