Radiation detectors monitoring likely terrorist sites

Well, another "TOP SECRET" program designed to help keep us all alive has been exposed. I wonder how long this will continue before someone goes to prison for life-with-no-parole in order to put a stop to it. In this case, the FBI has been secretly monitoring various sites in Washington, DC, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle. FBI agents working with NEST (Nuclear Emergency Support Team) personnel from the Department of Energy have been monitoring "over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses."

What has everyone from the left in a snit is the fact that all this took place clandestinely. That is, the FBI and NEST teams didn't walk into a grocery store in Dearborn and announce, "We're here to check radiation levels in yer air to see if y'all'a a-plannin' a terrorist bommin' er a nukyular AY-tack." And, of course, the "Muslim sites" bit has everybody hopping and foaming at the mouth over the usual racial profiling jazz. As if the Shinto-ists, Hindus, Buddhists and Hebrews had been rattling their nukyular sabers at us of late.

What everyone seems to have missed in this is that, according to this article, NEST has been conducting clandestine surveillance like this for thirty (30) years. That's three (3) decades, one and one-half (1 1/2) generations, "using high-tech detection gear fitted onto various aircraft, vehicles, and even backpacks and attaché cases." Only when the FBI gets involved and Muslims become the surveilled do the knee-jerk lefties get their panties knotted. And, Oh my!, are they ever knotted. Let's take a look at some of the usual suspects:

Shakespeare's Sister seems not to be able to differentiate between C-4 plastique and plutonium.

Meanwhile, monitoring radiation levels does absolutely nothing to protect against the use of, say, C-4.

Perhaps I can help here, Shakespeare (her maiden name, I would presume). C-4 has the TNT equivalence of 118%. Therefore, the volume of C-4 required to produce a 5 megaton nukyular explosion during the height of visiting hours at the Henry Ford Dearborn Museum would be 84,764,000 lbs of C-4. At the normal 50,000 lb weight limit of cargo delivery trucks in Dearborn, the terrorists would need to deliver, simultaneously, 1,695 fully loaded 48 ft tractor-trailers to the museum and then detonate all of them, simultaneously. I think the FBI would tend to rely on Dearborn traffic cops and the museums parking lot attendants to nip this threat in the bud. Shakespeare also seems not to have read up on the fact that Timmy McVeigh is pretty dead.

Think Progress seems not to realize that stopping a nukyular blast in, say, Washington, DC would save the lives of ". . . those who stood with him in the Islamic Center . . . ," as well as about 100,000 other Muslims who were too busy to attend that soiree Or does he expect all 100,000 of them to get phone calls instructing them to flee the area. You know, like all the Jooz got out of the twin towers before Mossad flew those planes into them.

Georgia 10 at Daily Kos seems not to be able to differentiate between a search for marijuana plants and a search for a 5 megaton plutonium explosive device.

Does monitoring radiation levels constitute a "search" that requires a warrant? From Justice Scalia in Kyllo (police used a heat detection device from the sidewalk in front of a house to detect the heat given off by heat lamps inside the house):

Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a "search" and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.

Mathew "'T' Challenged" Gross says

Let's just throw out that stupid Constitution.

Mathew, if you think civil liberties are being stepped on now, just wait until the government is being run out of a NORAD bunker in Utah after Washington gets reduced to a wasteland. And you want to see civil rights violations, you ain't seen nothing yet.

TAGS: NEST, FBI, radiation detection, civil liberties