THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607280092
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SERIES: Olympics '96 :From Atlanta
SOURCE: Tom Robinson
LENGTH: 86 lines
ATLANTA - When my eyes met the headline - PARK EXPLOSION - Saturday morning, my jaw did not drop and my pace toward the newspaper box did not quicken. Slowly, and so casually it scares me, this thought materialized first:
So. It's happened.
Of course, it's happened. It's the Olympics, stupid. The world is watching. Why wouldn't some cretin want to build a pipe bomb, hide it in a crowded park at 1:25 in the morning and watch it go boom?
How dumb can we get?
And how numb?
That's what worries me in the aftermath of the one death and 111 injuries caused by the explosion at Centennial Olympic Park - the way we can throw up our hands, whimper over how inevitable it was and wonder why it hadn't happened sooner.
Kooks mail exploding packages. Jetliners fall from the sky.
Japanese subways are gassed. Federal buildings are bombed. Elementary school children are trapped in Scottish gymnasiums and wiped out by monsters with semiautomatic rifles.
In the satanic viper pit of terrorists and psychos, there is a game of can-you-top-this going on in which there is one rule: Wreak as much chaos and death as you can.
And there's no way to end it. That was the fear going into the Games, and it's the lesson from Saturday's disaster. These were one of the most secure Olympics in history. Scads of millions of dollars have been spent wrapping up the athletes, buildings and spectators in an unprecedented web of safety.
It's not enough. Nothing will ever be enough, not when making a bomb has become about as easy as baking a cake.
Remember, this happened in a park, an open space that had turned a few decrepit downtown city blocks into a bustling celebration of people and nations.
Helmeted security guards were everywhere, not to mention the probable presence of hidden surveillance cameras and plain-clothes agents. But entry to the park was cost- and search-free, to anybody or anything that happened along, as it should have been.
``It becomes, in a free society, a tradeoff on how strong our restrictions are on people to come and go,'' FBI agent Woody Johnson said. ``It's a tough situation. We've taken the measures we felt, at that time, were adequate. And in fact, officers were responding almost instantaneously to the bomb threat.''
That's right. The feds believe the bomber called the Atlanta police a half-hour before the explosion, from a pay phone just two blocks away. At nearly the same time, a park officer noticed a suspicious knapsack, had a bomb squad there in minutes and was clearing the area when the explosion occurred.
``Everyone always knew (Centennial Park) was the most open and vulnerable place,'' President Clinton said, and he's right. But it could just as easily have been a subway car, a bus stop, a trash can along crowded Peachtree Street or any other common place before this.
It was bound to happen, and everybody knew it. It's why hundreds of stories were written and broadcast on Olympic security in the past year. It's why those two rural Georgia rednecks who were picked up for making bombs in the woods last April drew so much publicity.
It's why that author who wrote a novel about terrorism at the Olympics was scrutinized. It's why Atlanta even welded shut its manhole covers, for God's sake, before the Games began.
Yet, short of putting machine-gun toting troops on every corner - as at the '88 Seoul Olympics - or instituting martial law for two weeks, there will always be holes in security's game.
A guy still made it into the Opening Ceremonies with a loaded gun. A rudimentary bomb still went off in Centennial Park. A person still is dead from the blast, and another from a heart attack in its aftermath. And the Olympics once more are revealed as being impossibly and unmanageably gargantuan.
They are a sitting duck that cities have to be crazy to invite into their parlors. But Francois Carrard, International Olympic Committee general director, said Saturday he had talked with representatives of other Olympic-hopeful cities ``and they expressed no indication of lack of interest'' in continuing their bids.
Ironically, Carrard spoke from the same stage where the media were scheduled, in a session that was later canceled, to meet with a group of U.S. wrestlers.
One of those wrestlers made the team after a champion named Dave Schultz was slain over the winter on the estate where he lived and trained.
In that room we were supposed to be talking sports. Instead we talked terrorism and fear.
Some surprise.
KEYWORDS: OLYMPIC BOMB EXPLOSION by CNB