Bushworld Security

Is It Safe?

The Kurds
So apparently Turkey has gone from invading Northern Iraq on foot to bombing it.

We're doing nothing to stop them of course.

Source: Raw Story

The Colombians
Our proxy state in South America looks to have ignited a possible three-way land war, as Venezuela and Ecuador are both unhappy about their cross-border incursion. Venezuela is moving tanks to the border now.

Source: Raw Story

Rad
Remember Democrats saying that securing our ports would be a nice first priority for national security, as opposed to blowing up Middle Eastern countries?

That would have been nice. Instead we get this.

Department of Homeland Security tests of new radiation detection machines last year did not show whether the costly devices performed well enough to be used as planned at ports and borders to protect the country against nuclear attacks or dirty bombs, according to a new report about the process.

The performance tests were organized by the department's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, which has been trying to deploy the machines along the borders and at ports in a $1.2 billion project, despite allegations from government auditors that the office misled Congress about their effectiveness and later conducted flawed tests to show they worked well.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had said the development and purchase of the machines was a "vital priority" for the department. Officials from the nuclear detection office had asserted the tests -- mandated by Congress before the project was allowed to move forward -- showed they worked well.

But Chertoff called for an independent team to review the program last summer after a Washington Post article spelled out questions about the project. Last fall, Chertoff put the project on hold, conceding that the machines were not ready for wide use.

Ahh, all that taxpayer money gone.

I've never been too sure how this was supposed to work anyway. If you want to transport nuclear material and live, you have to shield it anyway, and if it's shielded, it can't be detected. These devices are essentially big geiger counters. If the uranium or what not is either wrapped in lead or already in a bomb, they wouldn't detect a damn thing.

Source: The Washington Post

Come ON, China!
Yet more wonderful products from our Sino-Industrial Overlords.

A blood thinner tied to the deaths of at least 19 people in the U.S. has a "possibly counterfeit ingredient," a federal agency revealed.

Raw components of the drug, heparin, are produced in China, reports The New York Times in a story set to appear on their Thursday front page.

"Routine tests failed to distinguish the contaminant from [heparin]," write Gardiner Harris and Walt Bogdanich for the Times. "Only sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging tests uncovered that as much as 20 percent of the product's active ingredient was a heparin mimic blended in with the real thing."

Naturally, the Bush administration fell down on the job here too.

A series of independent assessments, including one by the agency’s own Science Board, have found that the F.D.A. is increasingly overwhelmed by its many responsibilities and is incapable of protecting the public from unsafe drugs, medical devices and food — particularly from China. The Government Accountability Office recently discovered, for example, that over a six-year period, the F.D.A. inspected just 64 of the nearly 700 medical device plants registered in China. Medical devices can include items like stents and spinal screws.

Well, I hope you like being poisoned. It's the status quo, now.

Source: Raw Story