I was channel-surfing a few days ago & I saw an alarming local news alert. 200 pounds of explosives had been stolen from a heavily fortified secret government arms depot.
Why were they announcing this? Obviously because they had no leads and hoped for assistance from the public. As expected, a concerned citizen phoned in some information; an arrest was made & the suspect confessed.
“Suspect admits he participated in explosives theft”
“The materials included electric and non-electric blasting caps, various types of detonator cord, smokeless powder, grenades and grenade-type devices, assorted ammunition, binary explosives, and C-4 military explosives.”
The criminal mastermind? A 40-something-year-old drug addict with no fixed address.
The heavily fortified bunker?
“Broken alarm, security failures aided break-in”
There were no regular patrols or security cameras at the site. Locks on the steel doors to the five bunkers where the explosives were kept could be cut away with a torch. The alarm system inside the bunkers was broken for some time, with the full knowledge of the Sheriff’s Office bomb squad, according to Horsley.
“They kept trying to fix it. It never got fixed,” Horsley said.
It was still broken over the Fourth of July weekend, when police believe Michael Alexander Allan, 46, got a vehicle through a series of locked gates and used an acetylene torch to cut the locks off the thick, steel bunker doors. Stolen were 200 pounds of volatile explosives and blasting caps, enough to conduct several terrorist attacks, such as car bombings.
Allan was arrested in Union City on Wednesday night and much of the explosives was recovered.
Horsley said he had not been informed about the broken alarm, but declined to say who on his staff knew about the problem. No disciplinary action is planned.
“I can’t blame someone for a technical problem that they were incapable of fixing,” Horsley said. …
Exactly who is responsible for security at the site is unclear. The San Francisco Police Department, San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and FBI all store property there, and security was described as a “shared responsibility.” The Sheriff’s Office recently eliminated a patrol in the area during budget cuts. …
Most of the 3,410 pounds of high explosives stolen last year were from companies with blasting permits. With little commercial resale value, the only motivation for such items is curiosity or criminal purposes, he said.
A ton or two of high explosives can do a lot of damage but a nuclear device might do more. Unfortunately, experts estimate that it will be several years before nuke-sensing equipment is installed to check containers entering US ports. And nukes are a-proliferating. The top guy at the International Atomic Energy Agency says that Abdul Khan, the (reportedly Islamist) father of Pakistan’s nuke program, had nuke-related contact with 20 governments and “large companies.”
“ElBaradei: Pakistan gave nuclear know-how to at least 20 countries”
Meanwhile (according to a report in The New Republic), Pakistani officials claim that the Bushies are turning a blind eye to Khan’s past proliferation in exchange for Pakistan’s capturing or killing a major al Qaeda leader just before the US election. (As I’ve noted elsewhere, Khan’s proliferating ways were known long before they were stopped.)
“PAKISTAN FOR BUSH – July Surprise?”
“Diplomatic and intelligence sources” leaked to the press this week the allegation that the Bushies, overruling the Pentagon and CIA, released Saudi terror suspects in exchange for that nation’s quiet support for the Iraq war. (Backstory for Fox News fans: As part of a Saudi and US government covert program requiring plausible deniability, money was funneled through charity organizations and given to jihadists fighting in Afghanistan. Osama Bin Laden was one of those jihadists and, more often, one of the fundraisers. The Saudi government claims to have stopped funding bin Laden in 1989 but right up to, and perhaps after, 2001 al Qaeda received funds from the pre-1989 jihad funding charities. Iraq, on the other hand, is not known to have funded or armed al Qaeda at any time.)
“Saudis freed Britons in a secret swap of prisoners”
Which brings to mind the fact that last month the Tampa International Airport contradicted the Bushies and confirmed that on Sept. 13, 2001, when most US air traffic was grounded, 3 young Saudis – including one sharing a hijacker’s last name – accompanied by an ex-cop and an ex-FBI agent, flew to Kentucky, and then out of the USA. (The cop & agent returned to Florida.)
“TIA now verifies flight of Saudis”
And, last but not least, AG Ashcroft has squelched the testimony of a former FBI translator who wants to go public with information about alleged infiltration of the Pentagon, State Dept., and FBI, citing “certain diplomatic relations for national security.”
It’s really a matter of trust.