American Politics Journal

Seagulls
Terrorists want us to say "flock it" and run away
By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Oct. 7, 2001 -- MT. SHASTA, CALIF. (APJP) -- I knew a guy once who made a living scaring the shit out of seagulls.

I didn't have any particular moral reservations about this, since I tended to regard seagulls as nothing more than rats with wings.

And in this case, the guy was doing it in order to prevent people from being put at risk of being killed.

You see, this was at an airport, which was situated on what had once been a salt marsh, less than a quarter mile from the ocean. And, runways and 737s and strobing runway lights notwithstanding, the birds thought it was a dandy place to hang out.

Which they did. In the hundreds of thousands.

Of course, being birds, noise -- like the noise of a 737 taking off -- would disturb them and, in the hundreds of thousands, they would take off, often directly in the path of the accelerating jet.

The danger was evident enough that the airport hired a guy to be a human scarecrow. To this end, he would drive around on the taxiways and along side the runways in a car that was outfitted with a large pair of loudspeakers on the roof. He had a tape deck hooked up to the loudspeakers, and in the tape deck was a recording of seagulls making distress calls.

It worked. He would crank it up to eight, fire up the tape, and watch the birds explode into the air. Most would go wheeling out over the ocean, with a small percentage going to ground inland, home of the tastiest city dump on the entire coast. The area would be free of seagulls for up to several hours.

But after a few days of steady use of this ploy, it stopped working. He would put on "Fugue of Seagull Being Hammered in A minor" and the birds would, at most, give him a vaguely interested look before returning to the serious business of becoming one with the intakes on United Flight 903.

My buddy took the weekend off -- presumably seagulls are less inclined to murder airplanes on weekends -- and when he came back on Monday morning, he drove out, and to his delight, discovered it was working effectively again.

But by mid afternoon, the birds were ignoring him.

My friend was no dummy. He realized that if he played it constantly, the birds quickly became accustomed to it, and would blow it off. It was when they were relaxed and not ready for the next blast that it would cause them to spook and fly away.

This was a smallish airport, with perhaps a dozen large jets taking off per day, and my friend learned that if he sounded the seagull alarm along the runway the jet would be landing on or taking off from about twenty minutes before the event, the area would stay pretty much free of seagulls. The vagaries of airline take off and departures kept the whole thing pretty much random, not that seagulls are all that well equipped for picking up on schedule patterns. Like I said, rats with wings. My friend hit on a basic premise of guerrilla and terrorist assault. Keep it erratic. Keep it intermittent. Give the adversary time to settle down and recover. Then hit him again.

It works on Americans just as it works on seagulls, although Americans are smarter and smell better.

On September 12th, I predicted that we would not see any more terror attacks for a while, and that's been the case.

But it's been over three weeks now, and most people have assimilated the attacks, and gone on with their lives. War fever has subsided, and public interest in the matter is beginning to subside. Americans have figuratively stopped circling in the air and have settled back down in their roosts alongside the runways.

There might have been a terror attack overseas the other day. A Russian plane, leaving Israel for Siberia, went down in the Black Sea. Our government promptly pronounced that the plane was brought down by an errant SAM, fired by the Ukraine military in a training exercise -- but not only do the Ukrainians vociferously deny this, but the Russians, who designed the SAMs that the Ukrainians use, note that they couldn't possibly take down a passenger jet cruising at an altitude of 33,000 feet.

Assume that our government is lying to us about that. A late report this evening indicates that recovered portions of the fuselage were riddled with bullet holes. Barring the outside chance that Superman was flying alongside the plane and pumping it full of lead, we have to assume that the evidence suggests that someone figured out how to get a gun on board. In ISRAEL.

We also have to assume the terrorists are cycling up to another hit.

There was a disturbing report on the CNN site posted October 5th. According to the report, authorities were disturbed by patterns that were emerging from intelligence being gleaned from the terrorist network. The traffic and message tones are falling into the same patterns that were observed in the week prior to September 11th, and a couple of officials told CNN that it was their strong feeling that something big was in the works.

It won't be commercial jets flying into notable landmark structures this time. It will be something very different. We aren't seagulls, and won't start the same way to the same stimulus.

My buddy Grunt and I used to sit around swilling beers and talking about different entertaining ways of smashing the system. This was during the early seventies, when swilling beers and talking about smashing the system was just the sort of thing guys with too much time on their hands did. We didn't have any real interest in smashing the system -- although we dreamed of destroying the Nixon presidency. But the idea of monkeywrenching fascinated the hell out of us. We had read Edward Abbey and John Brunner, and spent hours figuring out ways a couple of guys with nasty imaginations and access to a full chemical lab and machine shop could really screw things up. We came up with dozens of ways, some at least as destructive as September 11th.

So with that in my background, I stopped to ask myself, "If I was a terrorist, intent on causing mass confusion rather than mass destruction, what would I do next?"

We live in a very complex and sophisticated society, and the more complex and sophisticated something is, the easier it is to find critical vulnerabilities. It didn't take long to come up with the realization that there really is no way to safeguard against terrorism. There are just too many ways in which terrorists can strike. A propane truck, rigged to blow, parked in a stadium parking lot in a small town just after the Homecoming game ends. Plastique under a bridge at rush hour, not in an obvious place like New York or San Francisco, but where nobody would be really watching for something like that -- Pittsburgh or Portland, Oregon, maybe. Ice cream truck dispensing treats laced with cyanide.

The possibilities are endless -- the ones above are all scenarios I've seen mentioned elsewhere. There are others I thought of that I really don't feel comfortable mentioning. I'm not worried about the authorities: I just don't want to give the damned TERRORISTS any ideas!

So, much as I hate to say it, I fully expect that at some point in the near future, this horror is going to come back into our lives, and will remain, on an intermittent and random basis, for the foreseeable future. It won't be as gaudy as the World Trade Center, but it will be vicious, horrible, and carefully calculated to create the maximum in fear, anger, and hatred.

They can't destroy us. But they think they can make us destroy ourselves.

Whether they're right or not is up to us.

Hopefully, we'll catch Osama bin Laden, and it looks like the allies are doing all the right things to bring about the collapse of the Taliban and make bin Laden's life that much more difficult.

But bin Laden is just one man.

There are plenty of people who, rightly or wrongly, hate us, and -- wrongly -- seek to terrorize us.

They aren't interested in just disturbing us long enough so a plane can take off safely. They know they will succeed in terrorizing us if they can make us destroy our freedoms and our ability to live our lives unafraid.

Whether they succeed or not is up to us.

Personally, I'm betting on us.

We aren't seagulls, you see.