Trouble at Mildenhall and Atlanta International Airport: the Israel connection?
As Monday’s story about an intruder at RAF Mildenhall looks too implausible to be true, news from the States may well offer the inkling and starting place of a less random explanation. There is nothing but very tenuous circumstantial data to link Sunday’s black out at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport with the event at Mildenhall, but even in that state, taken all together, and considering recent history, there might yet be evidence for some very fishy activity related to a possible, rumoured, upcoming war launched on Iran and/or Hezbollah by Israel and/or Saudi Arabia.
Between 1pm and 2.45pm, Monday 18th December, RAF Mildenhall airbase in Suffolk was locked down because of an unauthorised visitor, or a trespasser as he has been characterised, was able to drive his car through the main gates (supposedly ramming them) and infiltrate into the complex a considerable way even to the runway at the centre of the site. It should be understood that RAF Mildenhall is a joint USAF base and, according to Wikipedia, “is currently the home of the 100th Air Refueling Wing (100 ARW)”. Moreover, there is probably great significance in the fact that plans to move the operation to Germany have been stalled for two years “because of discussions between the United States and Germany pertaining to program management, procedures and responsibilities”. Can the US military do as it pleases off of German soil as it does from British, is probably what it all boils down to.
However, signs that the story might not be all that it appeared to be first surfaced in reports that the intruder had only suffered cuts and bruises during the course of his arrest – despite being shot at by American service personnel (“Man drove through hail of bullets”: the Telegraph). The notion of his being able to gain entrance by ramming the entrance gates, and from an apparent stationary position, and then be fit enough to progress so far into the camp also seemed to be improbable, but the real give away was in the following reportage:
An intruder who was shot at after storming a US Air Force base in Britain with a teddy bear strapped to his body has been detained under the Mental Health Act.
Military personnel fired shots after the man armed with the cuddly toy rammed his vehicle through the gates of RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk yesterday afternoon.
The suspect became involved in an ‘altercation’ with guards at the main checkpoint at the base after he pretended he was a member of the US Secret Service.”
Although there is mention of a bear in the Sun, the Times and the Express, the source seems to be the Mail (Larisa Brown, that organisation’s defence correspondent).
And so the extract above has all the hallmarks of being duping delight, or in-the-know mockery of the millions of corporate-media-consuming, critical-thought deficient, information spoon-fed, drooling morons who are routinely gulled by the constant lying that is passed off to them as coverage of current affairs.
If the story is merely cover for something else that happened at the base, then the procedure for personnel during such an incident suddenly makes very interesting reading. The Sky News correspondent happened to mention it during his account of the occurrence; please note the reappearance of the detail regarding the attempt at impersonation of base staff:
Sky sources said the man pretended to be someone else to get through the checkpoint.
Sky’s defence correspondent Alistair Bunkall said: “I have been told by the Ministry of Defence in London that one individual is in custody with Suffolk Police.
“It was described to me as some sort of argument at the base gates. There were reports of shots fired. The situation is ongoing.
When the base gets placed on lockdown people have to stay in their offices; you turn off the lights, you lock the doors, you draw the curtains or blinds around the windows to make it look like no one is around.”
In short: during a lockdown, base staff isolate themselves.
On Sunday 17th December, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, the international airport, suffered a power outage at about 1pm that would go on for another 11 hours until the very early hours of Monday 18th December. During this time, planes were grounded, and the first flight to depart after the crisis had passed was one that took off at 12.56 am, Monday morning.
And yet, at 6.27pm, on that same Sunday evening, a cargo plane belonging to an Israeli company, CAL Cargo Airlines, flew out of ATL (Hartsfield-Jackson) ultimately on its way to Tel Aviv via Liege, Belgium, and Larnaca, Cyprus. Moreover, and this is verified by the author’s own investigations, the plane landed at Atlanta just after 1pm – as the airport was going into a blackout. The reader can peruse the source of this information where the author found it here, and here. There are aspects that make for very interesting reading, such as the case made for the realistic unlikelihood of a power outage given back-up facilities, and the status enjoyed by CAL Cargo – which to be fair, is presumably far from being unique – whereby operations are to a large part without customs supervision for simplicity of process.
However, FBEL doesn’t subscribe to any of the speculation about the nature of the cargo that the reader may find on the pages linked to, either in the body of the articles, or in the comments underneath. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that a Boeing 747, with the tail number 4X-ICB, landed and took off from Atlanta airport as described above because the author checked the flight history of the plane at the FlightRadar24 website. It is still not clear to the author whether cargo planes were exempt from the grounding orders; the reportage that the author reads across corporate-media only mentions the turmoil caused to passenger traffic. Having said that, this plane was delayed by nearly 5 hours before it departed, and this suggests that cargo traffic had been affected by the blackout – as such, why did the grounding order suddenly not apply to this plane when it still applied for other flights?
The finer details of the plane’s history (found in the “playback” facility for each flight) showed that it reached Liege at 7.14am, GMT. The local time at Liege is one hour ahead, and this is why the overview of the flight history of 4X-ICB – see image below – must give the status as landed at 8:16am.
The plane then took off from Liege at 13.35 GMT (14.35 local time) and arrived at Larnaca, at 17.07 GMT (19.07 local time – according to the “playback” in-detail data). It looks like it then flew to Tel Aviv, arriving at 20.17 GMT (22.17 local time). The author notices that the table doesn’t give the scheduled times of departure or the scheduled times of arrival for the parts of the journey into Larnaca and Tel Aviv. Quite interesting too is the fact that plane appears to have left Liege while the lockdown was in place just across the North Sea (so to speak) in Mildenhall – in fact, 5 minutes before Suffolk police were made aware of the incident, which is when it became official – where nobody was allowed to look out of the windows to see what was going on.
The reason why we should look for connected significance in the activity at Mildenhall, while somebody with the executive power to do it at the Federal Aviation Administration cleared an uninspected Israeli freighter plane to fly out of an “all planes grounded” airport so that they can progress on their way to Tel Aviv, is because of what happened in 2006. Back then, the US military stopped off to refuel at British air bases as they took munitions into the war zone that was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. These flights first came as routine into Prestwick – a civilian airport – but were said to have “violated normal procedures” (the author is not sure how) and the Scottish Labour MPs that ruled Britain at the time got nervous. Some flights were diverted to Mildenhall; the cargo was described by local press as “hazardous material bound for Israel”.
A member of staff at RAF Mildenhall told the Press Association that one plane operated by US cargo firm Atlas Air was on the runway – but they could not say what was inside it.
Atlas Air is being used for two hazardous material flights from Texas to Tel Aviv, and planes were due to fly into Prestwick over the weekend – but they were diverted to a military base elsewhere in the UK, according to a source at Preswtick.
An official operations spokesman at RAF Mildenhall, which has one of the biggest runways in Europe, later refused to confirm or deny the hazardous material flights had been diverted from Prestwick to Mildenhall.
It is not sure exactly what is on board the planes, but their dangerous contents needed a special exemption from the Civil Aviation Authority, which was approved.
Should we be suspicious? The answer is definitely yes. But further data is required.
