FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs

And when they go to school, we want to make sure they've got supplies. We want to make sure they've got tablets to write on and crayolas to color with, and even jump ropes to jump with. And so one of the things that's happened is we've put a coalition -- that means a group of people together to send textbooks to Afghanistan. We've sent 4 million textbooks thus far, and there's another 6 million to go in Afghanistan, so the boys and girls will have something to read.

FBI alert puts almanac editor on defensive

Gary Dorsey, Baltimore Sun Friday, January 2, 2004



At first, Kevin Seabrooke admitted he felt "a little bemused" by this week's news of the FBI's terrorist warning to 18,000 law enforcement organizations to be watchful of people in possession of, well, almanacs.

Seabrooke, a senior editor for the annually published "The World Almanac and Book of Facts," did not say "amused."

"Bemused," said Seabrooke, employing an appropriately cautious synonym for "bewildered, perplexed, utterly confused" and/or "stupefied."

On Monday, when the FBI's bulletin -- urging police to be alert for almanac-wielding rascals who might use the weighty compendiums for "target selection and pre-operational planning" -- became public, Seabrooke was in the midst of his usual end-of-the-year radio trivia shows -- "talking to people doing wrap-ups on the Top 10 news stories and that kind of thing."

Suddenly, he was at home on the phone doing damage control. He acknowledged that he has had to be careful not to be too critical of an alert that some people might consider a bit overwrought.

"We applaud the FBI," Seabrooke said. "They're trying to do their job and keep us safe and cover all the bases -- and perhaps over-covering the bases, but who can say?"

So instead of criticizing, Seabrooke said he's telling people everything in the almanac is already public information readily available on the Internet and at their local libraries. "In fact," he added, masking a hint of irony, "the government is our biggest single supplier of information."

He is also reminding people that in 1961, a wire service photograph of President John Kennedy in the White House showed only six books on his desk --

including the World Almanac.

And a similar photo of President Bill Clinton in 1999 showed the chief executive at his desk with a copy of the World Almanac clearly visible.

During World War II, he added, the government asked almanac editors to send 100,000 copies of the popular tome to American troops overseas. Which they did, of course.

"We've been around for 136 years," Seabrooke said, noting that the FBI's warning might only be relevant to the 2004 book's chapter titled "Buildings, Bridges and Tunnels," which begins on page 436 and, he hastened to add, only covers "12 pages out of 1,008."

As for those pages, Seabrooke said, much of the information can be obtained easily from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which is where the almanac got it.

Mr. Ashcroft said critics had tried to persuade the public that the F.B.I. was monitoring libraries to "ask every person exiting the library, `Why were you at the library? What were you reading? Did you see anything suspicious?' "

The Justice Department, Mr. Ashcroft said, "has no interest in your reading habits. Tracking reading habits would betray our high regard for the First Amendment. And even if someone in government wanted to do so, it would represent an impossible workload and a waste of law enforcement resources."