5
French Tourists Get Drunk, Cause a Terrorism Scare
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Just Having Some Fun ...
Back in 2011, five Frenchmen were touring the United States and ended up in Texas. For reasons that were never made explicit but almost certainly boil down to "ask the alcohol," the tourists decided it would be great fun to don sombreros, break into a San Antonio courthouse in the middle of the night, steal a judge's gavel, and swing it around like the Mightily Plastered Thor. Sounds like good, clean, innocent debauchery to us!
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"I sentence you to six-to-eight beers and hard liquor."
Oh, Shit!
San Antonio police, on the other hand, interpreted it as terrorism and acted very accordingly.
The drunks triggered a silent alarm during their boozecapades -- once the authorities showed up, three of them were already gone, but they had left behind their sombreros (after all, God forbid you look stupid while drunkenly stumbling the streets at 2 a.m.). Somehow, the cops took these sombreros as the calling card of a highly-organized terror cell, and immediately went into high alert. They shut down and conducted a massive sweep of the entire surrounding area. They soon located and arrested the remaining perpetrators, who were snoozing in their RV and totally unaware that they had joined Al-Qaeda.
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"I swear, I thought 'Jihad bomb' was a beer cocktail."
The news media played their role well, meaning they exaggerated everything, wove tales from whole cloth (and possibly the anchor's favorite Clancy novel), and acted like 9/11 Part Deux was nigh. No damage was reported, yet they called it an "attack". They reported that two of the men were on an FBI watchlist, which is two more than actually were. They falsely claimed a search of the RV turned up photos of the courthouse and the city's water system. Also, the men were suddenly Moroccan, because brown people.