by William Skink
It’s been twenty years since Ted Kaczynski was arrested on April 3rd in Lincoln, Montana for the lethal bombings that earned Ted the title of Unabomber. While Ted will die in prison, the entity that helped create him by first breaking him–the CIA–continues to wreak havoc across the globe.
The Agency isn’t supposed to be operating on American soil, but when has that ever stopped this out-of-control branch of the American security state?
That issue came up recently when the CIA “accidentally” left some plastic explosives on a school bus. Yes, you read that correctly. Here’s how NPR reported it:
The CIA “inadvertently left” explosive material on a school bus after a training exercise with local law enforcement in Loudoun County, Va., the agency and the country sheriff’s office say.
The bus then remained in service for two days, transporting students to a high school and two elementary schools, before the explosive material was found during routine maintenance, the sheriff’s office says in a statement.
According to a statement from the school district, the bus carrying the material “made eight runs totaling 145 miles carrying 26 students attending Rock Ridge High School, Buffalo Trail Elementary School and Pinebrook Elementary School.”
The CIA put the material in the bus as part of a regular joint exercise to train explosives-sniffing dogs at Briar Woods High School on March 21-24, during spring break, the sheriff’s office says. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and Fire Marshal’s Office took part in the drill.
Um, ok. Does this smell like a fortuitously thwarted false flag attack to anyone else? Here is Dave Lindorff with a piece at Counterpunch (a source I often quote):
There is plenty of evidence that over the past two decades, the US government and its intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have engaged in a number of so-called “false flag” operations, usually portrayed as “tests” gone wrong, or as “stings” designed to lure out alleged terrorists — though these latter operations usually turn out on investigation to have been wholly government-created incidents where low-wattage victims are talked into participating in a terrorism action either for pay, or under the belief that they are working for the government. There are just too many occasions when some crazy terror plot either gets prominently “uncovered” and “prevented,” or actually is attempted right when the government could use some increased public sense of panic to help pass some new law diminishing Constitutionally-protected freedoms, or higher spending on war and government intelligence agencies.
As one CIA veteran offers, “The only ‘innocent’ explanation as to why the agency was training locals on this is that the agency has more money than it knows what to do with, whereas others are not that flush,” but this source adds, “There are a host of other, more sinister possible explanations. This needs to be looked into.”
There are certainly enough bozos in the US government’s intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, including the CIA, for me to believe that this school explosives “testing exercise” was just a really stupid idea gone wrong. But I’m also suspicious enough to believe that it could have been something much more insidious that didn’t go as planned only because of the alertness of one school district mechanic.
I’m probably just being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, right?