From stolen fertilizer to shop vacs... or how not to alarm the public By Douglas J. Hagmann

"21 May 2007: Question: What looks like fertilizer, smells like fertilizer, is packaged commercially like fertilizer, is labeled as fertilizer, has a total weight of 5 tons, and is the subject of a wide search by law enforcement officials? Answer: Twenty-eight pallets of commercial 'shop vac' style vacuum cleaners, according to public information officials at the Los Angeles Police Department. The story itself smells as bad as the raw cargo that went missing from a tractor trailer in the Los Angeles area sometime Sunday. The mysterious morphing of 5 tons of potentially lethal bomb material, however crude, into 28 pallets of high-powered sucking devices evolved unchecked by media sources, but became the target of our research and investigation.

Since the initial report that a tractor trailer hauling five tons – 10,000 pounds of nitrate based fertilizer was stolen in California on Sunday, the Northeast Intelligence Network has been closely researching this incident. According to initial reports, a tractor-trailer was stolen while the driver took a break Sunday afternoon, parking his truck in an industrial area near Griffith Park, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. When he returned for his rig about 5 hours later, the tractor-trailer was gone. According to the initial reports to law enforcement, the driver was transporting 10,000 pounds of bagged nitrate based fertilizer he was to deliver from Texas to the Home Depot store in Tracy, California."

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