As Fate would have it -- a Newsday columnist happened by. And wrote this column.

A Column from NEWSDAY

I also wanted to find out if the city is living on the edge of a knife, waiting apprehensively for another attack. Who could blame New Yorkers for walking around with their shoulders scrunched up? All those alerts, all those dire predictions from Washington.

How many times have we been told by those who are supposed to know that, "Oh yeah, they'll be back. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."

So I wasn't surprised when a flotilla of fire engines, ambulances, cops in riot gear and cops with canines pulled up on Trinity Place at 10:30 a.m.

"What's happening here?" I asked.

"Nothing," a cop said.

He was right. It wasn't anything.

But nothing when you are braced for something can bring out a crowd of heavily armed counterterrorism cops along with firefighters and ambulance drivers.

"Go to the Wall Street subway station," someone told me. I walked a block up toward Broadway and as I got to the station a man wearing a transit supervisor's badge emerged.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Someone reported a suspicious package in the station," he said, "but it was identified and it was nothing so the trains are running again."

He wouldn't give me his name but he knew what he was talking about.

Nothing.

A spokesman for New York City Transit told me that, yes, there had been a package seen on the tracks near that station. So Transit shut down service on the No. 4 line for more than an hour, from 9:56 a.m. to 11:01 a.m.

The spokesman said that on its daily report for Monday, March 24, it would be called "police activity." Later, a spokeswoman for the cops told me, "We identified the package. It turned out to be nothing.

"We get quite a few of those every day," she said.

Tony Missio, 43, of Toronto, was climbing out of the station at Wall Street and Broadway. "There was an announcement uptown that there was a delay," Missio said. "I waited for about 20 minutes."

He was on vacation and said he bought his ticket before the Iraq war began. But he said he didn't have any fears of another attack on the city. "I'll take the odds," he said. "They can't kill everyone."

Still, if nothing could galvanize the police, fire, and emergency medical service several times a day, how will they respond when something does happen? The cops don't want to advertise their willingness to strap up and go to such calls. It costs $5 million a week to bring out the heavy artillery, even for nothing.

Because you never know.

When Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence David Cohen told Ed Bradley during a "60 Minutes" television interview shown Sunday night about plans to shield the "highest-target threats," Bradley asked the right question.

"So you heard specific information?"

"Absolutely," Cohen replied.

Police spokesman Michael O'Looney dashed cold water on Cohen's assertion of immediate danger.

"There is no specific threat," he said.

Cohen may be following Deputy Commissioner Frank Libutti out the door for that scary remark, even though he is probably right.

Libutti has been in charge of counterterrorism for the NYPD, but is leaving soon to work in Washington in a similar capacity.

I walked over to St. Peter's Church on Barclay Street - the oldest Catholic parish in New York State - to see the Rev. Kevin Madigan. I spent some time with him during the week of Sept. 11. His church had been hit by falling parts from one of the hijacked airplanes.

"I am not worried about terrorists," Madigan, 56, said. "I am more worried about settling our claims from that incident with our insurance company."

He also worries about the sanity of the ruling crowd in Washington.

"They are using 9/11 to justify this war with Iraq. There is no proof that Saddam Hussein was allied to Osama bin Laden," he said.

Then I walked along Church Street to peer through a hole in the green curtain that hangs over a fence around what now looks like an ordinary but giant-sized construction site.

There I heard a sweet choir from a Seattle high school raising their voices to sing "Ave Maria."

A chaperone with the choir, which sang in Riverside Church in Manhattan in a national choral competition Sunday, said that some of the parents of the teenagers weren't sure they wanted their children to travel to New York.

"But these kids wanted to go," she said. "And I'm glad we are here."

Then she spotted the flashing lights, and the sirens of the police and firefighters a block or so away.

"What's going on? she asked.

"Nothing," I said.

Written by Newsday Columnist, Dennis Duggan
March 25, 2003
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.