Posted on: Tuesday, November 19, 2002

EDITORIAL
Crying wolf: how much will the public tolerate?

We're all familiar with the fable of the boy who cried wolf, over and over again, because he found the drastic and frantic defensive measures taken by his fellow villagers amusing to watch. They quickly learned, of course, to ignore him.

The alert the nation received at the end of last week was about as dire — warning of "spectacular attacks" — as any we've heard. "Our message," leaked an anonymous government tipster, "is be afraid, be very afraid." The "chatter" being monitored by intelligence agencies was said to have reached about the same level as that immediately preceding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Most media outlets, of course, took these officials at their word and gave this message a lot of ink and air time. After all, look what happened when we failed to prepare before Sept. 11.

We are fighting the temptation to suspect that these warnings, along with daily leaks about such horrors as Iraqi development of "dusty" powders that can penetrate military protective clothing with deadly poisons and accumulation of enough biotoxins to wipe out the world's population, are somehow manipulative in nature.

It remained for Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to deflate the latest alert. "There are no new threats," he said. "It's really nothing new."

In an editorial Sunday, a furious New York Times called the latest warning "ludicrous." "The only thing warnings this vague are good for," it added, "is providing political cover."

That's a valid point, but we hasten to add that our intelligence services find themselves in an unprecedented situation. We've never been in a war against terrorism before. It will take time and experience to develop and implement a workable "civil defense" drill.

For now, a little humility on the part of the CIA, FBI and their cohorts might go a long way. Americans can understand the difficulty of detecting and halting terrorist plots. Information that needlessly frightens them without helping them to protect themselves is merely crying wolf.

That's exactly how the terrorists — and wolves — like it.