Police Seize Rental Truck With Traces of TNT

FoxNews ^ | 05-13-02 | GRRRRR

[GRRRRR]

Two men in custody, believed to be Israelis (?!) after bomb sniffing dogs detected a Ryder truck with bomb residue in it. Additional tests with other higher tech sniffing devices confirmed the results.

Article HERE

It's Starting....GRRRRRRRollin'

[Illbay]

Article said Israeli nationals......not that they were Israeli's....

So, you can be a "U.S. National" but not an American?

I suppose you meant "they were Arab (Christians or Muslims) but not Jews." But you never know with the cockamamie logic and syntactic sommersaults commonly executed by the Israel-Right-Or-Wrong crowd on FR.

[Mamzelle]

Israelis...could be Arab Israelis...also could be fake ID.

[Illbay]

Are you sure that Arabs get carte blanche citizenship in Israel? My friend, who is a Syrian from the Golan Heights, was not allowed to have Israeli citizenship, even though he was only three years old when Israel occupied the Golan.

He applied several times but was told "no" each time. Finally, he came to the U.S. and is now a citizen. He said he was tired of having no "home".

He is a Christian, BTW.

[null and void]

So, you can be a "U.S. National" but not an American?

All you have to do is be born here...

[rintense]

It's entirely feasible that terrorists will try to copy-cat the Tim McVeigh truck bomb.

[Lion's Cub]

Well, at least the local constabulary had the wits to check these guys and their truck out. You can bet the next bunch of sociopaths won't be doing over the speed limit, though...

Maybe the guys were speeding, maybe they weren't. (Several of the hijackers had speeding tickets, IIRC, so it may be par for the course for these guys). Or maybe these guys have been under surveillence and someone decided it was getting too dangerous and it was time to bring them down. But I'm not buying that it's routine for cops to test the inside of rentals for explosives every time they give an illegal a speeding ticket. There's a lot more to this story that hasn't come yet.

[Shermy]

I see on the Yahoo map that the island is a ways off a major interstate "5". If they were straight, or up to no good, should be easily determined - that is, their travel story should be easy to determine due to the remoteness of the location. I assume they weren't working commercially since they had a rental truck.

Of course, they could be up to no good unrelated to terrorism, like smuggling.

[Lion's Cub]

You're assuming that the person who talked to Fox News had current information, and not just the initial information, which was several days out of date.
I think that is probably a bad assumption.

Score one for you, DG :)
I think that's a valid point.

[Almondjoy]

Technically no.. but it would be an ARAB.. who has Israeli nationality.. there are millions of them. But I will hold judgement until they say what exactly their ethnicity are.

[Almondjoy]

1. I hope we actually find the bomb.. or bomb making material.. 2.. these guys had RDX.. as I recall It's pretty nasty and certainly not as easily gotten as making a fertlizer bomb. 3. It's not going to be long before our luck runs out.

[Lion's Cub]

Sorry. Got so wrapped up in the discussion, I forgot to index this and give you a "ping"

[c-five]

Could be as simple as a Whidby EOD guy was one of the previous renters, and used the truck one weekend to move his furniture.

[El Sordo]

No, I am not saying that.

What I mean to say is that it is not unusual to find Israeli citizens who are of Palistinian or other Arabic heritage.

Israeli treatment of the Palistinians has been saintly compared to the treatment they have received many Arabic couuntries. It is my understanding that Israel has, in the past, allowed citizenship to Palestinians. How many and under what terms I cannot say.

I cannot back this up, but I seem to recall having read somewhere once that there are more Palestinians with Israeli citizenship than Jordanian citizenship, Saudi Arabian citizenship or a host of other Arab countries that use the Palestinians to fight a proxy war for them.

[jonatron]

Yes, there are many Arab Israelis. There is even an arab Israeli member of the Knesset [congress] who calls for the destruction of Israel.

[cgk]

Retraction was the wrong word.

I'm more concerned with the media's selective coverage of these matters. Similar to the way they cover crime, identifying white suspects while ommitting the race of black suspects. It seems like they've now extended that courtesy to the Arab community.

But since Arab and Isreali are not mutually exclusive, you're right, there won't be any need for a retraction. Just an accurate reporting of those facts when those facts are revealed.

I still don't expect to see that anywhere but Fox.

[luvzhottea]

What an "ally"

[PrescottBush]

Don't jump too fast FReepers. This is the second story today about potential Israeli bombers:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/682903/posts

[theirjustdue]

"Seriously, moving furniture around late is no big deal - missing in this story is if their story was bogus - an obvious point easily refutable in a week's time. This article does nothing of the sort. How long was their drive? And the "near" an air base story. So what? How near? How good were the tests? I'm no expert, but why would a terrorist have traces of both TNT and RDX? Isn't the latter plastic? Maybe someone could help me here. AND WHY weren't traces of both found on both the steering wheel and shift? Screwy.

It may sound screwy, Shermy, but if only half the information is accurate, it doesn't sound good.

I live across the channel from Oak Harbor on Camano Island and look directly out at the town. The base is only a few miles north of it. I was a visitor on the base during Desert Storm and it's a very large airbase.

As to your question of why a terrorist would have both explosives, there are any number of answers for that: TNT is block high explosive while RDX, just as you thought, is the principle ingredient in plastic explosives. They could both be used for the same purposes (except TNT can't be molded). RDX is also used in some det cords, which is used to connect separate charges to detonate nearly simultaneously and is also used as an ingredient in some blasting caps.

Given all the above, if those arrested were palestinian or Arab Israelis, it adds up to a highly improbable set of coincidences, if there nothing to this.

The base could be a target, but there are other potential targets as well in the area.

Oh, almost forgot. It is very easy to speed through Oak Harbor and is known locally as a speed trap.

[demlosers]

Could be as simple as a Whidby EOD guy was one of the previous renters, and used the truck one weekend to move his furniture.

I had the same thoughts. The trace TNT and RDX, which RDX is the largest component of C4 could have come from some EOD/Munitions guy who had the truck.