Walked out of work at the airport Tuesday and saw a Port Authority policeman carrying a long military grade weapon. He was alone, eyeing people as they came and went just outside entrances to the lower level of the Central Terminal Building. The policeman quizzed a few guys who caught his eye and then moved on along the perimeter of the building.
He looked more soldier than cop.
It was the same M-O at the 34th Street / Herald Square subway station in Manhattan this morning – and even here in the Heights at the busy 74th and Rosie station. These guys were all NYPD. They were impossible to miss and they too had special weapons that look much more fierce than what you’d normally see from the city’s law enforcement.
This is probably as far as government will go to bolster existing visible security measures at the New York City airports and in the subway system. You put guys with big guns in places where people who use those facilities can see them. Show the bad guys some muscle and firepower.
Beyond that, it gets cumbersome or impractical, doesn’t it for those who like freedom of movement in a place already so densely packed and tough to move about? I had a co-worker suggest Tuesday that perhaps only ticketed customers should be allowed to enter the airport terminal building. Not sure whether the tradeoff on such policy is beneficial. Pushing out a target’s boundaries brings a lot of people associated with the target right out there with the new dividing line.
The former journalist and FBI flack John Miler appeared with Scott Pelley Tuesday night to discuss Brussels. Miller went out of his way to object to the public’s access to readily-available encrypted chat applications. Miller is Bill Bratton’s right-hand man on terror and intelligence for NYC and has always seemed like a sharp, reasonable guy.
Should the citizenry have guarantees against government snooping on communication via cell phone through third-party apps? I would argue yes but the debate turns more difficult on days when attacks are planned and executed via technology so easy to obtain. Miller is worried about this technology.
I was surprised how slow the news coverage of Brussels moved as the day went on. I was checking dozens of news organizations in the US, UK and France throughout and watched the expanded network newscast on CBS.
Almost every newspaper I checked spotlighted and relied on what is now becoming a famous photograph taken by Ketevan Kardava, a Georgian broadcast journalist based in Brussels who just happened to be at the airport when the bombs went off. It’s a compelling shot but it seemed to be the default choice of almost all the news outlets to illustrate what happened. The picture shows a flight attendant from India sitting in a chair, covered in soot with blood dripping from her forehead. Her top appears to have been partially blasted off, exposing her undergarment. She’s wearing a left shoe but she’s barefoot on the right. She appears badly dazed. Another woman seated to her right is speaking urgently on a cell phone with blood running down from the hand holding the phone. She appears OK otherwise and has a composed look but is not paying attention to the woman in distress. The photo invites so many questions. Is the woman on the phone calling for help? Is she speaking to a loved one? Does she know the flight attendant.
The New York Times placed the Kardava photo prominently and with good size on top of the fold under the headline: BRUSSELS ATTACKS SHAKE EUROPEAN SECURITY.
The Daily News used the same photo on its front page but made the mistake of cropping out the woman on the phone. Newsday went with the blurry surveillance video screenshot of the three men at the airport connected to the bombings. The Telegraph yesterday reported that law enforcement did not want that photo disseminated immediately but agreed to confirm its legitimacy after it was leaked.
Also curious in the early phase of the coverage were numerous reports that one of the bombs had been set off in the vicinity of the American Airlines check-in counter. A few hours passed with that specific detail being widely reported before American asserted strongly that all their people were OK and that the cited blast did not originate near where they do business. A little before 10 AM in the East, American put out a news release to debunk the bad info – saying in part: “American Airlines check-in operates out of row 8 of the departure hall, and the explosions did not occur at row 8.”
The Times says that there was a blast at row 3 of the main departure hall which is arranged in an unusual rectangular space unlike any check-in space I could compare it to. The nearest US-based carrier to row 3 is United (at row 6) but that company also declared early yesterday that all of its people were safe and accounted for.
Among the airlines that check-in customers at row 3 are Lufthansa, Austrian and Turkish although you’d assume those with the most exposure to the blast’s flying debris may be people waiting in line at row 2.