The War On Terror?
This is beyond absurd, as reported in the Kansas City Star: Former workers at area munitions plant charged with sabotage
Former employees of an Independence munitions plant allegedly stole tons of copper that was to have been forged into bullets for U.S. soldiers, according to sabotage charges unsealed Tuesday.
The copper — described as “bullet cups” in the indictment — eventually was sold to a Moberly, Mo., salvage company for $45,362.
Charles Dale Osborn, 45, of Odessa, Mo., and Timothy Duane Langevin, 36, of Independence, were charged in the 10-count federal indictment. According to allegations in court records, the conspirators initially smuggled out of the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant relatively small amounts of copper in buckets, but later used heavy equipment and a trailer to haul out ever-growing loads.
Prosecutors acknowledged that charging the men under the sabotage statute was unusual, but said it was warranted in this case.
The men purportedly interfered with the war effort during a time of national emergency, which President Bush announced on Sept. 14, 2001, just after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“The theft of such large amounts of copper could have a direct impact on the ability of our men and women in the armed forces to accomplish their missions in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said U.S. Attorney John Wood.
This is a US Army ordnance facility with massive amounts of things that go “BOOM”. So, I will ask the obvious question that my Mother asked when I told her about it: “Where was the security for the plant?” Where were the guards who were checking the identity of people coming and going, and checking the contents of vehicles? Were they all tied up preventing people from taking sippy cups and pudding on airplanes?
8 comments
…well, this would presumably be the statute under which they are being charged, so it looks like the federal prosecutors may be setting themselves up for an unnecessarily difficult prosecution over that “intent” issue. Your (and your mother’s) question is right on the money; if security is so lax over the protection of this “war material” that these two jokers can drive out the gate with trailer loads of this stuff, what’s to keep some real saboteur from wandering around flipping cigarette butts into the smokeless gunpowder storage areas…
They keep talking about threats to “national security” and generate “war-time” prosecutions, but they aren’t even taking the minimal steps necessary to protect military assets. They have a private “rent-a-cop” company controlling access the the local Air Force base, not the military. It’s a joke.
This was larceny. That’s what you charge unless you are trying to lose the case. They’ll get a hung jury and mistrial if they go this way.
Crap, they’d have better luck going after these two dudes for drug charges, since they’re obviously tweakers. Except that’d require, like, work to track them and find out their drug connections and arrest’em while they’re still holding, and much easier(?) to just charge’em with something spectacular so you can set up an appropriate show trial for them. Unfortunately, there’s still a significant number of Americans who refuse to vote “guilty” if they have to sit through a show trial as a juror. Bummer. Why do Americans hate America?
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The trial is going to showcase the fact that the Federal government doesn’t protect US ammo dumps any better than it protected Iraqi ammo dumps. I wonder if they can account for all of the smokeless powder that was at the plant. That has a value of $15+/pound, while copper scrap is going for about $3/pound.
I reloaded when I lived in New York, and I can tell you that you have to jump through some hoops to buy smokeless powder, even a pound at a time. They required a concrete outbuilding to buy a bigger quantity, even though it is not actually an explosive.
Unless they have pictures of these guys drinking tea with Osama, I don’t see this going anywhere. Another embarrassing DoJ loss.
But tweakers don’t know how to sell smokeless powder, while the tweaker underground knows all about how to sell copper scrap (I know that the hard way, unfortunately — some of them broke into one of my properties and stripped every single bit of copper wire out of the place). That’s why I’m 99% certain that these two losers were tweakers. That and the fact that they actually drove semi-trailers in there to load up with copper. Only someone meth’ed to the gills would think that they could get away with that.
– Badtux the Meth-sniffin’ Penguin
I would be interested in finding out the price these guys got for the copper. If they got $3/pound the scrap dealer was just stupid, but if they got $1.50/pound, the dealer knew damn well it was stolen and should be in the dock with them.
I helped a friend get rid of more than a dozen old refrigerators, and the guy who did the hauling mentioned that he got top dollar for them because it was obvious they weren’t stolen and the old compressors have a lot more copper than the new ones.
Yes. junkies do weird things, and if they have a pattern, they don’t vary. It was really annoying to have to keep arresting them for the same thing.
In this case they didn’t load 8 to 15 tons of copper in one trip, so they were right about being able to get away with it for a while. The “security” had to be a joke.
agreed about the lax security, but i’m not heartbroken that a few million bullets didn’t get manufactured. and, if it’s going to be more difficult to convict them of sabotage than larceny, i’m not entirely unhappy about that either.
but yeah, this rent-a-government crap has got to go.
At this point I would think that it would be impossible to convict them of sabotage, because you have to show that decreasing the availability of ammunition was their intention and not greed. Without that autographed picture of Osama, that is one tough row to hoe, especially, if as Badtux suspects, they are meth addicts.