The Usual(ly Ignored) Suspects

Let's say you wanted to smuggle something rilly illegal - say assault weapons with silencers - into a war zone - say Iraq. You come up with a plan to stash the weapons on pallets, surrounded by something legal, then shrink-wrap the whole deal. You know you'd have to get past US Customs and obviously, if they look at your pallets and suspect anything, all they have to do is slice the shrink-wrap, dig in and you're toast.

So the thing that you surround the weapons with - it's got to be some item that US Customs would never in a kajillion years care about inspecting. Hmm, what could that be - cases of bar soap maybe? No what if they think it's special soap for washing criminal behavior offa ya - they might check. How about crates full of hula girl bobbleheads? No the Customs agents might go catatonic, succumbing to the bobblehead trance and you couldn't get around their googly-eyed, frozen bodies. Got it: bags of dog food! US Customs will absitively posolutely not be inspecting those. That's just food for dogs, made from leftovers from the human food industry - no worries there. What possible need could there be to inspect dog food? And you know the US track record on inspecting dog food - as in, FAIL.

From ABC News:

Two other former [Blackwater] employees tell ABCNews.com they also witnessed the dog food smuggling operation. They say the weapons were actually hidden inside large sacks of dog food, packaged at company headquarters in North Carolina and sent to Iraq for the company's 20 bomb-sniffing dogs.

[Note: So did the bomb sniffing dogs actually get anything to eat after all?]

Larger items, including M-4 assault weapons, were secreted on shipping pallets surrounded by stacks of dog food bags, the former employees said. The entire pallet would be wrapped in cellophane shrink wrap, the former employees said, making it less likely US Customs inspectors would look too closely.

Last year, a US Department of Commerce inspector at JFK airport in New York discovered an unlicensed two-way radio hidden in a dog food sack being shipped by Blackwater to Iraq, according to people familiar with the incident.

A federal grand jury in North Carolina is looking into the matter.