The Goat Pen

On July 13, 2010, this cargo container arrived in Genoa, Italy. It was emitting torrents of radiation. No one knew what was inside. And no one knew what to do next.

In June or early July 2010, the box was trucked—Saudi authorities are still investigating by whom—to the docks in Jeddah. There, a crane lifted it into the hold of a ship owned by MSC. On July 9 it passed through Gioia Tauro, a port in Calabria at the toe of Italy’s boot-shaped south. Gioia Tauro is a transshipment center, shuffling more than 3 million containers from ship to ship each year. That no one there checked the container isn’t a surprise. Transshipment ports are the equivalent of the Internet’s packet switchers, more concerned with efficiently shuffling boxes from one ship to another than with what’s inside. “Customs tends not to focus on containers that are being transshipped,” Spayd says. “Their attitude is ‘It’s not my container; it’s just passing through.’”

It was hardly the first fishy shipment to pass through Gioia Tauro. Famously, just six weeks after 9/11, workers there heard noises coming from inside a container being transshipped to Nova Scotia via Rotterdam. Inside, police found an Egyptian-born Canadian carrying a Canadian passport, a satellite phone, a cell phone, a laptop, cameras, maps, and security passes to airports in Canada, Thailand, and Egypt. The container’s interior was outfitted with a bed, a water supply, a heater, and a toilet. Nicknamed Container Bob, the man posted bail in Italian court and was never seen again.

Nicknamed Container Bob, the man posted bail in Italian court and was never seen again.

eCat wrote:I just watched the Daily Show with clips of Ann Coulter talking about how "our blacks" (in the republican party) are better than "their blacks" (in the democratic party).

How does anyone take that woman seriously.