Redstate

By james p Posted in National Security — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If you are at all like me you have made fun, or laughed as others joked about DHS or our color coded terror alert system. Many have made jokes about government warnings to be on alert and what exactly that meant. I am not laughing anymore.

Monday morning I went to my local Walmart to buy some groceries. As is customary for me, I went over to the electronics section first to look at DVD's and CD's. When I reached the department I noticed a man with a middle eastern apperance looking at Go phones (pre-paid cellular for those who didn't know). I didn't think too much about it at first and he walked away within a minute or two of my arrival in the section. Not ten minutes later two middle eastern gentlemen (one of which may have been the first man) came in to the electronics section talking. I wasn't close enough to hear if they were speaking English or Arabic but it was obvious that they knew each other. One of the two men grabbed two phones from the display without even breaking stride, turned the corner and, I assume, headed back toward the front of the store. He didn't even look to make sure the packaging was okay and not damaged. I am pretty sure that the two men split up at the phones, but I am not positive.

At this point I was very suspicious. I went ahead and finished my shopping and went up front to pay. When I approached the line I noticed a middle eastern gentleman (maybe the first man I saw) paying for two phones. I was going to ask the cashier if she had noticed a lot of people buying those phones when I got up to the counter, but a middle eastern woman got in line with two phones behind me and I held off.

As soon as I got home I called the direct line for my local police and they took down the information and got my number so they could check into it and possibly call me back. Much to my surprise they did call me back about three hours later and advised me that a report had been filed with DHS. I was told that this behavior was first reported last week and this Walmart was selling about 100 of these phones per day. When asked why they were buying so many phones, the people in question told the police that they were buying the phones, removing the batteries and mailing those batteries to family overseas. I was thanked for calling in the information and the officer expressed his wish that people would report things that don't add up like this more often. Fortunately, the story didn't end there. When I told one of my brothers about it he used some of his connections and forwarded the information to not only the FBI, but the Pentagon as well. It appears that they are going to look into it.

A couple details that may interest you: I live in a town with less than 6000 people, though it is not too far from a major metropolitan area. I go to that particular Walmart at least once a week and had never noticed anyone of obvious middle eastern descent in my neck of the woods before Monday. For the record, I have lived here for just over a year.

The moral of this story is that people should always be aware of their surroundings and able to notice things that don't add up, or fit in some obvious way. I didn't pay extra attention to those folks just because they were middle eastern. I paid attention to them because their behavior was not normal and I had never seen those particular individuals around my neck of the woods before. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck... Here's hoping that this turns out to be nothing, but better safe than sorry.