Massive rehearsal planned for Northwest mega-quake, tsunami

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Imagine a devastating earthquake and tsunami have cut off Pacific Northwest coastal communities. Phone and internet service have collapsed. Ham radio operators living on the stricken coast fire up their radios, contact emergency managers and report on the magnitude of the disaster so that no time is wasted in saving lives.

This is the kind of scenario that will be rehearsed during the second week of June in a massive earthquake and tsunami readiness drill that has been developed by the U.S. government, the military, and state and local emergency managers over the past few years to test their readiness for what — when it strikes — will likely be the nation’s worst natural calamity.

The June 7-10 exercise is called Cascadia Rising. It is named after the Cascadia Subduction Zone — a 600-mile-long fault just off the coast that runs from Northern California to British Columbia.

“This is the largest exercise ever for a Cascadia break,” said Lt. Col. Clayton Braun of the Washington State National Guard. Braun has been a key planner of the doomsday drill, which is being overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Federal officials say about 20,000 people will be involved in the disaster drill, representing various federal agencies, the U.S. military, state and local emergency response managers across the Pacific Northwest, Native American tribes and emergency management officials in British Columbia.

One main goal of the exercise is to test how well they will work together to minimize loss of life and damages when a mega-quake rips along the Cascadia Subduction Zone and unleashes a killer tsunami.

Awareness of the seismic threat looming just off the Pacific Northwest dates back to the 1980s, when researchers concluded that coastal lands long ago had been inundated by a tsunami. Research also indicated that a tsunami that was documented in Japan in January 1700 originated from the Cascadia Subduction Zone, also known as the CSZ.

Research suggests that the CSZ on average produces magnitude 9.0 quakes every 500 years, but big quakes have been separated by as few as 200 years and as many as 1,000. So it is impossible to predict when the next monster quake occurs. However, tectonic stresses have been accumulating in the CSZ for more than 300 years and seismologists say it could rupture at any time.

More than 8 million people live in the area that is vulnerable to the Cascadia Subduction Zone. It contains the most heavily populated areas of the Pacific Northwest, including Seattle and Portland, as well as Interstate 5, one of the nation’s busiest roads.

Coastal towns are especially at risk. Studies have forecast that while 1,100 people could die from a 9.0 magnitude quake, 13,500 could perish from the tsunami that would slam into the coast within 15 to 30 minutes after the shaking begins.

A scenario document written in preparation for Cascadia Rising exercise states “the scale of fatalities across the coast may overwhelm the resources of local governments.” Whole towns along the coast may disappear. Hospitals could either collapse or be too severely damaged to handle casualties.

All across the region between the Pacific and the Cascade Range, bridges and roads could be destroyed, fuel supplies and communications disrupted, and buildings and crucial infrastructure may sink into soil that’s been liquefied by the intense shaking.

The region has taken steps over the last few years to better prepare for the looming calamity. Schools are being moved out of tsunami inundation zones. Money is being allocated for seismic retrofits of crucial structures. Tsunami evacuation routes to high ground have been identified.

Cascadia Rising is an important part of the planning that has picked up pace over the past few years.

Some of the exercise will put boots on the ground. For example, Washington State National Guardsmen will conduct a landing on Vashon Island to rehearse delivery of supplies with landing craft. About 2,300 National Guard soldiers are among the 6,000 or so exercise participants in Washington state.

Another major drill rehearses how to get the Port of Tacoma back into operation after it has been devastated by a quake, using a U.S. Army Reserve pier that consists of a logistics support vessel, a barge derrick crane and a large tug. source

Gray State Screenwriter David Crowley, his wife and five-year-old daughter were found dead on Sunday morning in a Minnesota home in what is being called a murder-suicide.

The authorities are calling it a murder/suicide. Due to the nature of the film, many are wondering about the “suicide” part of the cause of death. The setting and plot of Gray State involves the government of the U.S. calling Martial Law and beginning to place citizens in FEMA Camps.

It goes on to show an uprising of the people against the government.

Bill and Alice Hixson, who lived across the street from the Crowley house for the past 21 years told the Tribune that they witnessed the father and daughter playing in the back yard recently.

“It’s such a grisly, gruesome thing,” Alice Hixson said.

GRAY STATE ROUGH CUT:

The Apple Valley Police Department is being assisted in their investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office.

Read the rest of the story on Freedom Outpost…

by NTEB Contributor John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute 

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”  – James Madison

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” — Barack Obama, October 30, 2008

“We are going to have to change our conversation; we’re going to have to change our traditions, our history; we’re going to have to move into a different place as a nation.” — Michelle Obama, May 14, 2008

If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the Founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers, $61 billion budget and sub-agencies that include the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”

In the 12 years since it was established to “prevent terrorist attacks within the United States,” the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life. With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight and accountability into the DHS’ purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.

A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. In making the case for shutting down the de facto national police agency, analyst Charles Kenny offers the following six reasons: one, the agency lacks leadership; two, terrorism is far less of a threat than it is made out to be; three, the FBI has actually stopped more alleged terrorist attacks than DHS; four, the agency wastes exorbitant amounts of money with little to show for it; five, “An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification”; and six, the agency is just plain bloated.

To Kenny’s list, I will add the following: The menace of a national police force, a.k.a. a standing army, vested with so much power cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored. Indeed, as the following list shows, just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to police agencies in the form of grants.

1. Militarizing police and SWAT teams. The DHS routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants.

Obama Calling For Creation Of Civilian Army from Now The End Begins on Vimeo.

2. Spying on activists, dissidents and veterans. In 2009, DHS released three infamous reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” and another entitled Operation Vigilant Eagle, outlining a surveillance program targeting veterans. The reports collectively and broadly define extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.” In 2013, it was revealed that DHS, the FBI, state and local law enforcement agencies, and the private sector were working together to conduct nationwide surveillance on protesters’ First Amendment activities.

3. Stockpiling ammunition. DHS, along with other government agencies, has been stockpiling an alarming amount of ammunition in recent years, which only adds to the discomfort of those already leery of the government. As of 2013, DHS had 260 million rounds of ammo in stock, which averages out to between 1,300 to 1,600 rounds per officer. The US Army, in contrast, has roughly 350 rounds per soldier. DHS has since requisitioned more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammo, “enough,” concludes Forbes magazine, “to sustain a hot war for 20+ years.”

3. Distributing license plate readers. DHS has already distributed more than $50 million in grants to enable local police agencies to acquire license plate readers, which rely on mobile cameras to photograph and identify cars, match them against a national database, and track their movements. Relying on private contractors to maintain a license plate database allows the DHS and its affiliates to access millions of records without much in the way of oversight.

4. Contracting to build detention camps. In 2006, DHS awarded a $385 million contract to a Halliburton subsidiary to build detention centers on American soil. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies such as “natural disasters.” Viewed in conjunction with the NDAA provision allowing the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone, including American citizens, it would seem the building blocks are already in place for such an eventuality.

5. Tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices. Distributed to local police agencies as a result of grants from the DHS, these Stingray devices enable police to track individuals’ cell phones—and their owners—without a court warrant or court order. The amount of information conveyed by these devices about one’s activities, whereabouts and interactions is considerable. As one attorney explained: “Because we carry our cellphones with us virtually everywhere we go, stingrays can paint a precise picture of where we are and who we spend time with, including our location in a lover’s house, in a psychologist’s office or at a political protest.”

Cruz: Obama To Repeal The First Amendment from Now The End Begins on Vimeo.

6. Carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities. Each year, DHS funds military-style training drills in cities across the country. These Urban Shield exercises, elaborately staged with their own set of professionally trained Crisis Actors playing the parts of shooters, bystanders and victims, fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers, bystanders and the media into thinking it’s a real crisis.

6. Using the TSA as an advance guard. The TSA now searches a variety of government and private databases, including things like car registrations and employment information, in order to track travelers’ before they ever get near an airport. Other information collected includes “tax identification number, past travel itineraries, property records, physical characteristics, and law enforcement or intelligence information.”

7. Conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners. Under the direction of the TSA, American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced patdowns at airports to bag searches in train stations. In response to public outrage over what amounted to a virtual strip search, the TSA has begun replacing the scanners with equally costly yet less detailed models. The old scanners will be used by prisons for now.

8. Carrying out soft target checkpoints. VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams have laid the groundwork for the government’s effort to secure so-called “soft” targets such as malls, stadiums, bridges, etc. Some security experts predict that checkpoints and screening stations will eventually be established at all soft targets, such as department stores, restaurants, and schools. DHS’ Operation Shield, a program which seeks to check up on security protocols around the country with unannounced visits, conducted a surprise security exercise at the Social Security Administration building in Leesburg, Fla., when they subjected people who went to pick up their checks to random ID checks by federal agents armed with semi-automatic weapons.

9. Directing government workers to spy on Americans. Terrorism Liaison Officers are firefighters, police officers, and even corporate employees who have received training to spy on and report back to government entities on the day-to-day activities of their fellow citizens. These individuals are authorized to report “suspicious activity” which can include such innocuous activities as taking pictures with no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements and drawings, taking notes, conversing in code, espousing radical beliefs, and buying items in bulk.

The similarities are terrifying, the conclusion inevitable.

10. Conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers. Data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency, fusions centers—of which there are at least 78 scattered around the U.S.— constantly monitor our communications, collecting and cataloguing everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police. Despite a budget estimated to be somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion, these fusion centers have proven to be exercises in incompetence, often producing irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence, while spending millions of dollars on “flat-screen televisions, sport utility vehicles, hidden cameras and other gadgets.”

11. Carrying out Constitution-free border control searches. On orders from the DHS, the government’s efforts along the border have become little more than an exercise in police state power, ranging from aggressive checkpoints to the widespread use of drone technology, often used against American citizens traveling within the country. Border patrol operations occur within 100 miles of an international crossing, putting some 200 million Americans within the bounds of aggressive border patrol searches and seizures, as well as increasingly expansive drone surveillance. With 71 checkpoints found along the southwest border of the United States alone, suspicionless search and seizures on the border are rampant. Border patrol agents also search the personal electronic devices of people crossing the border without a warrant.

12. Funding city-wide surveillance cameras. As Charlie Savage reports for the Boston Globe, the DHS has funneled “millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a ‘surveillance society’ in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost.” These camera systems, installed on city streets, in parks and transit systems, operating in conjunction with sophisticated computer systems that boast intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification, military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime and facial recognition software, create a vast surveillance network that can target millions of innocent individuals.

13. Utilizing drones and other spybots. The DHS has been at the forefront of funding and deploying surveillance robots and drones for land, sea and air, including robots that resemble fish and tunnel-bots that can travel underground. Despite repeated concerns over the danger surveillance drones used domestically pose to Americans’ privacy rights, the DHS has continued to expand its fleet of Predator drones, which come equipped with video cameras, infrared cameras, heat sensors, and radar. DHS also loans its drones out to local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies for a variety of tasks, although the agency refuses to divulge any details as to how, why and in what capacity these drones are being used by police. Incredibly, the DHS has also been handing out millions of dollars in grants to local police agencies to “accelerate the adoption” of drones in their localities.

It’s not difficult to see why the DHS has been described as a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.” If it is a beast, however, it is a beast that is accelerating our nation’s transformation into a police state through its establishment of a standing army, a.k.a. national police force.

This, too, is nothing new. Historically, as I show in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the establishment of a national police force has served as a fundamental and final building block for every totalitarian regime that has ever wreaked havoc on humanity, from Hitler’s all-too-real Nazi Germany to George Orwell’s fictional Oceania. Whether fictional or historical, however, the calling cards of these national police agencies remain the same: brutality, inhumanity, corruption, intolerance, rigidity, and bureaucracy—in other words, evil.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His latest book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (SelectBooks) is available online at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.