The Air Force Cover-Up of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

[babylonsister]

The Air Force Cover-Up of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight
Submitted by dlindorff on Wed, 2007-10-31 19:14. Impeachment | Iran

“It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”
---Pentagon official

There is something deeply disturbing about the Air Force’s official report on the Aug-29-30 “bent spear” incident that saw six nuclear warheads get mounted on six Advanced Cruise Missiles and improperly removed from a nuclear weapons storage bunker at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, then get improperly loaded on a B-52, and then get improperly flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana—a report that attributed the whole thing to a “mistake.”

According to the Air Force report, some Air Force personnel mounted the warheads on the missiles (which are obsolete and slated for destruction), and another ground crew, allegedly not aware that the missiles were armed with nukes, moved them out and mounted them on a launch pylon on the B-52’s wing for a flight to Barksdale and eventual dismantling. Only on the ground at Barksdale did ground crew personnel spot the nukes according to the report. (Six other missiles with dummy warheads were mounted on a pylon on the other wing of the plane.)

The problem with this explanation for the first reported case of nukes being removed from a weapons bunker without authorization in 50 years of nuclear weapons, is that those warheads, and all nuclear warheads in the US stockpile, are supposedly protected against unauthorized transport or removal from bunkers by electronic antitheft systems—automated alarms similar to those used by department stores to prevent theft, and even anti-motion sensors that go off if a weapon is touched or approached without authorization.

While the Air Force report doesn’t mention any of this, what it means is that if weapons in a storage bunker are protected against unauthorized removal, someone—and actually at least two people, since it’s long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem—had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms.

Since the Air Force report does not explain how this hurdle to unauthorized removal of the six nukes could have been surmounted by “mistake,” the report has to be considered a whitewash, at best, or a cover-up.

That leaves us speculating about what actually happened, and about who might have authorized the removal of those nukes from storage, and why the Defense Department would be covering up the true story. We know that the loading of nuclear-armed missiles or bombs onto an American bomber has been barred since 1991, even for practice and training purposes. We know also that the carrying of nuclear weapons by bombers flying over US airspace has been banned for 40 years. So if the evidence suggests strongly that the removal of the nukes from the bunker was done intentionally and with some kind of authorization from higher authorities, then the loading of nukes onto the plane, and the flight of those nukes to Barksdale have to also be assumed to have been authorized.

more...

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28254

[Sequoia]

1. My bet is on Chaney.

[katty]

10. o yea, this is a Darth C operation-his paws all over it

[peacetalksforall]

2. I highly recommentd Read it through to the end and then ask yourself two questions:

Can there lying get any worse?

Where are our Congressional Leaders?

They are all preoccupied with fighting against impeachments.

[tridim]

3. Do they even know about it?

Serious question. I know most of the public doesn't know it happened.

[jimshoes]

4. The likelihood that moving those nukes was

simply a mistake is about nil. Somebody deliberately moved them. The question remains by whom and for what purpose?
ed:sp

[Ghost Dog]

5. .

* What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper Military Times?

* Why hasn’t the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle “accidents” involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale? Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force “investigation” didn’t even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the magazine American Conservative, found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

The Secretary of Defense appears to have been upset about this incident. Secretary Robert Gates ordered an unprecedented stand-down of all air bases in mid-September to check out and account for the entire nuclear inventory, and a general was dispatched immediately to Minot after the discovery of the wayward nukes on August 30 to investigate what had happened. Following a subsequent Air Force investigation, 70 people at Minot and Barksdale AFBs were removed from their posts and decertified from handling nuclear weapons, including five officers, one of them the Minot base commander.

* But a base commander does not have the authority to order nuclear weapons to be loaded on a plane and flown. So who issued that order and why has no one at a senior level in Washington been sacked?

[TheWraith]

6. This article is full of falsehoods.

1. The nuclear warheads did not have to be mounted on the ACMs, they were already there.

2. It tries to give the impression that there was a long list of seperate improper actions, whereas there was really only two things which happened in conjunction.

3. It's a complete myth that nuclear weapons on bombers have been banned for 40 years.

4. You don't need to disable the bunker security when you are in fact authorized to remove de-loaded ACMs from the same bunker where loaded ACMs are stored.

5. It's also a myth that nukes on Air Force planes have been banned since 1991.

6. If there were authorization from a higher authority to move the nukes, there wouldn't be any need for a cover story of a "mistake."

7. Barksdale does not "bill itself" as the main staging base for Middle East operations. Other people do. In fact, Barksdale is only one of many bases which support Middle East operations.

8. The worst part is the reference to the bullshit that's going around about the supposed "mysterious" accidents and suicides associated with Minot and Barksdale. Let's make this very clear: most of those happened long before the cruise missile incident. Further, none of them have the slightest bit of actual evidence, conspiracy theory mumblings aside, that any of these people were what they're claimed to be, other than one man who was actually a pilot, and who died in July. All the other duties attributed to these people are either outright fabrications or the most grotesque twistings of a shred of half truth. Lastly, when you have military bases which house and employ literally thousands and thousands of people apiece, there are bound to be a handful of people who get killed in vehicle accidents. Trying to put this stuff together into a conspiracy theory is like the "Clinton Death List" crap that Jerry Falwell and company used to try and sell, that Bill Clinton was a drug runner who'd murdered 200 people and raped teenage virgins in the dining room of the Arkansas governor's mansion. Of course the Air Force investigation didn't mention these deaths: the random accidental deaths of uninvolved people months earlier have no bearing on the incident.

That was as far as I could stomach to get through the article.

[specimenfred1984]

7. Here's another link

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7158

---Missing Nukes: Treason of the Highest Order---

[Joe Chi Minh]

9. Steady there! I think you should at least offer TheWraith something for his indigestion.

No man deserves to suffer so, even in the interest of truth.

[DCKit]

8. Has Anyone Been Charged With Treason Yet?

With all the supposed safeguards bypassed, we deserve better answers.