An Analysis & Critique

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” A. Conan Doyle

Last month I posted part 1 of my piece on Minot/Barksdale here. In it, I reviewed the incident and the Defense Science Board’s final report on the incident in question. When the story broke, there were reports and writings all over the blogosphere connecting it with possible strikes against Iran, possible diversion for false-flag attacks here at home and even Chinese electronic tampering through backdoor access to Chinese-made semiconductors allegedly used in Air Force electronics. In this piece, I will examine some of these allegations as well as some of the deaths of Air Force personnel in an attempt to determine any relationship to the above incident.

As stated in Part 1, over 36 hours on August 29-30, 2007, two pylons of 6 AGM-129 cruise missiles one package containing inert payloads, the other 6 active nuclear warheads, were removed from the 5^th Bomb Wing secure ordnance storage at Minot AFB, mounted on a B-52H bomber like the one pictured above carrying identical pylon payloads and flown 1100 miles to Barksdale AFB where they were discovered by ground crews after sitting, unguarded on the tarmac for 11 hours. The resulting Nuclear Security Alert and it’s aftermath investigations led to a wholesale review of Air Force Nuclear Weapons Handling procedures and precipitated an unprecedented wave of disciplinary actions across the ranks, up to and including the resignations of the Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Moseley and Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne. Although the weapons never left overall Air Force custody, they passed through five separate chain-of-custody handoffs requiring visual inspections on two bases until being discovered by the unloading crew at Barksdale.

The DSB final report found the following:

1. Over time, nuclear weapons movement procedures for bomber weapons have been compromised for expedient work processes. This evolution occurred without adequate review and approval above the Wing level.

2. There was confusion over applicability of nuclear weapons handling procedures for nuclear weapons systems that do not contain nuclear weapons.

3. The practice of storing nuclear munitions in the same facility with nuclear-test, nuclear-training and nuclear-inert devices led to confusion and unnecessary access to nuclear weapons.

4. The various levels of inspection activities failed to detect these changes in process which compromised established procedure. The Nuclear Operational Readiness Inspection process required only limited mission performance, sometimes generating as few as one aircraft being subjected to inspection.

This combined with the increased tempo of conventional bombing operations led to an overall erosion of standards within the nuclear weapons mission. In other words, it was a FUBAR SNAFU of the highest order. For me, the one glaring omission not addressed was how nuclear warheads, by all informed accounts, easily identifiable and rigorously alarmed to prevent improper movement, could have been removed from Secure Ordnance Storage in the first place without setting off alarms as soon as they crossed the threshold. Read more ?

Over 36 hours on August 29-30 2007, six AGM-129_ACM Air Launched Cruise Missiles each containing one W80_(nuclear_warhead) were removed from safeguarded weapons storage facilities at the Minot AFB in North Dakota, loaded aboard a B-52 bomber and flown 1500 miles to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. While removed from secure storage, these weapons passed through six separate links in the chain of custody without being discovered, without being visually inspected and were left unguarded and unsecured on the runways of both Minot and Barksdale for 15 hours and 12 hours respectively before the Ordnance Unloading Team at Barksdale discovered the error, established a security zone and activated a Nuclear Security Alert to further safeguard the warheads.

Attempting to conceal the incident as part of the DOD’s policy on neither confirming nor denying the presence of nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary Robert Gates notified President Bush and ordered in internal Air Force Investigation of the incident, the first of it’s kind in the 40+ years of nuclear weapons handling. This lasted 6 days until the story of the incident was broken by the Military Times, quoting unnamed sources and picked up by the MSM. Soon after, the Air Force announced that the Minot Munitions Squadron commander was relieved of command and 25 airmen were disciplined. They also assured the public that the weapons never left the custody of Air force personnel and the public was never in danger. The results of that investigation saw the commanders of the 5^th Bomb wing and the 5^th Maintenance Group at Minot and the 2^nd Operations Group at Barksdale relieved of command, four senior NCOs of the 5^th Bomb Wing received “administrative action”, all personnel of the 5^th Bomb Wing were stripped of their nuclear certifications, 65 airmen lost their Personnel_Reliability_Program certifications and all tactical weapons ferry operations were suspended, citing:

“There has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards at Minot Air Force Base and at Barksdale Air Force Base.”

Additionally, the Inspector General offices of all USAF major commands with a nuclear mission were tasked to conduct “Limited Nuclear Surety Inspections” at every nuclear-capable unit under Defense_Threat_Reduction_Agency oversight. This prompted Gates to appoint retired USAF General Larry Welch to lead a special Defense Science Board to study the mishap in the context of the overall review of all nuclear weapons handling policies and procedures. That report was released in February of 2008 and is available for viewing here

Part I of this piece will look at the incident and DSB report from the perspective of a nuclear weapons handler, whether the reasons cited are credible and whether the actions taken to address it will have any effectiveness in improving nuclear weapons safeguards. Part II will look at some of the ancillary stories related to this incident and attempt to gauge their overall credibility and connection. Read more ?

In Part one of my piece, I attempted to explain the nature and scope of the US Warrantless Wiretap Program and the growing Surveillance Regime being built in this country. In Part 2, I will compare and contrast the growth and structure of the aforementioned Surveillance Regimes with other countries’ corresponding Systems of surveillance and control. I will also spotlight the International Surveillance Industry and its efforts to market its products by offering this technology to governmental power centers around the world.

Back in 1992, I was living in Vallejo, Ca, a working-class/Navy town in the northeastern San Francisco Bay Area. At that time, there was a local news story about a local drug dealer facing his third-strike conviction under California’s Three-Strikes law who had a brilliant idea. If I blow up the police evidence room and destroy my incriminating evidence, they can’t convict me. He knew the local police evidence storage wasn’t in the Police station, but at the local library of all places. He also knew that if he blew up just the library, sooner or later, the police would get around to him as a suspect. So he hired two other guys he knew who actually managed to find and steal enough explosives to construct three bombs. They planted the first bomb outside the local Solano County government office which detonated late at night doing little damage. The second bomb they planted against the outside wall of the evidence storage room at the library, but a local kid discovered it and the police were able to successfully defuse the bomb. So the two guys planted the third bomb next to the ATM at the local Wells Fargo branch, which also detonated with little damage, as another diversion. Unfortunately, for all concerned, the ATM camera had captured perfect pictures of the two men and police were able to solve the case in short order.

I offer the preceding story to illustrate a point. Had those 2 men just left town in 1992, taken a powder, gone to Buffalo, chances are they would have probably gotten away with it as the surveillance technology had not become so advanced, ingrained and integrated into society. Had those guys attempted the same crime today, their first bomb placement would have been recorded by surveillance cameras surrounding the government building, their facial features subjected to facial recognition software and their identities established from police and prison records, their fingerprints correlated to evidence from the explosives theft site, and their movements tracked from RFID chips embedded in their new “Real ID” driver’s licenses  thus apprehending them before they had a chance to place their second bomb.

I had my first personal experience in Biometric Access in 2000 at Level 3. I had been administratively transferred from the Outside Plant Department on the Central Coast of California to the LA Metro office as I had responsibilities for their fiber routes out to San Bernardino and up to Santa Barbara. Level 3 had installed fingerprint scanners at all access points into their equipment rooms and my prints had to be inputted into the system. I also saw the installations of workplace cameras throughout the facility, where the main long haul fibers terminated into my equipment and then branched off to two floors full of Cisco routers. Since Level 3 was marketing itself as “The Carriers’ Carrier” and selling off a lot of dark fiber to other firms, I took note. Read more ?

This piece will attempt to analyze the US Government’s Warrantless Wiretap Program utilizing open source information including A.T.&T. Whistleblower Mark Klein’s EFF affidavit, podcasts by James Bamford and Russell Tice available on this site, and comparisons with similar surveillance networks currently in use in Great Britain and China. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the past thirty years has been touted as a mechanism of information freedom and open societies, a global clearinghouse for political and personal empowerment and a panacea against the forces of repression and censorship. What I will attempt to show in this piece is how those lofty goals remain largely unrealized and how governments, under the guise of “security” are, in fact, using the Internet as a new, overarching and suffocating surveillance state to monitor, compile and track the personal and private lives of virtually everyone who uses modern telecommunications in any form. I will attempt to demonstrate that, because of the erection of this surveillance regime, privacy of communications is essentially dead. I will also attempt to show how information gathered under this program can be used to populate private corporation databases and affect the general populace through credit reports, employment opportunities and the convergence of private and government databases.

Let me begin by defining some terms to help the reader understand the overall scope of Warrantless Wiretaps. These terms will give the reader an idea of the masses of data being monitored:

Read more ?