by CKR
Not much to report. The morning tv shows are totally free of any more facts on this story. No leads and no suspects.
The owner of the mysterious company from which the explosives were stolen is an employee of Sandia National Laboratories. I hate to participate in the Los Alamos paranoia, but I'll just ask how the story would be treated if the company were run by a Los Alamos employee.
One account says that Cherry Engineering's business is the training of police bomb squads. To do what? I recall being shown, back in junior high or so, a board with blasting caps on it, mockups with no explosives of course. "If you see any of these, call the police. Don't touch them." So these guys would have to touch them, and it might be useful to have some of the real thing around, blow one or two up occasionally to show them what happens. A hamburger-filled glove on top of the blasting cap when it goes off mocks up a hand. But 2500 blasting caps? 20,000 feet of detonating cord? One of the safety rules in handling explosives is not to keep any more around than you need.
CNN interviewed Brian Jenkins:
Rand Corp. terrorism expert Brian Jenkins said such thefts are common, with 1990s figures showing more than 100 such incidents each year.Several hundred bombings occur each year, most of which have nothing to do with terrorism, Jenkins said. "Most have to do with insurance fraud, organized crime, personal vendettas, extortion, revenge, vandalism and protest."
Oh. Okay. There are tens of thousands of pounds of high explosives loose in the US, with blasting caps, but we don't need to worry. I guess the remarkable thing is that we don't hear more explosions as some guy blows up his wife. Or maybe it's that telephone monitoring by NSA that is keeping us safe. As President Bush said about terrorist attacks, not having any proves that the monitoring is doing its job. (Or was that the guy who was snapping his fingers to keep away the elephants?)