There Are Bad Men Out There

Our enemies certainly do still exist in great numbers, and it should greatly trouble any reasonable American that we have a bumbling fool who loves the Communists of his party and who has never seen an enemy of America who he couldn’t soon snuggle up to and crawl in bed with, in the same vein as the Traitor named John Kerry, who has been betraying America, since April 22nd 1971.

We should all expect to see a number of hits from various enemies, now that another cowardly appeaser holds the office. Or worse yet, we will soon be engaged in Benghazi style misadventures, since, as Ric Grenell recently noted, Susan Rice appears to be leading a shadow government behind the scenes, with Biden’s mind basically gone and Kamala basically clueless.

Whatever the case behind the Colonial event, the nation has neglected its most important sections of infrastructure for much too long. Let’s hope it all doesn’t implode upon us all like a fragile house of cards anytime soon. ~ J.O.S.

Nothing is quite so important as defending America’s infrastructure against potential and imminent attacks, whether those attacks come from domestic terrorists, foreign criminal cartels or foreign nations, and since the first successful detonation of a plutonium device, named “Gadget”, during the Trinity test on July 16th 1945, opening the door to threats of nuclear attacks and electro-magnetic pulse bombs capable of destroying regional electric grids, many other threats to our nation have become apparent and evolved, as science has moved in leaps and bounds. And now, in the aftermath of one of the worse cyberattacks America has experienced in several years, on May 7th, that shut down the Colonial pipeline, the largest U.S. pipeline, and gasoline to the Eastern Seaboard of America, moving seventeen states to declare a state of emergency, infrastructure security for every segment of our infrastructure must be given hard scrutiny, by those charged with protecting and defending America.

The Colonial pipeline traverses twelve states and has branches that run to Linden, New Jersey and Houston, Texas and my home state of Tennessee and as well, operating across 5500 miles, and its importance cannot be overstated, once one understands this pipeline provides half the fuel that states along the East Coast, from Delaware on down to Florida, rely upon for automobile transport and flights. It is linked to several crucial airports, such as Atlanta’s Hatfield Jackson Airport, and this interruption of service, experienced between May 7th and May 12th, had the potential of becoming a severely damaging event, if it had lasted much longer, as it would have terribly impeded the re-supply of grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals and even our military.

This was a clear case of interstate commerce under attack, if only for the monetary gain the hackers received, and it is unconscionable for Joe Biden and his administration to fail to address the national security aspect of this event, even if they were “technically” correct in noting that Colonial’s payment of $5 million to the hackers, possibly the group known as DarkSide, was a “private sector decision”.

No Joe … when a company’s actions or inaction — in this case a negligence in implementing state of the art cyber-security measures — affects an entire region of the nation, in a manner that actually endangers millions of American lives, it is no longer a “private sector decision”. This falls under the purview of the federal government’s constitutional mandate to protect and defend America. It is a matter of national security and must be treated as such.

How ironic it was to hear this from a dictator who already has shown he believes every other aspect of American private life falls under the command and demands from the federal government, to the point that he was once again recently heard saying all Americans must keep wearing the mask, if the haven’t yet received the Covid vaccine.

One certainty is clear. Now that hackers know ransoms will be paid, every single bit of major infrastructure across America, from railway and shipping to water systems and on to the electric grid and telecommunication sites are ready targets.

The electric grid has been somewhat protected through work mandated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that made companies install and implement state of the art cyber-security measures and programs to ensure nothing like what happened with Colonial can happen with the U.S. electric grid. Of course, with every new cyber-security advancement, there’s another hacker waiting in line to try his luck; and it’s important to note, these mandates for the electric grid have not yet been extended to the three million miles of pipeline that transport gas, oil and hazardous liquids across the country, but the FERC recently recommended doing so — imagine that — a day late and a dollar short.

Although this was supposedly an independent criminal group acting on its own, if it does indeed prove to be DarkSide, this is a group with deep ties within the current Russian oligarchy leadership, and it would be tantamount to an attack on our soil by a foreign state power. Russia regularly engages in his sort of subterfuge and “plausible deniability”, and this becomes ever so much more important when one considers that Russia and Iran and China have all done extensive experimentation with Electromagnetic Pulse bombs.

One of the very first tests with EMP bombs was conducted by the United States in 1962, to test the feasibility of using them to stop incoming Soviet missiles, during the Cold War era, and the third test on July 9th 1962 caused all hell to break loose in the Hawaiian Islands, after a 1.4 megaton nuke was detonated 240 miles above an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Throughout the Hawaiian Islands, over 800 miles away from ground zero at Johnston Island, street lights and circuit breakers were immediately blown, phone service went dead, radio communications were disrupted and all other items operated by electricity malfunctioned.

In 2004, Lowell Wood, a physicist and expert on EMP at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told Congress:

“Most fortunately, these tests took place over Johnston Island … rather than the Nevada Test Site, or the electromagnetic pulse would still be indelibly imprinted in the minds of the citizenry of the Western U.S., as well as in the history books.”

The current megatons of nuclear power unleashed by the new era of bombs could unleash enough destruction to shut down an entire nation’s electric grid for months, if not years. The results in the cities would be millions of deaths [some suggest as high as 70% to 90% of the population of the affected area] as water systems became contaminated and refrigeration capabilities ended, along with other possible deaths seen from extreme heat or cold, depending on the time of attack. And they don’t necessarily have to arrive by air, since I full well suspect that a container ship chugging its way up the channels from the Chesapeake Bay with a massive nuke on board would serve its death-dealing purpose very nearly equally well.

This aforementioned scenario becomes increasingly plausible as Iran is well on pace to having its own full blown nuclear program, which no one really knows how far along it has advanced, as the warnings have been flying out from its shores from 2002 to the present, reported by nationally renown investigative journalists, such as Jerome Corsi. And with Joe Biden living in a fantasy land that embraces Iranian lunatic jihadists as “partners in peace” as he moves to re-enter an already failed Iranian nuclear “agreement”, the risks and the danger to America has been exponentially increased, by a hundred fold, not too mention that his laissez-faire attitude towards border security and illegal immigration will certainly also serve any future terrorists purposes as well as it already serves the drug cartels and human traffickers.

America has simply been lucky to date, thank God for all His favors, big and small.

Fortunately, President Trump’s administration had the foresight to start serious work to secure the United States electric grid against EMP attacks, although the Defense Threat Reduction Agency has been working on communication and electrical systems that could withstand an EMP attack since 1962. A March 26th 2019 Presidential Executive Order demanded coordination between government agencies to stop EMP attacks, and pilot programs were started earlier, in 2018, in San Antonio and South Carolina to try to make full protection a reality over the next decade.

And along with all of this, despite numerous warnings from Homeland Security and other federal agencies, since 2001, U.S. water systems and reservoirs remain remarkably unprotected. Well over one hundred cases of real and threatened plots to contaminate U.S. water supplies in various cities have been documented. Approximately 22 cases were actual contamination events, for which half occurred in modern water systems with pressurized pipe distribution, including one conducted by an Islamic jihadist and chemistry student from Canada, who tried to poison a reservoir in New York City and the most recent cyberattack against the water treatment station in Oldsmar, Florida on February 5th 2021.

During the attack in Oldsmar, an unknown hacker remotely accessed the system and manipulated controls to release a dangerous level of sodium hydroxide, an industrial cleaning agent. It was simply a stroke of luck that an aware plant operator caught the change and was able to stop the attack. These sorts of attacks, while eclipsed by others considered “more serious”, have occurred with some regularity over the past two decades.

One cannot leave our nuclear facilities out of this discussion either, but this issue alone would require several new articles to properly broach its current state of affairs in our country.

So, with this latest headline attack on one of our major pieces of infrastructure, the nation is all a twitter about cyber-security. Let’s not forget the real need for an actual hard, physical security in all areas directly tied to our most important components of America’s infrastructure, especially in light of past planned attacks seen originating in the ranks of Islamic jihadists, soon to be renewed, due to Biden’s projection of weakness throughout the Middle East, as he recently revived cash payment to the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas terrorists of Gaza.

Lets not forget the following:

* Jose Padilla planned to detonate a dirty radioactive bomb in New York City, in 2002, after receiving training from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 9/11 “mastermind”, before his arrest.

* Dhiren Barot led a seven man terrorist group in a plan to attack and bomb the New York Stock Exchange and other financial institutes in D.C. and New Jersey, before being discovered and arrested in August of 2004.

* Also in 2004, two more Islamic jihadists were arrested after plotting to bomb a subway station near Madison Square Garden, prior to the Republican National Convention.

* In August of 2005, four members of Jamiyyat ul-Islam Is-Saheeh, an Islamic group, were arrested for a conspiracy to attack National Guard facilities, synagogues and other targets in Los Angeles.

* In June 2007, four Islamic terrorists plotted to detonate explosives around aviation fuel tanks and pipelines at the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.

* In June 2011, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, were arrested, after trying to purchase fully automatic machine guns and grenades for planned attacks on the Joint Base Lewis – McChord and the Seattle Military Entrance Processing Station.

* And last but not least, who can ever forget the guy who detonated a bomb in Nashville, TN on Christmas Day 2020, near the ATT Complex, shutting down cell phones across several states for most of the day?

The recent cyber-attack against the Colonial pipeline may not have been the brainchild of a malevolent state agent or an actual terrorist intent on harming America, and it has been, in fact, reported the hackers “didn’t intend to create chaos, since they simply wanted money; but, no matter who the actual culprit was, this attack has revealed just one more of the gaping holes in systems all across America, that are still in much need of great repair, updating, modernization and heightened protection, if we wish to prevent a massive number of our countrymen from dying in some future terrorist attack on a larger scale than September 11th 2001.

But isn’t it curious to consider, if Donald Trump was still president and had stated the Russians had nothing to do with this cyberattack, that has created long gas lines, unseen since the Carter years, and soaring gas prices, there would be a thermo-nuclear meltdown in the ranks of the Leftstream media. Biden stated as much, without any evidence at all for his assertion, after following Obama’s lead and railing against all things Russian over the past five years, as he suggests Putin is innocent, after not so long ago calling him a “killer”, rightfully so. And yet, at this time, no one is raising an objection of any kind.

There are bad men out there, anywhere one wishes to name, who would love nothing better than to see all America in anguish and pain over more death and destruction wrought through their evil machinations, and as such, it shouldn’t give any American any comfort to know that the so-called president, this imposter to the presidency, Joe Biden is the same man who tried to nix the idea of killing Osama bin-Laden, as Vice-President and seeks a new love-fest with Iran, and he’s the same man who was on board with the abandonment of the people at the CIA Annex in Benghazi, Libya. And he is the same man who has been all too willing to follow the old Democratic Party Communist maxim of “never let a good crisis go to waste, as seen during this hyped Covid virus event and his insistence on forcing masks and vaccines on all America.

No — Joe Biden gives me no comfort that he and his administration will actually strive, endeavor and work diligently to keep America safe from the people who seek to destroy Her, since all too often, his own desires, plans and agendas align with theirs and he is every bit as much an enemy to America as the Ayatollah of Iran. And, aside from this, I believe he and his administration are afraid of provoking Putin, since he also has no intentions of actually ever confronting him or containing him, in areas that demand it, and his “leadership” has been absent in all things, other than his inane, mindless, ignorant and continuous harping about masks, giving the nation the feeling of being rudderless and adrift on its own.

And given the suspect nature of everything that Ol’ Uncle Joe says and everything released by his administration, it is harder yet to believe anything he says today, or that Russia had no involvement in this matter. It puts me in mind of something from 1997 that I will close with, inasmuch as it concerns the ever expanding technical aspects of information warfare, including the strategy, tactical deceptions, psychology, propaganda and structural propaganda underlying its use:

“All of which of course, could sound a lot like what our Chinese friends call ‘soft destruction.’ As William Church says, ‘The most damaging form of I-war [information war] is political war.’ And pretty much anything can be a part of it: power outages, network breakdowns, clever disinformation campaigns — anything ‘to get the populace to feel that the country is going to hell.'” ~ A Farewell to Arms

May 15, 2021

~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.