"I'm just going to write because I can't help it."- Charlotte Brontë


Friday, January 17, 2014

Have You Heard the One about the Nun and her Two Friends?


Armed with nothing more that a hammer and bolt cutters, they broke into the Y-12 National Security Complex, America's "Fort Knox" of weapons grade uranium, supposedly designed and fortified to repel terrorist attacks. I know I feel so safe after reading this:

"The security breach," as the Department of Energy's Inspector General later described it, exposed "troubling displays of ineptitude" at what is supposed to be "one of the most secure facilities in the United States." At a February hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, multiple members of Congress thanked Rice for exposing the site's gaping vulnerabilities. Eleven launch officers were targeted in a separate investigation of illegal drug use. But that didn't deter federal prosecutors from throwing the book at Rice and her accomplices: Greg Boertje-Obed, a 57-year-old carpenter, and Michael Walli, a 63-year-old Vietnam veteran. They now sit in Georgia's Irwin County Detention Center, awaiting a January 28 sentencing hearing where a federal judge could put them in prison for up to 30 years.
Laughable security, corruption and drug use, then retribution for daring to show up inexcusable and dangerous system failures - this is another of those I-wish-it-were-a-joke pieces one comes across scooting about the internet, a physical equivalent of your Snowdens and Assanges.

2 comments:

parlance said...

I'd say those Americans are so, so scary, but basically it's every government in the world that is scary. Oh, wait...it's the whole human race that is scary.

I don't know another species that has the capacity or the will to blow all life off our planet.

Gitte Christensen said...


I'm constantly amazed we've made it this far. Pure, dumb luck, I think. And maybe the actions of certain people pulling as back from the brink at the right time?

No, I'll stick with the dumb luck theory.