Never Saw Nothing at All

Everybody wears a halo, never saw nothing at all
So who put that bullet hole in Peggy's kitchen wall? - Bruce Cockburn

I was in the middle of writing something else when I saw this. Read it fast, while it lasts, because it's the kind of discomforting story that disappears quickly with little follow-up and no national attention.

Two Houston men driving a tractor-trailer pulled up to the gate of Pennsylvania's Beaver Valley nuclear power station Tuesday afternoon. They said they'd arrived from Chicago with an empty flatbed to pick up a large tool container bound for Youngstown, Ohio.

There are at least a couple of accounts of what happened next. In one, the men drove away as soon as they were informed their vehicle would be subject to routine inspection, prompting the security guards to become suspicious and call police, "who pulled the truck over about a mile from the plant." In the sleeping compartment, more than half a million dollars in ten bundles of small bills wrapped in plastic and duct tape was found stuffed in a locked duffel bag. In another version the bag is found by security before the truckers drive off and the search warrant is executed. In both, the truckers claim they had no idea what was in the bag, and offer no persuasive explanation for how it got there. One trucker claimed it was for a truck his boss hoped to purchase, "but when the security workers called the truckers' boss in Houston, he also said he knew nothing about the money." In this account, it was the boss who instructed the drivers to back away from the plant and return to the road.

Three more things: A police dog sensed drug residue on the bills (Not necessarily exceptional, that: "The probability that every single person in the United States is carrying drug-tainted money is almost certain.") Though the truckers were said to be polite and cooperative, one of them wasn't carrying identification, and told the dog-ate-my-homework tale of it having been stolen from the truck the night before. (While a duffel bag of cash was left behind?) And the "truckers worked for a company hired by San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp., which is performing construction work and replacing equipment at the plant."

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force was summoned and quickly sized up the situation. The truckers were released, the money seized and, as seen in this video, it was the reporters who were detained. The truckers were allowed to leave because authorities claimed there was no indication they had committed a crime. How quaint, and how selective the presumption of innocence. That the men were from Houston rather than, say, Bangla Desh, meant they didn't look like terrorists to the security guards, even though Michael Meiring also lived in Houston for a time.

So what is going on here? Because something just had its cover blown.

Could the intention have been to purchase nuclear material, perhaps for a dirty bomb to trigger the Iran war and make a US nuclear assault less objectionable? Could be, but I'd also say this scene appears too sloppy for such a task, and Bechtel wouldn't risk showing its hand so close to such action.

It strikes me, rather, as aspects of a covert drug routine so familiar that the players got lazy. Caught out, all they have to do is forfeit the money back to the government from which it probably came. In this old racket, Bechtel risks nothing.

On the other hand, terror and drugs are simply different manifestations of the same Will to Control. So whatever was intended will still endeavour to find its way, and the media will be looking somewhere else, comprehending nothing.