> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
That kind of seems like an unlikely next step for the same people who were supposedly ignoring repeated warnings that this could cause a massive explosion.
* Russian-leased ship under apparently untraceable ownership.
* Captain receives an order to make unscheduled stop for an undisclosed shipment. Which means the destination was never announced under the travel plan.
* Ship is impounded and intended shipment never arrived, yet owner shows no interest despite supposedly being fleeced.
* Government prevents any legal attempt to clear the cargo, yet leaves it unguarded.
* Cargo is pilfered by unknown people. Whatever they do with it is something that does not mind the poor storage conditions.
* Cargo turns out to be rather explosive.
* Did I mention there was a large civil war next door, and one side is a significant Russian ally?
Assuming a plot in this case is hardly unreasonable.
> Did I mention there was a large civil war next door, and one side is a significant Russian ally?
Doesn't Russia just provide it's allies with military equipment? I don't see why they would execute this strange plan to get explosive material to anyone they openly support.
Russia could have sent material directly but that would have implicated them directly in Assad's war. In 2013, Russia wasn't as hands on as it would be a few years later, trying to keep a bit of distance from his atrocities would have been reasonable. I do admit there are other possible clients for explosive material in the area.
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.
I'm thinking about it as more of an abstraction layer for the direct exchange of benefits/detriments of right/wrong acts, where a modified version of normal spending-money currency still acted as the medium of exchange for goods and services.
Just a thought experiment really, about what a "moral" (for lack of a better word) currency could look like. Completely impossible and without clear definitions of a right or a wrong and ignoring the practical reality that a wrong can't really be cancelled out. As I said, just a thought experiment. Let's call it "The Moral Currency Conjecture"
A currency with negative and positive denominations directly built in, no separate system of debt. One where anyone could mint more currency through their own actions. Maybe the most value for an individual would be obtained by keeping their net worth as close to 0 as they could.
Normal currency would be a medium of exchange to affect & incentivize the transfers. As "wrongs" seem easier to produce, anyone with excess "rights" would be under pressure to divest themselves back towards neutrality to thereby ensure as many wrongs as possible were cancelled out. To incentivize this, the value of the normal currency would be tied to a person's proximity to a net 0 balance in the moral currency. Negative moral currency balance, less buying power for the same dollar. Same for positive moral currency balances, with the except that if the global supply of the moral currency had a positive net balance, then the normal currency value would increase in proportion so that a positive moral currency balance didn't incur a penalty.
Assuming there would always be more wrongs than rights, putting rights at a premium, however much money a person accumulated by doing wrongs would not be enough to purchase enough rights to get back to net zero, so you couldn't just steal or fraud your way into money and assume you'd buy your way clear. Meaning that in order to have a balance close to net zero a person would have to do at least some rights. In addition, debt with normal currency could be dealt with by doing more rights and selling them off.
The whole system would make it difficult to be successful by doing wrong things. Eventually it would shift the world through it's incentives to a net good balance gradually improving the world. Although at that point, normal currency might become more inflationary, and so the nature of the system might end up being a pendulum.
But to bring things back closer to reality, those with bad intentions and a desire to accumulate power might do so too quickly to have the monetary system catch up, giving them the resources to subvert the system in some way. Or you'd need massive public service projects to ensure that people with so many wrongs that they shifted their normal currency values below sustenance levels had a way back from that situation. It would also require a nearly perfect knowledge of rights and wrongs along with precise methods of assessing their magnitude, especially difficult when a right thing may eventually have a very negative and not easily foreseeable impact, e.g., proper recycling of harmful industrial byproducts back into something safe ends up causing cancers in the long term.
But ignore all that. This isn't a real proposal. (It's also not a problem for blockchains to solve.) It's just a thought experiment.
I put forth that it would have to be a non fungible token given that rights in general do not generally address any wrong; helping a grana across the street in Belfast doesn't help prisoners in Arizona suffering from a lack of climate control as an example.
Probably not. Hypothetically, it would be incredibly easy to acquire, at no cost, if it was fairly well know that a few million pounds of it was available for minimal effort behind a poorly guarded broken warehouse door. Why, I'd speculate that as much as 80% might be stolen before chance, incompetence, and bad luck came together to blowup the remaining 20%. Hypothetically. :)
That aside, this wasn't fertilizer. It was high purity explosives grade nitrate that had been enroute to a place intending to use it in explosive applications, not farming. That might be easier to obtain in Lebanon than other countries but it still doesn't fly completely under the radar. And why bother when there's a freighter worth of free supply?
Fertilizer would be easy to get a hold of, but take more more money, effort and larger quantities for the same bang, if that was the reason for buying it. Plenty of the Beirut supply might have been stolen to adulterate down to fertilizer concentrations, but a non-zero number of people were interested in its military applications, and it's existence wasn't a secret. And millions of pounds were stolen so it's fairly plausible some of it was stolen for use in explosives. That was actually one of the proposed disposal mechanisms by those who tried to get the government to act on the issue: Give it to the Lebanese army.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why? Israel gains nothing by disclosing the information if they have it. Telling the world about it won't stop it, staying silent and watching the situation will help identify Hezbollah agents and facilities. It's the same as Hezbollah's vast arsenal of rockets in southern Lebanon. Right under the noses of the "peacekeepers" they bring in tens of thousands of artillery rockets and the world doesn't care.
> 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.
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"
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.
You mean "incredulous", and the responses 'addingnumbers gave to the question I raised are in every respect what I was hoping someone's would be - measured, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and elucidatory of a possible chain of events which I had theretofore not considered.
Their behavior here has in every respect exemplified the highest among the reasons why I continue to value participation in HN discussions - sure, I've passed the occasional glib comment about the place betimes, but I know no other place on the public Internet where such worthwhile discussions reliably occur.
I'm glad of the light 'addingnumbers has shed - not, as they also noted, by trying to say what did happen, but by describing something that might have which had not and may never have occurred to me. ('dogma1138, too.)
Of your own participation in this thread I regret I cannot honestly say anything so laudatory.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Must take in mind that the stuff also decomposes spontaneously. If stored for many months in bad conditions of conservation some amount just would go silently to the air in form of water vapor and laughing gas.
The EU bans export of fertilizer containing more than 16% ammonium nitrate. Many countries won't even ship it to the Middle East.
The Beruit stockpile was from a ship that was held in port on its way to another country, with "weapons grade" ammonium nitrate intended for an explosives manufacturer.
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.
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)?
Also if something fishy was happening to that massive stockpile of explosive material it's something that might wind up interesting the FBI for purely selfish domestic reasons.
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
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.
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.
"we have 63 legal attaché 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."
> FBI personnel abroad serve under the authority of the Department of State, chief of mission at United States embassies, at the pleasure of ambassadors and host country governments.
These are known agents of the United States.
I had meant “precludes availability for covert foreign missions.”
I am not sure of this, however, to me, it does not stand a reason test to use an FBI agent as a CIA agent when they have entirely separate functions and responsibilities.
> 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.
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 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel this material was intentionally stranded in this customs purdah for the purpose of providing explosives to terrorists and over the years ~~four-fifths of it was removed from a supposedly secure customs enclave.
The explosion was so intense that it was all detonated - it is possible a small amount was scattered, but no significant residual unexploded Ammonium Nitrate was found.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>revolving door between industry and regulatory agencies
There are specific laws restricting/regulating people who go from government to industry, intended to address conflicts of interest.
You are repeating a cliche that wrongly makes it sound like nobody ever thought of the issue.
The problem with casual cynicism based on ignorance is that it allows you to fall right into the trap of trusting corrupt people who say everybody else is the same.
Are you saying that you don't believe people obey the laws, or that following the laws is insufficient to be adequately ethical?
Do you think that if a few powerful people do get treated differently, that means the system is totally corrupt regardless of whether ordinary people have constraints and generally do what they should?
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
Because of reverse splits, the stock appears to have peaked at around $1.5B per share in late 2007. If you multiply that by the shares now outstanding you get about $130 trillion. Which of course it was never worth.
They kept issuing shares and getting asymptotically closer to zero, but I'm not sure they ever actually went out of business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
The best you can do with a single number would be something like 6·10^2 tons, you also use 6 hectotons or 0.6 gigagram though people might find those a bit weird.
Or you could just denote its accuracy, which the original source likely does, but which news article inevitably fail to include (and subsequently fail to adjust the number of significant digits).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)