Several readers have asked me to comment on the upcoming “Jade Helm” military exercise planned for the southwestern United States this summer. The military drill has been quite the buzz on the internet and right-wing talk radio recently, but it’s not just the fantasy of the tin-foil cowboy hat crowd. Here’s what an article in “Gawker” found:
http://gawker.com/jade-helm-the-pretend-invasion-of-texas-thats-driving-1693863561
Jade Helm: The Pretend Invasion of Texas That’s Driving The Web Crazy:
(Excerpts)
“From July 15th to September 15th, over a thousand armed American soldiers will maneuver through the Southwest United States as part of a vast operation with a single motto: “Master the Human Domain.” Internet conspiracy theorists wait their whole lives for a moment this rich.
“JADE HELM 15” is a real military exercise cooked up by the United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC). It’s also, if you ask a certain cohort of internet dweller who thinks each day will be the one when Barack Obama personally carries away his guns, the first phase of martial law in America. When I was first forwarded this slideshow—apparently a preliminary briefing on Jade Helm marked marked “For Official Use Only”—the conspiracy theorists were the only ones talking about the exercise.
AllNewsPipeLine.com considers this the beginning of the end:
With September of 2015 consistently being warned of as a potential timeframe for the global collapse and World War 3, are these exercises more proof that something huge will happen near that date or just more ongoing drills as posse comitatus no longer applies upon American soil and America turns into a ‘no longer’ invisible dictatorship?
The site adds that FEMA-operated “death domes” are already being erected across Texas to prepare for civilian abductions during Jade Helm. InfoWars, the New York Times of right-wing paranoia, notes that “Although nations can benefit from joint drills, the exercises also serve to blur the lines of national sovereignty, slowly leading to the formation of a North American Union.”
FreedomOutpost.com is equally suspicious:
For years now, our veterans, Christians, patriots, gun owners, constitutionalists, pro-life advocates, small government supporters, small businesses, real journalists in the press, anti-corruption activists, anti-UN Agenda 21 advocates, anti-global warming supporters, anti-war patriots, anti-criminal immigration supporters, have all been targeted by this administration as enemies of the United States, even within government documents. Are we supposed to trust that they have pure intentions now?
Realizing that ignoring the paranoid will do nothing to quiet them, Army spokespeople are trying to ease everyone’s nerves with some military boilerplate. From ArmyTimes.com:
The Army says Jade Helm is a real exercise and will take place in the Southwest, as the slides indicate. But USASOC spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria said that’s the extent of the reports’ accuracy.
“It’s a training exercise. Just a regular training exercise,” Lastoria said of Jade Helm, which USASOC documentation references as a training exercise in at least one previous year as well.
It’s funny how even an extremely mundane denial sounds ominous coming from the Pentagon. Lastoria also spoke to Stars & Stripes:
“This exercise is routine training to maintain a high level of readiness for Army Special Operations Forces because they must be ready to support potential missions anywhere in the world on a moment’s notice.”
But you don’t need to believe in FEMA death domes or an Islamofascist White House to find Jade Helm a little bit unsettling—even if it just a routine exercise meant to simulate a future Middle Eastern war zone inside America. One particular slide, which divides up the Southwest into “hostile” or “insurgent” pockets, has been the epicenter or message board frothing…”
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There are embedded links in the original article if you want to dig deeper. The Gawker review confirms that armed military units will be both in uniform and undercover in plain clothes, and in military or civilian vehicles. Other sources I have found suggest the operation will not be just in the southwest, but to a certain extent nationwide. In an attempt to cross-reference this information with other military drills, I found this fascinating article in The Guardian of London:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown
Social science is being militarised to develop ‘operational tools’ to target peaceful activists and protest movements
(Excerpts)
“A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model “of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions.” The project will determine “the critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagians by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey.”
Twitter posts and conversations will be examined “to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised.”
Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington “seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate,” along with their “characteristics and consequences.” The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on “large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity,” and will cover 58 countries in total.
Last year, the DoD’s Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine ‘Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?’ which, however, conflates peaceful activists with “supporters of political violence” who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on “armed militancy” themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:
“In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence.”
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(Editor) Here’s the key:
“In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.”
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Aside from another inevitable banking collapse, the impact of climate change is already a major concern. Already the future of agriculture in California, a State that supplies 1/3 of the country’s food crops is hitting a brick wall. The southwest in general will soon run out of water for irrigation, let alone household use. In a mass exodus, people from the southwest and California will attempt to relocate to areas in the northwest. Prior to this we can expect a lot, a lot of violence as food and water run short. Here’s some projections from The Washington Post:
A ‘megadrought’ will grip U.S. in the coming decades, NASA researchers say
(Excerpts)
“The long and severe drought in the U.S. Southwest pales in comparison with what’s coming: a “megadrought” that will grip that region and the central Plains later this century and probably stay there for decades, a new study says.
Thirty-five years from now, if the current pace of climate change continues unabated, those areas of the country will experience a weather shift that will linger for as long as three decades, according to the study, released Thursday.
Researchers from NASA and Cornell and Columbia universities warned of major water shortages and conditions that dry out vegetation, which can lead to monster wildfires in southern Arizona and parts of California.
“We really need to start thinking in longer-term horizons about how we’re going to manage it,” said Toby R. Ault, an assistant professor in the department of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell, one of the co-authors. “This is a slow-moving natural hazard that humans are used to dealing with and used to managing.”
Megadroughts are sustained periods of sparse precipitation and significant loss of soil moisture that span generations, about 10 times as long as a normal three-year drought.
Tucson had less than 80 percent of its normal rainfall for long stretches in the 1990s. If that were to last for two decades, “that’s a megadrought,” Ault said.”
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So here we are as the “perfect storm” approaches: a looming bank collapse, Ferguson and Baltimore-style riots, and the coming megadrought. No cash, civil unrest, and shortages of food and water.
To a certain extent it’s understandable why these studies and drills are conducted. The powers-that-be want to keep a lid on things as long as possible. Obviously, the rich know that when the shit hits the fan, their heads will be on the chopping block too.
For another look at the possibility of internment camps for dissident populations, see an article we wrote in May of 2013 – “Chicago Gangs and The King Alfred Plan”
http://www.covertbookreport.com/chicago-gangs-and-the-king-alfred-plan/
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Operation FALCON Raids – Project Censored
Under the code name Operation FALCON (Federal and Local Cops Organized Nationally) three federally coordinated mass arrests occurred between April 2005 and October 2006. In an unprecedented move, more than 30,000 “fugitives” were arrested in the largest dragnets in the nation’s history. The operations directly involved over 960 agencies (state, local, and federal) and were the brainchild of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and US Marshal’s Director Ben Reyna.
The US Marshals Service has not yet disclosed the names of the people arrested in these massive sweeps nor of what crimes they were accused. We have no way of knowing whether they were provided with due process of law, where they are now, or whether they have been abused while in custody.
In reference:
http://www.projectcensored.org/6-operation-falcon-raids/