Posted on 10/11/2001 1:49:43 PM PDT by be-baw
I work in a power plant in Michigan. Last Friday afternoon, three young middle eastern-looking men showed up in the plant carrying cameras. They asked for a tour so they can take pictures for a photo-journalism college class they were taking. My boss, the plant director, talked with them, got the name of their professor and turned them away. Having noticed the discussion I talked with my boss afterwards. I asked them if he thought that was peculiar. He said yes. I asked him if he was going to call the police. He didn’t answer. He just turned around and walked away.
This afternoon I noticed on Free Republic a post about three Pakistani men who were discovered inside of a water treatment in Hudson, New York. The similarity of that incident to the one in my plant seemed like it was far beyond coincidental. I called my boss (I’m off today), and told him about it. He told me he had contacted the professor of the three students. The professor told him he thought he knew who those three students were, but that they had had no specific assignment to try to get pictures of our plant. My boss told me he would follow up, without being specific how he planned to it.
Well, I decided I wanted to know for sure that the proper people were being notified, so after contemplating for a couple of hours, I decided to call the FBI. The office listed in my phone directory is in Detroit. I called and was connected to the command center. The gentleman I spoke with would not give me his name. I started out by telling him that I work in a power plant and three students showed up wanting to take pictures. “Oh yeah,” he said,”we’re getting a lot of that.” “What do you make of it,” I asked. “We don’t know what to make of it,” he said.
This guy did not seem interested in hearing about it. I say this because he did not ask me any questions, as I expected he would. Finally, I asked him, “Well, don’t you want to know more about it?” “Sure,” he said, “go ahead.” So I explained the rest to him. I asked what he thinks we should do. He said if it happens again, ask them for picture identification.
I find this rather disturbing. It sounds as if this is happening all over the country, yet those who have a responsibility to investigate don’t seem to want to pursue it. One would think, at the very least, warnings out to be going out to utilities to beware of swarthy men carrying cameras…
I posited that it could just be the work of my own hightened paranoia. But who knows?
My favorite, so far, is this one:
A suspicious librarian in Canton alerted authorities who called in the FBI after the man visited the library as many as five or six times and asked for detailed maps of Canton's water system and books concerning microbiology and animal borne diseases according to Friday's Akron Beacon Journal.Ohio Site of New FBI Terrorist Probe
Among the things the man sought were maps of waterlines running under Interstate 77 to Canton's Mercy Medical Center, the librarian told the Beacon Journal, which added that the water main, coincidentally, broke a few weeks ago.
``The questions we normally get from (foreigners) are about green cards or learning English,'' the librarian told the Beacon Journal. ``Usually people don't come in asking about water maps.''
The man said he had worked in a medical lab in Egypt and had been able to identify parasites in people that couldn't be found by others.
The librarian told the newspaper about his first meeting with the man who the FBI refuses to identify by name. ``It was a long discussion,'' the librarian said. ``Eventually, I got the word `parasites' out of him. He was very interested in parasites that travel from animals to people.
What are we to make of something like this? (And remember the guy asking questions about crop dusting planes? Or the guy who asked a flight instructor if he could just learn how to turn a plane...)
I mean, many of these terrorists turn out to be wiz kids. Often they're the sons of diplomats who've had $$ educations. Sometimes they even turn out to be former US special forces who've gone turncoat (I saw that one on CNN the other night). Would any such person do some of the things these people are apparently doing?
On the other hand, don't some of these incidents sound remarkably like many of the "Lee Harvey Oswald" incidents that occurred (or, I suppose, "occurred") prior to JFK? (The rifle range, the street pamphlets, the Russian embassy...)
Mark W.
Keep that place safe, I grew up just a few miles from there and spent many happy weekends with the boy scouts camping in the local hills.
That sums up the Situation pretty well right now. Many people really aren't getting it. There seems to be no comprehension of the seriousness of the Situation, or its potential extent for further death, destruction and damage.
The President said we are "at war." Whether a war is Declared or not, we must take President Bush seriously when he said we are "at war." In war the enemy gathers intelligence, creates diversions, and counterattacks. In this new asymetrical warfare, the distinction between citizen and soldier is beginning to blur.
My guess is that those "students" taking photos of power plants, dams, factories, government buildings and what not are actively involved in an intelligence-gathering operation, and must be assumed to be doing so. (In War, there's really no such thing as "innocent until proven guilty," which was WHY the Founders put into the Constitution the provision for suspending Habeas Corpus during wartime emergencies.)
Yes, during and after the Carter Administration, I began to hear about this type of thing commonly when I was a reporter. The basic problems now seems to be that all FBI agents today are usually busy all the time investigating “more important” leads regarding all sorts of crimes and investigations. Based on what I’ve read in the past, apparent back in the old days, when J. Edgar Hoover was in control of the FBI, he had a large list of regular informants (maybe thousands of them) that helped FBI agents conduct investigations and who helped the agents keep an eye on all sorts of criminals, commies, KKK groups, black power groups, and potential law-breakers. But after the Church Committee hearings of 1976 and especially during the Carter Administration, the liberal politicians and media kept insisting that the FBI not use citizens to spy on Americans, and so the old informant system was cut back quite a lot, especially since Hoover finally died. That means the FBI is now without much detailed intelligence concerning criminal and terrorists organizations, and agents themselves have to conduct more investigations personally, since they don’t have as many informants now as they had back in the past. So when a big event takes place, like the OKC bombing and the New York thing, the Director has to suddenly pull hundreds or even thousands of agents off of other investigations and put them on the new emergency investigations, so they are constantly understaffed.
In the mean time, there are so many alerts, tips, and threats being phoned into FBI offices right now, the agents just don’t have time to investigate all of them. I think the agents who are called should at least ask each caller a few questions, but in this more liberal era, they often don’t do that. In the old days, just about everyone who called in with a tip was visited by agents and was asked to become some type of informant, even if it was just a simple request such as to keep on the lookout for middle-eastern men snooping around your power plant. If this were 1969, you would be visited by an agent who would ask you to keep on the lookout for any unusual situations at your power plant, and he might ask you to take pictures of any unusual visitors, as well as get their names, addresses, and phone numbers. But this is not 1969, Hoover is dead, and we’ve had too many liberal Presidents and Congressmen in power since 1969.
If your boss won't listen to you go above him. If the person at the FBI doesn't sit up and notice, ask for his superior. Or call your local police department. Tell them, then call your local newspaper and speak to the political editor. Local TV news is good. There's pictures in this story. Someone will hear you.
If your boss won't listen to you go above him. If the person at the FBI doesn't sit up and notice, ask for his superior. Or call your local police department. Tell them, then call your local newspaper and speak to the political editor. Local TV news is good. There's pictures in this story. Someone will hear you.
Get yourself a little portable pocket camera or disposable camera and carry it all the time. If you see any of them taking pictures, go up and take pictures of them and let them know you are taking pictures of them.
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