As anyone who knows me knows, I have, since 9-11, taken the threat of terrorism seriously. Perhaps too seriously, even, making me the object of some amusement among my more cynical -- or less nervous -- friends. And I'm certainly willing to poke fun at the situation myself, as I did in this 2003 piece, "Homeland Security is for Girls".
Still, when the nation went on Orange Alert in early 2003, I recalled President Bush's warning that the smoking gun in Iraq could be "a mushroom cloud" and I quietly assessed my winter coats for which would be likeliest to deflect beta particles (answer: the three-quarter length leather one). And I packed my “go-bag,” as prescribed: Bible, money, medicine, change of clothing -- the works. If Tom Ridge wanted a poster-girl for Domestic Preparedness, he wouldn't have needed to look any further than me. Be ready, he said. I was ready.
There was even one evening during the great plastic sheeting panic of February 2003 when -- I admit it -- I actually duct-taped my windows.
But in the year and a half since then I have drunk all the water in my ready-room. I have spent the cash in my go-bag on cab-fare and sundries. My passport has migrated back out of the go-bag in the closet and into a drawer after returning from a visit to England. I used the tiny flask of brandy I'd stashed away in the event of an emergency to instead flavor a clafouti. And today, I don't worry about Orange Alerts anymore, even if I should, because -- like the boy who cried wolf -- so many of Tom Ridge's alerts and the president's proclamations have turned out to be based on bad intelligence.
The latest alert came on Sunday. Back to Orange, are we? No problem, I said to myself. Within the week this information will be revealed to be bogus or somehow wildly misinterpreted.
And so it was. According to today's Washington Post:
Most of the al-Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued since then, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday.
More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? ... I still don't know that."
I think my bottle of Cipro from the anthrax panic of 2001 has finally expired, too. Two years ago, I might have finagled for a new one. Today, I'm just going to throw it in the trash.
As with my worries, so widely shared by women across the land that a whole new poll-able demographic category, "security moms," was created, I suspect that my learned distrust of the Department of Homeland security is also just an instantiation of something larger. Reuters has been running with the story “Ridge Defends Three-Year-Old Terror Alert”, suggesting it's not just me that's starting to think poorly of Ridge and his minions: “Jorge Diaz, a Times Square building safety worker, suggested the government was overcompensating for failing to point out that the nation might be attacked three years ago. ‘At a certain point it becomes exaggerated,' Diaz said.”
As in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, "Nobody believes a liar...even when he is telling the truth."
That's a terrible position for the Department of Homeland Security to be in. Like the president, the department has a developing credibility problem. And given its important role in protecting the public, that's a potentially deadly thing.
Garance Franke-Ruta is a Prospect senior editor.
