Did you ever misplace something in your house or office? I know that things get misplaced from time to time in my house. Don't worry about it though, compared to the government what you misplace is just a spit in the ocean as they say. Look at what the government misplaced recently, 200,000 assault rifles. Yes you heard me right, we have lost 200,000 assault rifles. that were supposed to be shipped to Iraq for use by the Iraqi police and army. The total weight of the entire shipment was 99 tons. So how does one loose this many weapons, surely it must have been hard even for the government to do? The first thing that you do is contract out the project to arms dealers who then hire a shady airline to send, an airline that has been in trouble before. The U.S. Department of Defense contracted out the delivery of these weapons that had been gathered up in Bosnia, they were all AK47s, the famous Russian assault rifle that is supposed to be one of the best of these types of weapons in the world. The airline used was Moldovan and had been smuggling arms in 2003 before the U.N. caught them. No one involved seems to know what happened to the shipment, but air traffic controllers in Iraq have no record of the planes ever landing there. The airline used was so bad that the day before it shipped the rifles., the firm had it's license taken away. Some of the companies involved insist the rifles were delivered and say they have proof but won't show it. The odds are in favor of the entire shipment having been sent to al-Qaeda. Does anyone think that maybe at least some of the subcontractors know more than they are saying?

A company that has been in favor with this administration lost a shipment of radioactive material months ago but didn't notify the government of the loss for months. It seems that they can get away with anything. This story had a happy ending however as the lost shipment was found intact in Boston. Government regulations require the notification of lost radioactive material to be made immediately or within 30 days depending upon the material that was involved.

In 2005 a deadly flu virus was sent out in routine test kits to about 3700 laboratories around the world. When officials realized what happened, they asked the labs to destroy the viruses. Here is the problem, two shipments, one to Mexico and one to Lebanon disappeared. This is the same virus that killed between 1 and 4 million people in the late 1950s.

In 2004 nuclear fuel rods disappeared from a reactor near Eureka. Up to that point, it was the third case of missing fuel rods. The plant was scoured for the missing rods. The search went on for several months. A revelation was made that the rods MAY have been found. Can you imagine something this important and the word MAY is being used? The utility that owns the plant states that it has found what MAY be the remains of the rods at the bottom of it's used fuel pool and further states that they MAY have been sitting there since the 1960s. Great record keeping.Hey I MAY have won the lottery but haven't been notified yet.

Every day on average, there is at least one accident that releases hazardous materials into the air. Many of these accident are with trucks and some with trains. According to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, you just never know what may be in a truck that is in an accident. More than 300 million shipments of hazardous materials crisscross the country each year. It is amazing that we don't have more accidents than we do.

Some countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union have large discrepancies in what nuclear products they should have and what they really have. There is enough missing nuclear material to make many bombs. The west thinks that this is just poor book keeping and much, if not all, of the missing material was disposed of as scrap waste. We can never be sure what really happened to this material. It could turn out that it is in the hands of terrorists already or it could just be what they say it is, a paper loss.

Getting back to those 200,000 missing rifles, we find that they are not the only munitions involved with Iraq to disappear mysteriously. In 2004 over 377 tons of munitions disappeared without a trace. Even this amount of munitions is only a tiny amount of munitions that are unaccounted for since the fall of Saddam Hussein. If one were to take the figures that were given by the U.S. government of 650 to 1 million tons of munitions in the Iraqi military forces and subtract the 400,000 tons that we said we destroyed, that would leave from 250,000 to 600,000 tons of munitions that are still unaccounted for. If these munitions are in the hands of the terrorists we are in big trouble. Most likely much of these munitions are being used by the insurgents against the new Iraqi government.

So many things have gone missing in this world of ours, dangerous things, that is hard to believe. We have lost nukes, some have just fallen off planes onto land while others lay at the bottom of the ocean with the reactors of sunken nuclear submarines. These types of things will be denied but if one was to go over the old news clippings they would surely find events where we have had to clean up places and decontaminate them, such as an area in Spain. You know what they say, if you can't keep track of your toys, you don't deserve to have them.

There is no doubt about it, we need better tracking of important items, better handling and better book keeping and if things are this bad here, imagine what they are like in some other places.