Super Bowl Is Better Protected Than Our Troops
This year’s Super Bowl in Las Vegas has better protections against rogue drones than the many small U.S. bases in the Middle East like Tower 22, where three American soldiers were killed by a kamikaze drone last month due to minimal anti-drone defenses, as I reported at The Intercept.
Unlike Tower 22, this year’s Super Bowl will enjoy a host of “hardened” measures including electromagnetic weapons that can incapacitate drones. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas this week declared the area around Allegiant Stadium a “no drone zone,” saying that his agency, together with the FBI and even the military, has been preparing for 18 months to protect the event. All of this effort has gone into protecting the event against drone attacks despite Mayorkas conceding that the intelligence agencies have no evidence of any specific threat.
“To be clear: there are no known, credible, specific threats to the Super Bowl or to Las Vegas at this time — but we are vigilant, and we are prepared,” Mayorkas said at a Super Bowl Security Day press conference on Wednesday.
Compare this hypervigilance with the glib way the Biden administration has discussed the terrorist drone that slipped past military defenses and killed three Americans and injured 41 others.
“For the most part, our air defenses have been able to catch, or been able to destroy, any impact or any incoming, whether it be rockets or drones at bases,” said Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.
For the most part. You know, besides the deaths of three National Guard soldiers from Georgia. Working class people with families — the supposed focus of the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the working class.” But who cares about them?
Washington created a remote desert base in secret, sent soldiers there without announcing their deployment, hid the base through security classification, and took no emergency measures three months after small bases started to be attacked in our undeclared war with Iran, all of which resulted in the deaths.
And while the administration pretends it isn’t at war and makes excuses for this scandalous failure, the major media are gracious enough not to press them about it.
The sole piece of evidence Mayorkas provided that the Super Bowl might be attacked was an unidentified drone that flew over M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore during last week’s Ravens-Chiefs Championship game.
“It does not require much imagination to understand the significant threat such an incident could pose,” Mayorkas said.
Perhaps Mayorkas could talk to the Pentagon, which lacked the imagination to understand the significance of U.S. forces in the Middle East suffering over 150 attacks since the Gaza war broke out on October 7. There was every indication an attack like the one on Tower 22 was going to happen — militias had already used drones to attack outposts in Iraq and Syria — yet while the Pentagon scrambled multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers and fighter jets to support Israel, they just forgot the little guys, their beloved troops that they otherwise brag are their top priority. (While the Pentagon described the troops killed at Tower 22 as supporting the war on ISIS, they were actually fighting the Iran-backed groups the administration is pretending we aren’t at war with, as I reported in The Intercept on Friday.)
“We are not at war in the Middle East,” Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder said just before the attack on Tower 22.
So while working class people are stuck on the front lines of a war the White House refuses to acknowledge, the billionaire Taylor Swifts of the world will enjoy some of the most sophisticated counter-drone technology available. The Department of Homeland Security is even bragging that it is mobilizing over 385 personnel in Las Vegas.
That is more than the total number of soldiers and airmen at Tower 22.
Rest assured though, the Pentagon is prepared to use the Super Bowl to recruit an increasingly disillusioned cohort of young people who have no interest in joining the military. And it is moving mountains to make sure that those deployed in Jordan and other non-war zones will have an opportunity to watch the big game.
This post is the latest in a series about the completely avoidable deaths of the three soldiers Kennedy Sanders, Breonna Moffett and William Rivers. I am hell bent on getting justice for them, please help me do that by becoming a paid subscriber and by posting this article to social media. I know for a fact the Pentagon is sweating about all this — Ken
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ok i have an idea: we sprinkle all the swifties amongst all the bases and have taylor go on tour to each one