nothing there — was it taken down already?

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!— Xan

Nothing there about sums it up.

And I wonder if it comes under the heading of “we’re all niggers now.” People with no trust in or control over their rules need to build models of the world somehow—especially when they’re being rules by a kleptocracy. And CT does have predictive power; the narratives do blaze a trail to the future. For example, “The Plan” in NOLA was CT. And it came true. Ditto the Tuskegee Experiment is eerily mirrored in the CIA’s experiments on civilians (and in the Bush administration’s Stanford Experiment at ABu Ghraib).

I’m not sure where the line is between CT and model building and DIY investigative journalism. All I know is that I know it when I see it, possibly by the self-referential qualities of the discourse that make it seem so much like a winger circle-jerk. Bad links are a symptom of this self-referential quality.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

A member of the security team for the errant nukes may have died.

Or may not. Anything I don’t see at my own lab bench I don’t trust these days. Anything I do see gets repeated for at least N=3, or until the sampling error falls below 5%.

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

Not exactly a joke….

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

Hmm…the posting and the nuke both go missing. As Tom Friedman says “Click on this, dirty brown person!”

++++

Here’s the correct link for stolen nuke story:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thre…

Someone, operating under a special chain of command within the United States Air Force, just stole a nuclear weapon.

ATS Premium Article by Chuck Simpson

…
In 1991 by Presidential order, nuclear weapons were removed from all aircraft. Bomber nuclear ground alerts, during which nuclear weapons are loaded onto bombers during test and training exercises, were halted. After that time, all nuclear weapons to be delivered by plane were permanently maintained in secure storage facilities.

…
On August 30, for the first time since 1968, nuclear warheads in combat position were carried by an American bomber. Numerous international treaty provisions were violated in the process.

…

But the missiles were not transported on their way to decommissioning. Missiles are normally decommissioned at Davis-Monthan AFB at Tucson. Nuclear weapons are decommissioned at the Department of Energy’s Pantex facility near Amarillo, Texas, accessed through Kirkland AFB in New Mexico.

[This has been discussed here regarding Pantex and the above info is probably wrong. In addition, it makes sense to me to move all ACMs to one place and then ship them off on trucks to be decommissioned / recycle / repurposed. I find nothing odd about putting them all in one place first.]

I’m surprised I haven’t seen more discussion of handling procedure. I wonder if this is all 100% factual.

A sophisticated computerized tracking system is used for nuclear weapons. Multiple sign-offs are required to remove the weapons from their storage bunkers.

The AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile was designed to carry nuclear weapons. No non-nuclear warhead is available for this missile. So the only possible error could have been loading nuclear warheads on the missiles instead of practice dummies.

The practice warheads have standard blue and yellow signs declaring “Inert, non-nuclear”. The nuclear warheads have at least three distinctive red warning signs. This error is therefore highly improbable, absent tampering with signage.

Nuclear weapons are transported from the storage bunker to the aircraft in a caravan that routinely includes vehicles with machine guns front and rear and guards with M-16s. All steps in the process are done under the watchful eyes of armed military police.

Rules require that at least two people jointly control every step of the process. If one person loses sight of the other, both are forced to the ground face-down and temporarily “placed under arrest” by observant security forces. All progress stops until inspections are made to assure the weapons weren’t tampered with.

All nuclear weapons are connected to sophisticated alarm systems to prevent removal or tampering. They could only be removed from the storage bunker by turning the alarm off. And the squad commander clearly would not have authority to turn off the alarm.

Why isn’t the media going nuts about SIX versus FIVE. It’s one thing to mistakenly move nukes around. It’s another thing entirely to not be able to count to six or have any idea how many are missing?!

According to one report, almost ten hours were required for airmen at Minot AFB to convince superiors that the nuclear weapons had disappeared. According to information provided to Congress, this time lapsed before airmen at Barksdale “noticed” the weapons were present. News reports will continue to overlook this fact also.

Even here the focus is on time. The number of missiles and warheads issue was overlooked.

Early news reports spoke of five nuclear warheads loaded onto the bomber. Apparently, this information was provided from Barksdale.

That number was later updated to six weapons missing from Minot, apparently based on anonymous tips provided to Military Times by people at Minot. This information has also been forgotten.

Conclusion

Six nuclear weapons disappeared from Minot AFB in North Dakota.

Five nuclear weapons were discovered at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.

Which leads to my chilling conclusion:

Someone, operating under a special chain of command within the United States Air Force, just stole a nuclear weapon.

Airman 1st Class Todd Blue, 20 years-old, died Monday, September 10th while visiting with family members in Virginia.
Blue was a response force member assigned to the 5th Security Forces Squadron.

Link to news segment (.wmv) (Screw the embed it keeps autoplaying..)

From down aways in the comment thread at ATS Premium. (Link from intranets above.) Personally I only trust information that comes from sites with a black background - that’s how you know it must be accurate:

“Jesuit Coadjutor Hal Turner has been given some correct information. I saw the CNN news report of the B-52s moving the nuclear warheads in the Denver airport and knew this was possibly the beginning of placing nuclear devices in targeted cities here in the US. Following the detonations, Al Qaeda will be blamed, Mecca and Medina blown to bits by CIA/Al Qaeda with pre-placed special weapons, martial law declared, the roundup of all American Moslems (as portrayed the Order’s Hollywood movie in which military officer Bruce Willis rounds up American Moslems) and the opening of the concentration camps.

“This movement of nukes is indeed a Criminal Conspiracy carried out by Bonesman George Bush under the leadership of his Knight of Malta father who is the mere vassal of Knight of Malta and Archbishop of New York City, Edward Cardinal Egan—-directed by Jesuit Avery Cardinal Dulles at Fordham University whose SMOM uncle and ex-DCI Allen Dulles was a co-conspirator in the murder and cover-up of JFK.”

Don’t worry, lambert, your secret plot to bury America under a protective blanket of zucchini, twarted last year by a secret counter-strike of North Korean nanobots disguised as threads of mildew, has not yet been discovered; there is still hope.

Xan is right, this is like being in a Tom Clancy novel, if Clancy wrote while taking acid.

Hmmmmmm….

While at the present time we are unable to either confirm or deny that the voice on this tape is that of the elusive Uncle Alice, sources close to the investigation have suggested that the width of his stance is highly suggestive.

Have a listen; something is “fishier” indeed.

Charlie Brown!

Here’s what USED TO BE the way it was done:

A number of weapons were taken by (armed and escorted, and the roads they used on base were closed down an hour beforehand and kept closed an hour afterward) nuclear munitions convoy from the base’s Weapons Storage Area to the loading area (usually this was done on in a hanger but during an ORI or a STAN-EVAL exercise it *could* take place with a bird on the ramp). A Munitions Maintenance Crew and an Organizational Maintenance crew worked together to get the weapons uploaded onto the bird, which (ordinarily) then taxied over to the alert ramp to relieve an aircraft that had been ’on alert’ for its prescribed period. The aircraft coming “off alert” then taxied out for dismounting of its weapons, which went back to the WSA; that bomber then taxied out onto the ramp and its aircrew dismounted, then spent the next 14 days ’off alert’. Convoys ran approximately 45 minutes covering the roughly seven mile journey, each way, and there was a convoy at least once a week. Two or three times a year, exercises were run on the convoys wherein one or another squadron of LE/SPs would “simulate” ambushing the convoy and trying to steal the weapon(s).

Here’s the thing: the weapons were not separately carried one to a vehicle; to get one you’d have to create a condition where you could get them all.

Do I think a nuke is missing somewhere?
No.

Do I think the Air Combat Command didn’t know exactly where all its ACGM missiles were the day these were moved?

Oh, hail yeah.

But the ramp rats knew. Betcha.

ok, then how is it that the flight crew claimed not to know they were carrying live nukes? None of the flight procedures for flying with nukes were followed, and how did Barksdale people that off loaded the ACMs did not know?

Or did it take 10 hrs after landing for the “ramp rats” in Barksdale to finally unload the ACMs and noticed something wasn’t right? And how did they notice? Or did the leak come from people at Minot?

…this is like being in a Tom Clancy novel, if Clancy wrote while taking acid.

Those Tom Clancy novels can cause serious brain damage, with flashbacks occuring years later.

Now, if somebody really had enough security access to steal a nuke, don’t you suppose they’d have enough security access to cover it up completely?

Now that the day has ended and I’m not hot plasma fallout drifting my way towards Lambert over Lake Erie, it seems that the only the thing to conclude is this whole exercise was an elaborate disinformation designed to distract, manipulate, and/or desensitize people.

It seems…

No Hell below us
Above us, only sky

was taking a load of what he thought were “standard” missiles (i.e. these are the identical missiles without the nuclear warheads) from Minot to Barksdale — a routine operation.

The A/C has to inspect the airplane before each flight but he doesn’t have to inspect each weapon separately (that is, he would look at the weapons mount stations and count how many / if any, and that counts as his inspection of the weapons; he does NOT physically weigh or check them otherwise — that’s the Munitions Maintenance Squadron watch officer’s baby, not the aircraft commander’s).

Now, apparently the MMS troops at Minot were screaming bloody murder shortly after takeoff — which suggests to me that the MMS squadron shift effed up pretty spectacularly, and an NCO picked up on it at shift change or shortly afterward. But either because the MMS CO didn’t have properly trained troops or because the MMS CO didn’t believe /pay attention to / forward up the chain of command the info from the ramp rats at Minot, the BUFF left with an improper load. (yeah, shit happens in all known human endeavors)

Being as how the A/C for that Buff is probably at least a Captain and is liable to be a Light Colonel, the Air Force is not going to come down on a qualified (multiple-hours!) pilot too terribly hard in today’s atmosphere (the A/C could say ok, sign retirement papers, walk off the base and quadruple incoming pay the following day at any number of airlines, possibly including FedEx, and the Air Force knows this).

Meanwhile the bird is in the air for three to six hours, depending on the profile of the flight — exercises extend the flight, but there are different profiles you can fly with a BUFF so that even more-or-less straight-and-level flights can vary in length by an hour or more over the distance involved — and then there’s the landing and the time for the offload MMS crew to get out there, get the missiles off the pylons, and notice that something about these missiles is waytoowrong, as well as get that word not just up their chain of command but to somebody who will believe it (institutional you-gotta-be-shitting-me is so damn thick in the bomber force at command levels it’s hard to believe). So, yeah, by the time they get somebody at BAFB to actually, like, phone a guy at MAFB … 12 hours could go by real easy.

But hey, America, sleep tight: your Polish Air Force is on the job!!!

And the Captain in charge of that Minot MMS squadron is now busted, possibly looking at time in Leavenworth; the A/C may or may not be under investigation, and the MMS CO at Barksdale probably wishes the damn pylons had fallen off somewhere over Oklahoma.

A-r-o-o-o-o-o-o-g-h!

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Actually, I’m very pleased that Sarah knows aircraft. Just too cool.

Of the two great explanations for all human events, conspiracy and fuck-up, I am inclined to fuck-up on this one. I wonder if Bush has wrecked the Air Force along with everything else though. Are fuckups more likely to happen?

Oh, and don’t talk to me about acid, bringiton. It’s you guys, the early baby boomers, that got all the good stuff anyway. Leaving us with the brown stuff. Ick.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

for a reason, compadre.

Oh, and the paperwork load that’s been generated by this has got to have a whole lot of completely innocent people steaming pissed off.

Back when I did a lot of work with the Navy I quickly learned that the way to get things done was cozy up to the master chief and convince him (sorry, was always a him) that doing what I wanted him to do was somehow in his best interest, and that there was a way to do it with minimal paperwork. Too much paper to shuffle? No can do.

Odds are, and we’ll never know for certain, is that somebody on the munitions detail filled out the disassembly/reassembly paperwork ahead of time AND signed off on completion, then split without seeing the job actually done. The rest of the crew screwed off, figuring the next shift would finish the work. But, next crew came on and saw missiles with warheads to be shipped via B52, paperwork looks good, no problem here, load them up and strap them on. Nobody checked to verify that the warheads were in fact dummies, because all the paperwork said it was so. (The missiles had to have some kind of warheads for aerodynamics.) The missiles were not meant for launch so the computer control cables were never hooked up, none of the indicators that nuke warheads would have triggered could possibly have gone off in the cockpit. All the flight crew would have done is match the number of missiles hanging off the wings with the number of missiles stated on their paperwork, check and check, all clear here.

Sloppy, sloppy on a lot of levels, this is what the stand-down is for. Many people will get their asses reamed but good, spit will be flying and dark stains will appear in many sets of underwear, as much for the now-requisite paperwork load as for the screw-up itself.

Is there a giant dark conspiracy here to do something evil? Not even remotely possible. This is just SNAFU, a consequence of routine and boredom and laziness. If most civilians had any idea how often munitions were mishandled and misplaced nobody would be getting any sleep, no supersecret conspiracies required.

Now on the other hand, if Sarah had a photo of this plane with the warheads circling over the US Capital during the FISA vote we’d be on to something.

eom.

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!— Xan

End Of … Mission? Mantra?

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan

end of message

sorry bout that

here are some other samples

rtb
return to base

he
high explosive

wp
white phosphorus

ac
aircraft commander

ewo

electronic weapons officer

eta
estimated time of arrival

ett
estimated time to target

scm
successfully completed mission

sca
successfully completed activity

odd how old habits pop back up sometimes

We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!— Xan

good sorry to startle anyone.No Bringiton,that isnt my voice, you can find it at www.unclealice.ca and I’m not elusive I’m just on tour for a few days. I couldnt help but bring that to peoples attention on a clear conscience as it came from a reliable source. A good thing to keep an eye on as the people.Glad it looks like Im wrong. Cheers