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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SirRealist who wrote (19036)	2/16/2002 6:37:43 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 281500

SirRealist, Re: but not the source of mailed US Army-Grade anthrax (too embarrassing?) or a Middle Easterner with a suitcase nuke. Actually, Customs has a killer sensor for the nukes. It's about the size of a pager, and 4,000 of them have been issued. Very good technology. One example: A driver was coming across the U.S.-Mexican border recently and the sensor sounded an alarm having detected radioactivity. The Customs office requested that the driver evacuate the vehicle so that a further search with the detector could locate the source in the vehicle. He came up empty. No radiation. So the customs man approached the driver. Alarms sounded. Turns out that the driver had just been in the clinic for radiation therapy for thoracic cancer. The residual ionization was enough to trigger the detector. So, I don't have a whole lot of concern about nuclear materials making it into the country via any means where inspections are carried out. We got it covered. The anthrax situation is a completely different can of worms entirely. Looking to motivation for the attacks, in the initial instances, the media was attacked, and someone wanted the word to get out about biological terror, now didn't they? Then a bunch of annoying celebrity politicians at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue were dispossessed of their offices, a Post Office was further discredited and the general populace was left with a continuous stream of warnings for which no useful action could be taken, leading to a sense of helplessness and for the weaker minded, a basic instinct to rely on the natural leaders of the herd for psychological comfort, much the way that any herd animal will follow the leader out of perceived danger while remaining as part of the pack or herd. Basically, a three-fer for the successors to the "plumbers" of yore, with the media seduced to call it the way they were "supposed" to see it. BTW, do you recall the flurry of announcements about childish pranks on the part of Dems as they were leaving the White House? You know, removing the "W" keys from the computers and such like? Turns out that it was almost completely a fabricated hoax on the part of Administration staffers. Do you suppose they've simply gotten emboldened? All the best, Ray