The Air Force Coverup of that Minot-Barksdale Nuclear Missile Flight

If this was a 'mistake' as the Air Force claims, it was made at a very high level.

Dave Lindorff:

"It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck." -- Pentagon official

There is something deeply disturbing about the Air Force's official report on the Aug. 29-30 "bent spear" incident that saw six nuclear warheads get mounted on six Advanced Cruise Missiles and improperly removed from a nuclear weapons storage bunker at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, then get improperly loaded on a B-52, and then get improperly flown to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana -- a report that attributed the whole thing to a "mistake."

And yet we're asked to believe some low-ranking ground crew personnel at Minot AFB simply walked out of a nuclear weapons bunker with six nuclear armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, not knowing what they were carrying, and labored for eight hours to mount those missiles and their launch pylon on the wing of a B-52 strategic bomber without ever noticing they were armed with nuclear weapons. We're asked to believe that none of those electronic alarms and motion sensors built into the system went off during that whole process.

Vice President Dick Cheney is known to be pressing within the administration for a war with Iran, to be launched before Bush leaves office. According to some reports, Cheney has even, on his own authority (or lack thereof), urged Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, in hopes that Iran might retaliate, thus drawing the U.S. into a war.

Could the nation's war-mongering VP have used his neo-con contacts in the Defense Department or some of the Armageddon-believers in the Air Force to bypass the official chain of command and spring those nukes from their bunker?

Or was there a plan for a so-called "false-flag incident," where a small nuke -- made to resemble a primitive weapon of the type a fledgling nuclear power might construct -- might be detonated at a U.S. target abroad, or even within the U.S.?

These are terrible and terrifying questions to have to ask, but when you have six nuclear weapons go missing, when the military investigation into the incident is so clearly a whitewash or coverup, and when you have a vice president who is openly pressing for an illegal war of aggression against a nation that poses no threat to the U.S., and who, in fact, appears to be conducting his own treacherous foreign policy behind the back of the president and the State Department, these questions must be asked and answered.

They probably won't be, at least while the present criminals are occupying the White House, but I have no trouble at all believing it was a Cheney plan. The question is whether he was just wavin' his weenie or, worse by orders of magnitude, actually intended to use nuclear weapons to start his next failed war. Either way, he should be in prison.