The solution is to get rid of phone booths

BC Ferries received a bomb threat over the weekend. That instantly turned into a Terrorist Threat. Why? Well, initial reports issued by BC Ferries president David Hahn contained the information that the caller, who has been traced to a Coquitlam phone booth, had a middle-eastern accent.

As Vive le Canada has noted, news reports which made that reference, apparently the part which elevated this from a run-of-the-mill bomb-threat to a threat of terrorism, have removed those words from their online reports.

Run-of-the-mill?! Yeah. Bomb threats almost always turn out to be hoaxes, just as this one did. This one however, caused the cancellation of 21 sailings. Because it was "credible".

The details we are being given? The call was made by a person unknown to the Delta police 911 line at around 3:30 pm on Saturday from a phone booth at the Coquitlam Centre Mall by a man with a middle-eastern accent.

How much does everybody actually know?

... finding the person who made the threat may be like looking for a needle in a haystack, said police spokeswoman Sharlene Brooks.

"Unless someone comes forward that has personal knowledge of the individual that may have made this call, identifying this suspect may be next to impossible," she said.

In other words, this could be a kid who's having an incredibly boring summer and the police have nothing.

That hasn't stopped the pants-pissing though.

B.C. Ferries spokeswoman Deborah Marshall said security was heightened at terminals yesterday, but wouldn't go into detail. "We don't want to tell the terrorists what we're doing," she said. "Our employees are always vigilant. Their eyes and ears are the best tools they can use to see if anything is unusual."

Vigilant for what? Merchant mariners and terminal attendants aren't trained to spot terrorists. I defy BC Ferry Services to prove otherwise.

And to claim terrorists are behind all this is to ignore a single basic fact. By way of demonstration:

- 1972 Munich Massacre
- Cubana flight 455 bombing
- Air India flight 182
- Narita airport bombing
- Pan Am 103 Lockerbie Scotland
- 1993 World Trade Center bombing
- Oklahoma City bombing
- Khobar Towers bombing
- 1998 US embassy bombings
- Omagh, Northern Ireland
- Sept. 11, 2001 attacks WTC and Pentagon
- 2002 Bali bombing
- 2004 Madrid bombing
- 2005 London bombing

What does this sample of a long list of terrorist attacks have in common? NO WARNING.

Terrorists don't phone in an attack. They take credit for it after the fact.

Keep working on it people. You'll eventually get it right.