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So why is it an exercise in futility.
Oh wait, you want Bush dead.
Just heard on C-Span in the live coverage of the presser...
Scotty McLellan in the live press conference dropped a bombs .
The reason the President wasn't nofified will after the event was that it was AN EXERCISE.. and * was the only person inside the White House that knew.
Aside from George Bush the only other cabinet member involved in the exercise was new Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertkoff.
Mclellan said Homeland Security wanted a real examination of the capitol's defences. "And they came up wanting".
McLellan said that in the forecase for the scenario the small plane had not been expected to get so close to the white house.
"If a slow moving cessna not responding to radio traffic can get this close to the Capitol then we are in trouble", he said. He went on to point out that a faster plane would have undoubtedly been able to deliver its payload to deadly effect.
Mr McLellan was clearly at pains to point out that the reason everybody was kept in the dark for so long about the true nature of these events was so that they could assess not only the preparedness of authorities to respond to such a threat, but also the media and political response to such an event.
"Fear is the stock in trade of the terrorist," he said. "Homeland Security want to be able to assess how people react to these events."
He would the Homeland Security service would not rule out holding further "live fire" exercises saying that the experience had been invaluable to the Homeland Security teams involved.
WOW!!!!
So why is it an exercise in futility.
Oh wait, you want Bush dead.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/briefings/
If you're gonna lie, know there are no sources to refute you...stupid.
That's all he said about it in today's briefing.
Actually, I WAS hoping that someone WOULD do some homework on this topic. McClendon obviously never made those statements, but there is obviously much more to this cessna story than we are be told.
Here are some clues...A Washington Post article from June 3,2004...
Washington PostPentagon's 90-Minute Drill Not Tied to a Specific Threat
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 4, 2003; Page A09
Many Washington area residents may find their sleep interrupted by the roar
of Air Force F-16 fighters tonight as the Pentagon conducts a 90-minute air
patrol exercise to test federal procedures for identifying and confronting
hostile aircraft, defense officials said yesterday.
In the drill, which will start at 10:30 p.m., two F-16s will intercept two
Cessna 172 civilian airplanes in a scenario designed to test pilots,
antiaircraft missile crews and civilian and military commanders.
A spokesman said the jets will take off from Andrews Air Force Base but
declined to provide further details on the affected airspace. He said that
the exercise was scheduled for the period when civilian air traffic is
lowest and that flight paths were adjusted to reduce the noise level.
"We've changed some of the flight profiles to minimize the noise as much as
possible, but people still will be able to hear some of these things," said
Major Don Arias, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense
Command (NORAD). He added that the F-16s would not use afterburners below a
certain al ude.
The drill, dubbed Falcon Virgo, is the latest test of a U.S. air defense
system that was overhauled after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
The U.S. military now maintains irregular air patrols over Washington, New
York and other cities and deploys Avenger artillery batteries equipped with
Stinger missiles at various locations, including President Bush's retreat in
Crawford, Tex.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the number of NORAD aircraft dedicated to
patrolling the continental United States has increased from 14 to more than
100 at peak times, and the number of bases involved has grown from seven to
26. Military personnel have responded to more than 1,050 in-flight incidents
since the attacks.
The military also has corrected NORAD's lack of direct radar coverage over
the mainland United States and improved radio communications with its
pilots.
Tonight's drill is not tied to a specific threat, and similar drills held
May 21 and May 29 were unrelated to the elevation of the nation's terrorism
threat level from yellow to orange between May 20 and May 30, Arias said. He
declined to specify the troops or units involved in tonight's exercise but
said it will be coordinated with the Federal Aviation Administration, the
Secret Service and the Army, among other agencies.
The military has run other drills involving cruise missiles, unmanned craft
and remotely piloted vehicles launched against the continental United
States. Last year, 1,500 U.S. and Canadian military personnel participated
in the mock downing of a hijacked civilian jet in the Northwest. That
exercise, called Amalgam Virgo, had been planned before hijackers flew
commercial airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The authority to declare a civilian aircraft a hostile target and to shoot
it down -- which has been delegated in an emergency to NORAD regional
commanders -- is tested "probably between eight and 15 times a week," Gen.
Craig McKinley, commander of the Continental United States Region of NORAD,
told a panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks last month.
In tonight's exercise, Civil Air Patrol pilots will be cast in the role of
intruders, or "red air" team members. Several civilian and military agencies
will monitor the exercise, which will be controlled by NORAD.
Also involved will be the government's new national capital region air
defense coordination center at the FAA building in Herndon, which includes
military personnel, the Transportation Security Administration, the Secret
Service and other agencies.
More clues coming...
Clue number 2...
Washington Post"First lady Laura Bush and former first lady Nancy Reagan, who was visiting, were ushered to a bunker beneath the White House for safety, and Vice President Cheney was taken to a secure location, officials said. THE PRESIDENT, who was riding his bicycle at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in suburban Maryland, was alerted by his security detail after the drama was over."
This is 911 all over again. The nations capital may be under attack and the President is off on a bike ride and is told about the Washington incident a hour and a half later?
yes, this drill was 9/11 all over again!
Like I said, if you're gonna lie...
Dan, I think you need to explain yourself more fully on this.
Your first post clearly said that you heard on CSPAN that the thing was an exercise,
then you say McLendon obviously never made those statements?
If you wanted somebody to do the research, why not just say so? Were you hoping they would stuble upon the other info you posted? Pretty naive if you ask me. The only "research" needed to determine the truth is to find a transcript of the press conference to discover what he really said. And that is so obvious that you would realize it ahead of time.
That leads me to believe that you have just been caught in a lie, and are trying to worm your way out of it.
I typically lean left in politics, and have given you the benefit of the doubt in the past, but this is not the way to build credibility.
Oh, I completely agree that my tactics in this thread were completely under-handed, but for a few hours, at least, nobody disputed the possibility of this actually being a Home-land Security training exercise. Now, let's say I had taken the normal course of presenting articles from various sources and tryed per usual to make the case that this was only a training exercise. It would have easily been dismissed as just another Nbadan conspiracy theory, and my credibility - well, I'll let my past record of do enting my sources speak for itself.If you wanted somebody to do the research, why not just say so? Were you hoping they would stuble upon the other info you posted? Pretty naive if you ask me. The only "research" needed to determine the truth is to find a transcript of the press conference to discover what he really said. And that is so obvious that you would realize it ahead of time.
That leads me to believe that you have just been caught in a lie, and are trying to worm your way out of it.
I typically lean left in politics, and have given you the benefit of the doubt in the past, but this is not the way to build credibility.
This was merely an attempt to show how information and news, bad or good, can be manipulated by the way it is presented, and perhaps, mixed in with a few ad libs facts by the presentor. Either way, by using this approach I have taken the wind out of the sails of most of my would-be critics in this post because they did not bother to challenge the contention in my original post. The allegations that this was a training exercise were believable, even defenseable. Just as the Iraqi WMD were believable, the Al-Queda-Saddam connection was believable, the one-legged al Zarqawi leading the insurgency in Iraq is believable...and so on and so on and so on...
I guess my point is, just because you may have been originally wrong about the Iraq threat, or feel manipulated into being wrong, doesn't mean that you've completely surrendered your rights to speak up about the war if you now feel we are headed in the wrong direction.
Anyway, the reason all this is matters is because its a important propaganda and manipulation technique, and until you are made aware of it, most of the time you don't even know it is happening to you, and also I thought It would be fun since turn-about is fair play.
Either way, I will continue to make my case that if this wasn't a Homeland training exercise (or merely a lame attempt to draw attention away from 'the memo'), the Cessna incident brings up some disturbing questions about the chain of command in Washington. So those of you who fell for my original post may yet be vindicated. Thanks for calling me out on this Mark.
Last edited by Nbadan; 05-15-2005 at 05:10 AM.
Back to the original topic. More questions yet unasked about last weeks Cessna invasion on Capital hill..
Somebody at DailyKos gets itMy Pet President?: Even More to the Story than you think
by Magorn
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/5/13/143032/127
Fri May 13th, 2005 at 11:30:32 PDT
Talk about missing a hanging curveball. The media was handed the Story of the Decade two days ago and none of them seem to care.
Not that the Capitol was under "attack" and our Dear leader was AWOL.; no there's a bigger story by far. As DC-Metro native, using a little simple geography, I think I can clearly prove that W was deliberately cut out of the loop, when it came to dealing with this crisis
<SNIP>
Diaries :: Magorn's diary :: :: Trackback ::
While the offical story is that the crisis was too minor to bother the President, the WH at first certainly didn't react that way. Federal offices, the White house and Congress were evacuated. Laura and a visiting Nancy Reagan were quickly hustled into the WH bunker. VP Cheney on was whisked out of Town in a VERY heavily armed Motorcade.
I spoke to an eyewitness who saw the Motorcade Crossing the Roosevelt bridge. He said that the Last SUV in the group had part of its top removed and some sort of multi-barreled missile launcher was clearly visible sticking out the top (I'm not enough of a military geek as to even hazard a guess). I know that I've never seen an offical motorcade, where the security force had weapons exposed.)
Clearly the situation was edging from Code red to Code Brown. But The one person who didn't swing into action was the guy supposedly in charge. He had better things to do than worry about it.
After the crisis, Press Secretary Scotty McC seemed to know they had a problem. He went from spitting out his usual non-answers and instead tried to cover up the inexplicable moment by, not to put too fine a point on it, Lying his ass off
<SNIP>
In other words, there was a time when a critical Shoot/Don't Shoot decision for the unknown plane had to be made. Either answer could put lives in danger. Shoot it down and you've not only killed the pilots but the wreckage could cause damage and death on the ground. On the other hand if you don't shoot and it IS attacking... However, at that critical moment, the only thing on the President's mind was which gear to use for the next hill.
And that dear, and patient reader is where the Local knowledge kicks in.
You see, the place where the President was biking is almost in my back yard. The White House seems to want people to have the impression its some sort of remote wilderness area. In reality its nothing of the sort. <SNIP>
Notice that the northern end of the Refuge (where the President was most likely biking given the abundance of trails in that area> actually borders the southern end of Ft. Meade?
So why is this significant? Well Ft. Meade besides being a US Army base, also houses the National Security Agency
In case you have trouble keeping your intel agencies straight, NSA is the one in charge of SigInt, or electronic intelligence. In other words they are the ones that can eavesdrop on virtually any electronic communication anywhere in the world,( As people following the Bolton nomination now know) and the folks who make sure OUR communications are secure. There would be no better placed to be plugged in during a crisis, except maybe the situation room at the WH.
So let's review. Washington's airspace was being invaded. Jets were being scrambled and defense grid was lit up. Laura and Nancy were rushed to the WH Bunker and, Cheney split town in a motorcade that looked like it was headed to the Baghdad airport. and the city was placed in Full OMFG mode.
While all this is going on GW is less than five minutes away even by bike from the absolute Nerve center of America's entire secure communications and electronic intelligence network. And nobody even bothers to tell him what's going on
There's really no reasonable explanation for this except that his handlers made a deliberate decision to keep him away from the reins of power while the grown-ups handled the crisis. And this isn't the first time its happened
The sheer magnitude and uniqueness of 9/11 obscured the fact that that's exactly what happened on that day too. Cheney, not the president, was the Man in the Situation Room that day, the one who almost had to order a pilot to shoot down an aircraft full of people.
<SNIP>
The pattern is there and its very clear. Anytime there is a crisis that require immediate action and split second decisions, W's minders seem to conspire to keep him as far away from the Big Chair as possible. They know he's not great even when exhaustively prepped for an appearance in front of a friendly crowd. There ain't nobody who wants to see him improvise.
I now believe that at some point in 2000, maybe after the SC primary, Cheney turned to Karl Rove and said "Okay Karl, I was skeptical at first, but I now believe you can get this chimp elected. But you gotta promise me that if the ever hits the fan you'll keep him away from all the big red buttons, and let me handle it."
So the real question is, how long until the Media wakes up and recognizes it has a huge blockbuster story?
<SNIP>
So Conservatives, pay attention here because this requires a little thinking. Faced with the facts presented above there can only be two reasonable explainations to what happened with the Cessna incident:
1. This was a training exercise combined with Homeland Security and the President knew exactly what was gonna happen, thus there was no need to inform him
or
2. The President is such a buffon that when a critical decision had to made his minions chose to not follow protocol and made the decisions themselves.
So which one is it gonna be?
Last edited by Nbadan; 05-15-2005 at 02:51 AM.
Perplexing Clue Number 3: Exactly, who is W's biking buddy on that day (IN BLUE) Mike Woods?
LinkNow, we wonder who Mike Woods is. There is a big repug bu$h* backer in Louisiana (but another link says this Mike Woods grew up in Shreveport and we know bu$h* didn't go to high school there - of course, it may be another lie from the White House that the two biking buddies were high school friends):
"Shreveport businessman Mike Woods (R). His father, Dalton Woods, was a major force in shaping the Republican Party some thirty years ago. Woods is a Shreveport oilman, and presently serves on the State Board of Supervisors for the University of Louisiana System appointed by Mike Foster. He has his own financial resources to spend."
DailyKos? For all your daily news insight.
If it was just a drill, why is the guy getting brought up on charges? Part of the drill for the judicial system?
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