{"id":441,"date":"2004-01-08T01:37:50","date_gmt":"2004-01-08T06:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2004\/01\/not_enough_terror_hype\/"},"modified":"2004-01-08T01:37:50","modified_gmt":"2004-01-08T06:37:50","slug":"not_enough_terror_hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2004\/01\/not_enough_terror_hype\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Enough Terror Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got so caught up with the Second Coming<\/a> that I missed this nugget<\/a> in yesterday’s Washington Post<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The new details of the government’s search for a dirty bomb help explain why officials have used dire terms to describe the reasons for the nation’s fifth “code orange” alert, issued on Dec. 21 by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. U.S. officials said they remain worried today — in many cases, more concerned than much of the American public realizes — that their countermeasures would fall short.
\n“Government officials are surprised that people [in the United States] aren’t more hyped about all this,” said one source familiar with counterterrorism preparations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think this is the media’s fault. They haven’t devoted nearly enough coverage to the terrorism threat. [\/sarcasm]
\nSeriously, what do they expect people to be doing? Dashing about in flak jackets?
\nPerhaps people have lost their hype because they’ve concluded the government is rather clueless in assessing danger, with good reason:<\/p>\n

Officials said intelligence can be misleading, and some in law enforcement acknowledged that there is no way to know the actual urgency of the threats. Officials said one of their key challenges is determining whether al Qaeda is planting provocative but false clues as a diversion or as deliberate disinformation to test the U.S. response. Some foreign governments have voiced concerns that the United States is overreacting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Authorities done a great job in passing along that confusion to the public. Be it the revolving color wheel, the commands to shop boldly amongst the sleeper cells, the official pronouncements on dirty bombs, duct tape, scuba divers, almanacs, and what not. It’s all a sordid mess. Should we be surprised if people are tuning things out?
\nIf government officials want the public to be concerned about a specific threat, such as a dirty bomb, they should tell us to look out for a dirty bomb. But they can’t just floating out these vague warnings or a continuously changing threat-flavor-of-the-week and expect people to remain in a perpetually-stoked state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got so caught up with the Second Coming that I missed this nugget in yesterday’s Washington Post: The new details of the government’s search for a dirty bomb help explain why officials have used dire terms to describe the reasons for the nation’s fifth “code orange” alert, issued on Dec. 21 by Homeland Security […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}