Looks as though things are getting interesting:
The attack one week ago on two substations in Moore County, N.C., resulted in the loss of power to 45,000 people and raised questions about the security of America’s power grid.
And when further attacks in North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, and Oregon were revealed, those questions have now become urgent. Are the attacks — all involving gunfire targeting substations — unrelated pranks, or are they connected to a plot of some kind?
As outlandish as the idea of some kind of coordinated attack on our electrical grid being underway sounds, federal authorities are not dismissing anything or any theory at this point. They can’t afford to. The electric infrastructure our country depends on is critical — especially moving into the winter months when so many homes use electric heat.
Here’s what I find interesting. If we assume that these attacks are not committed by the Random Asshole Set — teenage boys, for example — and I think it’s safe to they’re they’re not, given the geographic locations of each attack, it behooves us to try to figure out who are behind them. Here are my thoughts.
Radical Muslims. Our perennial bugbears, they are, although I think it’s unlikely they’re intent on bringing the electrical grid down; their preferred target is people, not stuff. Again, nothing is impossible and they might have changed their modus to punish The Great Satan by ending video gaming, porn movie gazing and Sunday morning Christian broadcasts, but I think it’s a remote chance, at best.
Leftist / Gummint provocateurs [some overlap]. I would believe this if, say, the FBI were announcing that “right-wing hate groups / White supremacists” are “persons of interest” in their investigations. But I don’t think even the NY Times will buy that story. Most persuasively, there are no RWHG / WS groups capable of organizing such widely-dispersed and well-planned acts of sabotage, simply because actual membership of such groups is scattered over thousands of basements across the U.S.A., and I think too many of these people, feeble as they are, would be willing to risk being set up by Fibbie plants in their ranks. Those birds ain’t gonna fly again soon.
Eco-terrorists. Yeah, as a next step to gluing yourselves to roads and paintings, this would be a logical exercise for these nutcases. The part that makes this so credible is that the Radical Greens have a wide, international membership — so you could bring in a group from Germany, the U.K. and all over Europe, give them the plan and the explosives, have them execute the plan and fly them out of the nearest major international airport while the pieces are still falling out of the sky. The Carolina attacks, for example, took place not far from Charlotte-Douglas, and the Washington- and Portland ones are close-ish to both Portland PDX and SeaTac airports. Thus there are no local suspects because there are no local perpetrators.
It’s all early days, of course, and no doubt greater minds than mine are considering the same variables; just none at the FBI, because they’re too busy trying to fit some chumps in the Christian Urban Brotherhood Society — CUBS — in Biloxi MS into the frame.
My Readers are welcome to add their addled thoughts, wild-ass theories and so on in Comments.
