Defused Times Square bomb Governor: “It’s terrorism”

NEW YORK  – The face of the man “white and forty years old” who wanted to send to Hell Times Square is imprinted in one of the videos that the police compiled with a single hope: that the attack on Saturday night is really that ” isolated blow “that National Security Minister Janet Napolitano was quick to define. An SUV stuffed with explosives didn’t blow up “just because the mechanism didn’t work”. The technique seems the same failed in London three years ago: two car bombs to make a massacre. An Islamist site has already claimed the action: the Taliban of Pakistan wanted to avenge the killing a few weeks ago of the head of Al Qaeda Al Masri “and other Muslim martyrs”. But the head of the New York Police Department, Raymond Kelly, says that there is no evidence of the claim and that it cannot be excluded that the “amateur” car bomb – definition by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg – has the signature of that internal terrorism on which a few days ago it had raised the alarm ‘former president Bill Clinton: the same anti-government hatred – now fueled by anti-Obama extreme right-wing campaigns – that 15 years ago led Tim McVeigh to plant the Oklahoma City bomb that killed 168 people.

The now sought man would have pulled a black shirt off Times Square and escaped with the red shirt he was wearing. A tourist would have resumed the suspicion and his images are added to those of at least 30 of the 80 surveillance cameras scattered in the area. The police also know the identity of the owner of the SUV. The White House confirms that the investigations of this “serious incident” go in all directions.

Barack Obama praises those who helped discover the bomb and promises: “Justice will be done”. Meanwhile, he canceled the trip he had planned in New Jersey on Wednesday. From the New York Post to the CNN there is already talk of “Scare Times”: scare means fear and alarms multiply. Saturday night scared on the Chicago-Philadelphia flight for a “suspicious message” found on board. Sunday afternoon fear during the Pittsburgh Marathon for a bomb that is not there. On the SUV there would also be the bomber’s fingerprints and the police have already gone back to the car repair shop in Connecticut where an old Ford license plate stuck to the Pathfinder would have been stolen. An anonymous phone call at around 4 am announced that there would be “a big explosion” and that the car bomb was just a trap.

Instead that car could really make a massacre: three propane tanks, like those used for the grill, two gallons of diesel, fireworks, a couple of wires and two yellow alarm clocks used as timers. Eight bags with suspicious dust in a gun case. This is why the police – who had previously said that the car bomb would have caused “a fireball splitting in two” – now say that “the explosion could have been more lethal: a catastrophe that we cannot even define”. Nine years after September 11th.

It’s 6.28 on a Saturday night when a camera takes a Nissan Pathfinder, take 45th street towards Eighth Avenue. The dark SUV is parked at the intersection with Seventh Avenue with the four arrows and the engine running. A tourist sees a man walking away. Lance Orton, a peddler of t-shirts, sees smoke coming out of the car parked in front of theaters that are filled with spectators. There they give “Next To Fall” and “The Lion King”. Nearby is the headquarters of Viacom that produces “South Park”, the cartoon threatened by Islamists: it showed the Prophet in a teddy bear version and the police do not even exclude this track.

The peddler calls the mounted policeman Wayne Rhatigan: he is 47 and from 19 he is a sheriff in New York. Wayne feels a strange smell, he calls a couple of colleagues and starts evacuating people. It is 6.34 am, but when the bomb technician arrives, the mechanism has already failed: you can hear the crackling, there is no explosion. Two blocks away Oprah Winfrey enjoys the musical “Fela”. Liza Minnelli is the guest of honor at the Marriott. The diva Lucy Liu is about to get on the stage of her “God of Carnage” and asks the cops what’s going on. Spectators are asked not to leave their seats. Tourists locked out of hotels. The Marriott, the McDonald’s, are emptied, the largest toy store in the world, Toys’r’Us, is emptied. Thousands of evacuated. It’s almost three in the morning when Bloomberg returns from Washington: he was at the reception for the White House correspondents. He still has the bow tie of the party: “We were lucky, it could have been a massacre”. On Sunday evening he returns to the streets: he is in a shirt, among tourists, to show that “the crossroads of the world is safe”.

And the psychosis also strikes in Pittsburg where a microwave oven found on the side of the road where the marathon was run has caused a bombshell. Then in reality the object contained no explosives.

(02 May 2010)