(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The National Guard, FBI and other agencies conducted an exercise involving a “frantic search for a nuclear dirty bomb” at a basketball and hockey arena in Trenton, New Jersey last month.
As noted by The Intercept, the national security state has been conducting such exercises regularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But this time, government agencies were drilling for domestic terrorists, rather than groups such as Al Qaeda or ISIS.
“In just a few hours, more than 10,000 people will crowd the facility to listen to the vice president of the United States,” participants in the terrorism drill were told.
“The FBI has just received intelligence that a well-resourced domestic terrorist group has planted bombs, including one with cesium-137—a radioactive isotope—in the arena.”
The Intercept described last month’s drill as resembling post-9/11 TV series 24, which dramatized the concept of a ticking time bomb and the extraordinary measures it might justify—including torture and other such tactics.
“But 24 portrayed the dirty bomb plots as being masterminded by foreign terror groups similar to those that carried out 9/11. By pointing the finger at a ‘domestic terrorist group’ — that is, Americans — the U.S. military outpaces not just Hollywood, but also the facts,” The Intercept reported, noting that the country has yet to experience anything close to a nuclear attack from domestic terrorists.
“Though the FBI says in its fiscal year 2025 budget request to Congress that during 2023, its Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate ‘disrupted 42 incidents; made 62 arrests; and had 43 indictments, 56 sentencings and 56 convictions,’ none involved actual nuclear materials or such a dirty bomb,” The Intercept noted.
“There’s no evidence that any domestic terrorist group has ever been well-resourced enough to construct a nuclear dirty bomb. But that hasn’t stopped Washington from building on January 6 to feed its current domestic extremism obsession and fearmongering about it.”
While The Intercept is correct in that assessment, the FBI has tried to provoke a domestic terrorist nuclear attack before.
Indeed, in the FBI’s 1990s-era operation Patriot Conspiracy, or PATCON, a one-time FBI informant named Tom Posey plotted to attack Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama in order to steal a cache of weapons there. Posey at the time was the leader of the Civilian Material Assistance, which was a CIA-backed group that participated in the 1980s Contra wars in Nicaragua.
“Posey thought a second American Revolution was imminent, and he hoped to help fund it by selling off these weapons for profit. To make their getaway, Posey planned to set off a bomb in the plant’s control room,” Newsweek reported in 2011 of Posey’s plot.
Posey allegedly had befriended several of the nuclear plant guards, who were in on the take, and performed reconnaissance. He finalized his plans by October 1993, but never carried them out. He was arrested that month for selling stolen night-vision goggles, but no one was ever charged for the alleged plot to attack a nuclear plant—perhaps, because Posey had been an FBI informant.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
