U.S. lacks measures to avert truck bombs

NEW YORK, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- The U.S. government has failed to take steps to prevent terrorists from getting the ingredients needed to make truck bombs, the New York Times said Tuesday.

"In the chemical and trucking industries, the offices of law enforcement agencies and the ranks of anti-terrorism experts inside and outside government, there is a widespread sense that little can be done to keep potential terrorists away from trucks, buses and the material that can turn them into weapons," the paper said.

James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow for domestic security at the conservative Washington-based Heritage Foundation, told the paper that explosive substances like ammonium nitrate fertilizers are now so widely used and so easily stolen and stockpiled that any restrictions imposed now would have little effect.

"Last week the fertilizer industry, in concert with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, began urging sellers of ammonium nitrate -- which has been the main ingredient of the bombs used in at least half a dozen major terror attacks here and abroad -- to track sales and require buyers to show identification," the paper said.