Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
April 27, 2010

Northcom has unexpectedly withdrawn from participation in National Level Exercise (NLE) with FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Defense announced on April 26 it was decoupling its Ardent Sentry exercise from the National Level Exercise.

	NLE 10 planned to simulate a dirty bomb terror attack in Las Vegas.

Ardent Sentry is a Joint Chiefs of Staff directed and Northcom sponsored “homeland defense” exercise. It is one of a number of DoD and Homeland Security exercises that blur the boundaries between the Pentagon, the federal government, and state and local governments under the guise of combating terrorism and responding to natural disasters.

The Pentagon said it decided against the exercise after Las Vegas, the planned site for a post-nuclear-attack response exercise, pulled out in November, fearing a negative impact on its struggling business environment, according to the Washington Times. Officials said a new site could not be found.

“The official also said the Northern Command’s exercise plans for ‘cooping’ — continuity of operations, during which commanders go to off-site locations — also had been scratched,” writes Rowan Scarborough for the newspaper.

“One thing is definite about this year’s federal play-acting exercise to assess national emergency preparedness: A faux radioactive nuke, or ‘dirty bomb,’ will not be blowing up the Las Vegas Strip in May,” the Christian Science Monitor reported on March 30. “Sen. Harry Reid (D) of Nevada, in the midst of battling for the White House’s healthcare reforms, wrote late last year that to ‘simulate a nuclear detonation in the heart of the city would unacceptably harm the Southern Nevadan economy.’”

On April 2, the Washington Post reported the federal government was considering whether to scale back NLE 10. “The decisions are playing into a quiet debate about the future of the large-scale national exercises,” the newspaper noted.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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On April 14, the Public Intelligence website posted a story indicating it had received a message from FEMA requesting the removal of a document entitled “National Level Exercise 2010 (NLE 10) Exercise Overview,” a ten page document consisting of approximately 20 PowerPoint slides.

“The contents of the brief are basically a calender of potential dates for the exercise and very brief descriptions of some preliminary plans for the exercise,” notes Public Intelligence. “The document has already been seen by a large number of people and has been discussed on a variety of websites and forums, which include mirrors in some cases.”

Public Intelligence also published the National Level Exercise 2010 Training Manual.

A number of people have warned that the NLE 10 exercise might “go live” in the same way drills went live on September 11, 2001, most notably Tripod. Other drills and exercises dealing with hijacked airplanes were also conducted weeks and days prior to the attack.

Did Reid’s rejection of running a dirty bomb attack simulation in Las Vegas prompt Northcom to back out of the exercise? Or did the attention of the alternative media and speculation about the possibility of a nuclear exercise going live have something to do with the decision?

FEMA’s sensitivity over the posting of NLE 10 documents on the Public Intelligence site is indicative. Is it possible all the attention is getting to them? Or was a false flag attack designed to crack down on domestic political activity seriously threatening the establishment canceled or rescheduled?

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