Saturday, March 21, 2009

Customs Hypocracy to Cost Union Pacific Millions.

Back in 1998, a US Customs Agent by the name of Darlene Fitzgerald, was hot on the trail of a major narcotics smuggling operation being run out of the Guadalajara Rail Yards. Pressurized tanker cars full of hazardous materials that were inexplicably overweight (presumably with contraband of some sort) were transiting the US-Mexico border with regularity. She was working with Union Pacific and Burlington Northern-Santa Fe to identify and secretly inspect the cargoes and then track them to their destinations in order to try to catch the smugglers picking up the cargoes. Someone in the US Customs service shut the operation down and then drummed her and her partner out of the US Customs Service. The assumption being that they were getting too close to breaking someone's corrupt rice bowl.

Now the US Customs service is suing Union Pacific for not stopping those shipments themselves...

Pot, meet kettle.....

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Rorschach, great stuff, I got the Bordergate link up at the Flood story, but when I tried to list your blog entry, the Chron computer rejected it for being too long!

That is not the first time I've had that problem, either.

( When you're writing about a Chron story where we can comment at the Chron as well, you need to keep the title entries in the blog permalinks short and sweet so the Chron system won't kick it back! :^D )

March 22, 2009 3:37 PM  
Blogger Rorschach said...

I'm not sure it is actually a length issue. Dean Betz won't talk to me about it, but I've noticed that TinyURL links and FURL links don't work either, and they are about as short as it gets. I think they have a blacklist that includes FURL, TinyURL and Blogspot links to prevent spammers, but of course it has other uses as well....

March 22, 2009 6:42 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nothing new, SOS been going on for decades.

March 24, 2009 8:11 PM  

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