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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Great Moments In National Security

Great Moments In National Security

by John Cole|  March 26, 20088:43 am| 32 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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The government that insists you have your phone conversations snooped to keep us safe can not tie its own shoes. Consider:

Court documents show an armed man arrested in January near the Capitol allegedly had explosives in his truck and was trying to make and set off a large bomb.

Michael Gorbey, 38, of Rapidan, Virginia, was arrested January 18th for carrying a shotgun outside the Capitol. No one was injured in the incident that caused gridlock for hours on Capitol Hill. Police searched his truck and said at the time there were propane tanks and wires but no immediate danger.

Terrance Gainer, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, tells The Washington Post that police searched the vehicle again several weeks later and found “explosive material.”

Also consider:

The Defense Department mistakenly shipped nuclear-missile fuses to Taiwan more than 18 months ago and did not learn the items were missing until last week, Pentagon officials said Tuesday, deepening concerns about the security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

While the shipment did not include nuclear materials, the error is particularly sensitive because China opposes U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province.

Officials with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) sent four nose-cone fuse assemblies to Taiwan in August 2006 instead of four replacement battery packs for use in its UH-1 Huey helicopters. The fuses help trigger nuclear warheads on Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles as they near their point of impact.

I am moving to Montana with Tunch and a goat, some tools, some seeds, and some “How-To” books and going off the grid.

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Reader Interactions

32Comments

  1. 1.

    The Other Steve

    March 26, 2008 at 8:45 am

    Maybe this will cheer you up?

  2. 2.

    joe

    March 26, 2008 at 8:46 am

    How do say “WTF is this?” is Taiwanese?

  3. 3.

    4tehlulz

    March 26, 2008 at 8:51 am

    gb2/b/ TOS

  4. 4.

    Zifnab

    March 26, 2008 at 8:51 am

    Maybe this will cheer you up?

    We can see the URL in the link. Nice try, though, TOS.

  5. 5.

    jenniebee

    March 26, 2008 at 8:52 am

    well there’s just one more reason for Hank Hill to steer clear of DC

  6. 6.

    khead1

    March 26, 2008 at 8:53 am

    Montana? Just move to the other end of the state. McDowell or maybe Mingo county.

  7. 7.

    The Other Steve

    March 26, 2008 at 8:55 am

    4tehlulz – n00b

  8. 8.

    myiq2xu

    March 26, 2008 at 8:55 am

    To be fair, aren’t nose cone fuses and battery packs virtually the same thing?

  9. 9.

    4tehlulz

    March 26, 2008 at 8:55 am

    NO U!

  10. 10.

    Zifnab

    March 26, 2008 at 8:57 am

    I am moving to Montana with Tunch and a goat, some tools, some seeds, and some “How-To” books and going off the grid.

    Whatever. If you did anything worth mentioning, they’d probably misidentify you as an illegal housemaid from Guadalahara and perform a no-knock raid on some poor woman’s house in the 3rd world part of Miami.

    $5 says that by the time Obama steps up into the Presidency, he’ll be looking at the most poorly implemented and catastrophically managed domestic spying program conceived of by man.

  11. 11.

    Jen

    March 26, 2008 at 9:04 am

    I think actually the survival of mankind demands selflessness. John should put Tunch and the goat in the doomsday vault. Maybe 2 goats, come to that.

  12. 12.

    Wilfred

    March 26, 2008 at 9:04 am

    I am moving to Montana with Tunch and a goat,

    Who gets the goat?

  13. 13.

    Phoenix Woman

    March 26, 2008 at 9:06 am

    Get yourself some printed thin-film solar cells from companies like Nanosolar: http://www.sustainableindustries.com/technology/16076607.html

    Check out wind technology, too: http://www.montanagreenpower.com/wind/index.html

  14. 14.

    lutton

    March 26, 2008 at 9:17 am

    >>Michael Gorbey

    That’s not a very middle eastern sounding name…must he how he snuck into the country. Wait, what? He’s not a foreign terrorist? Hmmm…

  15. 15.

    Seitz

    March 26, 2008 at 9:30 am

    You really didn’t have to tell us about the goat. I’d rather not know what you were planning to do with it.

  16. 16.

    4tehlulz

    March 26, 2008 at 9:41 am

    Just don’t take Mickey Kaus’s goat. He’s very attached to it.

  17. 17.

    LiberalTarian

    March 26, 2008 at 9:41 am

    Hm. See what I had to put up with growing up? A bajillion disaffected white guys with goats and seeds who hate the government. Lots of John Birchers and Constitutionalists (who seem to forget they hate the government when they are nursing at the teat of the government dole).

    And they’re always trying to get you to tell you where the good fishing holes are so they can go out take out every damn fish; meanwhile they are putting up no trespassing signs and shooting at everything that moves.

    But, they usually get bored about the third year and move back where they came from (unless they do a Freemen or Kaczynski and are actually hiding out from their violent felonious behavior elsewhere).

  18. 18.

    LiberalTarian

    March 26, 2008 at 9:43 am

    Having thought this out, John, Alaska is where you want to go. Really. ;)

  19. 19.

    Mr Furious

    March 26, 2008 at 9:45 am

    Gonna be a dental floss tycoon?

  20. 20.

    CFisher

    March 26, 2008 at 9:46 am

    The latter story remind me of one of my favorite Simpsons quotes: “Mom! Dad build a device that could dangerous in the wrong hands, and he’s holding it!”

    My favorite part is the Taiwanese government saying ‘you shipped us something we probably shouldn’t have’ for a year before the geniuses in charge did anything about it.

  21. 21.

    Wilfred

    March 26, 2008 at 9:50 am

    Michael Gorbey…Mikhail Gorbachev. Coincidence? I think not.

  22. 22.

    Krista

    March 26, 2008 at 9:51 am

    I am moving to Montana with Tunch and a goat, some tools, some seeds, and some “How-To” books and going off the grid

    Careful. Goats eat everything, the little bastards. Your seeds, your tools, your how-to books. I think Tunch would be safe, though.

    That’s one thing I like about living in the sticks. You become a lot more self-sufficient. When there are widespread power outages, you know that the cities will get turned back on first, and they’ll get to you oh…sometime in the next few weeks, between 11am and 3pm. In our new home, we’re going to have a generator and a wood stove. Himself knows how to hunt, I can fish, and we have edible mushrooms growing on our property. As soon as money permits, we’re getting solar panels. If the end of the world comes due to Bush’s incompetence, start driving northeast and call me when you’re an hour away so I can put supper on. :)

  23. 23.

    Cyrus

    March 26, 2008 at 9:54 am

    The government that insists you have your phone conversations snooped to keep us safe can not tie its own shoes. Consider:

    Court documents show an armed man arrested in January near the Capitol allegedly had explosives in his truck and was trying to make and set off a large bomb.

    Apparently they arrested the guy, who seems like simply a nut, and had to wait a few weeks to get a warrant to search his truck. Waiting a few weeks is scary, but on the other hand, getting a warrant is a good thing. Yes, we have low standards for our government. I’m more bothered by the fact that they’re calling it an attempt to “make or own a weapon of mass destruction.”

    It was identified in court documents as being made of a can of gunpowder duct-taped to a box of shotgun shells and a bottle containing buckshot or BB pellets.

    If this is a WMD, I’m surprised they haven’t been using that term for IEDs.

  24. 24.

    horatius

    March 26, 2008 at 9:58 am

    John,

    Can you take myiq=0 and P. Luk with you. See if the calm surroundings knock some sense into them?

  25. 25.

    Grand Wazoo

    March 26, 2008 at 9:59 am

    Dammit, Mr. Furious beat me to it! I can see him now, on his pygmy pony over by the dental floss bush, his tweezers gleeming in the moonlight at night…

  26. 26.

    Punchy

    March 26, 2008 at 10:31 am

    Wait….a minute. They saw propane tanks and WIRES, but didn’t bother to re-inspect the truck until WEEKS later?

    Holy Mother of WTFs.

  27. 27.

    NonyNony

    March 26, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Apparently they arrested the guy, who seems like simply a nut, and had to wait a few weeks to get a warrant to search his truck.

    Actually, that’s not how the article you linked to reads. It reads more like they arrested the guy, searched the truck, found stuff, had him in a cell for a few weeks, searched the truck again and found something they missed in the first search. It sounds like it was missed in the first search because it occurred during MLK weekend, and the bomb has been sitting in the police impound lot for the last month. This isn’t a “couldn’t get a warrant” situation as much as it is “we were in a hurry to clear this thing so that traffic could get moving again”. Incompetence of the professional kind, not of the bureaucratic kind (one of the bomb squad guys apparently won’t be coming back to the squad because of the screw-up, according to the Post article).

    The warrant that they refer to later sounds like a follow-up warrant for the investigation – like it took them three weeks to get it because they put it on the back burner because they weren’t expecting to find anything. It says the warrant was for “papers and other items related to the investigation”. Presumably they knew they had the guy in a cell, they knew the truck wasn’t going anywhere, and so they didn’t push the paperwork really quickly. But the initial bomb search wasn’t hampered by the lack of a warrant or anything like that – this is just the usual prioritization of workflow you get anywhere.

    As for claim of WMD or not – that term is pretty much meaningless now if it ever had a real meaning in the first place. Would a truck full of fertilizer like the one that took out the Federal Building be considered a “WMD”? Depending on how much propane this guy had and what he planned to do with it he might have been able to build something of that level out of it. That sounds like what the police suspect this guy might have been up to, given the record he had and the documents they found on him when they arrested him. Whether this turns out to have been an actual threat or something that they’ve blown up out of proportion will hopefully come out at trial.

  28. 28.

    LiberalTarian

    March 26, 2008 at 10:38 am

    Wait….a minute. They saw propane tanks and WIRES, but didn’t bother to re-inspect the truck until WEEKS later?

    Holy Mother of WTFs.

    Yeah, it’s not pretty. I keep thinking, “the new elections will put competent people in charge.” But, lately, I am worried about where all those incompetent fucks are going to end up. Shit o dear. They are going to work somewhere, hopefully not for DHS anymore, but still. Like the man says, you can’t fix stupid.

  29. 29.

    Punchy

    March 26, 2008 at 11:02 am

    They are going to work somewhere, hopefully not for DHS anymore

    Would just like to say….flew 5 times in 2 days this past weekend/week, carried on way more than the allowable deoderant, contact solution, and toothpaste, never once turned off my phone, nor my iPod on takeoff, and NOT A SINGLE PLANE CRASHED.

    Those DHS/TSA rules/regs were completely fabricated for scare/shock value. Period. What a joke.

  30. 30.

    Michael Keyes

    March 26, 2008 at 11:49 am

    Hey, the batteries/atomic missile fuse thing is easily explained – the stock numbers were only on digit apart. Anyone could make that mistake. Give them some slack :grin:

    Of course the other explanation is that we have been secretly feeding them parts for ICBMs all these years and some incompetent fool at their end blew the whistle.

  31. 31.

    Fern%9Ziegler

    July 28, 2009 at 8:17 pm

    ur Work on del.icio.us today — liked it.. bookmarked it , will be back to check out some more later .. nice article ..

Comments are closed.

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  1. Lurita Doan’t « 300 says:
    March 26, 2008 at 9:23 pm

    […] Jump to Comments Balloon Juice got the U.S.C.P’s balls-out-in-your-face fail and it’s getting late. So Icheated and went to the Giant Bumper Grimoire of bAdmin. Fuck Ups for some wonkery (via the GAO): CCE [Contracting Center for Excellence] is paying up to almost 27 percent more for its contractor-provided contract specialists than for similarly graded government employees. This comparison took into account government salary, benefits, and overhead and the loaded hourly labor rates paid to contractors. Our review of available résumés showed that six contractor employees supporting CCE in fiscal year 2007 had on average more contracting experience than CCE’s five recent government hires. […]

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