Operation Tinfoil Hat 15

My God, people. I'm pretty certain the next yahoo that posts to my Facebook wall about this Jade Helm crap and how this is just the first phase of martial law and government takeover and FEMA camps and gun confiscations is gonna get a size 10W Doc Martens boot in their solar plexus. Enough with this tinfoil hat conspiracy theory bullshittery. Seriously, people.

It's not all relegated to one political leaning, either. Both sides have kooks coming out of the frikkin' woodwork like termites with the drunk munchies.

Do you have a moment to talk about Jade Helm?

The left-wing liberal kooks are claiming that Jade Helm is the start of a military coup to oust Lord Obama from his castle and institute a military junta and martial law as we become slaves to the Illuminati, the giant corporations, and a cyborg Dick Cheney and their plan for a Thousand Year Reich.

The right wing uber-conservative kooks claim Jade Helm is the beginning of martial law and the confiscation of civilian guns in a military takeover designed to install Obama as Dictator for Life,  turn America into a Muslim Caliphate, and imprison threats to the One True Faith before summary executions.

C'mon, guys. Get real.

On paper, Jade Helm 15 is a massive exercise involving thousands of American Special Operations troops, playing out over several weeks this summer and across several states. And people are absolutely losing their mother-effing minds over it.

I almost think people are losing their shit  because the government has been so open about the exercise and it's freaking people out. You must admit, transparency isn't exactly what we've gotten from this administration, no? So for the military to release entire press packets about the exercise, under the auspices of keeping the general public calm and informed about why there's helicopters to and fro and unusual movements of military gear and personnel, it brings out the tinfoil faster than the Hanson Brothers at a hockey game.

Oh My Gawd, they're telling everyone to stay calm and not to fret so that no one will resist the invasion!!!! 

Oh, please. Look, I sure as hell don't trust 90% of the government and distrust 101% of the current administration, but I do trust the American Warrior. I trust our troops to do the right thing. I think if the US military were ordered arbitrarily to impose martial law and enforce a government takeover, the vast majority of our people would question it and openly revolt. And if a takeover were to be tried, while many of our citizens would blindly go along like good little sheep, a huge swath of the population would take up arms against the government. There's an old adage wrongly attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamato (he who planned and executed the attack of Pearl Harbor) that iterates the foolishness of invading mainland America because there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass. While there is no clear evidence that he said that, the notion is sound. There would be a well-armed and trained partisan insurgency against martial law and takeover. We are, after all, a gun-owning populace and the rights that guarantee such were granted with fighting a tyrannical government in mind.

He never said that, even though it's the truth

Still, the lunatic fringe is flooding the Interwebz with all manner of Chicken Little nonsense that is so comical that debunking it makes your brain hurt from the sheer tedium.

There are constant reports of convoys being spotted.  That's nice; various units (especially transportation units) practice convoy movements all the time. And people are going apeshit over trains being spotted with military equipment on them. Guys, it is so much easier to railhead your gear to a training area across the country than it is to try and fly it (a C-17 can only carry but so much....think of moving an apartment building full of furniture across the state using just a few standard moving trucks. Better yet, imagine moving everything you own across the state using just a Smart Car.) If you tried to drive it all across country it would burn way too much fuel, take way too long, and cause excess wear and tear on the gear. For example, an M1A1 Abrams tank typically uses a half gallon of fuel per mile, though it can get one gallon per mile, depending on engine temperature, environment, etc. It can reach a 70 mph top speed with the governor disabled, in which case the engine will likely overheat quickly and cause bad ju-ju... It typically travels at 40 mph top speed, so one hour at 40 will use less than one fifth of its 504 gallon fuel tank. The max distance it can travel is about 250 miles on one tank, uses 8 gallons to start up and get warmed up for action and little more than a half gallon per mile in desert operating conditions (with heat and sand affecting the engine). It also requires almost an hour and a half of maintenance for every hour that it is operated. And this is just one tank.

Now, multiply all this by however many Hummers, trucks, MRAPs, and other miscellaneous vehicles (yeah, I'm simplifying for my civilian readers) the unit may have..... at 40 miles an hour. Yeah, it is so much easier to put it all on a train.

When 1st Infantry Division geared up for Gulf War One in the fall of  '90, all their vehicles were railheaded from our base at Fort Riley, KS and sent to a port where it was then shipped (by ship of course) to the war zone. then after the war, it reversed and all came back to the wheat fields of middle America by train, minus a couple vehicles destroyed but plus a bunch of captured Iraqi gear.

This is a picture of me standing on a captured Soviet-made self-propelled howitzer at the railhead at Ft. Riley.

 Now, another thing to consider: how much of this is equipment headed to the exercise, and how much of it is equipment simply returning to the US from having been deployed overseas in the various war zones? It takes a long time to ship home all the stuff that was sent over there during a 10-year-plus war. It gets loaded on a big ship, floats over here to a port and gets put on a train to go back to its base of origin, or to a refit and maintenance depot where it may be completely stripped down, refurbished, and rebuilt before being shipped back out.

A still capture from a YouTube video that whines about a trainload of tanks. They look brand new. My guess? Refurbished.

 

Now, where the hell was I? 

Ah, yes. Lunatics.

One afternoon the Interwebz was abuzz with hullabaloo concerning a military unit walking down a suburban street in Ontario, California. I fail to see how this is news, actually. A National Guard or Army Reserve unit on their weekend drill time conducting a road march does not constitute preparations for a takeover. Here is a link to the report from CBS in California, and one from an alleged Conservative site. Utter hogwash.

One Facebook page posted this tripe: 

My God. The bullshit meter is pegged in the red. Microwave weapon? That, kids, is an STT on a trailer. What's an STT? A Satellite Transportable Terminal. It's a frikkin' satellite dish for mobile communications. It's not a death ray. It's not a microwave weapon. It's a big foldup satellite dish on a trailer. And in front of it on the right? That's a generator on a trailer. 

The National Guard armory down the street has a few of them. Buddy of mine works there and I'm pretty sure he'd have mentioned death rays when he gave me the nickel tour of the place a few months ago.

This YouTube clip just floored me with it's bullshittery. Please watch it, but not if eating or drinking. It's so effed up that you'll end up with stuff all over your screen from almost choking on the wealth of Dumb. MRAPs on the highways? Turkish pilots at Walmart? Air Force bomb technicians at a bomb threat in Missouri? The sky is falling!!!!


First,  that's not an MRAP, you twatwaffle. That's an LAV-25. It's a lightweight 8-wheeled armored personnel carrier that the Marines use. They routinely drive them on California highways around Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms. An MRAP looks nothing like an LAV, other than being big and having wheels.

Yup, that's not an MRAP. That's an LAV-25.

That, friends, is a Cougar MRAP.

Click to embiggen the picture, and you'll see an MRAP really looks nothing like an LAV.

You mean they drive them on the HIGHWAY? Yeah, chummy, they do. All the time. For reals.

Secondly, what the hell is so disturbing about two Turkish pilots at a frikkin' Walmart? We invite pilots from fellow NATO nations (Yes, genius, Turkey is in NATO) to train here all the time. I repeat: All. The. Time.

A Turkish F-16. Someone has to teach them to fly their multimillion dollar purchases, right?

Joint Base San Antonio encompasses Fort Sam Houston (where the Army teaches its medical personnel), Randolph Air Force Base (the headquarters of Air Education and Training Command, ie: the place where people go to learn to FLY PLANES) and Lackland Air Force Base (a huge training center that includes students from dozens of allied nations).

And Clinton, Missouri is a small town, population under 10,000. That's not a whole lot larger than the town I live in. That said, chances are high that neither the Clinton Police Department nor the Henry County Sheriff's Office has a bomb squad. However, about 20 miles away is Whiteman Air Force Base, and they do have a bomb squad, thus explaining why the Air Force was at the Walmart for a bomb threat. My God, you're an idiot.

Then you get this article of pure fantasy concerning alleged missile batteries near Lubbock, Texas. Somehow they *must* be part of the Jade Helm Conspiracy, right? Nope. Try again. They're fakes, a mockup of Soviet-made SAM batteries used for targeting training by nearby Dyess Air Force Base.

Plywood. Artifice. Fake. Mockup. Leave your parents basement once in a while.

Debunking this Jade Help crap is child's play. Some of these idiots aren't even trying to hide their fakery and are counting on the ignorance and gullibility of the public.

Beware of everything and anything!!!

The above picture is a perfect example. Those are European road signs (the red and white circles...those are Do Not Enter signs) and the Army hasn't had their tanks painted black & green camo since about 1991 or all-over olive drab green since about 1985. This is likely a mid-1980s train crossing in Germany.


The best shit ever is the attempt to connect the closings of five Walmart stores to government takeovers. While the unannounced and unexpected closings of these five stores is indeed a cover-up, it's not for the reasons you may be thinking. Didn't hear about this? Well, it seems that without warning Walmart closed five stores in Texas, California, Florida, and Oklahoma and laid off thousands of workers, claiming that they had "plumbing issues". Funny thing is, no plumbing contractors have been hired, no permits have been pulled, and in at least one location a local building inspector was escorted off the premises and refused entry. I personally think it has more to do with an asshole giant corporation exercising its muscle against stores with labor disputes and NOTHING to do with these stores allegedly being stockpile centers for supplies for the Jade Helm invaders, connected underground by thousands of miles of secret military tunnels. Why stockpile shit in Florida to invade Texas?

Closed, yes. Part of a government plot? No. Ask the assholes in Arkansas why they're closed.

 We can't finish a border fence and you think we have thousands of miles of tunnels? Put down the bath salts, pal.

So, really, what exactly is this exercise? The military has been very open and forthcoming about what's going to happen, as previously stated. They've released a lot of information to assuage the public's idiocy. See here below for just a sample, direct from US Special Operations Command. FOUO means For Official Use Only.

Sounds reasonable enough. Thanks for letting us know. That's mighty decent of you.

Of course, the tinfoil hat brigade has to twist it all to meet their own agenda as shown below.

More from the idiot who did the above picture here. It makes your brain hurt to read the drivel.

But there's Illuminati in my loaf of bread!!!!

This leads me to seriously question whether the average John and Jane Doe in America really knows just what the hell Special Operations troops actually do. I mean, the Air Force part of it is pretty cut and dry. They have specially trained aviators who fly the shooters to their destinations and pick them up. (yeah, I'm simplifying the scope of USAF SpecOps. Read the full scope here.) The Marines Special Ops focus is to train, advise and assist friendly host nation forces as well as reconnaissance and direct-action against enemy forces. That's a bit like the Army's Rangers and a bit like the Army's Special Forces. The Rangers are more of a direct-action and recon force, while the SF can do all of that plus gets tasked to train and advise friendly militaries to build their own forces up. The Navy's SEAL teams are more direct-action and less training of friendlies. Not to take anything away from the 82d Airborne, but apart from being ready to deploy at a moment's notice and ability to go in with a lighter combat compliment than a regular US infantry division, once they jump and hit the ground they're basically just that, an infantry division.

Now, brace yourselves, kiddies: I've seen stuff like this Jade Helm before and actually participated in it. Yes, you read that correctly. This isn't new, people. Hardly. Back in the fall of 1989, yours truly was a minor player in the grand scheme of things called JCRX Coronet Rodeo 89.

Yeah, great name, right? This crap is all computer generated anyways. A JCRX is a Joint Combat Readiness Exercise. For three weeks in October of 89, my unit was one of several dozen units involved in an exercise that spanned damn near the entire southern quarter of West Germany. Most of it took place below Munich and down towards Bad Toelz, but some of it extended up all the way to Stuttgart. All of us would be performing what would ostensibly be our real-world wartime missions. In peacetime, my unit worked for US Customs. In wartime however, we were an EPW/CI unit. More on that in a minute.

The soldiers of the 10th Special Forces Group were tasked to infiltrate the local area, both in uniform and in civilian attire to blend in with the local populace. They've done the same thing in Afghanistan by wearing a man-dress and shemagh and growing beards to blend in. It's called going mufti.  They were to evade detection and do what Green Berets do.

 Now, on our side of the event, we had regular infantry units patrolling the hills looking for the SF guys. We had counter-intelligence units and translators and radio intercept people hunting down the SF troops and finding their locations. They would call in either the Infantry or Military Police units to capture them and transport them to the EPW/CI facility. That was me. 

I was one of the guards for an Enemy Prisoner of War/Civilian Internee camp. Under orders from the 511th Military Intelligence Battalion, we made sure the “prisoners” got no more than 2 hours of sleep at a stretch, sometimes giving them as little as 45 minutes between wake-ups and roll calls. The lights were always on to ensure they never had a darkened area to sleep in. We kept them silent, and didn’t allow them to bathe but every few days. (The stench in the main tent was special). At night they were stripped to their skivvies and t-shirts to sleep in. But in the case of their leader, a Special Forces Captain, he wasn’t wearing any skivvies when “captured” so he got the added bonus perceived embarrassment of standing at attention for all the roll calls with his junk in the breeze in front of his subordinates. Southern Germany is cold and wet in late October so he was quite miserable. After about a week, we gifted him with a pair of pink panties donated by a female trooper, again for the humiliation factor, assisting in breaking the subordinates respect for their leader and in breaking down the officer for interrogation.

Keep 'em quiet, keep 'em apart, keep 'em from escaping.

The interrogations themselves were an amazing learning experience to see, even though I don’t speak Russian, the primary language used during the sessions. (This added realism to the exercises). There was a lot of yelling, banging on tables, the ubiquitous single light bulb overhead, and implied threats of a very personal nature, judging from the interrogators’ body language. The chief interrogator was a crusty old former Special Forces guy who escaped a labor camp in his native Bulgaria by beating a guard to death with the magazine of the guard's AK-47. Trust me, this dude was legendary. I was saddened to hear of his passing in 2008.

Some of the “prisoners” were graduates of the military’s SERE School, so the stuff we were told to do by the Intel staffers were a walk in the park for them. SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) is a program that provides military personnel with training in the Code of Conduct, survival skills, evading capture, recovery and dealing with captivity. Please look it up for a full overview. One prisoner even went on a hunger strike, eating nothing but grass until an admin time-out was called and he was ordered by the higher ups running the exercise to eat.

All in all, it was a fascinating training event. Read all about MP operations concerning prisoners of war here.

So the fact that soldiers in civilian clothes will be a part of the exercise shouldn't alarm anyone in the least. And as far as being armed, the literature days they will be equipped with blanks. How do you know they're blanks? Well, you don't have a blank-firing adapter (BFA) for a pistol, but rifles and machine guns certainly, so you'll know. But truth be told, true special operators can kill you eight ways to Sunday with nothing more than a bobby pin and a drinking straw, so blanks or not makes no difference.

Those little yellow boxes on the muzzles of their rifles are BFA's. Sometimes they are red.

Why a giant exercise here in America? Because it's ours. It costs money to fly troops and gear across the sea to train in foreign locations, and we usually have to bargain with host nations to get access to do so. That costs the taxpayers millions in foreign aid, promises, favors, and just plain old graft and bribes. We have vast swaths of open terrain in our own country to train in, terrain that in many ways is similar to the terrain these warfighters will be operating in as they go in harm's way.

Colorado? Afghanistan? You never know...

Much fuss has been made over recent (and upcoming) training missions by the military in populated areas and in large cities. Many of you are under the naive notion that fighting in an open desert is the same as fighting in the mountains is the same as fighting in a swampy jungle is the same as fighting house to house in a built up area. Surprise, kids; it ain't. Wide open areas are great for bulky things like tanks where they have room to maneuver. Tanks and other tracked vehicles are at a serious disadvantage in a city; no room to move and they can be easily outflanked and ambushed.

No maneuver room for that beast..

Iraq. Or Detroit. Hard to tell, actually.

City fighting is perhaps the most dangerous and deadliest form of combat. It's what the military calls euphemistically Military Operations in Urban Terrain, or MOUT. Buildings need to be cleared floor by floor, room by room. The possibility of booby traps, IED's, ambushes, snipers, and even hand to hand fighting is high. During the Battle for Stalingrad in WW2, it has been estimated that over two million casualties were suffered in some of the most brutal fighting of the war. At one point thousands of troops were fighting each other in the ruins of a tractor factory that was still producing T-34 tanks during the combat. Tanks would literally come off the assembly line, be fueled and armed, and then driven directly into the fighting by factory workers.

Are you trained enough to survive this?

Training for MOUT is taken very seriously. Some of the most vicious battles we fought in Iraq were for the cities. Fallujah, Tikrit, Ramadi...When I went through Military Police School in early 1988 at Fort McClellan, Alabama, the MOUT course was rudimentary and somewhat unrealistic in retrospect. Approach lanes of mud and dirt to belly-crawl through under razor wire. Three or four one story wooden structures that we had to boost a poor bastard up through a window where he was supposed to tuck and roll like a gymnast, spraying the room with gunfire. I swear, sometimes we were taught just enough to get us killed. 

During the Cold War the Army operated a large MOUT Course inside Berlin, called Doughboy City, literally right up against the Berlin Wall and within sight of East German and Soviet forces. The Brits operated a couple of large MOUT courses too, including a mockup of a German village at a place called Copehill Down.

Copehill Down's German Village.

Now the MP school is at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and has a rather large MOUT course built with knowledge gleaned the hard way. The military has several MOUT ranges around the country now.  The Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia has an Urban Training Center with 163 buildings. The adjacent FBI facility at Quantico also has a MOUT range called Hogan's Alley. The Marines also have one at Camp Lejuene and one at Camp Pendleton operated by the Special Operations Training Group. There are Urban Assault Courses at Fort Carson CO, Fort A.P. Hill, VA, Camp Blanding FL, Fort Stewart GA, Fort Polk LA, Fort Lewis WA, Fort Hood TX, Fort Campbell KY, and at my old stomping grounds at Fort Riley, KS. Pretty much anywhere the Army has a division stationed, there is now an Urban Assault MOUT range. Fort Bragg, NC has a couple of them, Range 37 and Range 74, for use by the 82d Airborne and Special Forces.

Part of the MOUT Course at Fort A.P. Hill

Marines at the Quantico Urban Assault Course

Rangers training at a range at Fort Bragg

Inside a live-fire shoot house on a MOUT range

As a soldier (or airman, sailor, or Marine) you're only as good as your training. There's an old maxim that goes roughly "The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat". We've come to expect a lot from our troops, and pretty much expect miracles from our Special Operations troops. They need places to train for the myriad environments we send them to.

That's all Jade Helm is. A large training exercise. It's not an invasion. It's not the UN taking over our government. It's not martial law. It's not gun confiscation. It's not a New World Order. It's not the Illuminati. It's not a vast right wing conspiracy. It's not a coup to topple Obama, or a coup to install Obama as dictator for life. You aren't gonna be sent to a FEMA camp.

Sure, the government can't always be trusted. They lie to us, make shady deals, keep us in the dark, spy on us, grope us at the airport, and piss our money away on frivolity, but I do trust the American Warrior and the commitment of our troops to freedom and upholding the rights of all Americans guaranteed in the Constitution. So please, stop listening to the fear mongers and the click-bait websites and the tinfoil hat brigade kooks. 

That billion dollar stockpile of FEMA coffins for use when the government kills us off with an Ebola outbreak? Well, that was BS, as they were just burial vaults for use is areas like mine where drainage and ground seepage is a problem with burial sites, and there was no Ebola outbreak here so that's two conspiracies debunked for the price of one. The alleged FEMA death camp in Wyoming was proven to be a satellite photo of a labor camp in North Korea.

Nope. False. Total lie. Hoax. Bullshit.

The conspiracy theories out there are mind-blowing and after you read a few you just want to pour a stiff gin and tonic. Not because they're credible, but more rather because the sheer ludicrous asinine lunacy associated with them is just maddening. A mental asylum prison camp in Alaska with room for 2 million prisoners. Over 100,000 three-tier boxcars with shackles and guillotines to transport us to over 800 camps, and in looking at alleged maps to these camps, several are located in Canada. I somehow don't think they'd go along with DC operating concentration camps in their country. The government can't even operate Amtrak; you think they can keep up with 100,000+ death train cattle cars?

And if I do turn out to be wrong, you can say "I told you so" as we stare out beyond the barbed wire together at a re-education camp somewhere if we survive the train trip... Maybe even Wyoming.

Y'know, I kinda told you so...

No one likes to hear a snarky snide "I told you so" from anyone, be it your spouse, your parent, your sibling, your child, your co-worker, or some smartass blogger. However......I kinda did tell y'all so.

Back in March when Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 went AWOL, I immediately hypothesized that the plane was stolen for later use by terrorists. Missed it? Read all about it. I then gave you my hypothetical list of targets based upon my humble professional estimation.

Now we get word recently that when Islamist scumbag ne'er do wells took over the Tripoli Airport as Libya circles the drain into an ISIS-like abyss, in addition to destroying a large number of planes on the ground, eleven or twelve jetliners from two Libya are missing. Yeah, missing. As in, nobody knows where the Farouk they are. We're talking about some of the most widely-used and ubiquitous airliners worldwide, the type that BLEND IN and don't get noticed until they HIT THINGS AND EXPLODE.

A lot of planes on the ground were destroyed because Islam can't have nice things.

Doing the Happy Dance on top of a captured Libyan Airlines jet. They look stable and peaceful...

The state-owned Libyan Airlines fleet included up 20 jets, including eight Airbus 320s, two Airbus 330s and eight Bombardier CJR-900s. Also state-owned, the Afriqiyah Airways fleet includes three Airbus 319s, seven Airbus 320s, two Airbus 330s, and one Airbus 340. The 319/320's and CJR-900's are relatively shorter-range jets but the 330's and the 4-engine 340 are definitely larger long-haul planes capable of trans-Atlantic flights. That's bothersome, since Thursday is the anniversary of 9/11.

Seriously. Think about it. Don't roll your eyes and call me a Tinfoil Hat whack-job. ISIS likes to behead people on TV. You don't think they'd like to do something major to us this week?

And you may also recall that in July I warned everyone that this stream of underage Third-World disease vectors flooding across our borders like a plague of locusts with the express permission of the White House could be very bad ju-ju. And today we get word that, SURPRISE!!!!!, hundreds of children across America have been sickened in recent weeks by what health officials suspect is a rare respiratory virus.

The CDC believes that Human Enterovirus 68, part of the virus family that includes polio and the common cold rhinovirus, is at the root of the epidemic, though testing of samples has not produced a definitive answer. Normally a bowel affliction, the virus is now affecting the respiratory system.

The Denver Post reported that officials at Children's Hospital Colorado have treated more than 900 children for severe respiratory illnesses since August 18, with 86 admitted to the hospital.At Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children, doctors put five children on ventilators this week, including a 13-year-old boy whose condition deteriorated from a mild cold to a life-threatening illness overnight.

In Kansas City, one hospital said 15 percent of the affected pediatric patients have been hospitalized.

The CDC said that similar suspected outbreaks have been reported in Colorado, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Georgia. The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported that Nationwide Children's Hospital reported seeing an average of 73 patients with respiratory complaints per day between August 31 and September 2.

What a coincidence that this rare virus has an outbreak just before 9/11, after tens of thousands of illegals pour into our population centers, and just as school starts back up.

 Call me a Conspiracy Theorist Headcase if you want, but coincidences aren't always mere simple coincidences. Often times there are more nefarious machinations afoot. Don't get caught unprepared.

So did MH370 land after all?

Here we are, over a month and a half since Malaysian Airlines 370 went missing, millions and millions of dollars spent on searches by ships and aircraft and satellites from over a dozen nations, and what do we have? Bupkis.

Now there's a fresh rumor and theory out all over the Malay peninsula and Indian subcontinent that the plane never crashed and did, indeed, land somewhere as I said from the very start. In case you missed it, here are my first two articles on the disappearance of MH370. Many of the theories I initially proposed came to be accepted, including taking the plane to high altitude to cut off oxygen and kill everyone via hypoxia.

This first part was originally published  on March 12, 2014.

This is the Boeing 777-200ER that disappeared, seen here leaving Paris in an undated photo.

Look, I'm not prone to wild conspiracy theories about contrails or black helicopters or stuff like that. Then again, the notion that the government was reading your emails and hacking your phone and using micro-drones was once a laughed at conspiracy theory too.

There's a jet missing with 239 people on it. Most people think it crashed. Others say terrorists blew it up. I fear it's far far worse.

So what do we know?

Weather was clear. The plane had enough fuel for an eight hour flight, two hours more than needed to get to its destination of Beijing.

The plane vanished around 1:30 am an hour into its flight over an area with spotty radar coverage. One report says the plane turned around. Another report says it was spotted on radar several hundred miles off course. The Malaysian Air Force lost track of the plane over Pulau Perak, a tiny island in the Strait of Malacca.

We have two Iranians who boarded using stolen passports that somehow were missed in Kuala Lampur despite one being stolen last year and one stolen in 2012.

The Boeing 777 is pretty much the safest aircraft flying today.The captain was vastly experienced, with over 18,000 flight hours, and the copilot had over 2800 hours but just recently transitioned to the 777.

The flight's transponder just stopped sending formation as if it was turned off.

Family members of missing passengers are saying they can still see their loved ones' cell phones logged online on the internet and the phones were ringing to voicemail as if the phones were still on and the people were still alive.

Okay...conspiracy time. Flight was headed to Beijing. The Chinese are very hard on their ethnic Muslim Uighur population and the flight originated from Malaysia which is 61% Muslim and neighboring Indonesia is 80% Muslim. A Chinese Muslim terror group has taken credit for the plane going missing but I think that's crap, and the whole Chinese/Uighur connection is a false flag; too obvious.

I don't think it was a mid-air bombing. Where's the wreckage? If it was a big enough bomb to vaporize the entire plane, I do believe surveillance satellites would have noted it. A smaller bomb would have left debris when the wreckage hit the water and may have left time for the crew to send a Mayday distress call. Where are the pings from the emergency beacons in the black boxes?

Yes, people suspected a bomb when that Air France flight from Brazil disappeared en route to Paris in 2009. But that turned out to be a crash after temporary inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements—likely due to the aircraft's pitot tubes being obstructed by ice crystals encountered flying through a storm—caused the autopilot to disconnect, after which the crew reacted incorrectly and ultimately led the aircraft to an aerodynamic stall from which they did not recover.

In the case of Air France 447, it took five days just to find the first floating wreckage. And it was nearly two years before investigators found the bulk of the French plane's wreckage and the majority of the bodies of the 228 people on board, about 12,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.

The Gulf of Thailand, the area where the missing Malaysian plane was last detected, is much shallower, with a maximum depth of only 260 feet and an average depth of about 150 feet. This means a pinging beacon would be much easier to detect by sonars.

Terrorists want their work to be SEEN by as many people as possible, public spectacles, as opposed to something just going missing.The act is designed to cause terror in the affected population, and therefore needs to be public and witnessed.

Personally, I think there was an elaborate inside job to not just hijack the plane but to STEAL it. Bear with me here.

Much to do was originally made of the two Iranian chaps traveling on stolen passports. Everyone is saying they have no terrorist group connections and appeared to be just plain old illegal immigrants seeking asylum in Germany and Denmark respectively, taking advantage of the very open and relaxed asylum laws in those countries. One of them allegedly even had a mother in Germany awaiting him. But what if this was an elaborate ruse? What if your terror cell sent two Iranians on board under the guise of simply being asylum-seekers, two guys who could easily be taking advantage of thebackdoor to Europe through Beijing, two guys with no known previous terror connections so in case they got busted with fake passports there was the plausible deniabililty of no known connections to your terror cell?

Our mysterious illegal Iranians.

Christian Kozel, our Austrian passport owner

Luigi Miraldi, our Italian passport owner.

What if you had the flight crew in cahoots with your terror cell? Both pilots are ostensibly Muslim. Now, I know that that doesn't make them automatically terrorists just by being Muslim but a duck often quacks like a duck. The flight crew could have had tools of the trade squirreled aboard or in brought in their carry-ons. Just today the UK Daily Mail reported that  a convicted terror suspect who was part of a shoe-bomb plot told British officials that he had given bomb materials to a Malaysian terror cell THAT INCLUDED A PILOT.

The two Iranians could have taken over the cabin. How? Well, the plane disappeared at about 1:30 AM, an hour into the flight, when most passengers would likely have been catching some sleep. What if they (and the pilots) donned breathing apparatus and the pilots depressurized the cabin rapidly? This would result in hypoxia and death quickly among the already mostly asleep cabin and the flight attendants could have been dealt with by force if they were cognizant enough to resist before succumbing.


The pilots could then have shut off the plane's transponders, then turned and dropped altitude, taking the aircraft down on the deck and UNDER the already dodgy radar coverage in the area. It's 1:30 am, when it's nice and dark and prying eyes won't be able to see from photo-recon satellites or with bare eyes that a plane just egressed the area. It had fuel enough to reach any number of locations where another cell could be operating a landing field or a terror-friendly nation could have had a military field awaiting their arrival. Could a 777 land on a runway at a smaller airport? Sure, especially if your pilot has over 18,000 flight hours. Could it take off again? Sure...a couple months ago the Boeing DreamLifter, a modified oversized 747, landed by mistake at a smaller airport in Wichita, Kansas and the experienced pilot was able to take off again the next morning. A heavier, older, slower plane than a 777, that was supposed to land at an Air Force base with two 12,000 foot runways and instead landed at a tiny municipal airport with a 6100 foot runway and furthermore TOOK OFF AGAIN fully loaded. In crappy weather, no less.

So, who's to say this 777 didn't hightail it at night under the radar to an undisclosed hideout away from prying surveillance satellites where it is being REPAINTED in the colors of another airline that flies the 777? Nearly 1100 Boeing 777's of various configurations have been built, and nine major airlines as well as a few other smaller airlines operate the craft. You could load this thing with TONS of explosives or biotoxins or (insert scary music here) Iranian-supplied NUKES. Wait a few weeks or months to let the commotion die down. Install a transponder with codes from a DIFFERENT aircraft. Then you fly it to....anywhere? Chaos ensues.

And to make it even scarier, what if the passengers were merely incapacitated and taken hostage? Would a terror cell install TV cameras to show the passengers on a live YouTube stream as they, strapped in their seats, are flown to their deaths?

Of course I'm just speculating. I'm not a counter-terror expert. I'm not an airline expert. I'm just a very suspicious former Army cop who can see way outside the box. My theories could already be unraveling as you read this because the Chinese (3 days after the fact) claim to have spotted three big chunks of floating debris via satellite and an oil rig worker off Vietnam swears he saw the plane crash that night.

I'm probably wrong. I better be wrong. But you have to admit, it's not that far-fetched really.

 And what follows below is my article from March 23, 2014 about potential targets for a weaponized 777.

Two full weeks after Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (MH370) mysteriously vanished en route from Kuala Lampur to Beijing, the conspiracy theories over what happened have gotten wilder and wilder. One pundit said they were hit by a meteor. Another says they were abducted by a UFO. The best ones yet swear the US stole the plane and took it to their base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. (here and here) and that this was part of a botched US attack on China.

YouTube viewers with bugger-all else to do have latched onto Pitbull and Shakira's 2012 song "Get It Started" and claim it may reveal what was going to happen to the plane. The song includes the lyrics: “Now it's off to Malaysia." along with “Two passports, three cities, two countries, one day.”

According to these Internet Geniuses the two passports refer to two men using stolen passports to get on the plane, the three cities being Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Hanoi and the two countries being Malaysia and Vietnam. My God, people. Get real. Put down the bath salts.

The news sites clog my phone almost hourly with report after report of alleged debris being spotted by satellite and then reports that searchers found nothing. The constant backpedaling by Malaysian officials and the lack of anything concrete has even started to give rise to various memes online.

Well, last week I sort of scooped most of the mainstream media by being among the early people to theorize that the still-missing plane didn't just crash, but more rather was deliberately taken by the crew as part of a nefarious plot. I theorized the aircrew, being exceedingly experienced, was in on it. I theorized that the passengers were dealt with via depressurization and hypoxia. I theorized they went below the radar and went for an improvised airfield or forward operating base with a short runway. All of these are being talked about openly by all the alleged experts in the field now.

I also theorized the plane was being repainted and fitted out to be used as a weapon. Others are backing my theory. But of course the next question has to be "What will the target be?"

The fact that nothing has happened yet in the almost 2 weeks since the jet went missing can mean a couple of things. One of them is that they (and by "they/them" I mean the Bad Guys) could be biding their time until all the hubris dies down and the media attention gets focused on the next shiny object that catches their fickle attentions and the general populace relaxes their guard before they act. Right now with half the known world to include Courtney Love looking for this plane it may be more prudent to lie low.

Yeah, you know things are bad when Courtney Love is your celebrity spokes-lunatic.

So many targets to choose from...

The other thing it could mean is that we all figured things out so fast that they simply can't act right now and their intended target is impossible to hit right now. But what could the intended target be?

1. ISRAEL
The obvious choice. Islamoterrorists spew forth rhetoric on a near daily basis about burning Israel to the ground and driving the ashes into the sea. The problem is, the choice is simply too obvious. Israel is always on alert. If they had been around in 1478, they would have actually expected the Spanish Inquisition. They're ready at the trigger and expecting to be attacked by a weaponized MH370. If not shot down by IAF fighters enroute, their Iron Dome missiles are ready to intercept.

2. KUWAIT
We don't have a lot in Kuwait these days compared to years past but being that it's not an obvious high-profile target and the Kuwaitis are very tight with us could make it an attractive target of opportunity. We still stage troops there as they enter and leave the theater of operations. We train there. We're planning to maintain about 13,500 troops there as a contingency.

3. DIEGO GARCIA
The aforementioned Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is a juicy target indeed. The airfield there has been used as a launching point for bomber strikes against the Taliban.The Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia provides Base Operating Services to tenant commands located on the island. The command's mission is "To provide logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf AORs in support of national policy objectives."
As of January 2012, the facility supported the following tenant commands:

    Maritime Pre-Positioning Ships Squadron TWO
    Branch Health Clinic
    Naval Computer And Telecommunications Station Far East Detachment Diego Garcia
    Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Detachment
    Naval Media Center Detachment Diego Garcia
    Military Sealift Command Office Diego Garcia
    Mission Support Facility
    Fleet Logistics Center Diego Garcia
    NAVFAC FE
    36 MSG Pacific Air Force
    Det 1, 715th AMOG (AMC)
    AFSPC Det 2, 22nd Space Operations Squadron (ARTS & GPS)
    AFSPC Det 2, 18th Space Surveillance Squadron (GEODSS)

Additionally, the USS Emory S. Land (AS-39) is forward deployed to Diego Garcia. She's a submarine tender.

In plain English, you have an airfield, air transport assets, a lot of surveillance assets, and a port facility, including enough ships & pre-positioned equipment to supply a Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit for 30 days in a combat zone. The problem with using a weaponized 777 to attack it? Hundreds and hundreds of miles of open ocean where our military radars could see it coming. Chances are we've sent some fighter coverage there as an insurance policy.

Diego Garcia from the air

Main runway approach to Diego Garcia

B-1 bombers and KC-135 tankers at Diego Garcia

 

USS Emory S. Land

USS Florida at Diego Garcia, outfitted for working with SEALs. Prime target much?

4. DUBAI
Dubai has had close ties with the US military for a long time, and is a fairly progressive pro-Western nation. Dubai is the home of Emirates Air, the largest user of Boeing 777's. If you wanted to hit a high profile target this is pretty juicy, and you have about 145 planes you can disguise it as.

Oh, snap. Look at all those 777's from Emirates Air parked in Dubai...

5. ABU DHABI
Right next door to Dubai, and as one of the United Arab Emirates, also conveniently served by Emirates Air.
Al Dhafra Air Base is located about an hour outside of Abu Dhabi, and currently hosts the 763d Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron. The 763rd conducts in-flight refueling missions throughout Southwest Asia in support of Operation Southern Watch, a coalition force tasked to monitor United Nations Security Council resolutions restricting air and ground operations in Southern Iraq. The Air Force operates KC-10 refueling planes which are involved in sustaining US warplanes covering the southern no-flight zone over Iraq.

6. BAHRAIN
Naval Support Activity Bahrain (or NSA Bahrain) is a US Navy base, situated in the Kingdom of Bahrain and is home to U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and United States Fifth Fleet. It is the primary base in the region for the naval and marine activities in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and formerly Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), to include when the latter was changed to Operation New Dawn (OND) until the end of the Iraq War. A former installation of the Royal Navy, it was transferred to the U.S. government in 1971. The commander of Navy Region Southwest Asia is responsible for NSA Bahrain and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. Navy Region Southwest Asia falls under the oversight of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (COMUSNAVCENT). Vice Admiral John W. Miller, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command and United States Fifth Fleet.

7. DJIBOUTI
Camp Lemonnier is a United States Naval Expeditionary Base, situated at Djibouti's Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport and home to the Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) of the U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM). The camp is operated by U.S. Navy Region Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia; CJTF-HOA is the most notable tenant command located at the facility as of 2008. It was established as the primary base in the region for the support of Operation Enduring Freedom - Horn of Africa (OEF-HOA). After negotiations between March and May 2001, the Djiboutian government allowed for the base's use by the U.S., providing for demining, humanitarian, and counter-terrorism efforts, and it now serves as the location from which U.S. and Coalition forces are operating in the Horn of Africa. The access agreement made by officials from the U.S. Embassy in Djibouti with the Djiboutian government allows for use of the camp, as well as a nearby airport and port facilities.amp Lemonnier is operated by Commander, Navy Region Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, which is responsible for its expansion, upkeep, and logistics support. Tenant units include the U.S. Marine Security Forces which provides the camp's external security, the CJTF-HOA commander and staff, a U.S. Navy Seabee battalion which conducts water-well drilling operations, U.S. Army units which provide additional security, military training, and Civil-military operations support, and several aircraft detachments.\Aircraft detachments include a U.S. Marine heavy-lift helicopter (CH-53) detachment, a U.S. Navy P-3 detachment (technically a part of the US Navy's 6th Fleet - Commander Task Force 67), and the U.S. Air Force's 449th Air Expeditionary Group. USAF detachments include a USAF HC-130 detachment, and, at times, a C-17 Globemaster III detachment.

In my humble opinion, this is strategically the target of choice. Camp Lemonnier is the thorn in Islam's grubby paw. From here launched many of the the drone strikes knocking off your terror scumbags in Yemen and Somalia. There's a staging area for special operations forces there. But then again, terrorists don't think strategically. They tend to think in terms of making a big showy splash and political statement, and that means the juiciest target out there is.... Qatar.

Welcome back, Qatar...

8. QATAR
Why Qatar? Al Udeid Air Base west of Doha, also known as Abu Nakhlah Airport, serves as a logistics, command, and basing hub for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nearby Camp As Sayliyah houses significant U.S. military equipment prepositioning and command facilities for the CENTCOM area of operations, as well as a key Theater Rest and Relaxation Program for deployed soldiers. Al Udeid Air Base houses foreign coalition personnel and assets, hosting a forward headquarters of United States Central Command, headquarters of United States Air Forces Central, No. 83 Expeditionary Air Group RAF, and the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing of the USAF. In lieu of hitting the main CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa at MacDill AFB, this is the next best thing, the local head of the snake biting Allah's ass. Or you take out the R&R facility full of relaxing infidel crusaders playing golf and tennis. It's just across the Persian Gulf from the the UAE so once again, Emirates Air is a regular sight in the area.

Like I've said before, I'm not an intelligence analyst. Yes, I'm an Army veteran, but over 20 years removed from active duty. However, I think outside the box and between the lines. I think like I was in Intel; question everything and take nothing for granted. If indeed the missing 777 has been taken to be used later on as a flying bomb, these targets make the most sense in my view and I dearly hope our security at these locations has been stepped up accordingly. Meanwhile, there are 200+ families who want closure.  I'd like nothing more than for this plane to land safely somewhere, and everyone aboard walks off telling a fantastic story of the planet or time zone or dimension they've been in for two weeks. I'm probably wrong. But I said that 2 weeks ago too when I came up with my initial theories too....

It beats Courtney Love, Pitbull, Shakira, and aliens.

Yeah, right.