Talk about a parking problem
In another sign of the post 9/11 world in which we live, Albuquerque police closed downtown streets this morning after finding an illegally parked station wagon near a federal building.
More accurately, maybe it should be said that it is a sign of the post-Murrah federal building world in which we live. That's the federal building Timothy McVeigh and possibly others blew up in 1995.
The commotion created inconvenience for motorists for several hours. But the episode said something about life in 21st-century United States, where vigilance -- and the threat of something sinister almost always never realized -- sometimes intrudes on everyday life. If it weren't for glaring examples -- 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing -- it'd be easy to chalk it up to overreaction. But reading Lawrence Wright's "Looming Tower," Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars," and other books -- as well as dozens of insightful magazine and newspaper pieces about the lead up the 9/11 -- one can easily recite the insufficiencies in the nation's intelligence. In the case of Albuquerque on June 12, 2008, it appears to have been an innocuous mistake by an out-of-state driver.
As KOB.com reported:
An out-of-state station wagon parked illegally in front of a federal building downtown resulted in much of the center of the city being closed for hours Thursday morning.Police cordoned off the vehicle and closed from Third to Seventh streets and Central to Gold avenues after discovering the car illegally parked directly in front of the old federal courthouse at Fifth and Gold. People working inside the courthouse were evacuated
Bomb squad members using a robotic device swept the car, breaking in a window of the car that they say had been parked at the site since 1:00 am.
FBI agents tracing the license plate were able to reach the mother of the car’s owner, who in turn notified him of the commotion his parking job had caused.
The man arrived on the scene shortly before noon to move the station wagon and FBI agents were questioning him. There’s no word where the man is from or why he parked where he did.
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