Rush Limbaugh confidently misinformed millions of his listeners this week that the USPS scans suspicious packages in order to intercept them and keep them away from the public.
For his part, radio personality Michael Savage laughably spent most of the week wondering how all these "bombs" could be "hand-delivered" all over the place supposedly without entering the postal system, because he believed fake news to that effect. It must have been a conspiracy! The van was too clean after all that driving up and down the east coast and to California and back! The stickers on the windows were too recently affixed because they weren't yet faded!
What we learned once again, however, was that the USPS only isolates suspicious packages for scanning by outside authorities. The cost of installing such scanners in every postal sorting facility would cost billions of dollars the already bankrupt USPS doesn't have. In this instance, the USPS was alerted to the package M/O by the outside authorities after the fact, after some of the "bombs" had already been delivered. The USPS was told what to look for, not the other way around.
This affair exposes the fact that the entire USPS system remains vulnerable to penetration by serious terrorists at any time, and that a person who really intended to harm others, say with bombs, could do so as long as the intended target isn't too famous. That's why the more serious threats are the poisoners, who can still reach their intended famous targets
occasionally with letters, such as Vanessa Trump. The contents of mail are not "scanned", only the fronts and backs are imaged and the images stored. That's how the authorities, once alerted to the problem in Florida, "were reviewing mail streams in and out of Florida, attempting to pinpoint locations where the parcels may have originated", as reported in the USA Today story linked below.
A real bomber in this instance would have rigged his packages to blow up as they are opened by the designated target, as when a box lid lifted on its hinge triggers a circuit with a detonator. Of course, the difficulty of getting such a package into the actual hands of famous persons with staff protecting them from such an eventuality is a thought which cannot have escaped the mind of Cesar Sayoc.
A real bomber does not stuff active devices into padded envelope mailers as Sayoc did, where they could blow-up indiscriminately under normal, rough handling, including in his own hands. A real bomber does not leave finger prints behind on his mail bombs, especially if his fingerprints are already in the crime reporting system due to many prior arrests and convictions.
It's almost as if poor Cesar Sayoc, aged 56, suddenly homeless and forced to live in his van, intended to get caught so that he could finally escape all his problems and finally get a roof over his head and three square meals a day for the rest of his life after so many years of struggling with poverty.
Bomb suspect Cesar Sayoc had been kicked out by his parents, so he has living in the van that we have seen in pictures today, according to a law enforcement official. ... Sayoc was initially somewhat cooperative, the official said. He told investigators that the pipe bombs wouldn’t have hurt anyone and that he didn’t want to hurt anyone.
The total number of bombs reached at least 14 Friday after more suspicious packages were recovered: one in Florida addressed to New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another in New York addressed to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a device recovered at Sen. Kamala Harris’ office in Sacramento, California, and another package that was intercepted at a mail facility in Burlingame, California, addressed to billionaire Tom Steyer.
Harris’ office says it was informed that the package was identified at a Sacramento mail facility. The FBI responded to the facility in a South Sacramento neighborhood that’s been blocked off by caution tape.
A package addressed to Clapper was recovered at a Manhattan postal facility. Like some of the previous packages, the one found in New York City on Friday had the office of Florida Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the return address, a photo obtained by CBS News showed. ...
The suspicious package intended for Clapper was spotted by a postal worker at the Radio City Station facility at around 8:15 a.m. The employee contacted U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and they contacted the NYPD and FBI.
NYPD Bomb Squad officers scanned the package and saw what appeared to be a pipe bomb, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence and Counterterrorism John Miller said at a Manhattan news conference.
