As you may recall, 400 pounds of plastic explosives -- some of it "sheet explosives" ideally suited for making letter bombs -- was stolen a week ago from an industial storage facility in New Mexico. Federal authorities today announced four arrests and the recovery of the explosives. CNN has an article on the arrests
here.
There are some interesting details and a bit of unintentional irony in the CNN report, discussed on the flip ...
The explosives hadn't been used, or apparently even fashioned into a bomb as yet when the feds moved in. But the report does specify that the explosives were recovered from three separate sites near Albuquerque, suggesting that this was not a simple "target of opportunity" theft but one where the explosives were being parceled out for specific buyers and/or specific operations.
Two of the people seized in connection with the theft, David and Leslie Brown (that's David in the picture), are in their mid-to-late forties and neither are believed to have the expertise needed to use the explosives properly, further suggesting that the materials were intended for use by persons unknown.
Despite stealing enough explosives to bring down a small fleet of airliners or assassinate most of any sitting legislature in the country, CNN dutifully parrotted the claims of a federal agent that "there was no evidence to suggest the theft was connected to terrorism." Anyone wanna give odds on whether they'd have said the same if ol' Dave up there had brown skin and a foreign-sounding name?