For visiting Americans, this might have seemed like an extension of home, so accustomed have they become to the sudden, vague threat, to the feeling of a bullet dodged.

Such shadowy threats pop up every few months in the United States, the bitter pills of living in an age of war, we’re told. Events in Prague Sept. 23 and 24 unfolded much as they usually do across the Atlantic. There was an announcement of a threat backed by “credible evidence,” emergency government meetings, a mobilization of security forces and the requisite press conference at which an official in a sharp suit takes the microphone and provides not one useful shred of information to the general public.

“We just wanted to inform the public in time because there was an unusual number of policemen at some places in the capital. It could cause panic,” Ivan Langer, the new interior minister, told Právo Sept. 24.

Well, anyone could see that. What would have been helpful is some specific information on the nature of the threat, something people could actually use.

Where did the threat come from? What did it entail? What were the “foreign intelligence services” that tipped authorities off? The media wrote about possible Jewish targets in Prague, but government officials wouldn’t comment on that, nor why other select buildings were under heavy guard (and those buildings were never identified). Metro line C was halted for a good chunk of Saturday, but we don’t know why.

Thankfully, the Czech Republic does not employ a color-coded threat meter that assigns our fear a different hue every day. But former Interior Minister Franti‰ek Bublan uttered something just as worrying: “Enhanced security measures will be in force until canceled.”

This kind of promised vigilance to an unknown threat has become almost a way of life in the United States, and it is disappointing to see the Czech government seemingly taking some cues in this department.

What governments never quite seem to understand is that citizens just want — and deserve — a little more information. Not the workings of midnight counterintelligence meetings, or the names and phone numbers of top-secret operatives working in the field. But something more than the word “threat.”

What does it hurt to be a little more specific? Just how close was Prague to getting hit with something? We don’t know.

Here’s what is hurt without specifics: a government’s credibility. Cite too many near misses without details and citizens just don’t know what to believe, especially when warnings come at a politically propitious time.

It only took a day or so for the Prague threat to take the shape of a political football. The opposition Social Democrats say Mirek Topolánek’s government knew of this “threat” some three weeks ago. So, why now?

The opposition says the struggling Cabinet, lacking any real mandate to govern, is trying to head off the negative publicity surrounding a rather embarrassing recent claim from Interior Minister Langer that scores of journalists were on the last government’s payroll, something of which the country’s Supreme State Attorney found no evidence.