Friday, March 14, 2008

New Terrorist Threat--Root Vegetables

A raw turnip in a gift bag led to a bomb scare at an Indiana law firm. The police bomb squad used a robot to move the gift bag to a parking lot and then unsuccessfully tried to detonate it before discovering the vegetable.

I guess I could understand someone panicking over a suspicious package in the weeks following 9/11.

But it's 2008. Come on people. Get a grip for crying out loud.

Whatever happened to using a trained explosives dog and handler to first assess the threat? Nah. That would be too easy, too "pre-9/11". Plus I suspect the cops were happy to have an opportunity to play with their high-tech bomb robot, which "justifies" this expense.

And what about the cost to taxpayers for the police response to these persistent false alarms? So Chicken Little gets a "suspicioius" package and instead of just opening it up he calls the cops. The cops come, evacuate the building and cordon off the parking lot. Then they send in a robot to retrieve the package and try to blow it up.

Shouldn't the Chicken Littles among us start paying for these false alarms?

On second thought, the terroristic turnip was sent to a law firm, so perhaps the attorney's guilty conscience went on overdrive, or perhaps his fears weren't entirely unfounded.

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