Short item from the Wichita Eagle today, titled "Comic books go boom at county garage," by Joe Rodriguez:

A "suspicious device" left inside the Sedgwick County parking garage on Thursday turned out to be a foot locker filled with comic books.

The Wichita Police Department bomb squad was called to the parking garage at Elm and Main at about 4:30 p.m., when someone discovered the box stuffed behind a vehicle on the third floor of the garage.

Authorities closed the garage and the streets around it, forcing people who were parked there to wait more than two hours to return to their vehicles.

The box was detonated at about 6:30 p.m. An investigation is ongoing.

"The times we live in, I'd rather be safe than sorry," said sheriff's Capt. Sam Houston. "I know we inconvenienced a lot of people today, but you just never know.

Chalk this up as a hidden cost of the Global War on Terror, which is itself a cost of running America's global empire and military-industrial complex. It's often said that Americans, in the "homeland" at least, are never asked to sacrifice for their nation's wars, but this is one such sacrifice. The question is whether it will be properly accounted for.

I also have to wonder whether blowing up an unidentified, uninspected box is a good way to dispose of it. That may be relatively safe if the box is a conventional bomb, but a box of chemicals could be made more dangerous by explosion. Such predictable behavior would itself open up opportunities for terrorists.

It is easy to see how unthinking rule-based behavior leads to stuff like this. We had an unrecognized person knock on our front door last night, so following our new rules of engagement didn't open the door. It was an awkward, impolite moment, and chances are very slim that engaging him would have resulted in anything worse than a minor waste of time. On the other hand, I worry about becoming prisoners of our own rules. And I worry that obsessing on preventing past disasters will keep us from thinking coherently about the unexpected future.