FBI probe: nitrate amount in Beirut blast was a fraction of original shipment
reuters.com
reuters.com
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.)
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.
They may have falsely believed it would be a small explosion because it was lacking what they thought was a critical component.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
They technically don't own it, but the owners were never going to pay the fine to get their property back.
It's the inevitable course of events in these situations.
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.
This is definitely a case of massive lack of care at least.
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.
People can be dumb, but come on.
It happens a lot. Crime concealment consistently places among the top 6 motives in studies of arson.
I'm not saying it's a very likely cause, but it would be hasty to rule it out
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.
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.
Israel would’ve jumped on the opportunity to lay the blame on Hezbollah, Syria or Iran.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, they're suggesting that the other, far more specific scenario, that was described was implausible.
Are you suggesting that 1+1=5?
Also, why would you get downvoted?
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.
Just replying with a link saying “the investigation claims this is what happened, here is the link…” would have been enough.
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.
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.
There seems to be a massive fire in Turkey, said to have been started by children "burning books".
https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/two-children-accused-of-ma...
Given the sequence events, with the welding going on etc, I don't think this happened. But not for the reasoning you gave.
The people trafficking on this were most likely terrorists. They use this stuff all the time.
We are not terorrists so we may not be versed on blowing up such incriminating evidence.
They however, presumably used it all the time. They would have known better than you or me on this topic
It would have been worse, but probably 10-20% more destruction.
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.
Additionally, many buildings were on the verge of collapse. I can imagine they did not need much more blast power to actually topple.
Also, the cube root of 5 is not 1.2-1.3 anyway, but quite a bit more, so there's that.
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.
At the nation state level especially I don’t think you’d need to concoct a complicated scheme to get your hands on it.
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.
It may be incredibly common but not in the quantity that was stolen.
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 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)?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/15/beirut-explosi...
https://abcnews.go.com/International/search-rescue-continues...
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.
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.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/internati...
"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."
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.
IIRC, the Oklohoma bombing was a simple fertilizer/nitrate bomb.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/internati...
- Lebanese govt invited them.
- USA wants to keep tab in that part of the world.
- Talented investigators in FBI and others want to keep their brains sharp.
- Advance knowledge about explosions, how to prevent them, etc.
They have been that way from the start.
https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
Discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149177
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.
Where did the rest of AN go? I am pretty sure Hezbollah knows the answer.
it doesn't work
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.
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.
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?
* https://risk-indexes.com/global-corruption-index/
* https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/index/usa
The US has its problems, God knows. But you've never seen real corruption if you think it's anywhere close to the worst.
That's just some institution at a conference not wanting to be pestered, which is something else entirely.
>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.
The article says AN which can be used for fertilizer or explosives. They never said exactly what it was.
We have no idea if this was $200 a ton fertilizer, or reagent lab grade high purity etc, right?
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...
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.
https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/DRYS
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.
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.
Seems unlikely that this estimate can have three digits of precision, which begs the question what the real margin of error is.
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).
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).
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.
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...