- Getting the Dirty Bomb Straight
George Webb:
"There was an important article written by a great journalist about the Gulftainer Corporation which is this UAE corporation that manages all these ports in the U.S. Port Canaveral, I think of being the first one. The article basically says, 'What could possibly go wrong?'(Center for Security Policy). The article cites that not only the UAE managing US ports, but one of the key individuals is the chief nuclear scientist for Iran [see image of pdf report
Now you take a very large ship which you can hide fissionable material in there, and then you have one of the people on the board being an Iranian nuclear scientist - which is a terrorist nation, it sets the stage for a potential terrorist event. Again, we shared that information, but we did not, still at this point, call the Coast Guard.
The Gulftainer information with the Iranian scientist, the Awan Brothers with all of their ties to Pakistani ISI - we just presented that information.
Now, someone through the fleet application (online search site) said they - I believe it was Joe Napoli said 'hey, the Maersk is actually eight minutes outside of Charleston, South Carolina.' Then somebody gave the long/lat of the ship location. I said that sounds like it's pretty darn close to Fort Sumter which is out in Charleston Harbor - I've taken the tour, it's a very good tour, you should take it. It turns out, that is where it was.
So, again, we did not call the Coast Guard in the Port of Charleston. Two other individuals watching the show called the Port the Coast Guard just to alert them that the Maersk was coming in and there may be potential issues with the Maersk.
They only called after we said two things. Look for an Awan Brothers shipment in the Bill of Lading through import genius (online search app) - so very defined - and then we also said look for what's called a 'diplomatic cover' or what they call a 'diplomatic pouch'. Even though, you think of as like a FedEx pouch now it's the size of an entire shipping container. They've expanded it over time to now say you can have an entire container as a diplomatic pouch. And what that diplomatic pouch means is you can't - Customs can't pierce the veil of diplomatic pouch. So even if they did search the vessel, which I think blew up the search far beyond the very targeted, laser focused recommendations we had. Even if they did find a diplomatic container - they could not open it. "