Webster G. Tarpley / Rense.com – 2007-10-15 23:23:23
http://www.rense.com/general78/kene.htm
(October 8, 2007) — The events of August and September now allow us to evaluate the accuracy of the August 26 Kennebunkport Warning, which generated much attention and controversy from the moment it was issued. The preliminary verdict of history is now in, and establishes the Kennebunkport Warning as one of the most remarkable successes of open source intelligence forecasting in recent decades. It may even have directly helped to disrupt Cheney’s plan for a nuclear sneak attack on Iran.
The Kennebunkport Warning was written in the afternoon of August 24, 2007. Support signatures were obtained in Kennebunkport, Maine later on August 24, and primarily on August 25. The document was sent out to a list of recipients in the US and abroad just before midnight eastern time on Sunday, August 26.
The first known internet posting was on the Jeff Rense web site (
On Tuesday, August 28, Bush signaled an escalation of tensions with Iran in a raving speech before the American Legion convention in Kansas. Here he warned that the Middle East now lay in the shadow of a “nuclear holocaust” because of the Iranian nuclear program.
He accused Iran of acting as a state sponsor of terrorism, intervening against the US forces in Iraq, and also made allegations about Iran as a backer of Hezbollah and Hamas. Diplomatic observers recognized that this tirade constituted an important intensification of US threats against Iran.
On Wednesday, August 29, Bush’s threats moved a step towards fulfillment as US Air Force personnel loaded six cruise missiles onto the wing mounts of a B-52 intercontinental strategic bomber at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. Each of the missiles carried a nuclear warhead of between 5 and 150 kilotons of explosive power. Reportedly because of mechanical problems, the loading process took some 8 hours.
On Thursday, August 30, the rogue B-52, with its cargo of six deadly nuclear-armed cruise missiles, made the 3.5 hour flight across the US to Barksdale, Louisiana. Barksdale is the number two US headquarters for nuclear warfighting, second only to Offutt AFB in Nebraska. Barksdale is also the jumping-off base for direct B-52 bombing runs into the Middle East, a role which Barksdale played in the shock and awe campaign in Iraq in the spring of 2003.
By the time the rogue B-52 reached Barksdale, cataclysmic events were not far off. This was exactly the kind of situation which the Kennebunkport Warning, which by that time had been circulating on the internet fro about three and a half days, had been concerned about.
At around this time, the rogue B-52and its cargo appear to have come to a halt. Between the late afternoon of August 30 and the public announcement of the rogue B-52 incident on the afternoon of September 5, we enter a gray area which requires much further investigation. According to Wayne Madsen, it was a “revolt and push-back” by Air Force personnel determined to block a wider the Middle East from being set off by a nuclear sneak attack, with support from elements of the intelligence community, which blocked the rogue B-52 from proceeding towards a possible appointment with Armageddon in Iran or elsewhere in that region.
This was exactly the case of loyal and patriotic military people refusing to obey an illegal order which the Kennebunkport Warning had pointed to less than four days earlier. As Madsen writes: “Selements of the Air Force, supported by US intelligence agency personnel, successfully revealed the ultimate destination of the nuclear weapons and the mission was aborted due to internal opposition within the Air Force and the US Intelligence Community.” (“Air Force Refused to Fly Weapons to Middle East Theater,” September 24, 2007, Wayne Madsen Report)
The Kennebunkport Warning thus represents an exceptionally successful effort to alert public opinion to a grave and imminent danger. Precisely the dangerous situation the Kennebunkport Warning talked about occurred in reality less than four days after the document had been posted on the internet. The Kennebunkport Warning must be acknowledged as accurate, timely, necessary, and indispensable for anyone seriously interested in stopping general war.
But there may be a further dimension. It cannot be excluded that the loyal and patriotic military and intelligence people who blocked the plan of the Cheney clique to use the nuclear cruise missiles in the Middle East, or even against a target or targets in the United States, had some how been encouraged to act by having seen the Kennebunkport Warning. The period of August 30 to September 5, when the crucial actions regarding the rogue B-52 would have had to occur, corresponds precisely to the maximum diffusion of the Kennebunkport Warning on the internet.
On September 1, a Google search indicated that the Kennebunkport Warning was either posted in full or was mentioned on 72,000 web sites worldwide. By September 2, this figure had risen to 102,000 web sites. On September 3, the maximum diffusion of 110,000 web sites was attained. These figures do not include e-mailings and other forms of attention generated by the vast interest and lively controversy generated by the document. In any case, those who stopped the nukes from going to the Middle East are unsung heroes who deserve recognition.
On September 5, the US Air Force makes a public announcement of the rogue B-52, which is quickly the subject of dispatches by Agence France Presse, The Army Times, The Air Force Times, and other wire services and web sites.
Considerable press interest in generated, but, so far as is known, not one member of Congress or presidential candidate of either major party has lifted a finger to start the obviously imperative in-depth investigation of the entire incident, including the half-dozen deaths. These deaths include:
Airman First Class Todd Blue, 20 years old, died Wyethville, Virginia, September 12
Two people from Barksdale Air Force Base, died Caddo Parish, Louisiana, September 15
Airman Adam Barrs, aged 20, killed in an auto crash in Minot, July 5
Air Force 1st Lt. Weston Kissel, 28, B-52 pilot assigned to the 23rd Bomb Wing at the Minot base, killed in a motorcycle crash in Tennessee
Air Force Capt. John Frueh, found dead in Skamania County, Washington state, September 2
On September 6, the Syrian News Agency SANA announced that the Israeli Air Force had mounted an incursion into the air space of northern Syria, and had jettisoned drop tanks and bombs along the Syrian-Turkish border. The Turkish Foreign Ministry protested the objects that had fallen on Turkish territory. The Israelis first denied, but later admitted, that this illegal incursion, an ipso facto act of aggressive war, had taken place.
Middle East experts estimated that the Israelis had been probing the Syrian and Iranian air defenses, but that they had been driven off by the new and superior Russian air defense systems now fielded by these two countries. This meant that the US-UK-Israeli model of air blitzkrieg was now in crisis, just as the Israeli land blitzkrieg technique had been defeated by Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
To cover up this humiliating defeat, the Israelis later concocted a story that this had been a successful air attack on a nuclear facility operating in Syria with North Korean assistance; this silly tale was then retailed by neocon John Bolton and also by warmonger Democrat Hillary Clinton in a candidates’ debate. But any bombing of a nuclear facility would have had to produce a cloud of radioactive nuclear debris, which would have been registered by Iran, Pakistan, India, Russia, China, Japan, or some other state in the region. Since no such reports have ever come to light, it must be assumed that the Israeli story was fabricated in an attempt to cover up the repulse of the Israeli jets.
According to Madsen, the rogue B-52’s cruise missiles were very likely linked to the Israeli sneak attack: “WMR has learned that a US attack on Iran using nuclear and conventional weapons was scheduled to coincide with Israel’s September 6 air attack on a reputed Syrian nuclear facility in Dayr-az-Zwar, near the village of Tal Abyad, in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. Israel’s attack, code named OPERATION ORCHARD, was to provide a reason for the US to strike Iran.”
On Friday, September 7, Joseph Cirincione is interviewed on the Bill Press morning show on Air America. Cirincione argues that transporting nuclear missiles by air is an exceedingly rare occurrence. It emerges that the US Air Force officially ceased air transport of nuclear weapons around 1968, partly as a result of crashes and lost bombs in the US, Spain, and elsewhere.
Shortly after this, the US Air Force announced a highly unusual stand-down of the entire USAF for Friday, September 14. The announced goal was to have all units at all levels review operating procedures and safeguards having to do with the handling of nuclear weapons.
On Sunday, September 23, the Washington Post published a front page article above the fold which offered a sanitized version of the rogue B-52 story. Even in this sanitized form, an article of this sort would normally have been enough to trigger a congressional investigation, with hearings and witnesses subpoenaed to testify under oath. But the Democratic leadership
On Monday, September 24, Wayne Madsen Report posted a story which concluded that “the B-52 transporting six stealth AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles, each armed with a W-80-1 nuclear warhead, on August 30, was destined for the Middle East via Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. [S] It is now apparent that the command and control breakdown, reported as a BENT SPEAR incident to the Secretary of Defense and White House, was not the result of command and control chain-of-command ‘failures,’ but the result of a revolt and push back by various echelons within the Air Force and intelligence agencies against a planned US attack on Iran using nuclear weapons.”
This report does not however mention the possibility that one or more of the cruise missiles was destined to be used against an American city, as prescribed by the Cheney Doctrine. A stealth cruise missile fired at night would be almost undetectable; all the public would see would be a nuclear fireball.
Predictably, the target city would be swarming with patsies and dupes carrying large suitcases or trunks with “Al Qaeda” or “Osama Bin Laden” monograms. At that point, Cheney would have the “suitcase bomb” pretext he so ardently desires. Madsen also does not discuss the half-dozen people connected to the Minot or Barksdale Air Bases who had perished under mysterious circumstances between July and September 2007.
But Madsen does stress one critical fact: according to reliable sources, one of the six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was reported missing in the course of the incident, and there was some indication that it was never found: “WMR has been informed by a knowledgeable source that one of the six nuclear-armed cruise missiles was, and still may be, unaccounted for.
In that case, the nuclear reporting incident would have gone far beyond BENT SPEAR to a National Command Authority alert known as EMPTY QUIVER, with the special classification of PINNACLE.”
On October 2, David Swanson, an early critic of the Kennebunkport Warning, issued a statement on Iran entitled “Leading Americans,” with the signatures of a number of well-known personalities from politics, entertainment, and the arts. This belated statement is of course to be welcomed, but at the same time its weakness and narrowness, especially if compared to the Kennebunkport Warning, must also be pointed out.
As soon as the Kennebunkport Warning had been published, Swanson challenged the notion that there was “massive evidence” of a false flag provocation by Cheney, to be used as a pretext to launch war with Iran.
This new statement, coming five weeks after the Kennebunkport Warning, and thus too late to influence the rogue B-52 affair, now acknowledges the danger of an attack, and urges US military personnel to refuse to obey illegal orders. So far, so good.
There is, however, no reference to the rogue B-52 incident, in which Air Force personnel have apparently done just what the statement urges. There is no reference to the question of a false flag attack. There are warnings against a “preemptive” attack on Iran, but Bush and Cheney, as well as their accomplice Mrs. Clinton, are already presenting the attack on Iran as retaliatory, aimed at stopping Iranian interference in Iran.
Any US attack on Iran predicated on a false flag terror attack inside the US (as noted by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Feb. 1 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) would be portrayed as purely defensive.
The Swanson statement therefore has an escape clause in it big enough for Cheney to sail an aircraft carrier battle group through. Instead of such an uncertain trumpet, we must state unequivocally: NO ATTACK ON IRAN, SYRIA, PAKISTAN, SUDAN, LEBANON, VENEZUELA, NORTH KOREA or any other country, for any reason. False flag events must be attributed to Cheney, and not to the governments or forces accused and scapegoated by US-UK propaganda.
As for the scurrilous “Cosmos,” “Colonel Jenny Sparks,” “Arabesque,” and Michael Wolsey, to say nothing of their comrade in arms, the Ford Foundation’s favorite Chip Berlet, they have no interest in doing anything to stop the new 9/11 and the threatened war with Iran. Their sole focus is to harass and sabotage those who are undertaking action in that regard – and remarkably effective action it has turned out to be, despite the exertions of the wreckers.
We urge all persons of good will to support, endorse, and distribute the Kennebunkport Warning, which is fully as relevant today as when it was issued.
