Car blown up at the Olympics

Olympic security decided to blow up a car that was left running outside a building. A ‘controlled explosing’ blew up the car, that turned out to be not much more than a false alarm. Reminds me of a story from Salt Lake. On the plane home, I was sitting with a ‘security contractor’ who was working in the SLC war room during the Olympics. He told me a bit about some of the systems they were using to ‘watch’ the Olympics (this was back when I was working in a similar field) and how they did quite a bit of racial profiling with the cameras. One story I remember is that they had a report of a bunch of Arab looking guys heading toward Salt Lake in an old school bus with the windows painted over. Needless to say, a bus-bomb at the Olympics would have done tremendous damage. A major alert was called and, according to this guy on the plane, a chopper full of special forces was sent down to intercept the bus. Their Blackhawk helicopter landed in front of the bus, which slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting it. The commando guys got out and surrounded the bus, and were kind of surpised to find it was a bus full of pot-smoking Mexican guys who weren’t even that sure what state they were in. Alert cancelled. Who knows what stories are true…but I did find it interesting.]]>