Did USAF B-52 Airmen Stop Cheney's Nuclear Provocation?

[TonyGosling]

Dr Strangelove territory this. But no fiction. Four stories on the B52 missing nuke and deaths of those brave U.S. Airmen at Minot and Barksdale Air Force bases that may have just stopped a nuclear World War III breaking out. More investigative work needs doing on finding out for certain whether or not all six nukes are back in relatively safe hands.


ARTICLE ONE
Nukes Over America: All a Stupid Mistake. Sure It Was

The Air Force’s Friday report on the August 29-30 nuclear weapons incident which saw six armed cruise missiles flown across the continental US in launch position on a B-52H bomber leaves all the big questions unanswered, attempting to shuck the whole thing off as an “unacceptable mistake.”

http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/nukes-over-america-all-a-stupid -mistake-sure-it-was/1534/
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/50

To be sure, Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Maj. Gen. Richard Newton, said that after a six-week investigation, five officers, including Col. Bruce Emig, commander of the Fifth Bomb Group at Minot AFB in North Dakota, where the flight originated, have been relieved of duty, and 65 other Air Force personnel were also removed from their duties, and both Barksdale and Minot were decertified for their strategic nuclear responsibilities. But that’s still pretty small beer for an incident so serious it’s never happened before in half a century of nuclear weapons handling.



There are, at this point, no court martials being contemplated, and nobody’s been discharged from the military.

Put simply, six 150-kiloton warheads were improperly attached to six Advanced Cruise Missiles, all loaded onto a wing launch pod, and then mounted on the wing of a B-52 H Stratofortress at Minot, along with six similar missiles with dummy warheads, which were loaded onto a launch pod on the plane’s other wing, an all 12 were improperly and illegally flown across the country to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

The Air Force, following its “investigation,” is saying the same thing it said before the investigation: it was all a big “mistake”—the result of “widespread disregard for the rules” regarding handling of nuclear weapons.



A few guys at Minot “inexplicably” screwed up and loaded the nukes and then there were a chain of mistakes because no one else treated the nuclear-tipped missiles as if they were armed with nuclear weapons.

The trouble with this theory, or story line if you will, is that while nobody at Minot, supposedly, noticed what was happening—even though ground crew workers spent eight hours laboring to get the pod with the six nuke-tipped missiles mounted on the plane’s wing. This despite the warheads are clearly visible and identifiable by the silver coating they exhibit when viewed through a little window in each nosecone cover, and because there are red coverings on the nuke nosecones—once the plane got to Barksdale, the ground crew there, which had no reason on earth to suspect it was looking at nuclear warheads, spotted them immediately upon going to the plane.
They had no reason to expect nukes because for 40 years it has been illegal for the military to carry nuclear weapons on bombers over US territory, and indeed since 1991, it has been illegal to even load nuclear weapons on a plane, period, even for training purposes on the ground..............................




ARTICLE TWO
Missing Nukes: Treason of the Highest Order
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7158
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, October 29, 2007
Missing Nukes on August 29-30, 2007

According to a wide range of reports, several nuclear bombs were “lost” for 36 hours after taking off August 29/30, 2007 on a “cross-country journey” across the U.S., from U.S.A.F Base Minot in North Dakota to U.S.A.F. Base Barksdale in Louisiana. [1] Reportedly, in total there were six W80-1 nuclear warheads armed on AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) that were “lost.” [2] The story was first reported by the Military Times, after military servicemen leaked the story.



It is also worth noting that on August 27, 2007, just days before the "lost" nukes incident, three B-52 Bombers were performing special missions under the direct authorization of General Moseley, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. [3] The exercise was reported as being an aerial information and image gathering mission. The base at Minot is also home of the 91st Space Wings, a unit under the command of Air Force Space Command (AFSPC).

According to official reports, the U.S. Air Force pilots did not know that they were carrying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Once in Louisiana, they also left the nuclear weapons unsecured on the runway for several hours. [4]

U.S. Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans, and Requirements, Major-General Richard Y. Newton III commented on the incident, saying there was an “unprecedented” series of procedural errors, which revealed “an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards” [5]

These statements are misleading. The lax security was not the result of procedural negligence within the U.S. Air Force, but rather the consequence of a deliberate tampering of these procedures.

If a soldier, marine, airman, or sailor were even to be issued a rifle and rifle magazine — weaponry of a far lesser significance, danger, and cost — there is a strict signing and accountability process that involves a chain of command and paperwork. This is part of the set of military checks and balances used by all the services within the U.S. Armed Forces.................................
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7158





ARTICLE THREE
speculations about the Minot incident, and call for investigation by a retired Naval officer
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_carol_wo_071009_speculations_a bout_t.htm
OpEdNews

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_carol_wo_071009_speculations_a bout_t.htm

October 9, 2007

speculations about the Minot incident, and call for investigation by a retired Naval officer

By Carol Wolman

The article below, by a retired Lieutenant Commander of the US Navy, demands a full, public investigation of the the B52 incident of late August. You may recall- if it hasn't gone down the memory hole- that some nuclear weapons were loaded onto a B52 bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, "for decommissioning". They were then flown to to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. This is against all the rules. Nuclear weapons are NEVER to be flown across the continent, for fear of accidents.

The chance that so many steps in the protocol of handling nuclear weapons would go wrong is miniscule, but if so, our tax dollars are being wasted, worse than wasted. We are funding idiots to guard bombs hundreds of times more powerful than the ones dropped on Japanese cities in 1945,



If the "mistake" was deliberate, it means that somehow the normal chain of command was bypassed. I've heard two theories about how this might have happened.

The first- the Chinese supplied key components of the computer systems that control our military command structure, and built in a "back door" route, by which they can override any orders in the system. They tricked the people at Minot and Barksdale with false orders, in order to demonstrate to the US military that orders cannot be trusted. This paralyzes the chain of command. They wanted to demonstrate their ability to do it in a peaceful way, so as to forestall an attack on Iran.

The other, more sinister theory is that Dick Cheney, who Bush put in charge of such things early on, has a separate override system which was in effect that day, and that all participants are sworn to secrecy. The cluster of violent deaths of young airmen and one woman from Minot and Barksdale AFB's from June-September- 6-7 young people in good health, and not in combat zones, makes one wonder........................................


Authors Website: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTowK03sr7Q

Authors Bio: Carol S. Wolman, MD is a psychiatrist in Northern California. A lifelong peace activist, she has written extensively on the psychology of our times. She is a cochair of Bay Area Impeach Bush-Cheney. You can join or form a local group at http://impeachbush.meetup.com/ She ran for Congress in '06, and is now a Gteen candidate for Congress in CA district 1. She is a coordinator of The New Broom Coalition, for a clean sweep of Congress...................
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_carol_wo_071009_speculations_a bout_t.htm



ARTICLE FOUR
Pentagon reels from second major nuclear arms blunder in a month
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_ article_id=489958&in_page_id=1811

26/10/07 - World news section

Pentagon reels from second major nuclear arms blunder in a month

The Pentagon was reeling last night from the American military's second major nuclear weapons blunder in a month.

Congress is demanding a full scale investigation and serious questions are being asked about the competence of the officers in charge of the world's mightiest arsenal.

The latest outrage came as Commander Michael Portland, the officer in charge of the USS Hampton, the most advanced nuclear attack submarine in the world, was fired after it was discovered that he had neglected to make basic daily safety checks.

Last month 70 US airmen were demoted after they lost track of six nuclear-armed cruise missiles and allowed them to be flown halfway across America by a bomber crew that didn't even know they were there.

The Pentagon said that it had lost confidence in Commander Portland's leadership after checks showed that he had failed to analyse the chemical and radiological properties of the submarine's nuclear reactor for a month.

It is considered vital that the reactor's condition be fully examined every day so that any malfunction can be caught early.

If something went wrong with the reactor it could lead to a devastating nuclear accident.

The USS Hampton, currently docked in San Diego, is armed with nuclear torpedoes, nuclear cruise missiles and a massive mine-laying arsenal.

US Navy officials said that it had also been discovered that logs on the USS Hampton had been filled out to make it appear the daily checks of the reactor water had actually been done.

Members of Congress are furious about the latest scandal especially as it follows so closely after the nuclear missile debacle.

In that incident a large US Air Force team failed to remove the nuclear warheads from six cruise missiles being flown by a B-52 bomber from North Dakota to Louisiana.

It was described as one of the worst known breaches of nuclear weapons procedures ever.

The incident sparked a so-called "Bent Spear" nuclear alert, one step down in military terms from a "Broken Arrow".

A "Broken Arrow" is triggered if a nuclear missile has been lost or detonated in a way that does not create the risk of nuclear war. If the B-52 had crashed there would not have been a nuclear explosion but there could have been major plutonium leakage causing thousands of deaths.

Independent inquires are being launched into both the nuclear missile and the nuclear submarine incidents and Congress is planning hearings into the Pentagon's nuclear safety procedures.

An investigation is also underway into how the US Army came to accidentally fire a ground to air Patriot missile from a base in the Gulf Arab state of Qatar earlier this month.

The missile landed harmlessly in the desert but it could have brought down any aircraft in the vicinity and it has renewed charges in the Middle East that American soldiers can be trigger-happy and careless.

Find this story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_ article_id=489958&in_page_id=1811


















by the way

Kennebunkport Warning thread
http://www.nineeleven.co.uk/board/viewtopic.php?t=11031



LIST OF KENNEBUNKPORT SIGNATORIES AND SUPPORTERS
http://www.actindependent.org/

The following is a list of individuals and/or organizations who have signed
or otherwise given their endorsement to The Kennebunkport Warning, on
and since August 24, 2007.
NOTE: Names will be added as they are received, the most recent first.
Endorsements should be sent via email to info@actindependent.org
Please put “KW” in subject line.
_____________________________________________________________
Last update: 10/19/07
BENJAMIN MERHAV, Melbourne, Australia
SAMUEL ANTHONY ETTARO, media producer & radio host
MARION LEONARD, Save Our World, Vermont
LYNN SANDAGE, Vermont
WANDA MCDONALD
MATT HOWARD, Iraq veteran, Vermont
ALI KHAGHANI
JAMES M. BUELS
MICHAEL MIDDLETON, The Geraldton 911 Time for the Truth Group,
Australia
JOSEPH THOMAS KELLEY, California
BRYAN OTTALINI, Georgia
911TRUTHSQUADS.ORG
ATLANTA911TRUTH.ORG
ROLF LINDGREN, Wisconsin
REBECCA L. WHITE, Maine
CHANNING BRECHLIN JR., Illinois
PETRUS VAN STADEN
KEN REINER
ALLAN RUBIN, Boston 9/11 Truth Committee
MATT SULLIVAN, Maryland
REV. PHILIP E. AND SUE K. WHEATON, Maryland
JOE AZAR, Virginia
MARCY POLLAN, Maryland

[TonyGosling]

Mystery surrounds deaths of Minot airmen
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=24190&sectionid=3510203

Six members of the US Air Force who were involved in the Minot AFB incident, have died mysteriously, an anti-Bush activist group says.

The incident happened when a B-52 bomber was "mistakenly" loaded with six nuclear warheads and flown for more than three hours across several states, prompting an Air Force investigation and the firing of one commander.

The plane was carrying Advanced Cruise Missiles from Minot Air Force Base, N.D, to Barksdale Air Force Base on August 30.

The Air Combat Command has ordered a command-wide stand down on September 14 to review procedures, officials said.

The missiles, which are being decommissioned, were mounted onto pylons on the bomber's wings and it is unclear why the warheads had not been removed beforehand.

In addition to the munitions squadron commander who was relieved of his duties, crews involved in the incident, including ground crew workers had been temporarily decertified for handling munitions.

The activist group Citizens for Legitimate Government said the six members of the US Air Force who were directly involved as loaders or as pilots, were killed within 7 days in 'accidents'.

The victims include Airman First Class Todd Blue, 20, who died while on leave in Virginia. A statement by the military confirmed his death but did not say how he died.

In another accident, a married couple from Barksdale Air Force Base were killed in the 5100 block of Shreveport-Blanchard Highway. The two were riding a 2007 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, with the husband driving and the wife the passenger, police said.

"They were traveling behind a northbound Pontiac Aztec driven by Erica Jerry, 35, of Shreveport," the county sheriff said. "Jerry initiated a left turn into a business parking lot at the same time the man driving the motorcycle attempted to pass her van on the left in a no passing zone. They collided."

Adam Barrs, a 20-year-old airman from Minot Air Force Base was killed in a crash on the outskirts of the city.

First Lt. Weston Kissel, 28, a Minot Air Force Base bomber pilot, was killed in a motorcycle crash in Tennessee, the military officials say.

Police found the body of a missing Air Force captain John Frueh near Badger Peak in northeast Skamania County, Washington.

The Activist group says the mysterious deaths of the air force members could indicate to a conspiracy to cover up the truth about the Minot Air Base incident.

[TonyGosling]

More Questions About the Minot Nukes
by Dave Lindorff
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_dave_lin_071104_more_questions _about.htm
The Pentagon has been stonewalling on my requests for answers to key questions. For two weeks a public affairs office has been declining to respond to my question about whether the six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles flown by B-52 from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB were programmed for specific targets, and if so what theose targets were, or even whether the team that investigated the incident checked to see if they were targeted.



The Air Force and Pentagon have also declined to explain whether US nuclear weapons in storage in US bunkers have been provided with the same alarm and motion-detection sensors that the National Nuclear Security Agency helped to install on the nukes being stored on Russian bases.

Clearly if such devices are standard on US nukes, as several Air Force active and retired personnel have assured me is the case, then there is no way that those weapons could have been removed from the Minot bunker by "mistake" as claimed the Air Force's official report on the incident.

The Pentagon has also refused to state whether the missiles were fueled up or not.

Meanwhile, I have no knowledge as to the accuracy of this, but one Air Force vet tells me that the Advanced Cruise Missiles that were nuclear armed and mounted on a launch pylon on the B-52 in question would have been electronically linked to the plane automatically (which has the capability to program and re-program the targeting of the missiles), and that therefore the pilot of the plane would have instantly seen on his instrument console that he had nukes on board that flight. He also told me that the idea that the pilot would only have checked out the missiles mounted on one wing--by chance the wing that had the six missiles with dummy warheads--instead of both pylons and all 12 missiles as required, which is the claim of the Air Force report, is ludicrous. As he notes, pilots on these aging Stratofortresses see the pre-flight check as a life-or-death matter. Anything wrong on these planes can mean loss of the plane and even loss of the lives of the entire crew and of people on the ground. That would include the secure mounting of the missile cargo.

As a former semi-trailer driver myself, I know that those checks of all the main systems--air brakes, trailer linkage, tire pressure, lights, etc.--are not taken lightly. Before you head out on the road with a trailer truck, you check out all the critical systems, because you know your life depends on their working properly. Surely this would be much more true with a strategic bomber, especially when it is carrying 12 missiles under its wings.

The more you look at this story, the more obvious it is that the Air Force claim that this was all just a big "mistake" has to be a blatant cover-up of the truth.


New Commander at Minot Air Force Base
Kristin Bien
11/5/2007
The new commander of the Minot Air Force Base is adjusting to his position.
Colonel Joel Westa was put in charge last week.

The previous commander, Col. Bruce Emig, was relieved of duty in the wake of the nuclear-armed bomber flight from Minot to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana....



Concerns raised over U.S. nuclear security
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=57611&archive= true
Conditions that led to August incident in states could reoccur, expert says
By Bryan Mitchell, Stars and Stripes
Europe edition, Wednesday, November 7, 2007

RAF LAKENHEATH, England — A nuclear weapons expert said the Air Force’s response to a recent mishandling of nuclear weapons raises questions about the security of America’s arsenal worldwide, including at several installations in Europe.

“[Maj.] Gen. [Richard] Newton said everything [in North Dakota] was done to Air Force regulations,” said Philip Coyle, a senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, an independent Pentagon watchdog group. “The problem I had with that was the same conditions could exist at other Air Force bases around the world.”

The Air Force still is recovering from its most serious safety infraction in recent memory after a B-52 bomber was inadvertently loaded with nuclear weapons at Minot Air Force Base, N.D., and flown to Barksdale Air Force Base, La.

The Fifth Bomb Group at Minot lost its certification to handle nuclear weapons, at least four officers were fired and roughly 65 other Air Force personnel were disciplined in connection with the Aug. 29-30 incident. Additional probes are slated from both the Defense Science Board and the House Armed Services Committee that may lead to further discipline.

The most serious condition Coyle cited was the storing of nuclear weapons alongside conventional munitions — as was reportedly the practice at Minot.

“Perhaps they are doing that (storage practices) in other places. If they are, there is an opportunity for a similar type of accident,” said Coyle, who has worked at a nuclear laboratory in the United States and served at the Pentagon.

According to the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, the U.S. military maintains nuclear weapons on seven military installations in six European countries: England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Turkey. The FAS reports that nukes were removed from Ramstein and Spangdahlem air bases in the past several years.

But an FAS nuclear weapons expert said the likelihood of a similar incident is diminished by the fact that the Air Force seldom moves its nuclear weapons — at least intentionally.

“The [nuclear] weapons do not move unless they absolutely have to be moved,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project with the Federation of American Scientists.

“The military is so reluctant to touch these unless they have to.”

Officials at RAF Lakenheath declined to comment on whether the nuclear weapons reportedly stored on base are housed alongside conventional weapons or confirm if the base even has nukes.

Kristensen said it’s widely accepted in the scientific community that the U.S. has forward deployed nuclear weapons across Europe.

“We take that information from a large number of sources,” he said. “Hearings, budget material and leaks are a big part.”

Moreover, a British Ministry of Defence report on the June 2003 joint exercise dubbed “Dimming Sun” appears to validate the FAS reports that there are U.S. nuclear weapons in England. The exercise — which included participants from U.S. federal agencies, military units and British first responders — involved the scenario of a plane transporting nuclear weapons from RAF Lakenheath crashing in Norfolk shortly after takeoff.

“The accident scenario involved a simulated release of radioactive material that had an impact on the local community,” the report states. “Such exercises include the arrangements for accidents involving United States of America nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom as required by the Government-to-Government Arrangement.”

Coyle said it’s possible other infractions involving nuclear weapons have occurred in the U.S. and abroad, but have gone unreported by the media.

“The only reason this one got noticed was because some Air Force people were so disgusted that they leaked it,” he said. “If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t have known about this one.”

[acrobat74]

Great thread Tony.

There's definitely something sinister at work here, it seems to be quite impossible to just move these missiles 'by mistake'.

[Disco_Destroyer]

Maybe it was an attack on Iran thwarted from inside the Military to which we should be greatful, maybe this is why they are stepping up patrols in the region to provoke an attack to which they can retaliate!

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3143267.ece

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g4Y5CydzzDq2UUBQMiYIJcMxIFcw

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5heSX5zuDqDR849yZGhm0CBjLUB7g

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IK10Ak01.html

links supplied by http://www.legitgov.org/ via http://www.myspace.com/legitgov

[TonyGosling]

UPDATE: THE "STRANGE" DEATH OF TODD BLUE

By Ted Twietmeyer
9-17-7

[url}http://journals.aol.com/foxxgiavani/shaken-but-not-stirred/entrie s/2007/09/20/update-the-strange-death-of-todd-blue/1296[/url]
Blue, Todd Alexander

The issue of deceased airman Todd Blue is highly unusual to say the least, and opens up a Pandora's box full of questions.

At the time of Todd's death, he was under investigation for his possible role in the nuclear weapons that were loaded into a B52 aircraft.

If military personnel are under investigation at any base for a crime, they will "NOT" be given any leave until the investigation is completed and they are cleared. Yet Todd was given leave and was at home with his family according to the obituary at the time of his death?

It's also interesting is that Todd isn't someone who's been in the airforce for most of his life.

Todd Blue was just 20 years old. Why wasn't his cause of death stated??? Obituaries usually state something - unless a death was the result of a suicide. From at least one write-up about Todd, we know he was a caring person who helped people in their time of need.

We may never know what Todd's role in this nuclear incident was, if he killed himself or it was made to like he did, if it really was an accident, a sudden heart attack, etc... unless a member of the family comes forward with what they know.

Until they do, they may be in grave danger as the bigger story here starts to unravel. If he actually did take his own life, then perhaps he couldn't live with what he knew.

It is also important to note that it would be utterly and completely impossible for Todd to have removed several weapons from storage and load them onto an aircraft as we shall see. Todd was an airman, which is "NOT" the same as an ordinance officer.

MOVING A WEAPON FROM STORAGE TO AN AIRCRAFT

Below are the basic steps required to remove any nuclear weapon from storage and load it onto an aircraft, according to a former air force officer:

* Orders to remove a nuclear weapon from storage must come down from the top.

* An ordinance officer in charge of the storage area must sign off

* A safety officer must sign off

* There are ordinance personnel who physically handle the weapons to move them from storage. They will have knowledge of the movement as well.

* The B52 pilot would have to sign off to complete the chain of custody.

* A retired airforce pilot told me "You would know you had the weapons on board. Your aircraft will take-off differently and handle differently."

* Several ordinance personnel are required to mount these weapons on the aircraft. This requires several trained and certified ordinance personnel to handle the weapons. Weapons must also be connected into the aircraft's ordinance firing system so the weapon to receive arming data. Lights on a control panel inside the aircraft would indicate the presence of the nuclear cruise missiles, providing further indication that the wing mounted missile carriers were NOT empty.

* There is the matter of arming the weapons. Nuclear weapons must receive a special arming code. Complex, encrypted arming code data can only come from the top of the chain of command and none of the air force personnel have any knowledge of it. This prevents a rogue officer at a base ordering personnel to load a nuclear weapon on an aircraft and using it (as portrayed in the film "Dr. Strangelove.") The arming code is sent via a satellite transmission - and must originate from the commander in chief. A briefcase which a military officer carries with the president (also known as "the football") is the portable means to transmit arming codes. This briefcase which is carried by an officer wherever the president goes on the planet, contains a specialized system for biometrically identify the president (in the even it is somehow stolen) and the means to enter nuclear device arming data.

Pilots perform their own inspection of aircraft they are about to fly. This is true in the civilian world as well as in the military. Such inspections can be bypassed, such as when a scramble takes place with fighter planes. It would be impossible for a pilot to not notice missiles hanging under the wings. Nuclear weapons are also clearly marked. There are also checklists pilots must run before the wheels are allowed to roll.

Yet we are to believe the pilot and crew knew nothing about nuclear weapons being aboard??? Would any pilot want to roll the wheels unless these weapons were AUTHORIZED to be on-board??? After all, he has to sign for them under the chain of custody.

At this point, we already see a large number of personnel will have full knowledge of the weapons being loaded onto the plane, as well as the crew aboard the plane. Hopefully all of them are still alive and will stay that way.

But what "LIES" would personnel be told so they would not question this insane action??? While it is true that air force personnel are trained to obey orders like other branches of the military, why didn't they question it???

Perhaps the biggest single item of interest here is what it took to start the removal of the weapons from storage in the first place - an order which can only come from the top of the military.

If the weapons were to be dropped on Iraq, then the risk from anti-aircraft missiles would be minimal. Only a state-of-the-art ground to air missile could take down a high-flying B52. Perhaps this was to be a last act of desperation to be blamed on "insurgents."

Since the Iraq war has been lost - it might be a last desperate act known as "scorched Earth." Nuclear weapons would leave the land radioactive and worthless for several millenia for Iraqis.

All of this raises yet another bigger question - what of the several hundred thousand American armed forces personnel in Iraq??? America would be killing off most of it's own military by using these weapons in Iraq.

It would take months to evacuate the troops from Iraq before such a strike took place. It's clear that none of these personnel were to be withdrawn, since the Commander in Chief already proclaimed on numerous occassions that he was going to "stay the course."

The newer stealth bomber B2 would be the aircraft of choice to insure weapon delivery. B2 bombers are deployed from an American airbase on American soil, go anywhere in the world on a bombing mission and return to America. They do not land anywhere but in America, partly because of the classified propulsion technology they have. If these bombers were to be used to deploy the nuclear weapons, a B52 would play no role in the mission.

To dispose of the plane (and crew) would be a far smaller sacrificethan a far more expensive, limited edition, two billion dollar B2 bomber. If these nuclear weapons were intended for this unthinkable mission, then the entire crew would have a flight plan with details on pecisely what coordinates to release the missiles, what course they were to fly, the altitude for detonation, when to release the missiles, etc... This must all be planned in advance.

And if the mission were to succeed, we can be certain that the aircraft would be destroyed and the crew would be killed to cover it up. Everyone involved in the chain of custody would be terminated. There would be a detailed plan in place to insure no witnesses live to testify that such a treasonous act of genocide took place, and the multiple nuclear events would be blamed on an "act of terrorism.

" Without any doubt, martial law would ensue and NO investigation would ever be possible. It would be an act of terrorism executed by at least one traitor the inside of government.

It is highly unlikely any airforce officer would participate in this mad scheme unless orders to deploy these weapons came from the Commander in Chief and were authenticated. If this is the case and the investigation reaches this conclusion, any investigation into this "incident" will become classified.

The media will probably "NOT" be saying another word about the incident, and they too, will help make it all "go away."

There is only ONE man commanding all of the military, at the very top, who would be desperate enough to try to do something like this. He is the only man who has the actual authority to deploy ANY nuclear weapons.

Even though about one week has passed since the incident, it is most likely that any investigation into this event has already confirmed who that treasonous individual is.

If America is already under secret martial law which the events of the past 6 years seem to suggest, then there will never be an investigation. And this may be why he thought he could do it.

Nothing will be done officially about the authorization of this event - but that doesn't mean his future is secure. Word has been circulating in the military for sometime that everyone has had enough of the madness. Stop The Madness

They know military's function is to defend America, and "NOT" go around the planet starting wars which put men and women in harm's way for no good reason. And the true patriots in the military are keenly aware of this fact. Stop The Insanity

Again, I stand with millions of Americans and salute the unknown DoD person(s) who exposed this madness. May this person serve as an example to military personnel everywhere, and live a long and happy life. Bravo

This is probably the closest America has every come to being completely destroyed.

How many Americans really understand this??? Let's all hope and pray that the traitors are brought to justice swift and sure who ordered this

action. Whistle

Jeff has offered to allow me to post this anonymously.

But if as Americans we don't stand up to tyranny, then in the end nothing will matter.

Ted Twietmeyer
tedtw@frontiernet.net
www.data4science.net

[TonyGosling]

The Mystery of Minot: Loose nukes and a cluster of dead airmen raise troubling questions
by Dave Lindorff

This article appeared initially in the Oct. 22, 2007 issue of American Conservative magazine.
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2007/112107Lindorff.shtml

The American Conservative has discovered that to date, more than a month after the incident, Pentagon investigators have completely ignored a peculiar cluster of six deaths during the weeks immediately preceding and following the B52 flight.
Wed, 11/21/2007—The unauthorized Aug. 29 cross-country flight of a B-52H Stratofortress armed with six nuclear-tipped AGM-29 Advanced Cruise missiles, which saw these 150-kiloton warheads go missing for 36 hours, has all the elements of two Hollywood movies. One would be a thriller about the theft from an armed weapons bunker of six nukes for some dark and murky purpose. The lead might be played by Matt Damon. The other movie would be a slapstick comedy about a bunch of bozos who couldn’t tell the difference between a nuclear weapon and a pile of dummy warheads. The lead might be played by Adam Sandler, backed by the cast of “Police Academy III.”

So far, the Pentagon, which has launched two separate investigations into the incident, seems to be assuming that it is dealing with the comedy version, saying that some incredible “mistake” led to nuclear weapons being taken inadvertently from a weapons-storage bunker, loaded into launch position on a bomber, and flown from North Dakota to Louisiana.

The American Conservative has discovered that to date, more than a month after the incident, Pentagon investigators have completely ignored a peculiar cluster of six deaths, during the weeks immediately preceding and following the flight, of personnel at the two Air Force bases involved in the incident and Air Force Commando Operations headquarters.

The operative assumption of the investigations appears to be that an Air Force decision to store nuclear, conventional, and dummy warheads in the same bunker and one mistake by weapons handlers initiated a chain of errors and oversights that led to the flight.

On Sept. 23, the Washington Post, in a story based upon interviews with military officials, many of them unidentified, suggested that the first known case of nuclear warheads leaving a weapons-storage area improperly was the result of two mistakes. The first, the article suggested, was a decision by the Air Force to permit the storing of nuclear weapons in the same highly secure and constantly guarded sod-covered bunkers—known as “igloos”—as non-nuclear weapons and dummy warheads (something that had never been allowed in the past). The second was some as yet unidentified mistake by weapons handlers at Minot to mount six nuclear warheads onto six of the 12 Advanced Cruise Missiles that had been slated to be flown to Barksdale AFB for destruction. Those missiles and the six others, part of a group of 400 such missiles slated for retirement and disassembly, should have been fitted with dummy warheads also. The Post article quotes military sources as saying that once the mistake was made, a cascade of errors followed as weapons handlers, ground crews, and the B-52 crew dkipped all nuclear protocols, assuming they were dealing with dummy warheads.

The problem with this theory is that dummy warheads don’t look the same as the real thing. The real warheads, called W80-1’s, are shiny silver, which is clearly visible through postage-stamp-sized windows on the nosecone covers that protect them on the missiles. In addition, the mounted warheads are encased in a red covering as a second precaution.

Apparently the nukes (which can be set to explode at between 5 kilotons and 150 kilotons) were easily spotted by a Barksdale AFB ground crew when they went out to the plane on the tarmac hours after it landed. If the barksdale ground crew, which had no reason to suspect it was looking at nuclear-tipped missiles, easily spotted the “error,” why did everyone at Minot miss it, as claimed?

Clearly, whoever loaded the six nukes on one B-52 wing pod, and whoever mounted that pod on the wing, knew or should have known that they were dealing with nukes—and absend an order from the highest authority in Washington, loading such nukes on a bomber was against all policy. The odds of randomly putting six nukes all on one pod, and six dummies on the other, are 1:924. And how curious that the pilot, who is supposed to check all 12 missiles before flying, checked only the pod containing the dummy warheads.

Various experts familiar with nuclear-weapons-handling protocols express astonishment at what happened on Aug. 29 and 30. After all, over the course of more than six decades, the protocols for handling nuclear arms have called for at least two people at every step, with paper trails, bar codes, and real-time computer tracking of every warhead in the arsenal. Nothing like this has been known to have happened before. Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, who served as US Strategic Command chief from 1996 to 1998, told the Post, “I have been in the nuclear business since 1966 and am not aware of any incident more disturbing.”

Philip Coyle, a senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, calls the iincident “astonishing” and “unbelievable.” He says, “This wasn’t just a mistake. I’ve counted, and at least 20 things had to have gone wrong for this to have occurred.”

Bruce Blair, a former Air Force nuclear launch officer who is now president of the World Security Institute, says that the explanation of the incident as laid out in the Washington Post, and in the limited statements from the Air Force and Department of Defense, which call it a “mistake,” are “incomplete.” He notes that no mention has been made as to whether the nukes in question, which had been pre-mounted on a pylon for attachment to the B-52 wing, had their PAL (permiswsion action link) codes unlocked to make them operational, or whether a system on board the plane that would ordinarily prevent an unauthorized launch had been activated. “For all we know, these missiles could have been fully operational,” he says.

The Air Force and Department of Defense are refusing to answer any questions about such matters.

Meanwhile, there are those six deaths. On July 20, 1st Lt. Weston Kissel, a 28-year-old B-52 pilot from Minot, died in a motorcycle accident while on home leave in Tennessee.

Another Minot B-52 pilot, 20-year-old Adam Barrs, died on July 5 in Minot when a car he was riding in, driven by another Minot airman, Stephen Garrett, went off the road, hit a tree, and caught fire. Airman Garrett was brought to the hospital in critical condition and has since been charged with negligent homicide.

Two more Air Force personnel, Senior Airman Clint Huff, 29, of Barksdale AFB, and his wife Linda died on Sept. 15 in nearby Shreveport, Louisiana, when Huff reportedly attempted to pass a van in a no-passing zone on his motorcycle, and the van made a left-hand turn, striking them.

Then there are two reported suicides, which both occurred within days of the flight. One involved Todd Blue, a 20-year-old airman who was in a unit that guarded weapons at Minot. He reportedly shot himself in the head on Sept. 11 while on a visit to his family in Wytheville, Virginia. Local police investigators termed his death a suicide.

The second suicide, on Aug. 30, was John Frueh, a special forces weather commando at the Air Force’s Special Operations command headquartered at Hurlburt AFB in Florida. Hurlburt’s website says, “Every night, as millions of Americans sleep peacefully under the blanket of freedom,” Air Force special Operations commandos work “in deep dark places, far away from home, risking their lives to keep that blanket safe.”

Frueh, 33, a married father of two who had just received approval for promotion from captain to major, reportedly flew from Florida to Portland, Oregon, for a friend’s wedding. He never showed up. Instead, he called on Aug. 29, the day the missiles were loaded, from an interstate pull-off just outside Portland to say he was going for a hike in a park nearby. (It is not clear why he was at a highway rest stop as he had no car.) A day later, back in Portland, he rented a car at the airport, again calling his family. After he failed to appear at the wedding, his family filed a missing person’s report with the Portland police. The Sheriff’s Department in remote Skamania County, Washington, found Frueh’s rental car ten days later on the side of a road nearly 120 miles from the airport in a remote area of Badger Peak. Search dogs found his body in the woods. His death was ruled a suicide, though neither the sheriff’s investigator nor the medical examiner would give details. What makes this alleged suicide odd, however, is that the sheriff reports that Frueh had with him a knapsack containing a GPS locator and a videocam—odd equipment for someone intent on ending his life.

Of course, it could be that all six of these deaths are coincidences—all just accidents and personal tragedies. But when they occur around the time six nuclear-tipped missiles go missing in a bizarre incident, the likes of which the Pentagon hasn’t seen before, one would think investigators would be on those cases like vultures on carrion. In fact, police and medical examiners in the Frueh and Blue cases say no federal investigators, whether from DOD or FBI, have called them. Worse still, because the B-52 incident got so little media attention—no coverage in most local news—none of those investigating the accidents and suicides even knew about it or about the other deaths.

“It would have been interesting to know all that when I was examining Mr. Blue’s body,” says coroner Mike Stoker, “but no one told me about any of it or asked me about him.”

“If we had known that several people had died under questionable circumstances, it might have affected how we’d look at a body,” says Don Phillips, the sheriff’s deputy who investigated the Frueh death. “But nobody from the federal government has ever contacted us about this.”

“Certainly, in a case like this, the suicides should be a red flag,” says Hans Kristensen, a nuclear-affairs expert with the Federation of American Scientists. It’s wild speculation to think that there might be some connection between the deaths and the incident, but it certainly should be investigated.”

[TonyGosling]

Top Air Force Leaders Ousted, Defense Official Says
By Bill Arthur
June 5 (Bloomberg) -- Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne are resigning at the request of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a nameless defense official said.
Gates scheduled a news conference later today to discuss the departures.
The departures are related to a number of Air Force problems in handling nuclear weapons and aren't the result of any policy disputes, the official said.
Admiral Kirkland Donald, director of naval nuclear propulsion, said in a recent report that Gates must make changes, according to the Air Force Times, a newspaper serving Air Force personnel.
Last October, three senior officers were relieved of command for their roles in mistakenly allowing a B-52 bomber to fly from North Dakota to Louisiana carrying six cruise missiles armed with nuclear warheads.
Less than two weeks ago, the same Air Force unit that was responsible for mishandling the cruise missiles failed key parts of a nuclear safety inspection, the Washington Post reported...............
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahxQoTPqqVTs


FACTBOX-U.S. military's nuclear fuse mistake
Fri Jun 6, 2008 4:02am IST
June 5 (Reuters) - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the Air Force's top leadership on Thursday after an investigation into the mistaken shipment of nuclear missile fuses to Taiwan found problems with management of America's nuclear arsenal.
http://in.reuters.com/article/rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews/idINN 0540221720080605
Following are some details of the incident released by the Pentagon. Full investigation findings remain classified...........

[chek]

[TonyGosling]

BBC finally cover the biggest nuclear weapon incident EVER ... ten months after it happened.

[TonyGosling]

Air Force Purge Shows Brzezinski's TLC Rules DC
By Webster G. Tarpley

WASHINGTON, DC -- Yesterday's extraordinary simultaneous ouster of the Secretary of the Air Force and the Air Force chief of staff, followed by the naming of Trilateral Commissioner and Carter administration veteran James Rodney Schlesinger to purge USAF generals and colonels, dramatically documents the fact that power in Washington DC is no long in the hands of the Bush-Cheney-neocon clique, but has passed to the Brzezinski-Trilateral faction.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the firing of Air Force Secretary Michael W. Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley, citing the failure of the Air Force to maintain the security of strategic nuclear forces, as shown in the infamous rogue B-52 incident of late August 2007, when a B-52 intercontinental strategic bomber with six nuclear armed cruise missiles flew from North Dakota to Louisiana totally outside of the purview of the USAF command control and communications systems. Gates also mentioned that four high-tech electrical nosecone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries, along with other failures.

Gates is a leading member of the Principals' Committee, an interagency group which now runs the US government from day to day with scant reference to the discredited outgoing lame ducks Bush and Cheney, who stay on mainly as figureheads. The Principals' Committee has been in charge of the US government since no later than early May, around the time of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, when the controlled corporate media began trumpeting that Obama was the winner of the Democratic nomination. The Principals' Committee is made up of Pentagon boss Gates, Secretary of State Rice, NSC director Hadley, Joint Chiefs of Staff head Mullen, intelligence czar McConnell, along with a few others. These figures are now marching to the tune of Trilateral Commission bigwigs like Zbigniew Brzezinski, Joseph Nye, and the Rockefeller family. These are the same forces who own and control the Wall Street Manchurian candidate Obama. It is notable that the high- profile purge of the USAF came less than 48 hours after Obama had unilaterally proclaimed himself the Democratic presidential nominee.

The rogue B-52 flew with six nuclear cruise missiles from Minot AFB North Dakota to Barksdale AFB Louisiana last August 30. Source reports published by Wayne Madsen suggest that the B-52 was stopped by patriotic low-level USAF personnel. As the issue of whether to allow the plane to fly on to the Middle East went up the chain of command and expanded to involve the intelligence agencies, it transpired that the majority of the government and the establishment did not want the plane to attack targets in the Middle East. The scandal of the rogue B-52 broke on September 5, and a stand-down and nuclear census of the entire USAF soon followed. According to all indications, the B-52 was under the extra-legal control of the Cheney faction, which evidently planned to fly it to the Middle East and quite possibly use one or more of the nuclear cruise missiles in an attack on Iran and/or Syria, probably in cooperation or coordination with the Israeli air attack on Syria which occurred on September 6. The fact that the B-52 was blocked may have represented the last gasp of the Bush-Cheney- neocon faction, and the beginning of the hegemony of a different and far more dangerous group, namely the Brzezinski-Trilateral faction.

The Gates purge indicates that the new Trilateral masters of Washington DC do not trust the USAF generals who are so deeply compromised with the Bush-Cheney-neocon faction. The USAF was up to its neck in 9/11, and then in the rogue B-52 affair. The Trilaterals are accordingly driving out the old rogues, and replacing them with new rogue generals of their own, who are loyal to the insane Trilateral agenda. Brzezinski does not want nuclear weapons wasted on Iran, which he intends to turn into an expendable puppet or kamikaze pawn in his apocalyptic showdown with Russian and China. This is what Obama's appeasement of Iran actually aims at: Iran as a US asset to be played against Russia and China. Brzezinski wants to be in control of those nukes, since he may soon need them for use against Russia and China. Those who might celebrate the defeat of the Bush-Cheney-neocon group must rather face the fact that the US has just jumped out of the frying pan of conventional invasions and into the fire of looming thermonuclear confrontations among the great powers. This is the real nature of the change for which Obama is the public symbol. .........


http://www.rense.com/general82/ztz.htm

[scienceplease]

http://www.military.com/news/article/ex-official-says-dod-nixed-iran-a ttack.html

[outsider]

This Op Ed item is based on a Financial Times article:
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/print_friendly.php?p=Pentagon--Over-1 000-Nuclea-by-Rob-Kall-080620-853.html