Mainstream media AWOL again as huge drill begins nationwide

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, July 27, 2009

A huge simulation coordinated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has begun today with no mainstream media coverage at all.

The security exercise known as National Level Exercise 09 (NLE 09) will last for five days and will involve foreign security officials working in conjunction with the US military, as well as Federal, State, Local Tribal and Private Sector representatives.

According to a factsheet in the recesses of the FEMA website, the agency will host National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09) on July 27 through July 31, 2009:

“NLE 09 will be the first major exercise conducted by the United States government that will focus exclusively on terrorism prevention and protection, as opposed to incident response and recovery,” the factsheet states. It is designated as a Tier I National Level Exercise, or TOPOFF, which are exercises conducted annually in accordance with the National Exercise Program (NEP), “which serves as the nation’s overarching exercise program for planning, organizing, conducting and evaluating national level exercises,” according to FEMA.

NLE 09 “will focus on intelligence and information sharing among intelligence and law enforcement communities, and between international, federal, regional, state, tribal, local and private sector participants”.

The FEMA information sheet states that the exercise involves a scenario that begins “in the aftermath of a notional terrorist event outside the United States, and exercise play will center on preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks. This scenario enables participating senior officials to focus on issues related to preventing terrorist events domestically and protecting U.S. critical infrastructure.”

The exercise will also include agencies in Britain, Mexico, Canada and Australia, the Department of Homeland Security has said. The Navajo Nation will also participate.

“This year the United States welcomes the participation of Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom in NLE 09.” The FEMA factsheet does not explain why the participation of foreign officials is necessary, nor does it elaborate on the roles they will play.

Canadian federal involvement was today confirmed in a press release attributed to “Public Safety Canada”. The Press release also noted the involvement of the United Kingdom, Australia and Mexico.

An independent reporter from Oklahoma (or FEMA region VI) was informed that NLE 09 is not “media friendly” because it largely involves people looking at computer screens in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

After asking if it would be possible to sit in on the exercise, Andrew W. Griffin
of Red Dirt Report was told by Brook Arbeitman, the public information officer for the Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security, that this was not possible and that the exercise is mostly decompartmentalized.

Arbeitman, interestingly enough, could not answer some more in-depth questions about NLE 09 because she is a role player in the exercise, playing – you guessed it – a public information officer for Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security and as a result “is not privy” to some of the specifics.

“We will be playing along with everybody to whatever extent the exercise” proceeds, Arbeitman said.

According to FEMA, the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, Justice, and State, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and a broad spectrum of component agencies, offices and commands will all participate in the exercise.

NLE 09 activities will take place at command posts, emergency operation centers, intelligence centers and field locations throughout the country, including federal headquarters facilities in the Washington, D.C. area as well as facilities in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and California.

In our previous story on NLE 09, we noted that this exercise is a continuation of previous simulations under FEMA and the DHS that have involved the rounding-up and internment of American citizens labeled as “suspected terrorists”.

Under REX 84 and other operations, FEMA, in association with 34 other federal civil departments and agencies, has consistently trained to detain large numbers of Americans.

We also noted that several recently leaked Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and local law enforcement documents have stated that the focus of security operations should be “rightwing extremists” who support the Second Amendment and states’ rights and oppose abortion and open borders.

Watch Alex Jones’ previous analysis of NLE ‘09:

DHS launches YouTube channel

Updated at 11:03 pm, Sunday, July 26, 2009
Tags: department of homeland security, janet napolitano

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, July 28, 2009

On Monday, the feds swooped down on an alleged terror group plotting murder and mayhem in North Carolina. A federal indictment against the gang claims Raleigh a drywall contractor Daniel Patrick Boyd and associates sought to wage “violent jihad” abroad and engaged in “military-style training at home,” according to the Associated Press. Specific details are not provided by the government.

	It is said drywall contractor Daniel Patrick Boyd — a poster child for “white al-Qaeda” if there ever was one — trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and fought against the Soviet occupation of that country.

It is said Boyd — a poster child for “white al-Qaeda” if there ever was one — trained at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and fought against the Soviet occupation of that country. Boyd was associated with Hezb-e-Islami, or Party of Islam.

Red flags should go up on this one. Hizb-e-Islami was led and founded by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was carefully selected by the Pakistani ISI and the CIA to wage jihad against the Soviets. Hekmatyar, a drug dealer with little support in Afghanistan, was a favored son of the CIA and the ISI. The U.S. worked with Hekmatyar over a ten year period and over half of all U.S. aid to the mujaheddin went to his faction (see Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, pp. 475 and Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, pp. 260-263).

CIA Director William Casey liked Hekmatyar because they shared a goal of extending the fighting beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union, according to Dreyfuss. In 1984 Hekmatyar developed a close relationship with another CIA-ISI operative, Osama bin Laden, who at the time ran Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), a front organization that funneled money and arms to the mujahideen. “MAK [is] nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation,” MSNBC reported in August of 1998, before everything changed. MAK was also known as al-Kifah and its branch in New York was called the al-Kifah Refugee Center. This branch played a pivotal role in the 1993 WTC bombing and also had CIA ties (see the History Commons profile on Gulbuddin Hekmatyar).

Another individual named in the indictment is Hysen Sherifi. “In July 2008, Sherifi left for Kosovo to engage in violent jihad, but it’s unclear if he did any actual fighting. He returned to North Carolina in April 2009 to solicit funds and warriors to support the mujahedeen, but again the indictment did not give details,” the AP reports.

Following the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the CIA-ISI contrivance al-Qaeda was inserted in Kosovo to help ethnic Albanian extremists of the KLA mount their terrorist campaign against Serb targets in the region. “The United States, which had originally trained the Afghan Arabs during the war in Afghanistan, supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. When NATO forces launched their military campaign against Yugoslavia [in March, 1999] to unseat [Slobodan] Milosevic, they entered the Kosovo conflict on the side of the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army], which had already received ’substantial’ military and financial support from bin Laden’s network, analysts say,” Isabel Vincent wrote for the National Post (see my From Afghanistan to Iraq: Transplanting CIA Engineered Terrorism, January 15, 2005).

But don’t take my word for it. Read the 1997 Congressional RPC report detailing the “Bosnian pattern” that was replicated in Kosovo. “With the complicity of NATO and the US State Department. Mujahideen mercenaries from the Middle East and Central Asia were recruited to fight in the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998-99, largely supporting NATO’s war effort,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in October, 2001. The KLA was armed and trained by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Services MI6, together with “former and serving members of 22 SAS [Britain's 22nd Special Air Services Regiment], as well as three British and American private security companies,” according to The Scotsman, 29 August 1999

In short, Hysen Sherifi and Daniel Patrick Boyd are intelligence operatives or more likely patsies. As Webster Griffin Tarpley has documented, patsies, dupes, useful idiots and fanatics are integral to any false flag terror operation.

The North Carolina arrests are of particular interest now that FEMA is conducting NLE 09. “The NLE 09 scenario will begin in the aftermath of a notional terrorist event outside of the United States, and exercise play will center on preventing subsequent efforts by the terrorists to enter the United States and carry out additional attacks. This scenario enables participating senior officials to focus on issues related to preventing terrorist events domestically and protecting U.S. critical infrastructure,” a FEMA press release explains.

The NLE 09 is considered “an important component of national preparedness, helping to build an integrated federal, state, tribal, local and private sector capability to prevent terrorist attacks, and rapidly and effectively respond to, and recover from, any terrorist attack or major disaster that occurs.”

The feds claim they have prevented a terrorist attack in North Carolina. This is a well orchestrated propaganda effort timed to coincide with NLE 09. It is particularly important to note this in the wake of the manufactured deluge of propaganda and federal and state reports portraying “rightwing” domestic terrorists as a threat to the homeland.

A particular egregious instance of this propaganda was released in June when the Washington Times — the cornerstone of Operation Mockingbird — reported counterterrorism officials “authenticated” a video by a supposed al-Qaeda recruiter who claimed he had the ability to smuggle a biological weapon into the United States via tunnels under the Mexico border. In the video, Abdullah al-Nafisi suggested that al-Qaeda might want to collaborate with “members of native U.S. white supremacist militias who hate the federal government.”

It is no mistake Daniel Patrick Boyd is white.  

7 arrested in North Carolina on terrorism charges

7-27-09

 

The men, all but one of whom are U.S. citizens, conspired to wage jihad overseas, according to a federal indictment. The men honed their weapons skills in rural areas of the state, authorities said.

By Josh Meyer
July 28, 2009

Reporting from Washington -- Federal authorities in North Carolina on Monday arrested seven men who they said had trained with high-powered weapons as part of a terrorist conspiracy to wage an Islamic holy war overseas.

The men -- including a father who, authorities said, trained in jihad camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and his two sons -- sought to provide material support to terrorists and to murder, kidnap, maim and injure people overseas, according to a seven-count federal indictment. The indictment did not allege that the group was plotting attacks on U.S. soil.
 

If convicted, the suspects, all but one of whom are U.S. citizens, could face life in prison.

At least some of the men were willing to die as martyrs, according to the indictment, which described a plot that began in 2006 and lasted until earlier this month. It said that the North Carolina residents had raised donations to support their training and had recruited and radicalized others -- "mostly young Muslims or converts to Islam, to believe . . . the idea that violent jihad was a personal obligation on the part of every good Muslim."

The men also offered weapons training and helped arrange overseas travel and contacts for others seeking to wage holy war, the indictment said.
 

Two federal law enforcement officials on Monday said the men did not commit any violent acts.

Although the indictment provided few details, it outlined a plan among four of the suspects "to meet up" in Israel, as well as other overseas forays. The conspiracy, according to the government, included other suspects "known and unknown," and its aim was to provide money, training, transportation and personnel to those wanting to fight a holy war against countries friendly to the United States.

David Kris, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's national security division, singled out Daniel Patrick Boyd for conspiring "to recruit and help young men travel overseas in order to kill."

"These arrests today show there are people living among us, in our communities in North Carolina and around the U.S., that are honing their skills to carry out acts of murder and mayhem," said Owen D. Harris, special agent in charge of the FBI's Charlotte, N.C., division, which led the investigation. The Charlotte division includes Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, N.C., where authorities say the men conspired.

The indictment alleged that Boyd, 39, traveled to Gaza in March 2006 and attempted to enter farther into the Palestinian territories with one of his two sons.

A year later, the indictment said, Boyd -- who called himself Saifullah, or Sword of God -- his son Zakariya Boyd and two other suspects went to Israel to wage jihad but returned without success.

Defendant Ziyad Yaghi, according to the indictment, traveled to Jordan in 2006 to "engage in violent jihad." And Hysen Sherifi, a 24-year-old U.S. legal permanent resident, traveled to his native Kosovo in July 2008 to "wage violent jihad," then returned to North Carolina to raise support for Islamic militants, the indictment said.

Daniel Patrick Boyd and the other suspects showed others how to fire Kalashnikov AK-47s and other weapons similar to those used in Afghanistan, authorities said.

Over the last two months, Boyd and some of the others honed their weapons skills on private property in rural Caswell County, the indictment said.

The seven men made preliminary court appearances Monday and are due to appear at detention hearings Thursday in federal court in Raleigh. No attorneys for the men were listed in the criminal filings unsealed Monday.

Authorities would not comment on an unidentified associate of the men who the indictment said left the U.S. on Oct. 7, 2008, "to travel to Pakistan to engage in violent jihad."

The indictment unsealed Monday has highlighted the complexities of the U.S. presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan in recent decades.

Daniel Patrick Boyd once fought in Afghanistan and trained in guerrilla camps there and in Pakistan, the indictment said.

But, it added, he did so between 1989 and 1992 in an effort to fight the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. Washington led and financed that campaign against its Cold War enemy with hundreds of millions of dollars in military and intelligence assistance, training and manpower.

The Associated Press reported that Boyd, a drywall installer in Willow Spring, N.C., and his brother had been convicted of bank robbery in Pakistan in 1991 and of carrying identification showing they belonged to the radical Afghan guerrilla group Hezb-i-Islami.

josh.meyer@latimes.com

---

Arrests in Terror Case Bewilder Associates

Wake County City/County Bureau of Investigation, via Reuters

Left to right, Daniel Patrick Boyd, Hysen Sherifi, Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan and Ziyad Yaghi have been charged with supporting violent jihad.

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

Published: July 28, 2009

WILLOW SPRING, N.C. — Daniel Boyd was a man of rare conviction for these parts.

(article continues after the pictures)

Related

The Lede: 7 Charged With Plotting ‘Violent Jihad’ Abroad (July 28, 2009)

Indictment (U.S. v. Boyd, et al.) (findlaw.com)

Criminal Histories of Four Suspects (findlaw.com)

Enlarge This Image

Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

Daniel Patrick Boyd is said to have worshiped at the Ibad Ar-Rahman mosque in Durham, N.C.

Enlarge This Image

Chris Seward/News & Observer, via Associated Press

The small town of Willow Spring, N.C., was the scene of an F.B.I. investigation Tuesday at the home of Daniel Patrick Boyd.

(article continues)  Rare because he and his family were Muslims in this quiet rural subdivision where the denominations generally run from Baptist to Presbyterian. But also rare for his intensity.

“How many Christians you see standing in the yard praying five times a day?” asked Jeremy Kuhn, 20, who lives across the street. “They just believed more than anyone else.”

But to the disbelief of Mr. Kuhn, the federal authorities say Mr. Boyd and two of his sons took their convictions beyond religious faith and into terrorism. They were among seven men charged on Monday with supporting violent jihad movements in countries including Israel, Jordan, Kosovo and Pakistan. An eighth man was still being sought, said a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors in Raleigh, about 20 miles north of here.

The men are charged with stockpiling automatic weapons and traveling abroad numerous times to participate in jihadist movements. There is no indication in the indictment that they were planning attacks in the United States, though prosecutors said they had practiced military tactics this summer in a rural county close to Virginia.

Their plans apparently involved a suicide attack, according to an e-mail message Mr. Boyd sent in 2008 to another defendant, Hysen Sherifi, about dying as a martyr.

Besides Mr. Boyd, who is 39, the indictment names his sons Zakariya, 20, and Dylan, 22; Anes Subasic, 33; Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, 22; Ziyad Yaghi, 21; and Mr. Sherifi, 24. All are American citizens except Mr. Sherifi, who is from Kosovo and has legal residence in the United States. Detention hearings for the men are set for Thursday.

Mr. Boyd, the son of a Marine, is a convert to Islam, and received training from Islamic radicals in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the indictment said.

Prosecutors said much of the activity took place over the last three years, citing coded conversations, exchanges of cash, numerous gun purchases and a Kalashnikov demonstration in Mr. Boyd’s living room.

Mr. Boyd, the central figure in the indictment, is also charged with lying to federal agents in 2007 about his reasons for a trip to Israel. According to the indictment, he and several other defendants had intended to join violent jihadists in the Palestinian territories, though the trip was ultimately unsuccessful.

It was the second trip to Israel mentioned in the indictment. Mr. Boyd is said to have taken his son Dylan to Gaza meet jihadists in March 2006, though that, too, was apparently unsuccessful.

Highlighted in the indictment, but not part of the charges, was a period the authorities say Mr. Boyd spent with his brother in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 1989 to 1992, training with and supporting fighters who were trying to overthrow the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. They were in the news at the time, when the Pakistani government charged them with bank robbery and sentenced them to lose their right hands and left feet. (The convictions were overturned by the Pakistani Supreme Court at the urging of the State Department.)

Federal officials in Washington said that the men charged on Monday were not seen as serious terrorist threats to the United States or American interests abroad, and that there were no indications of ties to Al Qaeda or other militant groups. But the officials said there was concern that they were amassing a sizable number of automatic weapons, given Mr. Boyd’s record as a foreign fighter.

“What essentially this is about is a guy with foreign fighter experience,” said one law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the pending prosecution, “who comes back to the U.S. from the conflict zone with street cred and a network of contacts overseas, intending to recruit others who were on the fence.”

Mr. Boyd’s wife, Sabrina, cited that same period in defense of her husband. “He was there fighting against the Soviets in a war that had the full backing of the U.S. government,” Ms. Boyd said through a spokeswoman, Khalilah Sabra of the American Muslim Society Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group.

Ms. Boyd is also an American, and, according to a 1991 Washington Post report, the couple were high school sweethearts in Northern Virginia. A neighbor said the Boyds looked for other churches before settling on Islam. The Post profile said Mr. Boyd’s stepfather was a Muslim.

“The charges have not been substantiated,” Ms. Boyd said. “We are an ordinary family, and we have the right to justice, and we believe justice will prevail. We are decent people who care about other human beings.”

Neighbors were startled, even angered by the arrests, which they learned about when federal agents, some carrying assault weapons, swarmed over the lawn of the Boyds’ house.

The house, with a Ford Bronco in the driveway and a swimming pool in the back, looks like any other in the quiet subdivision, and neighbors said the Boyds were generally no different than anyone else, other than being nicer than average. Mr. Boyd ran a company installing drywall, for which his two older sons often worked. The Boyds had two younger sons, one of whom was killed in a car accident two years ago, and a daughter.

Prosecutors said Mr. Boyd had stopped attending mosques this year because of “ideological differences” and had begun having Friday prayer services at home.

The Boyds had the usual interactions with the neighbors — tool swapping, rides to school — and other than a day when the house was egged, which neighbors attributed to their religion, their faith did not seem to be an issue.

“We never really had a problem with it,” said Anthony Perfetto, 15, who used to have after-school snacks at the Boyd home. “All they’d say about it was like they had to go pray, and that’s about it.”

All of which has left neighbors shaking their heads and repeating that there must have been some kind of mistake.

“I don’t believe any of this,” Mr. Kuhn said. “And it’s going to take a whole lot of evidence to convince me otherwise.”

Liz Robbins contributed reporting from New York, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

 

Scare tactics and the tactics of the scared

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime.
-Max Stirner

First, thanks to the observant reader who was kind enough to point out the following articles in the two dueling self-described "dailies". It would seem that the local, self-described corporate, print "media" feels compelled to carry out their civic duties of intimidating  opponents of the notion that the G-20 is qualified to run our lives and demonizing those who will still be willing to show up.

The "liberal", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (P-G), ran two stories on the consequences of opposing the G-20 summit, one on the ways in which the local legal/prison-industrial complex is turning itself inside out for their September fines and court costs fundraiser, and another piece about the muscle for the G-20, cowering in a "terrorist training camp", located in a "secure, undisclosed location". The "conservative", Pittsburgh Tribune Review, only wrote about the re-opening of the old jail and the revenue generation through arrests, skipping out on the story about the skull-cracking and chemical weapons, possibly because the right-wing has a serious problem with militarized policing, but only when there is a Democrat in the White House.

If witnessing some well-fed men in pads and helmets, lining up shoulder to shoulder, and pushing each other around when a whistle blows will give participants in the protests such an edge, then trips to Latrobe to watch the Steelers train at St. Vincent's should be mandatory. On a hopeful note, the P-G is reporting that the instructors for this particular terrorist training camp have been supplied by the competent professionals from FEMA.

Police officials asked that the Post-Gazette not reveal the location of the training or the specific tactics being taught because of fears that protesters will use the information to disrupt the summit, which has spawned large demonstrations in other cities.

During the next several weeks, groups of 50 to 60 Pittsburgh police officers will gather at the training site every three days. Most of the Police Bureau's nearly 900 officers will participate.

Instructors from the Center for Domestic Preparedness, a division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, are teaching the course, which is called Managing Civil Actions in Threat Incidents, or MCATI.

"The MCATI training prepares law enforcement for crowd control and unlawful protest," said Shannon Arledge, a public affairs specialist for the Center for Domestic Preparedness. "It provides officers with the knowledge to handle situations such as this in an effective and professional manner to maintain safety of everyone involved, including the public."

The center, based in Anniston, Ala., offers more than 40 courses for law enforcement agencies and emergency responders. Teams of instructors can deploy across the country to teach the courses, including MCATI.

FROM: http://www.examiner.com/x-10661-Pittsburgh-Grassroots-Examiner~y2009m7d15-Scare-tactics-and-the-tactics-of-the-scared

Gas leak forces mall evacuation

BOUNTIFUL -- A gas leak in Bountiful forced more than 15 businesses at the Colonial Square shopping mall to be evacuated Wednesday afternoon.

The leak was discovered outside at 500 West and 2600 South in Bountiful, right behind Wade Medical Plaza in the shopping center. The leak was caused by a crew that was installing a natural gas meter.

South Davis Metro Fire Chief Jim Rampton said there were no injuries or sicknesses reported as a result of the leak.

"It doesn't appear to be too big of a deal," Rampton said. "But it certainly could have been."

Firefighters eventually stopped the leak and businesses were re-opened.

A second natural gas leak also forced people from their homes Wednesday morning in West Bountiful. A construction crew using a backhoe hit a 2-inch natural gas line just after 9 a.m. The leak happened in a neighborhood near 700 West and 1000 North. About a dozen homes were evacuated, but the leak was fixed shortly afterward and everyone was allowed to return.

Obama Participates in Terror Preparedness Test

In a small room crowded with tables, the phones rang incessantly, each call delivering more bad news.

7-31-09

An explosion and subsequent fire wracked a college campus. Injuries and fatalities were piling up and more help was needed. And then came the worst news of all -- a terrorist group was claiming responsibility and told college officials more bombs were planted across the campus.

This was not a real-life situation but rather an exercise, part of a three-day emergency planning workshop at Mount St. Mary's University this week.

Representatives from six colleges and universities participated in the pilot program "Multi-Hazard Emergency Planning for Higher Education" presented by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Developing a comprehensive, uniform emergency plan for colleges and universities was spurred by such violent events as the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings where 32 people died before the lone gunman killed himself, but schools need these plans for many reasons, according to Barbara Nelson, a FEMA training specialist.

Higher education institutions must be prepared to deal with natural disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes, as well as man-made disasters and acts of violence or terrorism.

She noted the extensive damage to Tulane University in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as an example of natural disasters that can turn a college operation upside-down and put lives in peril.

FEMA hired C2 Technologies to develop the program curriculum, which has been a year in the making, Nelson said.

When the curriculum was ready to be tested, the Mount offered to host a pilot program. Invitations were sent to about 15 colleges and universities within 50 miles.

Millersville University, Gettysburg College, Frederick Community College, Howard University and the University of Maryland, College Park, all offered to be guinea pigs for the course.

During the simulated fire and explosion, Bob McKibben, a contractual instructor for C2 Technologies, said the group was doing a great job.

"This group came in with varying degrees of experience in emergency management," he said. "They've learned a lot here and I'm pleased with how they have reacted."

Half the group played university officials reacting to the on-campus incident and the other half played support staff in the emergency operations center, providing what the people in the field needed to manage and contain the incident.

The catastrophe was scripted, but the operations center staff had no idea what to expect, McKibben said.

"They came in here completely blind to the scenario," he said.

The group burst into applause at the conclusion of the session.

The course is designed to provide colleges and universities with knowledge and strategies to protect lives, property and operations more effectively and efficiently, according to the syllabus.

Barry Titler, director of public safety at the Mount, said the course will benefit the university which already has an emergency response plan in place.

The benefits of participating in the pilot course, which started Tuesday and ends today, are two-fold, Titler said.

"In this business, you want to learn from everyone. We're able to borrow ideas that other schools have that are proven to work."

Comments and suggestions from participants could improve the course before it is published and offered to all colleges and universities. FEMA hopes to launch the final version in the fall.

"We can affect not only this campus, but indirectly be able to affect the safety of campuses across the country," Titler said.  

LaGuardia terminal evacuated in NYC, 1 in custody

8-1-09
AP – In this cell phone photo provided by Blair Allen, travelers gather outside Laguardia Airport during an …

By STEPHANIE NANO, Associated Press Writer Stephanie Nano, Associated Press Writer –

NEW YORK – The main terminal at New York's LaGuardia Airport was evacuated Saturday morning, stranding hundreds of passengers, after a man entered the building with a fake bomb in a bag, police said.

The terminal was evacuated at around 5:30 a.m. Saturday after the man approached security in the airport's C concourse, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman John Kelly said.

It wasn't clear if the man made a threat, but security officials said he "was just acting crazy," Kelly said. The man's name was not released.

The device in the man's bag was a few batteries and wires, but was not dangerous, police said.

Police later reopened the main terminal, and passengers began re-entering shortly before 9 a.m.

It was not immediately clear how many flights were delayed or canceled by the evacuation, but the airport's Web site said passengers should check with their airlines for information.

Among the stranded passengers were 12-year-old Samantha Casady and her 10-year-old brother, Patrick, of Norwich, Conn., who were supposed to fly out to Dallas at 7:15 a.m. by themselves to visit relatives.

Their mother, Colleen, said she and her husband were accompanying their children through a long security screening line when there was a commotion "and just a swarm of TSA."

Casady said she later saw a man in handcuffs, surrounded by police.

The family was initially directed to go to another security gate, but it was closed, "and a few minutes later, they evacuated the building," she said.

The evacuation also meant that Irma Quidore, of Denville, N.J., had to delay a trip to Monterrey, Mexico, for a second time with her two daughters, Sofia, 6, and Isabella, 3.

They had originally planned to fly out on Thursday, but a delay that would have forced them to miss a connecting flight prompted them to reschedule their trip for Saturday, Quidore said.

"I guess we're going to make the trip to Mexico, but a little bit late," Sofia said as she pushed her little sister in a stroller toward the terminal.

NY's LaGuardia airport reopens after bomb scare Reuters - Michelle Nichols, Eric Walsh - ‎32 minutes ago‎ NEW YORK, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Authorities temporarily closed one of the terminals at New York's busy LaGuardia airport on Saturday morning and took a man into custody after discovering what turned out to be a fake bomb in his bag.   Video: LaGuardia Terminal Evacuated, Fake Bomb Found The Associated Press Bomb scare at NYC LaGuardia Airport; planes and terminal evacuated New York Daily News msnbc.com - The Associated Press - 9&10 News - Lower Hudson Journal news all 446 news articles »

NOTE:  If anyone believes this was a real event -  WAKE UP!!!
 

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
July 27, 2009

On March 25, Shepard Ambellas, reporting for Infowars, documented preparation of mass graves at the Department of Veterans Affairs Cemetery in Phoenix, Arizona.

A UK Home Office cabinet committee brought up the specter of the Great Plague and burial pits used during the seventeenth century.

Ambellas’s story followed a harrowing report by D. H. Williams of the Daily Newscaster in February. Williams reported on revelations of an Indiana county municipal official in the vicinity of Chicago who detailed FEMA and DHS discussions with county officials about the prospect of mass graves and a mass vaccination program.

On March 28, we reported on a large expansion of graves at the Houston National Cemetery in Texas.

Aaron Dykes, reporting for The Jones Report on April 3, detailed how the State of New York Division of Cemeteries sent out “Mass Fatality forms” to cemeteries in that state to collect data about their ability to deal with the high volume of casualties that would occur if their were a flu pandemic or other disaster. “Should a prolonged mass fatality disaster or pandemic flu occur in your community would your cemetery be able to provide temporary or permanent internment space for a significant number of disaster or flu deaths in additional to your current burial services?” the form stated.

In response to the mass grave stories posted on the Infowars and Prison Planet websites, Larry Scott, a self-described Veterans Administration critic, went on the Thom Hart radio program in late March and characterized the stories as “rumor-mongering.” According to Scott, the expansion of graves around in Phoenix was part of a standard upgrade intended to accommodate a record number of veteran deaths. Larry Scott put the number at an astounding 700,000 per year. Other critics have also characterized the stories as preposterous.

And yet, according to an AFP news item, governments are indeed planning for mass graves in response to a flu pandemic. In Exter, England, the city council recently moved to use underground burial chambers, currently a tourist attraction, to store the corpses of swine flu victims if the pandemic worsens. “A council spokesman said the plan could be put into operation if the cemeteries and the crematorium could not keep up with funeral demands.”

The catacombs were constructed in response to a cholera epidemic, which led to the death of 402 people in Exeter between July and October 1832.

In 2006, the UK Home Office announced plans to use mass graves in the event of a widespread pandemic. “According to a confidential report seen by the Sunday Times, 320,000 people in Great Britain could die as a result of a flu pandemic originating from a mutated H5N1 bird flu virus strain.” A cabinet committee brought up the specter of the Great Plague and burial pits used during the seventeenth century.

Earlier this year, Alan Johnson, the British Health Secretary, unveiled the National Pandemic Flu Framework. “Mass graves, inflatable mortuaries, 24-hour cremations and ‘express’ funerals could all be used, government papers show,” the Telegraph reported. “Some scientists say a flu pandemic is now overdue, either from the mutation of the normal human flu virus, or of the H5N1 strain that infects birds.”

A report issued by the government in Scotland claims a pandemic would force mortuaries, crematoriums and cemeteries “to operate round the clock, with old warehouses, council buildings, refrigerated lorries and specialist inflatable mortuaries being requisitioned to temporarily store the dead,” the Guardian reported on July 22. “With deaths expected to peak sharply within six to seven weeks of an outbreak, crematoriums would in many areas have to operate 24 hours a day, while every town and city would require temporary mortuaries and body storage facilities.”

On July 25, the Los Angeles Times reported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects the flu pandemic expected this autumn to kill hundreds of thousands. “The number of potential deaths is much higher than that usually seen in seasonal flu, which kills an estimated 36,000 Americans a year, and is even higher than the nation’s most recent pandemic.” The 1957 pandemic of Asian flu killed 70,000. The 1918 Spanish Flu claimed between 500,000 to 675,000 lives in the United States.

The CDC announced last week that it will no longer keep track of the number of people killed by the virus. “Health officials from the CDC said the virus was too widespread to continue counting,” the Digital Journal reported. “Health experts say millions have likely been infected worldwide.”

The U.S. government has bought 195 million doses of H1N1 swine flu vaccine for a possible autumn vaccination campaign, a U.S. federal official told Reuters on July 23. The U.S. Health and Human Services Department has also contracted for 120 million doses of adjuvant, a compound to stretch the number of doses of vaccine.

In addition, HHS has created a website “to help state and local governments, the medical community and citizens prepare for H1N1 and the fall flu season,” according to America.gov, a site produced by the U.S. Department of State.

As author F. William Engdahl notes, even though the H1N1 virus has killed a relatively small number of people and no “government or private agency in the world has yet to scientifically isolate, to photograph with means of electron microscopy and to list the chemical characteristics of the ‘novel H1N1 Influenza A virus’ as it is now officially called,” this has not stopped WHO from declaring a “Pandemic Alert” Phase 6 alarm. The hyped “pandemic” has prompted the Obama administration and Congress to approve an astounding $7.65 billion for the non-proven pandemic influenza.

On Friday, the World Health Organization said the H1N1 virus and pandemic is “gaining speed” and will likely strike this coming winter.

In response to an outbreak of swine flu in 1976, the U.S. government ordered a mass vaccination program. The experimental and untested vaccine killed dozens and left an undetermined number of people with Guillian-Barre syndrome, a debilitating neurological paralysis. The vaccine killed more people than the virus.

In late April, sources close to investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported that the outbreak of swine flu was the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen capable of producing a widespread global pandemic. “A top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission ‘vectors’ that suggest that the new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon,” Madsen reported.

“Our best intelligence estimate is that pandemic Avian Flu has already been created through genetic engineering in the United States, fusing the deadly genome of the 1918 Pandemic, misnamed the ‘Spanish Flu’, with the DNA of the innocuous H5N1 virus in a growth medium of human kidney cells, according to the National Institutes of Health and the vaccine’s manufacturer. Some virologists believe that this would insure that the man-made mutant virus recognizes human cells and knows how to invade them,” writes Rima E. Laibow, MD, head of the Natural Solutions Foundation, a citizen watchdog group monitoring the pharmaceutical industry.

In addition to planning mass graves and crematoriums operating around the clock, governments are planning to implement martial law in response to a pandemic.

In late 2007, the Bush administration issued a “directive” establishing a “National Strategy for Public Health and Medical Preparedness” based on Biodefense for the 21st Century. Prior to this, in May of 2007, the U.S. military had the foresight to “plan for a possible avian flu pandemic that could kill as many as three million people in the United States in as little as six weeks,” according to Yahoo News. Guidelines and “planning assumptions for US military services and combatant commands” were published in a document entitled “Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza.”

“Possible scenarios include US troops being called in to put down riots, guard pharmaceutical plants and shipments, and help restrict the movement of people inside the country and across its borders,” Yahoo summarizes. “The plan envisions fast moving, catastrophic waves of disease that would overwhelm health facilities and cripple the ability of state and local authorities to provide even basic commodities or services.”

The “hidden agenda consists in using the threat of a pandemic and/or the plight of a natural disaster as a pretext to establish military rule” and “suspend Constitutional government and allow the Military to intervene in civilian affairs in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act,” author Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2005.

As Infowars reported last week, on July 27 FEMA will conduct National Level Exercise 2009 (NLE 09), scheduled to run through July 31. NLE 09 will ostensibly focus on “terrorism prevention and protection,” according to the FEMA website. In addition to the participation of domestic “partners,” the FEMA exercise will include foreign troops. “This year the United States welcomes the participation of Australia, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom in NLE 09.”

The FEMA website states that “Fire and Emergency Medical Services will play a crucial role in the event of a pandemic. Planning for pandemic influenza is key.”

In Natural Disasters and the Militarization of America, Chossudovsky details how deployment of the military in response to a pandemic “would be governed by the same criteria in conformity with the basic tenets of the ‘war on terrorism.’ The latter also characterize the workings of FEMA…. Under the NRP [Homeland Security's National Response Plan]… civilian organizations are directly under the authority of the DHS, FEMA and the Pentagon.”

In short, martial law will be declared. Is it possible this is what NLE 09 is gearing up for?

by James Bovard
by James Bovard
Recently by James Bovard: McNamara's Other Debacle

The New York Times reported last week that the Bush administration considered sending in the U.S. military to arrest the so-called Lackawanna Six in 2002. Ironically, one of the worst prosecutorial overreaches by the Justice Department in the war on terror almost resulted in a temporary period of martial law.

The Lackawanna Six was a group of half-a-dozen Yemeni-Americans from a Buffalo suburb who traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2001 and attended an al-Qaeda training camp. Some members of the group asserted that they fled the camp after they heard appeals for violence against America.

After the six were arrested by the FBI and local police in September 2002, the Justice Department announced that it had "identified, investigated and disrupted an al-Qaeda-trained, terrorist cell on American soil." President Bush hyped the arrests of an “al-Qaeda cell” in Buffalo in his State of the Union address a few months later. While the president, the Justice Department, and legions of federal officials speaking anonymously to the media touted the Lackawanna Six as terrorists, the feds never dared make such a suggestion in court. Salon noted that “prosecutors never offered evidence that the Lackawanna defendants intended to commit an act of terrorism.” A secret FBI report in early 2005 admitted: "To date, we have not identified any true 'sleeper' agents in the U.S." nor any “evidence of concealed cells or networks acting in the homeland as sleepers."

But the feds did “persuade” the defendants to plead guilty to “material support of terrorism” – an amorphous charge that could mean something as simple as paying for their food at the camp. The feds coerced the plea bargain by threatening to label the men “enemy combatants” and send them to Guantanamo – and to charge them with treason, for which they could be executed. Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants, observed: "The [Lackawanna] defendants believed that if they didn't plead guilty, they'd end up in a black hole forever. There's little difference between beating someone over the head and making a threat like that."

Georgetown University law professor David Cole commented: "It's the first time in American history where people are going to prison for going to a training camp.” Virginia lawyer and human rights activist Elaine Cassel commented: “The idea is, 'Let's go out and arrest people before they actually commit a crime, or even think of a crime.'" The Bush team considered sending in the military in part because of the lack of evidence. The New York Times noted that the Justice department was concerned “that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna.” Vice President Cheney reportedly “argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.”

In other words, the idea was that it would require less evidence to totally nullify all of a person’s rights (including the “right” not to be tortured) then to arrest him on a felony charge. This judicial philosophy keeps getting stranger and stranger.

Some Pentagon officials supported Cheney’s proposal to send in the troops to grab the Lackawanna Six. Other administration officials objected, and Bush eventually decided to avoid the overt appearance of martial law for this roundup.

Cheney was invoking a secret memo from Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel’s John Yoo, who had written: “The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States.”

Since some of Yoo’s memos leaked out in recent years, we have heard that they are irrelevant because they were only academic-type posturing. But the New York Times article makes it clear that Cheney and others wanted to seize new powers and fundamentally change the nature of the United States.

This case illustrates how there are no idle pro-Leviathan legal errors. Instead, any such error is like a ticking time bomb – waiting to be exploded under the people’s rights and liberties.

But apologists for Bush would insist that it would not have been a dictatorship because one lawyer in the Justice Department assured the vice president that the White House was entitled to such power. Supposedly, it only takes one weasel lawyer to nullify all the constitutional checks-and-balances accumulated over centuries. Some Bush administration officials viewed using the military for the Lackawanna arrests as “testing the Constitution.” In reality, it would have tested how much dictatorial power Americans would permit the Bush team to seize. And the mainstream media might have raised scant protest. As one wag quipped online: “If the tanks rolled down the streets on the same day the American Idol winner was named, you'd never even hear about the tanks.”

July 29, 2009

James Bovard  is the author of the just-released Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Terrorism & Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. He serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2009 Future of Freedom Foundation

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