Wormsign

About the time of my previous post, leveymg at Kos noticed there are some funny things happening in D.C. this weekend.

The New York Pravda has removed the link Kos cited saying that Dear Leader is planning on spending quality time with Jim Beam under a mountain in Colorado this weekend. But the one I cited is still up. Less traffic from here, I guess.

Kos tells us that there is a planned domestic terror exercise in Washington this weekend. They caught this a couple of days ago at Defense Tech:

"Today, somewhere in the DC metropolitan area, the military is conducting a... Top Secret and compartmented [exercise of] the military’s extra-legal [response to] weapons of mass destruction," writes William Arkin, on his extremely awesome new blog, Early Warning. "It allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control."

A spokesman at the Joint Force Headquarters-National Capital Region (JFHQ-NCR) confirmed the existence of Granite Shadow to me yesterday, but all he would say is that Granite Shadow is the unclassified name for a classified plan.

That classified plan, I believe, after extensive research and after making a couple of assumptions, is CONPLAN 0400, formally titled Counter-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. [It's] a long-standing contingency plan of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) that... lays out national policy and priorities for dealing with WMD threats in peacetime and crisis -- from far away offensive strikes and special operations against foreign WMD infrastructure and capabilities, to missile defenses and "consequence management" at home if offensive efforts fail...

U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the military's new homeland security command, is preparing its draft version of CONPLAN 0400 for military operations in the United States, and the resulting Granite Shadow plan... include[s] deployment of "special mission units" (the so-called Delta Force, SEAL teams, Rangers, and other special units of Joint Special Operations Command) in Washington, DC and other domestic hot spots...

Further, Granite Shadow posits domestic military operations, including intelligence collection and surveillance, unique rules of engagement regarding the use of lethal force, the use of experimental non-lethal weapons, and federal and military control of incident locations that are highly controversial and might border on the illegal.

In The Coming Wars, Seymour Hersch quoted an intelligence source in the Pentagon as saying:

“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”

No mattress mice in the Granite Shadow...