Now that just makes me want to launch a guerilla art campaign in Boston. Lite Brites on every corner! Who’s with me?
No, no it doesn’t. It ends up with a road being closed for an hour while police investigate, and the police, coming to the conclusion that this was not a bomb and was not intended to look like a bomb, collectively shrug their shoulders. The Mayor does so as well.
Even you agree that the charges are unlikely to stick. If they were not bomb hoaxers, how does the mayor end up “steaming and raging”? What exactly is he raging about?
If they had done as RogueRacer had reccommended, and stopped as soon as proper procedure had been followed, and it became clear that this was not a bomb and was not intended to be a bomb, then we would not be sitting here laughing our collective asses off at Boston.
You say that this is a “warning shot”. Warning what? A warning not to put up things that don’t look like bombs? You agree that charges are unlikely to stick. Why? If I placed an item that was a mockup of a stick of dynamite in the middle of Times Square, you can be sure as hell I’d get charged for a bomb hoax. If the item looks like a bomb, I could hardly argue that I didn’t intend or expect people to fear that it was a bomb.
So what kind of “warning shot” are you talking about? A warning not to do anything “suspicious”, or even “remotely suspicious” (seeing as the lite-brite barely even registered in other cities, and was unremarkable in Boston itself for at least 2 weeks), or you may get thrown in jail on terrorism charges?
Incredible fear. After 9/11, no American city has been bombed, and yet London, which has been bombed and has had at least two legitimate bomb plots thwarted since, reacted more sensibly, as the articles above have shown.
Why? Is this fear rational? As someone has said, at what point do we stop shutting down the city on the account of unwarranted bomb scares? We already have testimony of a bomb disposal expert who said that >20% would have ripped it off on sight, and that that figure was probably on the low side. On what basis is the government deciding to press charges, and on what basis is the government deciding to shut down the city? Is this rational?
The people in charge appear (to me) to have lost their collective minds.
Things like: it wasn’t just one suspicious device, and the first items found weren’t all this cartoon thing; there were two (dud) pipe bombs found at a major hospital. The city budget doesn’t need hits like this, even at the level of what any of you would concede was an appropriate reaction, nor do area businesses and commuters need the disruption caused by such appropriate reaction.
On a personal level, the mayor mentioned in a television interview that recently another bomb scare had turned out to be real, and that a young police officer had been killed by the bomb. An officer he knew. Mumbles Menino can be criticized for a lot of things, but indifference to such personal tragedies isn’t one of them.
All due respect ETF, but there’s a big difference between a pipe bomb and a lite-brite. If trained bomb squad officers aren’t capable of distinguishing the two, perhaps they should be re-tasked to traffic duty.
That’s a tough one to answer really. That’s kind of why I’ve been repeating the “follow procedures” line. Every bomb disposal unit will have their own procedures based on their experience, expertise, and equipment.
When I first got into EOD, we would have checked it out wearing nothing more than our BDUs. As time went on, we started getting directives about wearing helmets and flak jackets. When I was getting out, we had just gotten our first bomb suit. Word was that they were trying to select a robot for us. I never saw the robot in person, nor do I know if it was ever actually purchased. Feelings were mixed on the robot. Most thought it was a good idea, but not all liked the one that was selected. The bomb suit that we had was pretty universally hated. It was very heavy. It had a shield in the front that was attached at the bottom by sliding it into a big pocket in the suit. The top was attached by velcro. Unfortunately, this shield (also heavy) had a nasty habit of falling out whenever you bent over. That was a poor characteristic considering the object that we were bending over was most likely explosive.
If I had to guess I would say that for something stuck up on a bridge, the team leader would have violated SOP and checked it out without the suit and risked an ass reaming later. We (EOD) were given a quite a bit of latitude for free thinking for a military unit, something my commander (ex-infantry) often lamented. An item on the ground, who knows? I guess it would depend on how serious the team leader was taking things. It seems clear that in the Boston case that someone, somewhere decided to go with a full blown bomb threat.
I wouldn’t think so. I would think that a terrorist would want a bomb to detonate during rush hour to create the most chaos. So, plant it at night and blow it the next morning. A good use for a photocell this time of year.
Yes, you would wonder why it was there. I mentioned before that you would want the local PD to try to find any connections (people who had seen it before, how long it had been there, did the character mean anything?). I think the fact that they found more and more of these Lite Brites worked against them. It appears that no determination had been made on the first when they got reports of more and more of them. That probably led them to suspect the worst and be more careful with the first.
I’m not so sure of that, but if nothing else, we’re having a very polite disagreement by Pit standards!
wolf_meister, anything is certainly possible, but I tend to agree more with the Rube Goldberg thing mentioned by Dag Otto. Your scenario seems more like something from a Die Hard movie (truly no offense intended). If anything due to the size of the objects, I think the worry would be that these were some kind of an anti-personnel device, but then why put them high on walls and bridges?
I just want to make sure everyone remembers my qualifying statements in my first post. It’s been a long time since I served in the Army or did any bomb disposal related work. I hope I’ve given a little insight and a relevant take on the situation, but I fully admit that I could be off base compared to current operating procedures. I’m sure that 9/11 caused all the agencies to be more uptight in how they deal with possibly threats. I never worked in the post-9/11 era, YMMV, etc., etc.
But how do you distinguish between suspicious devices and innocent ones? We have seen shoe bombs, and bombs in radios and backpacks, so are you suggesting we should mount the same response whenever these items are seen in Boston, or just the things that have wires and batteries? The point is, when people say, “But it looked suspicious!”, it could apply to anything; there is no way to identify a bomb by its external appearance. Bombs are not more likely to have wires and batteries showing, and by experience it is arguable they are less likely to appear that way. It is a false sense of security to believe we are doing the right thing by reacting this way, when we ignore hundreds of items scattered around the city that are just as likely to be bombs as something with wires and batteries. That is why this reaction is futile, and why the Boston police look foolish, and feel like they have to blame someone.
That’s not the point I was making, though. It’s that, in the first hours of this kerfluffle, the bomb squad was stretched out all over the place, dealing with more than one kind of suspicious object, in more than one area, all of which at that point were being found at or on critical infrastructure. It’s easy to look back with hindsight and say they should have figured it all out right away, but at the time things were a lot less clear. You also have to take into consideration that the mayor was getting secondhand reports of all this, with no one early on being able to confirm what the hell was really happening.
I think RogueRacer’s latest post helps to explain why the first few hours of this event got everyone so worked up. Did the authorities handle things well as the day wore on and more information trickled in? That’s certainly open to debate. Was there overreaction after it became clear what was going on? You can certainly make the case for it. I’m just commenting on points that I believe help to explain why Menino blew up.
Fear Itself, I think the above comments respond to your post too. We’re talking about different aspects at this point, it seems to me. I’m not arguing for the correctness of the response; I’m just saying what I think motivated Menino’s reaction. And I could be completely out in left field on that.
I’d like to thank you for your perspective. It’s been very helpful in clarifying for me what must have, should have, ought to have, likely happened through the whole thing. Taking that into consideration has modified my initial assessment of events.
And perhaps, as a random person in Fun Junction, California, you should not presume to know more than the Boston bomb squad about something they saw and you didn’t.
I don’t know where you live, but around here, if you close a major highway and subway line during rush hour, you make tens of thousands of people late for wherever they’re going. I can’t think of a mayor anywhere who would just shrug his shoulders at that, and go, “Oh, well.”
At least one of those things was carried off in a paper bag.
You still have yet to explain why the NINE other big cities that had these things strewn all over their infrastructure, only Boston reacted like that.
Seattle especially had a “strange device” reported by a transit worker on a railroad bridge, and when they investigated it, totally dismissed it.
Was it the simple volume of 911 calls? If so, how did that prevent any one of the “experts” on any of the scenes from reacting the same way the Seattle authorities did? Why did Boston alone panic and then start throwing around felony charges (and to reiterate, charging only these guys, and not the guy who BUILT AND PLANTED A DEVICE THAT ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE AND WAS MEANT TO BE TAKEN FOR A BOMB)?
Perhaps these other cities were wise enough to include personnel from Fun Junction on their bomb squads?
Well, I can’t believe I’m defending Boston here, but it may have been in part two pipe bombs that were also found that confused the issue.
Different M.O., and simple chance. Here’s an article on the subject.
And that’s perfectly understandable. However, when you flat out lie to the national media and paint the situtuation as a “bomb hoax”, then you’re going to get a ton of well-deserved flack for it.
The advertisements don’t look anything like pipe bombs, though. And, again, the guy that DID plant the pipe bombs hasn’t been charged, while the two guys who placed the harmless advertisements HAVE.
The King County Sherrif in Seattle mentioned that a transit worker found one of these on a commuter railway trestle, and yet the authorities there dismissed it as harmless.
And see Lute Skywatcher’s links…all the cities these were placed in were placed in the same types of locations as in Boston.
Boston is still the only city that reacted the way they did.
Lute, you missed the critical point in your last cite: “Once authorities were alerted…” And how is what a train crew in Yakima does at all relevant? The situation could obviously be different in a million ways. And I doubt the Boston bomb squad’s first thought in any given emergency is to say, “Hey, let’s call the Yakima Department of Public Works and see what they think!”
Doesn’t matter. When there has already been one bomb scare, finding more of them will just escalate the panic.