[HN Gopher] FBI probe: nitrate amount in Beirut blast was a frac...
___________________________________________________________________
FBI probe: nitrate amount in Beirut blast was a fraction of
original shipment
Author : yyyk
Score : 200 points
Date : 2021-07-31 16:49 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > 2,754 tonnes that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship
|
| >The ship arrived in Beirut in November 2013 but never left,
| becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and
| ship defects. No one ever came forward to claim the shipment.
|
| There is either in economy of scale that is so wildly unknown to
| me - or this was some shady shit to begin with.
| wmf wrote:
| https://ihsmarkit.com/products/fertilizers-nitrates.html
|
| Global use of nitrate fertilizer is in tens of millions of tons
| and prices are ~$200/ton. The seized fertilizer was worth only
| half a million dollars; I can imagine repairs on a cargo ship
| could easily cost more.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| There is this weird "worst of all worlds" where ships aren't
| maintained because owners are too cheap. If they break down
| before they reach the destination (or get hit with unexpected
| port fees), the cost of the repairs can be more than the value
| of the ship + cargo. So the owner just stops answering the
| phone (or rather the untraceable faceless fake corporation in a
| tax haven jurisdiction does).
|
| Then the crew are stuck: they won't get paid. But the port the
| ship is in won't let them leave with the ship without paying
| the fees, which they can't. And they aren't allowed to leave
| without the ship (and fly home or whatever) because the
| authorises don't want the ship to just sit there rusting or
| sink.
|
| That's what happened here. It can go on for decades.
|
| The issue here was that the courts said the cargo couldn't be
| seized as no one knew who the owner was in order to sue. So it
| just had to be stored forever. For some crazy reason they also
| refused to allow it to be moved out of the highly populated,
| busy port city. Not sure why that was...
|
| It's apparently quite common for this crap to happen and no one
| really cares. The big losers are crews. The winners are
| consumers getting a few nano percent less in shipping costs...
| structural wrote:
| The dirty secret is that shipping is a rarely profitable
| industry, so the "owners are too cheap" aspect is really the
| owners trying to go out of business as slowly as possible,
| hoping that times will improve in the future: if the shipping
| company goes out of business, it cares not one bit for the
| maintenance state of its fleet.
|
| So what do you do if you're a country that doesn't want this
| to happen? Well, we tried regulating how international
| shippers operate, and it turns out that it's expensive to do
| that. So we ended up with flags of convenience.
|
| It'd be easy to think that you could say "well, you need to
| be well-maintained, etc., etc., in order to dock at and use
| our country's ports" -- but that doesn't work either. There's
| no global inspection regime to make sure the ship is in good
| repair when it leaves the last port (and it can break down on
| the passage so that the only place it can be repaired to move
| again is at the same port you'd like to prevent it from
| using).
|
| You also can't be too heavy-handed about the whole thing,
| because shipping is pretty essential to the operation of
| industrialized countries, and if too many shippers were to be
| driven out of business the result might likely be worse than
| the current status quo.
| nradov wrote:
| That may be true for some of the bottom feeders but Maersk
| has been pretty consistently profitable.
| petra wrote:
| Why is shipping rarely profitable ? the barriers to entry
| are large, and at least in theory that should give
| companies some stable margin ?
| drran wrote:
| Ship and cargo should be insured for such cases.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| But then they'd charge more, and I'd have to pay 3p more a
| pointless plastic waste off amazon and that's fundamentally
| unacceptable to our democratic capitalist mess of a
| society.
| fragmede wrote:
| that consumers get things for slightly cheaper seems like a
| side-effect. The winners would be the owners of the vessel
| who have done the X vs Y math, and enjoy the extra money from
| having done so.
| structural wrote:
| 2754 tonnes is not really considered a large amount of material
| on the scale of global logistics. That's even closer to
| "regular weekly/monthly delivery" numbers than a large or
| special shipment.
| sparrish wrote:
| It could have been stolen, as the FBI suggests.
|
| Or it had been sitting in a sea port warehouse for 7 years. As it
| is hygroscopic and readily absorbs moisture from the atmosphere,
| it may be that the shipment had broken down over that time and
| only 20% of its explosive energy remained.
| oivey wrote:
| I'm sure they considered that. It's rather obvious, and the
| degradation of the material was openly reported in the news at
| the time.
| aurizon wrote:
| They normally ship in heavy plastic bags. There is a little
| water vapor transmission, but not enough to seriously degrade
| the Ammonium Nitrate - except for tears/punctures etc. One
| press release commented about damaged cargo. My guess is the
| local terrorists used it as an explosives bank. Being a customs
| port, it should all the watched/counted, but beirut is one of
| the most corrupt countries on earth = easy to steal/import
| anything. Now you know how Hezbollah gats their stuff, as I am
| sure Israel knows and monitors well.
| ficklepickle wrote:
| The bags were torn. They couldn't even give the stuff away,
| and not for lack of trying.
| tpmx wrote:
| > Many officials in Lebanon have previously said in private they
| believe a lot of the shipment was stolen.
|
| This seems plausible. If so, this would be one of those few times
| where lawlessness/corruption/incompetence kinda paid off. Imagine
| the damage to Beirut if there had been 5x more ammonium nitrate
| to blow up...
|
| (Of course, it was the same kind of general governmental
| incompetence that caused the ammonium nitrate to be stored there
| to begin with.)
| bostonsre wrote:
| It could be a little too early to claim that. Whoever stole it
| won't be baking cookies with it. It is a country with a war
| torn past with tons of individuals and competing factions that
| know how to use it effectively.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The thing about the "maybe they made it less bad" argument is
| that the authorities repeated refusal to let the shipment be
| moved could have come because they wanted it there so that it
| could be stolen (with said authorities paid-off for that). The
| explosion could even have been an effort to cover the tracks of
| those involved.
|
| Edit: I have no non-public information, of course. But I have
| read that some people were understandably worried and tried to
| get the shipment moved and the authorities squashed that
| effort.
| adrusi wrote:
| I agree it's likely that it was stored there specifically to
| be stolen, but I seriously doubt the explosion was meant to
| cover up the corrupt affairs. Even if you assume the people
| involved didn't care about civilian lives one iota, big
| explosions draw attention. And realistically criminals, even
| terrorists, and definitely corrupt officials actually are not
| typically into wantonly murdering their neighbors. Maybe they
| underestimated the size of the blast, but more likely
| improperly stored explosive chemicals just exploded.
| mike_d wrote:
| It is "common knowledge" among people who construct IEDs
| that the fertilizer needs to be mixed with diesel or
| another fuel to generate a large explosion. However
| ammonium nitrate will act as its own oxidizer and fuel.
|
| They may have falsely believed it would be a small
| explosion because it was lacking what they thought was a
| critical component.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Unless the fire and explosion was deliberate to cover up the
| fact it had mostly all been stolen... And maybe the explosion
| turned out much larger than the thieves expected...
| DevKoala wrote:
| This is also what I see as a possible explanation.
|
| Also, why would you get downvoted?
| mjburgess wrote:
| I agree that this sort of "conspiracy theory" is a
| "hypothesis involving conspriacy" and not "paranoid magical
| thinking".
|
| ie., we are talking about something a small number of
| people could plausibly do for the sake of covering up known
| crimes. It doesn't involve god-like levels of planning,
| forthought, coordination -- and the "theory" expresses
| nothing implausible about local corruption.
|
| I dont think we should downvote contributions that merely
| suppose covering up known crimes, at this very minor scale.
| Rather, perhaps, downvotes are owed to the more paranoid
| "maybe the whole world is a lie" type.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Because it's a conspiracy theory without any evidence, and
| isn't even plausible. They blew up their own port to
| distract from the explosives/fertilizer they were stealing?
| Hanlon's razor applies here.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| If you use Hanlon's Razor in criminal investigations,
| most criminals are going to walk.
|
| Most thieves don't hold equity or title to the structures
| they're stealing from. It's dubious to imply the people
| working in that warehouse have a greater interest in
| keeping the dock standing than in staying out of prison.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I have no idea what point you're trying to make.
| DevKoala wrote:
| Dude relax. Not everybody keeps up with every worldwide
| event. I didn't realize there was an investigation and a
| conclusion with 100% confidence of what happened, thus
| denying this possibility.
|
| Just replying with a link saying "the investigation
| claims this is what happened, here is the link..." would
| have been enough.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Pointing out why a theory is implausible and lacks
| evidence is a "dude relax" moment? What?
| salawat wrote:
| Hanlon's razor is rusty, mangled, and doesn't cut for
| beans anymore. Put it away before you give yourself
| tetanus.
| system2 wrote:
| This will feed conspiracy theorists for decades to come.
| spuz wrote:
| The difference between a conspiracy theorist and a healthy
| sceptic is that the more implausible the theory the more
| convinced the conspiracy theorist will be and the less
| convinced the sceptic will be. Since real conspiracies and
| cover ups do happen, it should be possible to speculate
| about conspiracy theories without falling into the trap of
| conspiracy theorist thinking by applying a healthy dose of
| Occam's razor.
| latchkey wrote:
| Hey @spuz... great response. Just wanted to let you know
| that the link in your profile goes to a junk website.
| Looks like a domain squatter got it.
| appleiigs wrote:
| the conspiracy theory is that spuz is the domain
| squatter! or is that Occam's razor
| Raineer wrote:
| This is very well stated. A healthy reminder of how
| logical thinking should be applied, especially in 2021.
| herendin2 wrote:
| But the (video documented by multiple sources) sequence of
| events on the day fits the scenario of an accidental
| detonation very well: repair work involving hot welding the
| door, a slowly growing fire, then successively larger
| explosions capped by an enormous blast after an hour. It all
| took so long that the fire department had arrived
|
| If one has access and just wants to destroy the evidence in a
| big boom, there's no need for so much complication and the
| uncertain results of it. Just pour gas on the pile, light a
| long fuse and run, fast.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Also, blowing up the fertilizer (and the port) to hide the
| fact that you were stealing fertilizer isn't exactly a
| plausible story.
|
| People can be dumb, but come on.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| Are you suggesting it's unthinkable that someone would
| burn down a crime scene?
|
| It happens a lot. Crime concealment consistently places
| among the top 6 motives in studies of arson.
|
| I'm not saying it's a very likely cause, but it would be
| hasty to rule it out
| throwanem wrote:
| Are you suggesting that someone trucked away two thousand
| tons of ammonium nitrate without anyone noticing,
| presumably for the purpose of recycling it into
| explosives and thus in full knowledge of its explosive
| properties, and then capped this incredible achievement
| in stealthy theft by setting off the rest of it as an
| improvised bomb that drew every eye in the world?
|
| Because I'm not sure how that _isn 't_ what this claim of
| yours really adds up to, and I'm not going to call it
| impossible, but I _am_ going to say it needs more
| substantiation than you have as yet seen fit to give it.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| I'm saying it would be premature to discount the
| possibility.
|
| A low-level dock supervisor could have been peddling this
| stuff for years, got spooked, and decided to cover his
| tracks, perhaps underestimating the size of the
| explosion, and assuming that the blame for an explosion
| would be spread too thin for his own liability to
| outweigh his personal, severe liability for his previous
| crimes.
|
| The comment I was replying to seems to assume this
| scenario is ridiculous without giving it due
| consideration.
|
| Again, I'm not saying this is a likely hypothesis, just
| that it's a credible possibility and didn't deserve the
| knee-jerk ridicule it was given.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| The nitrate being stored in the port was a public secret,
| there is no way Israel and quite likely the US didn't had
| surveillance covering it. If there was a shred of
| evidence suggesting that a regional actor siphoned any
| substantial amount of it it would've been released by
| now.
|
| Israel would've jumped on the opportunity to lay the
| blame on Hezbollah, Syria or Iran.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > I'm saying it would be premature to discount the
| possibility
|
| So you have no evidence, but demand that your theory be
| put on equal footing, just because.
|
| If you have evidence for a purposeful detonation, provide
| it. Otherwise you're just selling conspiracy theories,
| something this forum has little patience for.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| Not my theory. I didn't initially suggest it, I don't
| believe it, I don't even like it. I certainly made no
| demands. A hypothesis doesn't require evidence. Others
| have made some strong points toward falsifying the
| hypothesis elsewhere in the thread.
|
| It really seems to me that you're eager to bicker with
| someone who is actually credulous of this theory and
| didn't find any, so you decided to lash out and distort
| statements from a person who suggests we refine our
| falsification of the hypothesis a little further than
| just saying "I mean, come on"
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > A hypothesis doesn't require evidence.
|
| It does if you want it to be taken seriously. Especially
| when there are other hypothesis available with evidence.
|
| > It really seems to me that you're eager to bicker with
| someone who is actually credulous of this theory and
| didn't find any, so you decided to lash out and distort
| statements
|
| Follow the rules, please. This is pretty deep into
| uncivil territory.
|
| > refine our falsification of the hypothesis a little
| further than just saying "I mean, come on"
|
| This seems like a demand that I prove a negative. The
| purposeful detonation theory has currently no evidence
| put forth, while we do have evidence for the accidental
| detonation theory. Demanding that I refine the hypothesis
| further for something that is currently evidence free is
| to put the whole thing backwards.
|
| If you believe that the purposeful detonation theory
| deserves serious consideration, provide evidence.
| Otherwise don't get angry at people who are credulous
| about a theory that's just been thrown out there.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| How many people knew it was there before they blew up the
| entire port with it? Blowing it up certainly drew a lot
| of attention to both the ammonium nitrate, but also all
| the corruption surrounding it.
|
| Incompetence is always a more likely cause for these
| things than conspiracy. Not only do we have a long record
| of this stuff being stored in poor condition, we would
| also have tons of people leaking about the planned
| detonation of it were it purposeful.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Are you suggesting it 's unthinkable that someone
| would burn down a crime scene?_
|
| No, they're suggesting that the other, far more specific
| scenario, that was described was implausible.
|
| Are you suggesting that 1+1=5?
| redis_mlc wrote:
| FYI: Local Chinese officials routinely burn granaries
| when they expect an audit.
| eloff wrote:
| That's plausible. Never underestimate greed and the desire to
| avoid being caught for a crime.
| bogomipz wrote:
| No. While it is "possible" it is certainly not "plausible."
| Please explain why if you were trying to divert attention
| away from a stolen good such as fertilizer you would engage
| in a criminal act on such a scale as to get the world to
| focus on the very thing you would like to draw attention
| away from?
| eloff wrote:
| If you felt your theft would be discovered, you could
| very easily expect the explosion would destroy all traces
| of the theft and nobody would know any better. Many
| people, especially uneducated people, would not have
| expected that the theft would be detectable by the size
| of the explosion. I'm pretty smart and well educated, but
| I'm not even sure such a thing would have occurred to me,
| and even if it did I might have preferred my odds taking
| my chances on that anyway. To be very clear though, I
| wouldn't have done something so heinous in the first
| place.
|
| Given the sequence events, with the welding going on etc,
| I don't think this happened. But not for the reasoning
| you gave.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I see your point and i almost want to give it to you, but
| there's a nuance you didnt catch.
|
| The people trafficking on this were most likely
| terrorists. They use this stuff all the time.
|
| We are not terorrists so we may not be versed on blowing
| up such incriminating evidence.
|
| They however, presumably used it all the time. They would
| have known better than you or me on this topic
| krisoft wrote:
| Look I don't believe in this theory. But the part you are
| missing is the "And maybe the explosion turned out much
| larger than the thieves expected..."
|
| You look at the explosion see how big it was and say
| "nobody would be willingly cause that big of a problem to
| hide a smaller crime." But when you think that you are
| thinking backwards. You know how big the explosion was,
| therefore you conclude whoever did it must have known how
| big the explosion will be. That's not really correct.
| They might have underestimated for technical reasons,
| they might have underestimated because they are
| incompetent.
|
| It is kind of like asking "who would burn down 22,744
| acres for a gender reveal party?" Nobody intentionally,
| that's for sure. But the Earth is full of stupid and/or
| incompetent people.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It doesn't pay off if it was stolen because it's a chemical
| easily converted into more bombs.
| tpmx wrote:
| I don't think it's particularly hard to acquire fertilizer in
| this region, before or after the blast.
| tgtweak wrote:
| For whoever is counting, 5 wrongs and 4 rights do in fact still
| make a wrong.
| ineedasername wrote:
| And even that assumes rights and wrongs are a sort of
| fungible screwup-based currency where one can in fact cancel
| the other out.
|
| An interesting concept to play around with though: You'd
| essentially need currency that has both negative & positive
| denominations. In addition, you couldn't have a "100 Wrong
| Bill" because wrongs aren't fungible. A single wrong will
| differ in magnitude than another. To accurately denominate
| wrongs, you'd probably have to ditch quantity bills in favor
| of magnitude bills, and likely on a logarithmic scale too
| because the magnitude can vary so widely. "Oops I got into a
| fender bender" is too far away from "Oops I accidentally
| cause the largest non-nuclear explosion"
|
| Unfortunately it seems like it's easier for a single wrong to
| have an outsized impact than it is for a single right, so the
| negative denominations of this right/wrong currency would
| need to be logarithmic while the positive end would still
| probably need to be linear, and a sum of the two would still
| almost always come up negative.
| tclancy wrote:
| Someone should make a new digital currency based on this
| idea.
| mjburgess wrote:
| The USD exists. We price liability/damage/benefit all the
| time
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Agreed; if you squint a little, this what actuaries do.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Since explosions work on cubic law probably not much worse. And
| ammonia has pretty low detonation speed.
|
| It would have been worse, but probably 10-20% more destruction.
| jhgb wrote:
| What if this were the difference between the silo shielding a
| part of the town, and the silo being completely obliterated?
|
| Also, the cube root of 5 is not 1.2-1.3 anyway, but quite a
| bit more, so there's that.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Except even small increase in range means way larger part of
| the city would be covered by the blast.
|
| Additionally, many buildings were on the verge of collapse. I
| can imagine they did not need much more blast power to
| actually topple.
| baybal2 wrote:
| If ammonia was wet, it could've reduced the detonation power
| many times. Since it was a port, and a non air conditioned
| warehouse, it's not that much of a stretch to say that this
| must have played a role too.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Eh, it depends? Explosive that is blown up, as in ejected
| upwards before igniting can become a 2nd explosion, shaping
| the first one below into something more dangerous.
| nullc wrote:
| You mean that the pressure from an explosion follows the
| inverse cube of the distance, so even increasing the
| explosive power a lot wouldn't matter that much because the
| distance to damaging-pressure (for whatever threshold you
| choose) would only increase with the cube root of the factor
| it was increased by?
|
| How do you get 10% more? Based on that logic I'd expect the
| damage radius to be 1.6x the size for a 5x larger explosion,
| which would mean 2.5x the area inside a damage-threshold
| pressure contour.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Mostly because ammonia is shitty explosive. So it just
| wouldn't explode that efficiently if we make the pile
| bigger. The fact that it is 5 times bigger doesn't mean
| that it would release 5 times the energy in a detonation.
| wwwhizz wrote:
| I'm not American, and I am genuinely curious, why does the FBI
| investigate this?
|
| I can imagine the US government wanting an investigation in cases
| like this, and I can understand Beirut wanting (or maybe just
| allowing) different countries to investigate, but isn't foreign
| investigations a job of the CIA (or, at least, not the FBI)?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I imagine it's a good training exercise for the FBI staff,
| given that there aren't too many giant explosions like this in
| the States.
| rickeydidio wrote:
| I am American and this was my first thought when reading the
| headline. "Why is the FBI involved?" I can understand the CIA,
| like you said. So weird but a sign of our times.
| raincom wrote:
| There are multiple reasons:
|
| - Lebanese govt invited them.
|
| - USA wants to keep tab in that part of the world.
|
| - Talented investigators in FBI and others want to keep their
| brains sharp.
|
| - Advance knowledge about explosions, how to prevent them,
| etc.
| [deleted]
| dboreham wrote:
| FBI is just "the police", so it's very normal and happens all
| the time that police experts from one country are invited to
| help investigate crime in another country.
| refulgentis wrote:
| When you hear CIA think intelligence (as in espionage), when
| you hear FBI think investigation, never failed me
| ncmncm wrote:
| When I hear CIA, I think coercion to collect information,
| most usually information to be used to coerce somebody
| else. When I hear FBI I think coercion to instigate what
| will be well-publicized conspiratorial crime. Actual
| espionage and investigation are decidedly secondary
| activities.
|
| They have been that way from the start.
| pixl97 wrote:
| FBI has specialists that investigate fertilizer explosions.
| It's not uncommon for domestic terrorists to use this type of
| weapon in the US. Oklahoma City being a prime example.
| the-dude wrote:
| Maybe they want to confirm their knowledge about nitrate bombs
| for domestic purposes.
|
| IIRC, the Oklohoma bombing was a simple fertilizer/nitrate
| bomb.
| bogomipz wrote:
| As was the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| And the 2001 blast in Oslo.
| e12e wrote:
| 2011, not 2001?
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Sorry, 2011 is correct. Must have been a typo.
| papercrane wrote:
| FBI has expertise in the matter and was invited by the Lebanon
| government to help with the investigation.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/15/beirut-explosi...
| system2 wrote:
| FBI has expertise to do my taxes but they wouldn't come if I
| invited them. Most likely they invited themselves.
| mey wrote:
| Part of diplomacy is offering aid to those in need. Are you
| a potentially valuable ally?
| lazylion2 wrote:
| Also good for training
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| > _FBI has expertise to do my taxes_
|
| They do not.
|
| If you want to invite the FBI over for a visit, it's easy
| enough: just report a major federal crime.
| TheSoftwareGuy wrote:
| I'm not sure if you are being serious or not, but I'm sure
| the US government is getting useful intelligence out of
| this as well. The US has an interest in knowing how this
| happened
| humaniania wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Forge36 wrote:
| When 2000 to tons of explosive go missing paranoia about "where
| did it go?" is bound to attract attention from both.
| baybal2 wrote:
| In this case, it's likely it literally "Went South"
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > FBI investigators came to Beirut after the blast at Lebanon's
| request.
|
| > A senior Lebanese official who was aware of the FBI report
| and its findings said the Lebanese authorities agreed with the
| Bureau on the quantity that exploded.
| csommers wrote:
| Why wouldn't the US want to be involved? FEST responds to vast
| majority of these incidents, simply because we want to know if
| someone was behind it.
| bredren wrote:
| The CIA is tasked with intelligence gathering and covert
| foreign operations.
|
| So there may have well been CIA officers around the FBI
| mission, they would not have played a public role.
|
| If I understand it correctly, the CIA would offer their
| assessment of the blast to the United States DNI and President.
| This report might contain unflattering information, evidence of
| corruption or recommendations of subjects of new or continued
| surveillance.
|
| Whereas, the FBI, per their publicly accepted invitation would
| share a classified report with the Lebanese government as an
| expected result of their visit.
|
| The FBI report would likely be be more consultative, the
| mechanism of the explosion. Sort of like a car mechanic
| explaining why your car is making this squeak sound.
|
| Whereas, the Lebanese government would neither have insight
| into the amount of CIA resources aimed at Lebanon or this
| particular event, nor how these intelligence conclusions affect
| US foreign policy in the Mideast.
| wincy wrote:
| So like the CIA agent would be posing as an FBI agent though
| right?
| bredren wrote:
| While possible, I do not believe this would be very likely.
|
| FBI agents must regularly serve in a domestic capacity.
| That precludes availability for foreign missions.
|
| A CIA officer contributing intelligence would not be
| obviously investigating because the things they can learn
| are not so directly gleaned from visiting the site of the
| explosion themselves.
|
| An example of a CIA officer gathering intelligence on the
| explosion might be a business person who happens to have
| trade regularly passing through the port. Perhaps they
| employ many Lebanese to assist with this effort, some of
| whom are unwitting sources of intelligence.
|
| By conducting legitimate business, this ambient familiarity
| with the port, officials working there, gossip of the
| locals, would provide one point of insight that contributes
| to an overall assessment by the CIA.
|
| Information from the FBI report would likely be shared with
| the CIA via the DNI and / or from a direct classified
| briefing between the agencies. This would probably offer
| some information that is not shared with Lebanon.
|
| Presumably, the FBI's opinion on the matter is valuable
| enough to Lebanon that they okay'd the investigation. Or
| perhaps the explosion was so egregious that they knew the
| US would be crawling all over it so Lebanon might as well
| let some amount of that happen with cooperation so at least
| they get some information out of it.
| viewtransform wrote:
| <FBI agents must regularly serve in a domestic capacity.
| That precludes availability for foreign missions.>
|
| https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-
| structure/internati...
|
| "we have 63 legal attache offices--commonly known as
| legats--and more than two dozen smaller sub-offices in
| key cities around the globe, providing coverage for more
| than 180 countries, territories, and islands."
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Yep, not uncommon for FBI HRT agents to be embedded with
| Joint Special Operations command deployments. I imagine
| other teams are as well.
| newsclues wrote:
| Or the CIA can just get the report from the FBI and debrief
| the field team when they get back?
| [deleted]
| bogomipz wrote:
| One of the remits of the FBI is to protect the US from
| terrorist attacks. And as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
| and the Oklahoma City bombings were fertilizer-based this
| likely would have fallen into their purview. The CIA is
| supposed to be concerned only with intelligence-gathering. The
| FBI has offices around the world. See:
|
| https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/internati...
| jdavis703 wrote:
| The CIA doesn't really do these kinds of investigations. To be
| honest I would've expected ATF (they specialize in
| investigating explosions in the US) to have been the US agency
| lending technical assistance.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| How to get your bomb materials through shipping customs and
| international regulations.
|
| Have a ship loaded with explosives come to port. Openly report it
| as illegal. Levy fines and fees to someone that you know will
| reject paying them. Declare the ship unsafe to leave unless it is
| repaired by the same people that refuse to pay the fees. Do
| nothing. Now you have a legal bomb supply station.
| CPLX wrote:
| I mean it's a theory, but ammonium nitrate is an incredibly
| common farming input.
|
| At the nation state level especially I don't think you'd need
| to concoct a complicated scheme to get your hands on it.
| ipnon wrote:
| But Hamas, ISIS, FSA, Hezbollah, cannot simply park their
| bomb materials in a well-functioning port. No, they would
| need some sort of semi-failed state, in a big city with many
| places to hide, yes ... and one sharing a flimsy border with
| a warzone like Syria. And once the materials enter the
| warzone, they effectively disappear, and could reappear
| anywhere in the region. Where on the map could we find such a
| port?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I read this as another group, not a nation state, wanting and
| stealing the ammonium nitrate. Most of it was stolen before
| the blast -- terrorist groups? Low-level thugs? Who knows,
| but you're right that a nation state doesn't need to steal it
| in this way. That's why it points to other parties.
|
| It may be incredibly common but not in the quantity that was
| stolen.
| qubex wrote:
| > _ammonium nitrate is an incredibly common farming input_
|
| True, but this stuff was intended for use as a mining
| blasting agent in Africa so lacked most of the stabilisers
| added to the agricultural stuff specifically to make it less
| suitable for deliberate or accidental use as an explosive.
|
| In the context of this theory at least, this makes the
| material more valuable/suitable for 'military' use.
| jldugger wrote:
| How to level a city:
|
| As a national administrator, assume that was what was
| happening, and that the entire affair was a ruse to supply
| covert operatives without leaving a paper trail linking them to
| any government. Further assume they only left a tiny amount
| behind not worth executing any safety protocols over beyond a
| cursury 'inspection' to ensure the shipment hasn't left, when
| they in fact left 20 percent behind as an insurance policy in
| case you consider betraying the conspiracy.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Level oc corruption in Lebanon is unbelievable. Every government
| worker that has the right to approve something has at least two
| counter signer that need to approve or sign the same thing, still
| there is wild corruption running through the country.
| spoonjim wrote:
| It's only a few countries where rampant corruption is the
| exception and not the rule -- the US is one such country but
| many Americans don't recognize this because they have no
| comparison reference.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| A friend from Romania was astonished that Canadians threw a
| fit over a politician having $16 orange juice because of
| this.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| Here are two separate, independent, international corruption
| indexes that both rank the US in the best 15% of nations,
| above several major Western European countries:
|
| * https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
|
| * https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/usa
|
| The US has its problems, God knows. But you've never seen
| _real_ corruption if you think it 's anywhere close to the
| worst.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| American corruption exists, it is just excused as how things
| are done. E.g. speaking fees to important bureaucrats,
| revolving door between industry and regulatory agencies, etc.
| There is also probably insider trading by spouses of elected
| officials, but this is harder to prove.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Of course there is American corruption, it's just not on
| the level of most countries. The US for example is probably
| in the 25 least corrupt countries and 5 least racist
| countries but I don't think most Americans internalize this
| because the culture is to always want to be better. There's
| good to that but also important to recognize your success.
| shadilay wrote:
| Probably insider trading? They exempted themselves from
| insider trading laws specifically for this purpose.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| The EU is just as bad.. my mic was cut of when I asked a
| couple of questions. Afterwards they said I couldn't ask
| those kinds of question or they'll all end up in jail.
| dnh44 wrote:
| Care to share where you were when your mic was cut and what
| your questions were?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| At the EUIPO in Brussels & Alicante.. And the lobbying by
| Amazon is simply disgusting to see. The EU officials
| sucking up to the representatives of Amazon.
| jollybean wrote:
| The EU, on the whole is pretty close to the US in terms of
| corruption, but it's not because your mic was shut off.
|
| That's just some institution at a conference not wanting to
| be pestered, which is something else entirely.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The EU is a big place. Was this France or Bulgaria?
| vmladenov wrote:
| It does hurt to see Bulgaria mentioned in this context.
| [deleted]
| dr_hooo wrote:
| What post are you even replying to? Is your mic getting cut
| off an example of rampant corruption in the EU?
| [deleted]
| orf wrote:
| What specific questions where you asking? Did it have
| anything to do with anyone's race?
| zahma wrote:
| I wonder how much of that nitrate is in Hezbollah's hands and
| therefore accessible to Iran? Might very well have had some of
| our own troops or allies killed by bombs made with the missing
| nitrate. Foreign aid payments have been shown to be subject to
| avarice and corruption, and so the trend is to fund specific
| projects with deliverables and measurable success rates. There's
| no reason we should be sending this stuff to a country like
| Lebanon given the political climate in that country for the
| better part or seven decades.
| jorblumesea wrote:
| Nation states have no problem securing the raw precursors for
| explosives. The idea that Iran need some complex scheme is a
| little far fetched. Hezbollah, perhaps.
| erdewit wrote:
| > FBI say blast consistent with 552 tonnes of chemicals
|
| Seems unlikely that this estimate can have three digits of
| precision, which begs the question what the real margin of error
| is.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Usually this kind of thing seems to arise from a unit
| conversion by journalists working without an understanding of
| significant figures. The original report might have referred to
| "1000 cubic bloits" of nitrate, translating to 552 tonnes if
| you simply punch the numbers into a calculator.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| I actually don't find this to be unreasonably precise.
|
| I saw a video that showed how the blast was captured on around
| a dozen independent devices (smartphones, surveillance cameras)
| and how that data could be used to reconstruct a very good 3D
| capture of the blast and resulting smoke cloud.
|
| If the FBI spent X hours of simulation time to reproduce the 3D
| results captured on those videos, they might get it down to
| that precision (and who knows, maybe they just ran a lot of
| renders and 552 was the one that looked most right, while
| anything between 538 and 564 was also fine).
| amelius wrote:
| Significant digits isn't always the best way to denote a number
| and its accuracy. If a simulation says 552 +/- 100, then how
| would you write down the fact that the expectation is centered
| around 552 and there is an error of 100, using a single number?
| loufe wrote:
| Agreed, it does beg the question. Three digits of precision
| does not mean there isn't an error of +- 100 tonnes on the
| actual source calculation. I can imagine an engineer in the FBI
| did some modeling using damage radius, height of blast, etc. to
| get a rough estimate. News, being news, cuts off the error or
| the FBI, trying to look very competent, omits the error.
| jvdvegt wrote:
| Without paywall: https://archive.is/LsTS5
| lgats wrote:
| Using CloudFlare DNS / WARP I am never able to pass the captcha
| on archive.is
| opheliate wrote:
| There have always been issues with Cloudflare's DNS and
| archive.is, IIRC it's because Cloudflare don't pass on some
| information that the operators of archive.is think they
| should. Unfortunate, but both parties perceive it as
| something the other should fix.
|
| https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-
| error-1001/182...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
|
| https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1017902875949793285
| Hacktrick wrote:
| Imagine if the full 2,754 tons exploded.
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| Is anyone else nervous About keeping that much explosive material
| on hand may Be more sinister than run-of-the-mill incompetence
| and bureaucracy?
|
| Like, this is a perfect opportunity to slowly sell large amounts
| of a regulated material, ammonium nitrate, on the black market?
|
| I usually guard against conspiratorial Explanations when mere
| incompetence will suffice. But this does speak to two compelling
| explanatory narratives.
|
| First why in the world other than the reported bureaucracy would
| they keep that much just laying around. Second slowly selling
| over time explains the missing material from the FBI estimate.
| anonu wrote:
| August 4 will mark 1 year since this explosion. Lebanon has
| continued to devolve into an abyss of financial ruin (90% of
| savings have been wiped out by hyper-inflation), government
| incompetence (no government or even an inkling of one forming
| anytime soon), rolling blackouts (lebanons electrical capacity is
| 900GW with a peak demand of 3000GW - the gap is insurmountable in
| any reasonable amount of time), the international community has
| given up giving Lebanon any aid.
|
| Where did the rest of AN go? I am pretty sure Hezbollah knows the
| answer.
| CyberRage wrote:
| When you let a terror organization run your country...
|
| it doesn't work
| tobmlt wrote:
| First you steal the ammonium nitrate, but he sure to leave behind
| enough to blow up all the evidence (except that which may be
| deduced by dimensional analysis, if you are GI Taylor ;)
|
| Edit: Sorry I simply meant to be imaginative. I didn't realize
| there was a conspiracy theory along these lines. I just like the
| GI Taylor story.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Forensic Architecture's investigation released about 8 months ago
| used blast modeling to estimate that "as little as half of the
| 2,700 tons" exploded. The FBI's estimate cuts that estimate by
| about half.
|
| https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
|
| Discussed on HN at the time:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149177
|
| There was speculation at the time (including some by myself) as
| to what could account for the reduced yield relative to the total
| initial shipment quantity.
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(page generated 2021-07-31 23:01 UTC)