A big mall was evacuated today in Belgrade because of a alert that it will be attacked later, I think that in Russia this sort of thing was happening the entire year, a bunch of subway stations, malls and so on were said to be a target of a attack that will happen and so on.
Has there ever been a single case of this warning call that was actually real and where there were found explosives? It simply defies logic that a anonymous caller (presumably terrorist), would call police to notify them that they should basically evacuate the building, disarm the explosives and track him down via his phone.
If someone would do such an attack, why would he possibly want to tell anyone about that, let alone the police? He’d do his best to hide the explosives so that no one would discover them. If however a passer-by spotted a suspicious case or something, he wouldn’t call from a anonymous number.
I understand that you can’t risk fatalities and have to evacuate this large buildings, but it’s still crazy to think that a simple “prank” call can disrupt the function of a entire mall, train system, even a airport, which could cost several tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages due to delays.
Some, but not all, of the IRA bombings during the Troubles were preceded by warnings. IIRC, there was a pre-arranged code to be used by the bombers and the newspapers to ensure that these warnings were for real bombings.
The most famous one being the Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. One news photographer was killed after getting too close but there probably would have been at least hundreds of deaths.
The Mad Bomber in NYC in the 40s and 50s sent many warnings, but didn’t give specific locations. Interestingly, one of his bombs was placed and detonated in the Port Authority Bus Terminal where yesterday’s bombing took place.
There was a warning from the Zionist underground before the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in the 40s. The hotel was contacted but not the authorities, and the warning was considered a prank and ignored. Sometimes they aren’t pranks.
Another case of warning being ignored happened in August of 2001 when George W. Bush ignored a warning that Al Qaeda was going to use airplanes to attack the United States. I guess he didn’t want to disrupt traffic at the malls.
It still caused terror, because it sends a message that they can continue to do this and not warn whenever they want. I’m not sure of the motivation for doing it this way but I wonder if they worried about turning off their monetary backers if they had been too bloodthirsty.
I don’t know that it’s ever happened, but I can see a case where someone who knows about the attack but isn’t directly involved and doesn’t want to run afoul of the attacker or his group, might call in a tip about the plans. I could see where they could be wrong too.
I could see that a terrorist wants to cause damage but not kill people. After all, what good does it do to Al Qaeda to kill people? For that matter, what good does it do the US when a drone attack kills civilians. In each case, yes it spreads fear but certainly doesn’t incline people to support them.
The Weatherman Underground would precede bombings with communiques explaining the rationale behind the attacks and evacuation warnings. The WU was not, however, trying to incite public terror as much as it was lashing out at the US government and financial support and attempting to generate negative public sentiment toward the same.
Wouldn’t really consider that one, I doubt that a majority of people outside US actually consider the official story as genuine, as “edgy” as it may sound, it is just too convenient of an excuse to implement some actions later on. The Moscow apartment bombings several days before the second Chechen war are also considered controversial and if you said that to Russian media, you would be considered a crazy tinfoil hat person, just like with the 911 in USA. The Markale and Racak cases were proven to be hoaxes (first one even in Hague I think), but both were used as a pretext for military actions, let’s not even mention the WMD’s, Tonkin incident,etc.
Your thread title talks about “terror alerts”, but you seem to be assuming that these alerts only arise from deliberate warning calls to the authorities. There are surely other ways to obtain intelligence about upcoming attacks, the counterterrorism agencies are (I hope) not just sitting around waiting for a call.
Subscribed. As a mostly lurker I love when threads start off with a reasonable OP and then take this kind of turn.
In any case, 9/11 is a bad example. The OP uses the term “terror alert” in the subject, in which case the answer is yes, intelligence services get information about impending attacks all the time and act on them. However, in his post, it’s clear he’s talking about things like bomb threats phoned in by the perpetrators themselves. I am unaware of any claims that Al-Qaeda tried to warn anyone about the 9/11 attacks before carrying them out.
The IRA considered themselves to be at war with the United Kingdom and their rules of engagement included the concept of a “legitimate target” (this was fairly broadly defined to include military, politicians, royalty, police officers, prison officers and other agents of the state as well as civilians who were seen as collaborators). At least in theory, they were not trying to kill random civilians, who were not considered legitimate targets, and took some steps to avoid harming them. In reality, of course, random civilians were often killed or injured, either because the warnings were lacking, were inaccurate or did not allow sufficient time for evacuation, or were deliberately intended to lead the police and army bomb-disposal into a trap, or because the killers really just didn’t give a shit. But the distinction existed, at least in principle.