RT News & The Washington Post & Charles Pierce / Esquire & The New York Times & Dan Rather / CBS – 2016-04-05 00:59:05
https://www.rt.com/usa/337987-cia-explosives-school-bus/
CIA Leaves Explosives on School Bus Borrowed for Training
RT News
(April 1, 2016) — For at least two days, a school bus in northern Virginia has been carrying students with explosive material hidden in its engine compartment. The explosives fell out of a container, which was used by the CIA for training last week.
“During the exercise, explosive training material was inadvertently left by the CIA K-9 unit in one of the buses used in the exercise,” the CIA said in a statement. The agency attested that the explosives were “incredibly stable” and “benign” and didn’t put anyone in danger.
The explosive was discovered on Wednesday during a routine maintenance check. It had been unnoticed for nearly a week since March 24.
The CIA was called to retrieve the material. Neither the federal agency nor local authorities would go into detail about what kind of explosive was involved.
“The exact nature of the training material used in this exercise is not being released at the request of the CIA so as not to compromise its training techniques,” Loudoun County officials said.
Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde Byard described the explosive as a “putty-type” material designed for use on the battlefield and which requires a special detonator. Putty or plastic explosives, including the well-known C-4, are easily shaped and well-suited for demolition works.
The Briar Woods High School, which provided its premises to the CIA for the spring break training, said the vehicle was used for eight runs on Monday and Tuesday before the explosives were discovered. It carried 26 students attending Rock Ridge High School, Buffalo Trail Elementary School and Pinebrook Elementary School.
The CIA said the training was routine and part of exercises its agents do with local law enforcement. The container with explosive was designed to see how good sniffer dogs would be at finding it.
How the CIA Managed to Leave Explosives on a School Bus
Moriah Balingit, Greg Miller and Emma Brown / The Washington Post
(April 1, 2016) — Briar Woods High School, a half-hour drive from the CIA’s headquarters in Northern Virginia, might have provided an ideal training ground for the agency’s bomb-sniffing dogs. Its labyrinthine hallways and voluminous classrooms are home to something that can wreak havoc for the canines: polished floors, which cause dogs to slip and lose their focus as they hunt for explosives.
That was one reason the school, which educates nearly 1,700 students in Ashburn, played host to a CIA dog team for a training exercise while students were away for spring break last week, according to the Loudoun County school system. But the choice to go to a public school for the quiet exercise has led to an only-in-Washington embarrassment for the elite spy agency, which left explosive material behind in the engine compartment of a school bus that then shuttled special-needs schoolchildren for two days this week.
A mechanic discovered and removed the explosive putty — which county Supervisor Koran Saines, D-Sterling, said was the demolition explosive C-4 — during a routine bus maintenance check Wednesday. Until then, no one noticed that it was missing.
That the CIA was using live explosives and lost track of them in a place where children and teachers spend their days has raised concerns among parents about the use of a school facility for such kinds of law enforcement training.
It also illuminates the fact that local authorities and school systems feel obliged to prepare for scenarios that once seemed unthinkable, such as gunmen opening fire on schoolchildren and bombs hidden on buses.
Oh Good. The CIA Left Plastic
Explosives on a School Bus Full of Kids
Charles Pierce, Esquire
(April 3, 2016) — The Stupid Cafe is always open to hosting group events in our luxurious banquet and ballroom facilities in that part of the complex known colloquially as “Out Back By The Recycling Bins.” So, when a large group of people dressed in trenchcoats, dark glasses, false mustaches, and brandishing exploding seashells showed up, we were well able to accommodate their party.
The CIA left “explosive training material” under the hood of a Loudoun County school bus after a training exercise last week, a bus that was used to ferry elementary and high school students to and from school on Monday and Tuesday with the material still sitting in the engine compartment, according to the CIA and Loudoun County officials.
The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and the CIA said in statements Thursday that the explosive material was left behind after a training exercise at Briar Woods High School during spring break. The CIA said it was a training scenario for explosives-detecting dogs.
They should have put the dogs in charge. They’re pretty clearly the brains of the operation.
Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde Byard said the CIA indicated the nature of the material but asked the school system not to disclose it. Byard described it as a “putty-type” material designed for use on the battlefield and which requires a special detonator; such putty, or plastic, explosives—including the well-known C-4—are used in demolition and are considered stable. Byard said law enforcement agencies use school facilities on occasion to conduct realistic training exercises, including active-shooter drills.
As part of last week’s training exercise, CIA trainers placed explosive material into the engine compartment of a school bus on Thursday to test a dog’s ability to sniff it out. They also placed the material in parts of the school.
Byard said the dog successfully found the material in the engine compartment, but some of the material fell deeper inside the compartment and became wedged beneath the hoses.
The National Intelligence Program is budgeted at $53.5 billion this year. They can’t buy their own fleet of school buses?
A thousand pieces, as John F. Kennedy once mused.
Casey Reported Behind ’85 Lebanon Bombing
Stephen Engelberg / Special to the New York Times
WASHINGTON (September 26, 1987) — William J. Casey, the former Director of Central Intelligence, personally arranged for Saudi Arabia to sponsor a car bomb attack against a Lebanese Shiite religious leader believed to be involved in terrorism, according to a new book.
The author of the book, Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, writes that the 1985 operation — which failed to kill the Shiite leader but left 62 others dead — was one of three Saudi-sponsored operations arranged by Mr. Casey that circumvented normal CIA procedures. The others were covert aid to Chad in its war against Libya and efforts to damage the electoral chances of the Italian Communist Party in 1985.
The CIA is barred by executive order from carrying out assassinations and Congressional officials said today that they planned to investigate the incident and any others described in the book that involve possible violations of law or regulation.
A CIA spokesman said the agency would have no comment on the book. Mr. Casey died in May. Parts of the book, called Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA,’ were reported today in an article in The Washington Post. They include these disclosures:
* Mr. Casey personally planted a listening device in the office of an unidentified foreign leader.
* Mr. Casey had orginally hoped to be Secretary of State when the Reagan Administration took office.
* In the 1970’s, a senior Navy officer warned that the Soviet Union was reading this country’s coded communications, but nothing was done about the warning until the spy ring run by a former Navy officer, John A. Walker, was uncovered.
* A similar warning went unheeded in 1982 after the Russians located an American eavesdropping device on a Soviet underwater cable. It was not until 1985 that it was learned that a spy for the Russians, Ronald Pelton, a former National Security Agency employee, had passed on the location of the cable tap.
Among the most potentially significant revelations involves the car bomb attack on March 8, 1985, aimed at Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, leader of the Party of God faction in Lebanon. American intelligence had implicated the Sheik in attacks against American installations in Lebanon.
American officials said recently that a car bomb attack against Sheik Fadlallah was carried out by operatives linked to Lebanese Christian security forces. The officials said they were part of a unit that had received some training from the CIA earlier that year while the Administration considered plans to create a covert unit for so-called pre-emptive actions against terrorism.
That plan was dropped after members of Congress and some people in the agency questioned whether such a group could be adequately controlled. The CIA told Congress it broke off relations with the Lebanese unit well before it carried out the bombing.
The links between the Lebanese bombers and the CIA were reported by The Post and The New York Times in May 1985, as was the CIA’s disclaimer of involvement in the attempt to kill Sheik Fadlallah.
In interviews in the last several months, three present or former Government officials said that after the CIA stopped its support, Saudi Arabia financed the Lebanese unit.
Mr. Woodward’s book says Saudi Arabia provided the money at the direct request of Mr. Casey, who dealt with King Fahd. In its article describing the book, The Post said Mr. Casey ”circumvented normal CIA channels and personally arranged for the Saudi Arabian intelligence service to undertake three covert operations, including a Middle East assassination attempt that went awry.”
The article did not describe the evidence supporting this charge, and it did not explain how Mr. Casey could conduct dealings with the Saudis that were concealed from the agency’s operations directorate and his personal staff.
The book say says Saudi Arabia contributed a total of $15 million for the car bombing and for the covert effort in Chad and the attempt to undermine the Italian Communists.
Dan Rather CBS –
FBI Involvement in 1993 WTC Bombing
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