Staging the Portland Nuke
(A Comedy of Terrors)

"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
William Shakespeare

By Captain Eric H. May
Military Correspondent

Writer's note: Several of the characters in the Portland Nuke plot have supplied their own lines via emails and articles, from which I have included extracts below. All emails were addressed to me as replies to my questions or articles.

Prologue: LTC Philip Smith

"In August, Noble Resolve will coordinate with officials in Oregon to model a nuclear attack on Portland." wrote Josh Rogin, military reporter for Federal Computer Week's FCW.com on April 4. His article was the basis of my first call with Lt. Col. Philip Smith, a senior public affairs officer for the U.S. Joint Forces Command, which is conducting the military exercise.

Smith and I found plenty to talk about in a half-hour chat. As a former Army public affairs officer myself, I knew about his job, which is to inform the public on stories of interest or concern. We discussed computer-simulated exercises like Noble Resolve, and he seemed interested in my own experience with the concept back in its initial days, around the time of the first Iraq war. It's a small world when you're part of the military intelligentsia, and we soon discovered that both his wife and I had belonged to the 75th Division, specializing in military exercises, headquartered in Houston, Texas.

On the subject of Noble Resolve itself though, he had few ready answers other than the date of the exercise, which was August 20-24. I told him that this bare fact added greatly to public knowledge, and said that I found it shocking that no press release had come out since the spring. It was as if the government was purposely avoiding informing the public of the training it claimed to be conducting for the public's security, and that impression of things had become general across the Internet, where alarmed citizens and specialists were writing that the exercise might be a cover operation for the execution of the nuke scenario it was practicing.

Smith agreed with me that it was important to get an updated story out, and later replied to my email promising to follow up with much-needed details. By then, we were on a first-name basis:

Subject: RE: ATTN LTC SMITH: Next 9/11, Summer 2007?
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007

Eric,

I've have [sic] not received an answer to the two questions you asked yesterday; a list of participating agencies to include Oregon state assets, and a list of unclassified exercises like Noble Resolve.

Ms. Susanne Moore, LT Jereal Dorsey or I will contact you via phone or email as soon as we have the answer.

Philip J. Smith
Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army
Deputy Director of Public Affairs
U.S. Joint Forces Command

After this communication, though, he dropped strangely out of touch, something public affairs officers are taught never to do.

Act One: Politicians Dodging and Diving

Smith wasn't the only government official playing hard to get. Penny Dodge, chief of staff for Oregon's Congressman Peter DeFazio, had already disappeared from media scrutiny, although her boss was the center of anxious attention. DeFazio's constituents had blitzed him with their fear that Noble Resolve might turn out to be a false flag attack against them, undertaken by a sagging Bush administration to justify implementing National Security Presidential Directive 51, a plan for dictatorship, which Bush signed into effect in May -- at about the time that Dick Cheney led a growing chorus of White House insiders suggesting that an Al Qaeda nuclear attack was imminent.

Worried Oregonians hounded DeFazio, despite his initial assurances that all was well, into requesting an examination of the secret annexes of NSPD-51. As a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, with all appropriate security clearances, DeFazio was entitled to see NSPD-51 in full, but for the first time in his 20-year career he was refused access.

"Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right" DeFazio said in a July 20 interview, then issued a second request, this one written and co-authored by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bernie Thompson. On August 1 the possibility of a conspiracy seemed all the more likely: the White House had again refused DeFazio.

To date both DeFazio and Dodge have failed to return calls or offer an update. They are more than a week into the congressional summer break, and less than two weeks away from Noble Resolve.

One of the signs of an official conspiracy, it's said, is that officials refuse to consider the possibility of a conspiracy. According to that rule, the city of Portland is behaving most curiously, if not complicitly. On the same day I contacted Mayor Tom Potter's office about the widespread concern that his city might be a false flag target, his chief spokesman dived for cover, and hasn't been heard from since:

Subject: RE: John Doussard (Portland's Director of Communications)
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007

Capt May - No agency or bureau affiliated with the City of Portland is participating in any part of any operation affiliated with Noble Resolve. Our director of the Office of Emergency Management has contacted the federal government and asked that our name be removed from any public communication about Noble Resolve.

John Doussard
Director of Communications

So Portland isn't an interested participant in a most alarming exercise -- it's only the target.

Act Two: An Iconoclastic Inquest

Wednesday, after a week of waiting for LTC Smith to supply promised details of Noble Resolve, and more than a week since Congressman DeFazio and Mayor Potter had become incommunicado, my editor at The Lone Star Iconoclast, W. Leon Smith, decided that we had waited long enough. I wrote a brief article, "Portland Nuclear Inquest Formed & Functioning." It contained the email from Smith, was copied to the offices of DeFazio and Potter and, thanks to a raging Internet interest, was quickly published worldwide. It was a no-frills attempt to kick start what had become a closed conversation -- and it worked.

Act Three: Heroic Helpers -- KBOO-FM and an Anonymous Official

The next day Portland's KBOO FM radio station continued the truth offensive. Its news analysis program Press Watch, hosted by Theresa Mitchel, carried an hour-long examination of Noble Resolve. Mitchel noted that the KBOO news department had just contacted the JFCOM public affairs office, which had informed the station that the Portland nuclear attack of Noble Resolve had been changed into a volcanic eruption instead. Mitchel said she doubted the new story, likely issued as a "public relations soother," and urged her listeners to monitor and discuss the upcoming exercise.

That same day The Iconoclast and I received word from an anonymous military official that there was plenty in Noble Resolve -- and JFCOM's silence about it -- to worry about:

Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007
Subject: Re: "PORTLAND NUCLEAR INQUEST" Formed & Functioning

CPT May: I'm sure LTC Smith has been given his marching orders to NOT reply to your questions. If you make enough noise about Portland going live, then they can't pull it off. I have no vibes on activities, but if I were there, I would be on the look out for indicators of something being set up. I sure hope someone steps up and offers assistance from the inside. I look forward to your words and works.

Act Four: A Lap Dog and a Lap Dancer -- The Oregonian

On July 28 The Oregonian ran a story by its Washington reporter, Jeff Kosseff, with the headline "DeFazio chases secret terror-crisis plan," followed by the subheading "After the White House denies access, the Web buzzes with conspiracy chatter." Kosseff's article continued:

"After conspiracy theorists fanned the Internet with their outrage, the Oregon congressman renewed his push Friday to gain access to the classified portion of a White House plan to operate the government after a terrorist attack."

The deprecating tone of The Oregonian and Kosseff toward the "conspiracy chatter" in the Internet was a cheap shot to say the least. By all accounts, the only reason that DeFazio had attempted to gain access to NSPD-51 at all was the incessant -- and informed -- opinion of Internet writers that there was a story worth investigation. Without "conspiracy chatter" and "conspiracy theorists," DeFazio would have dodged the confrontation with the White House, and The Oregonian wouldn't have bothered to run the story of the presidential directive.

Further, The Oregonian had ignobly shirked half the story of why Oregon residents were worried about NSPD-51 in the first place: the Noble Resolve nuclear exercise, which they feared would turn into an awful false flag reality. In the months since the Internet took up the story, The Oregonian had never bothered to acknowledge the existence -- let alone report the details -- of Noble Resolve.

Having failed to report the news of the exercise, The Oregonian nevertheless editorialized in favor of it yesterday with its "'Noble' is good, not grand."

"In a couple of weeks, members of the Oregon National Guard are going to take part in a multiagency homeland security exercise... This drill, which the Pentagon has dubbed Operation Noble Resolve, has sparked concerns in some quarters in Oregon, where suspicions about the military and the Bush administration abound [because of the] online exercise that presses players to respond to a simulated emergency involving a nuclear threat... While some choose to view this exercise as sinister -- a pretext for a nuclear attack by the U.S. military on American citizens, according to some fevered speculation -- it is, in fact, a prudent thing to do.

Act Five: Joint Forces Comedy (JFCOM)

Yesterday JFCOM launched a public affairs operation for Noble Resolve as well. LTC Smith sent me and The Iconoclast a reply to the Portland Nuclear Inquest article. His tone had changed since our conversations and emails of a week before, and we were no longer on a first-name basis. He wrote (repeatedly) that what he had previously agreed was the Noble Resolve exercise was actually only an experiment -- and that he had always called it that. Finally, and amazingly, he asserted that the exercise didn't involve a nuclear scenario. This contradicted insider articles of previous months, KBOO's news department of the day before and The Oregonian's editorial of the same day:

Subject: RE: "PORTLAND NUCLEAR INQUEST" Formed & Functioning
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007
CC: Rep. Peter DeFazio, City of Portland, The Lone Star Iconoclast

Mr. May,

As discussed in our phone conversation last week, Noble Resolve is an experiment conducted completely in a modeling and simulation, or computer, environment. No troops or emergency management personnel will deploy. All of this is conducted in rooms and across computer networks.

[T]here is no "nuke" or weapon of mass destruction event, real or otherwise, simulated in the Noble Resolve experiment.

the [sic] most recent article on the experiment is found below. I believe it will answer your questions.

Philip J. Smith
Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army
Deputy Director of Public Affairs
U.S. Joint Forces Command

Smith attached a JFCOM press release, prepared that same day, with the innocuous title "Noble Resolve 07-2 aims at making communication easier." It asserted the same points he had made in his email, and it was poor reading -- unless you read between the lines. Needless to say, I had some hard questions for Smith about his email and the press release, but he had sent them at the close of business on a Friday, and neither he nor any other public affairs official has responded to messages relayed through the JFCOM duty officer. It's worth noting that Smith failed to provide the specific answers he had promised to my specific questions of the week before.

Epilogue: The Enemy at the Bridge

"Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories..."
George W. Bush to the United Nations, 11/1/01

The "war president" who uttered the words above was, at the time of the utterance, credible and supported by nine-tenths of the American People; the same man now lacks credibility and is scorned by two-thirds of the American People. His White House actions and actors have revealed impeachable motives, and may lead to his impeachment. As commander-in-chief, he is the ultimate source and director of Noble Resolve, and we are right to not trust him.

The same presstitutes who now openly detail his lies were once afraid to question his assertions in private, and they continue to lag behind public opinion when it comes to George W. Bush. Their incessant description of anyone who knows about, speaks about or writes about things outside their "reporting" as a "conspiracy theorist" is a self-serving attempt to explain away their failure to do their jobs, and is a good argument that there is indeed a conspiracy -- and that they are part of it.

I offer one parting conspiracy theory for the affable or the anxious reader: Portland really has been set up by a failing Bush administration, and is being let down by its political and media leaders. A disturbing report, dated April 19, by the "Preventive Defense Project," suggests that Portland is in the crosshairs of a nuclear attack. With the ominous title "The Day After: Action in the 24 Hours Following a Nuclear Blast in an American City," the report contains three nuclear blast/fallout maps. Two of them are general and, not surprisingly, show Washington D.C. as ground zero; the third is quite specific, and, quite surprisingly, shows northwest Portland's Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge, near the port on the Willamette River, as ground zero: bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/BCSIA_content/documents/DayAfterWorkshopReport_May2007.pdf

Whether or not the Comedy of Terrors I have presented above will succeed or fail is up to the American People, who must compensate for the propaganda and plans of their leaders by thinking and acting for themselves. This is what was expected of us by the founders who created our republic, who had the vision to predict that eventually their creation would become corrupt and, if not redeemed, conspiratorial.

# # #

Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine. Readers can receive regular updates on Noble Resolve through the Portland Nuclear Inquest: ca.groups.yahoo.com/group/Portland-Nuclear-Inquest/