More Boogeymen

With the trends clearly in John Kerry's direction, it's apparently time to scare everybody. So today we get this:

School districts notified of computer disk found in Iraq
 
WASHINGTON -- Federal law enforcement authorities notified school districts in six states last month that a computer disk found in Iraq contained photos, floor plans and other information about their schools, two U.S. officials said Thursday.

The downloaded data found by the U.S. military in July -- all available on the Internet -- included an Education Department report guiding schools on how to prepare and respond to a crisis, said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The districts mentioned are in Georgia, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Oregon and California. The officials said last month that FBI agents in charge of those areas alerted local education and law enforcement officials.
Officials did not give the districts' names. But Salem (Ore.) Superintendent Kay Baker confirmed her district was among them.

Except that, upon analysis, it becomes clear that this is not terrorism at all:

WASHINGTON (AP) Federal officials said Friday there is no terrorist connection to a computer disk found in Iraq that contained information about schools in six states.

The disk was made by an unidentified Iraqi man who was doing research and had no connections to al-Qaida or the Iraqi insurgents battling U.S. forces, according to the FBI. The man did have links to the Baath Party that ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein, but that's true of many former government officials and community leaders.

Some material on the disk appeared to be randomly downloaded from a publicly accessible Education Department Web site and included such things as manuals on workplace safety, crisis management studies, student codes of conduct and building security diagrams. It also contained an Education Department report on school crisis planning that was published in May 2003.

''It's not about schools, it's about policy,'' said FBI Agent William Evanina, spokesman for the FBI field office in Newark, N.J. ''There's no terrorism threat to these schools.''

Of course, the correction is deeper in the paper than the initial threat, I gather.

Gee, I wonder why anyone in Iraq would want plans about school buildings? It wouldn't be because they're... building schools there, would it?