Kinda like they did in Boston??? They are going to keep practicing until they get it right...

HEADS UP! Denver, Portsmouth, N.H., and D.C. - Large-scale, 10-day terrorism-response exercises

By David Ruppe

The federal government has begun preparing three U.S. cities for large-scale, 10-day terrorism-response exercises scheduled this month.

Beginning sometime between May 7 and May 29, local, state and top level federal authorities will respond to simulated weapons of mass destruction attacks in three cities — Denver, Portsmouth, N.H., and the Washington, D.C.-area.

Denver or Portsmouth will face either a simulated biological or a chemical weapons attack. The D.C. metropolitan area will respond to a radiological attack drill — which could range from simply an exposed container of radioactive material to a small nuclear detonation.

Looking for Realism

The congressionally mandated exercises are intended to examine how well local, state and federal authorities are prepared to respond to and together deal with the consequences of a weapons of mass destruction attack.

“The goal of the exercise is to assess the nation’s crisis consequence management capacity under extraordinarily stressful conditions,” the Department of Justice said in a statement released Thursday.

Specific dates and characteristics of the exercise are being withheld from participants, to make the tests as realistic as possible.

Link:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=94708&page=1#.UXQ-XUpNGdw


RELATED ARTICLE FROM PREVIOUS POST:

Was the Boston Bombing a “Dry-Run Disaster” Gone Live?

Victory Post – by Lucas Bowser

...Because the mainstream media outlets continue to treat questions concerning the possibility of false flag terrorism in the Boston Bombing as absurd, the alternative media is left with the job of investigating this angle. For those considering this possibility, the evidence of drills is key in determining if the attacks might have been carried out through the establishment bureaucracy. So how likely is it that there were drills being run at the Boston Marathon?

A 2008 article from the Boston Globe indicates that it is very likely, as it explains the value of holding disaster drills during massive events like the Boston Marathon. The article by Arnold Bogis titled, “Marathon as a dry-run disaster” states ”today thousands of runners and hundreds of thousands of spectators are unwittingly taking part in a planned disaster.” While that may sound dangerous, Bogis assures us that the people are not only safe but they are actually making the “citizens of Greater Boston safer in case of a natural catastrophe or terrorist attack.”

As a former policy analyst for a Department of Homeland Security grant at George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, Bogis goes on to explain that organizers see these, “annual gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people” as perfect opportunities to, “evaluate new technologies” and “exercise disaster plans.” He states that to successfully manage the marathon, public safety agencies, “must have relationships…with a diverse set of private organizations” so that, “When a real disaster strikes, these contacts can be called upon to lend needed supplies and other assistance.” He finishes the article by saying:

“Massachusetts is better prepared for a real disaster because every Patriot’s Day and Fourth of July is treated as a ‘disaster.’ Instead of constant warnings about the inevitability of another terrorist attack or natural catastrophe, the public would be better served if this type of local homeland security innovation were promoted and adopted elsewhere.”

Every Patriot’s Day is treated as a disaster? Is there any reason to believe that this wasn’t the case this year? Arnold Bogis updates us in a Homeland Security blog in April of 2011with an article titled, “The Boston Marathon: In preparedness, the old is new again.” His blog post outlines, “similarities between what (Presidential Policy Directive 8 ) calls for and the actions of Boston officials in preparing for and running the Boston Marathon as a ‘planned disaster.’” He explains:

“…today, in addition to being Tax Day, is Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts and the day on which the Boston Marathon is run. Why is this relevant to homeland security? As I wrote in and op-ed in the Boston Globe a few years ago: Today thousands of runners and hundreds of spectators are unwittingly taking part in a planned disaster.”

A recent ESPN article backs this up saying that, “… in recent years the Boston Marathon has become a training ground for state and local officials to develop their response to large-scale catastrophe, whether man-made (like terrorism) or natural (like an extreme heat wave.)” It goes on to say that the 2008 marathon turned into, “something of an anti-cataclysm laboratory as local agencies cooperated with tech companies and research facilities, bringing an impressive array of hardware to defend the event from disaster.”

According to the article, similar efforts were made at the 2009 marathon when, “the City of Boston first used an ‘enhanced situational awareness’ system developed by Raytheon.” The project named Athena, “integrated video, mapping and tracking software across the city’s police, fire and port security departments into one set of information that any public safety official could use.”

The dry-run disaster training continued into 2012 when the marathon, “deployed the Next-Generation Incident Command System…” The NICS is a, “sort of real-time virtual whiteboard developed by the Lincoln Laboratory, a federally funded research center at MIT.”

So while the public thinks of the Boston Marathon as a yearly sporting event, the government views it as a yearly disaster planning/counter terrorism exercise. Since these exercises have been carried out from at least 2007 to 2012, it seems perfectly reasonable to believe they would have had similar drills this year. In fact a local Boston news station, Local15TV.com, covered a reliable eyewitness report of this kind of drill taking place at the time of the event. University of Mobile’s Cross Country Coach, Alastair Stevenson told the local newscasters that, “They kept making announcements on the loud speaker that it was just a drill and there was nothing to worry about. It seemed like there was some sort of threat, but they kept telling us it was just a drill.”

Read the whole article:
http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/was-the-boston-bombing-a-dry-run-disaster-gone-live/41707