June 10-16, 2004

city beat

Al-Qaeda Takes Philly!

SOUND BITTEN: By the time police spokesman Inspector William Colarulo arrived at the scene, radio and television news were reporting that Philadelphia might be in the midst of a terrorist scare.

Breaking news: An inside look at the hype of last week's "terrorist" scare.

by Amy L. Webb

The commotion began early the morning of Wed., June 2. Those listening to KYW or WHYY radio heard a sudden newsflash: Bombs. American Airlines. Arab attackers.

Then, there was another breaking story during the early NBC 10 and WPVI Action News television broadcasts: Have terrorists descended upon Philadelphia? Are we safe?

Those early reports said that someone with a "Middle Eastern accent" had called 911 from the Embassy Suites near the airport. It was a man — at times muttering words that sounded Arabic — exclaiming that he'd put a bomb on a flight at Philadelphia International Airport.

Before long, there were more urgent updates, some offering conflicting information: The man called from his room down to the front desk and told the clerk that he'd put two bombs on two planes. Wait — one of the bombs was being carried by a woman. Wait again — she didn't know she had the bomb, he'd slipped it in her purse. One of the explosives was bound for Boston; the other, London. The desk clerk said the man was an Arab.

Cut to later that morning. WHYY was in the midst of Morning Edition. NBC 10 was airing the Today show. Newsflash! Terrorists may be outside City Hall!

Just after 6 a.m. that same morning, someone found paper airplanes and audiocassettes in plastic baggies taped to a pair of telephone poles. A few officers who'd already listened to the tape in a vehicle on the scene said the voices — more than one man was speaking — definitely sounded Arabic.

But the stories would change yet again: Philadelphia Police weren't sure of the man's ethnicity or what language he was speaking. They didn't even know where the call came from, except that it didn't originate from the hotel.

Eventually, a police department spokesman arrived at the scene, and every major media outlet in the city (and some from New Jersey) had claimed a position on the crowded streets around City Hall. They were shooting footage of the yellow police tape, the dozen SWAT officers standing around and the crowd that was slowly gathering.

Unfortunately, many of them had also claimed a position on the two stories — and that early take was wrong. The man who called in the bomb threat did have an accent, but it wasn't Arabic. And he wasn't a Middle Eastern terrorist. The cassette tapes found that morning did have more than one voice speaking in a language that wasn't English, but the police officers who supposedly listened to the tapes in their van had absolutely no foreign-language training and no ability to discern what language was being used.

For those who only caught a moment of the morning news, they might have spent the day worrying that Philadelphia was under siege. Is it just the aftermath of Sept. 11 that the mere mention of a foreigner and a possible bomb is enough to set the media wheels in motion without extensive reporting? Or was there no big story to begin with?

"We live in a continuous 24-hour news cycle," says Henri Barkey, professor of international relations at Lehigh University. "We now have a built-in bias toward al-Qaeda and people from the Arab world. Talking heads, reporters and editors tend to respond quickly to a news event, but their analysis can sometimes be very wrong."

While police and local FBI investigated the bomb threats, reporters continued their morning-long stakeout. More than a dozen photographers meandered around what was being called a "crime scene," which also happened to be just outside of the federal building where a grand jury would soon hand down indictments in a City Hall corruption matter.

Reporters filtered in and out of the building. Two television news producers wielding notebooks gathered around police spokesman Inspector William Colarulo.

"Have you talked about the tapes yet?" one asked.

"I can again, it's no problem," Colarulo said.

"Wait — did we get you on tape talking about this? Let me get someone so we can do it again on tape."

As he walked away, KYW 3's Robin MacIntosh stood in the shade, blotting his face with his hand. Meanwhile, a blonde NBC 10 reporter wearing a bright-orange suit jacket pressed Colarulo for more information about whether the paper airplanes could be linked to al-Qaeda and how they were related to the bomb threats.

After every mention of al-Qaeda, Colarulo offered the same response: We don't have reason to believe al-Qaeda is involved. We don't think al-Qaeda operatives were in Center City this morning taping paper airplanes beneath parking signs.

Nearby, four SWAT team officers were talking about the evidence that was found. "I think it was an Arabic videotape, you know, like some guy with a turban was reading a threat letter or something," one said.

"One of youse gonna go up and see what it was?"

"Nah — I got things to do. Gotta go to the 25th to see about Safe Streets. I'm sure we'll hear about it on the news."

A few hours later, during noon broadcasts, channels 3 and 6 both aired reports on the bomb threats and the paper airplanes. KYW reporter Natasha Brown was live at the airport. She said that at about 6 a.m. Thursday, a man called 911 from Embassy Suites to say that he'd planted a bomb on two flights. MacIntosh then reported on the paper airplanes and tapes. He said that while initial police reports showed the tapes to be in an Arabic dialect, now the officers weren't sure.

As it happens, the media learned on Friday that the bomb threat had more to do with a misplaced passport than terrorism, and that there was still no word on the cassette tapes, according to Jerri Williams, a local FBI spokeswoman.

And so went the hype and the story. There was little mention of it on WHYY or any of the television broadcasts over the weekend. That Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a short local-news blurb explaining that there had been a bomb, and the suspects were now in federal custody. They're charged with calling in a false bomb threat to an airline.

"There's been confusion in the media," Williams says. "Some [media outlets] are saying that the FBI alleged that the man who called in the bomb threats was in Philadelphia at the time, which isn't true."

According to Williams, on June 2, 33-year-old Ilyas Savas of London called the Embassy Suites and told a clerk that there were bombs aboard two American Airlines planes. And he was in London, not Philadelphia, at the time.

Savas was said to be meeting Hatice Ceylan, 18, of Edgewater Park, N.J., who had misplaced her passport. The FBI alleges that Savas intended to delay the flights while Ceylan retrieved her travel documents, Williams says.

The bomb scare caused 19 passengers on a Philadelphia-Boston flight to deplane on the tarmac while security searched through bags and the cabin. It also caused a 159-passenger Boston-London flight to be re-searched and rescreened. All searches turned up negative, Williams says.

"He did not appear to be Middle Eastern, but he does have an accent," Williams says, adding that Savas is Turkish. "They were not engaging in terrorist activity." The two are now being held without bail at the Philadelphia federal detention center. According to Wednesday's Inquirer, Ceylan and Savas met on the Internet.

As for the cassette tapes and paper airplanes, it was a Center City maintenance worker who found them secured to a pole at JFK Boulevard and Broad Street. Thinking nothing of it, the maintenance worker threw both away. But then, less than a block away on Filbert and Juniper streets, he saw another paper airplane, another baggie and another tape. He fetched the baggie and called the police.

Van T12, a traffic unit, showed up on the scene. The officers inside listened to the tapes using the van's stereo, according to Colarulo.

"They could tell that there was more than one voice," he says. "But they couldn't have known whether they were speaking Arabic or Farsi or Italian for that matter. We don't have Arabic-speaking officers. I don't know if the officers talked to someone and that's how the rumor got started. I don't know why KYW was reporting that there were Arab men speaking on the audiocassettes." Williams says that the language used on the tapes "is rare and not common." Until the FBI completes a translation of the tapes, it will not release the language of origin, Williams says.

"There was a problem with the story from the beginning," says Steve Butler, KYW Newsradio programming director. "The police explained that the voices were in Arabic, and we were going with what the police officials were saying. Our high water mark is whether a story is creating a large disturbance. They cordoned off City Hall because police thought there were Arab terrorists. We felt that this was an important story in the beginning. But our attitude is that once a story becomes a nothing, that's what we treat it as. So the story was dropped."

In a sense, it is easy to understand why a bomb threat called in by a man with a foreign-sounding voice coupled with ominous-looking paper airplanes and audiotapes recorded in a foreign language may invite reporters to consider a Middle East connection. Al-Qaeda destroyed American planes, skyscrapers and everyone's sense of security on Sept. 11.

"An Arab accent is not so easy to fake," says Barkey, who also served in the State Department under Madeleine Albright. "In this country, any accent is suspicious. Given what happened [on Sept. 11], people come to fast conclusions. On the other hand, Sept. 11 wasn't very typical. Not every person from the Middle East is a terrorist. We should be careful not to label them as such."

There is a saying in Arabic: Maktub. It is written, it has already been decided.

Barkey says that for the present, "it is those people from a country in the Middle East who will constantly be targeted and questioned, and that is the way it is. But tomorrow, there may be another threat, from people in a different country. Or it may even be someone who was born here, in this country."