Author Archives: Denise Simon

Paris Attacks Details Emerge

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  1. day after the attacks in Paris, raids were conducted in Belgium.  

Belgium’s justice minister the VRT network that several arrests were made in Brussels after a car with Belgian license plates was seen close to the Bataclan theater in Paris on Friday night, one of the places where victims were killed.

He said it was a rental vehicle and police organized several raids in the St. Jans Molenbeek neighborhood in Brussels on Saturday.

2. Countless migrants have found their way to Greece and continues their way into Europe including one of the Paris attackers.

The holder of a Syrian passport found near the body of one of the gunmen who died in Friday night’s attacks in Paris passed though Greece in October, a Greek minister said.  He traveled through the Greek island of Leros.

“The holder of the passport passed through the island of Leros on Oct. 3, 2015, where he was identified according to EU rules,” said Greece’s deputy minister in charge of police, Nikos Toskas, in a statement.

A Greek police source said the passport’s owner was a young man who had arrived in Leros with a group of 69 refugees and had his fingerprints taken by authorities there. Police declined to give his name.

Toskas did not know if the passport was checked by other countries through which the holder possibly passed on his way to France. The police source said French authorities had asked other countries in Europe, including Greece, to check on the passport.

3. While the shock of the Paris attacks continues, the United States conducted another airstrike in Libya against Islamic State. The target was Abu Nabil known as Wissma Najm Abd Zayd al Zubaydi, a senior Islamic State leader in Libya. He is dead and was responsible for the murder of dozens of Egyptian Coptic Christians on the shores of Tripoli last February. Libya matters because ‘Libya is a double-barreled existential crisis for the European Union. First there’s the humanitarian aspect of how to handle the torrent of migrants heading north. In this Brussels seems to have opted for a good cop/bad cop strategy of taking in a greater number of refugees and blowing up the smugglers’ boats respectively. Yet the bad cop doesn’t have a clue (it’s impossible to identify a smuggler’s boat since they’re often purchased from fisherman hours before a crossing) and the audience of EU member states has learned how to shut out the good cop’s lectures.

Brussels has proposed a quota system whereby member states would be asked to take in 40,000 refugees. In theory this would distribute refugees more evenly among the bloc, away from the countries at the frontlines of the influx and towards those with less of a problem. But the plan has already run into a wall of opposition from an immigration-wary membership. France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and various central and eastern European countries have come out against the proposal, setting the stage for another nationalist revolt against Brussels. In this we see how refugees can put added strain on a bloc that is bitterly divided on issues of immigration.’

And then there’s the elephant in the room, or the biggest political crisis of all: How can this be happening in a country just 450 miles from Europe’s southern shores? If there was ever an opportunity for the European Union to demonstrate the will and means to assert itself on the world stage, it’s in Libya – a country that certain EU member states are directly culpable in bringing to its present state. Though he was a monster through and through, Gaddafi presided over a stable Libya that exported 1.6 million barrels of oil per day, much of it to Europe. That the union is incapable of even attempting a serious, coordinated strategy to redress the current situation is the most damning fact of all. It suggests that no matter how proximate or severe, there’s no crisis that can break the ‘sleeping beauty’ of the European Union out of its geopolitical slumber.’

4. There are implications for other countries in Europe. Gatwick airport in the UK  was closed earlier due to a man with a weapon. A French passenger plane was grounded due to a threatening Tweet and Poland is refusing to adhere to refugee migrants in the wake of the Paris attacks.

5. Finally and most terrifying yet is the fact of Syrian refugees that arrived in New Orleans. NEW ORLEANS, LA (WVUE) –

The flood of refugees migrating from the terror in Syria and Afghanistan has begun to have a trickle effect in the New Orleans area.

 

“We had served two families, we’re expecting one more soon, and we do not know how many more, but we expect more,” said Martin Gutierrez of Catholic Charities, which is part of the Archidiocese of New Orleans.

Catholic Charities has targeted services for helping refugees.

“So it’s a matter of uniting the families, which is something that the church really promotes, obviously. Some of them don’t have relatives and we try to help them become integral parts of our communities,” Gutierrez said.

But some have argued against the U.S. accepting Syrian refugees, fearing terrorists might slip through the cracks. We turned to former New Orleans FBI chief and anti-terrorism expert Jim Bernazzani for insight on whether that’s a legitimate concern. Before coming to New Orleans, Bernazzani worked to ramp up the nation’s anti-terror strategies after 911.

“If I was in charge of ISIL, logistically I’d take advantage of this situation and put my people in, into the United States,” Bernazzani said. “Now with that said, the FBI is on top of this big time with our Joint Terrorism Task Force and we have what’s called a Terrorist Screening Center that these individuals will be run through.”

But make no mistake, not every refugee seeking admission to the U.S. would face such scrutiny.

“It’s going to be the 18- to 45-year-old male for the most part,” he said. “It’s a percentage game. It’s not fail-safe, but it’s a percentage game.”

Still, as more of the refugees take up residency in the New Orleans area, Bernazzani discourages fear.

“These are just people from another country trying to escape misery by virtue of a civil war,” he said. “We had our own civil war, and so I wouldn’t be worried, but I would be vigilant,” he said.

As local humanitarian agencies continue to serve refugees from Syria who find their way here, “there are multiple background checks that are done on these families and it is part of our  Christian faith to welcome the stranger,” said Gutierrez.

*** Reuters: A man arrested in Germany’s southern state of Bavaria in early November after guns and explosives were found in his car may be linked to Friday’s deadly assault in Paris, Bavaria’s state premier said on Saturday.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attacks in which gunmen wearing suicide bombing belts killed 127 people in several locations in Paris on Friday.

“We have an arrest through the dragnet, where there are reasonable grounds for presuming that it might be related to the matter,” Horst Seehofer said in a speech at a local party congress of the Christian Democrats.

A spokesman for the Bavarian police said they arrested the 51-year-old on Nov. 5 on a motorway near the town of Rosenheim after investigators found eight machine guns, several handguns and explosives in his VW Golf.

Bayerischer Rundfunk, which was first to break news of the arrest on Saturday, said that the man was a possible accomplice of the Paris killers, but the police spokesman dismissed this as “pure media speculation”.

***

Heavy: The Islamic State has officially claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris. It is the first time that ISIS has officially claimed an attack in Europe. The statement was released by ISIS in French:

isis, isil, is, islamic state, daesh, syria, iraq, terrorism

An English translation provided by SITE reads:

In the name of Allah, the All Merciful, the Very Merciful.

The Very High All Said: “It is He who expelled the ones who disbelieved among the People of the Scripture from their homes at the first gathering. You did not think they would leave, and they thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah ; but [the decree of] Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts [so] they destroyed their houses by their [own] hands and the hands of the believers. So take warning, O people of vision.” Surah 59 verse 2.

In a blessed attack for which Allah facilitated the causes for success, a faithful group of the soldiers of the Caliphate, may Allah dignify it and make it victorious, launched out, targeting the capital of prostitution and obscenity, the carrier of the banner of the Cross in Europe, Paris… Youths who divorced the world and went to their enemy seeking to be killed in the cause of Allah, in support of His religion and His Prophet, Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him, and his charges, and to put the nose of His enemies in the ground. So they were honest with Allah, we consider them thusly, and Allah conquered through their hands and cast in the hearts of the Crusaders horror in the middle of their land, where eight brothers wrapped in explosive belts and armed with machine rifles, targeted sites that were accurately chosen in the heart of the capital of France, including the Stade de France during the match between the Crusader German and French teams, where the fool of France, Francois Hollande, was present.

[They also targeted] the Bataclan Conference Center, where hundreds of apostates had gathered in a profligate prostitution party, and other areas in the 10th and 11th and 18th [arrondissements] and in a coordinated fashion. So Paris shook under their feet, and its streets were tight upon them, and the result of the attacks was the death of no less than 100 Crusaders and the wounding of more than those, and unto Allah is all praise and gratitude.

Allah had granted our brothers their wish and gave them what they loved, for they detonated their belts in the gatherings of the disbelievers after running out of ammunition, we ask Allah to accept them among the martyrs and make us follow them.

Let France and those who walk in its path know that they will remain on the top of the list of targets of the Islamic State, and that the smell of death will never leave their noses as long as they lead the convoy of the Crusader campaign, and dare to curse our Prophet, Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him, and are proud of fighting Islam in France and striking the Muslims in the land of the Caliphate with their planes, which did not help them at all in the streets of Paris and its rotten alleys. This attack is the first of the storm and a warning to those who wish to learn.

Allah is the greatest.

“And to Allah belongs [all] honor, and to His Messenger, and to the believers, but the hypocrites do not know.” Surah 63 verse 8

Before the official announcement, ISIS affiliated accounts on Twitter reportedly claimed the attacks for the Islamic State. They used the hashtag “Paris on Fire” in Arabic to celebrate the attacks, the same hashtag ISIS used to celebrate the Charlie Hebdo terror attack.

A suspended Twitter account affiliated with the Islamic State allegedly tweeted about the Paris terrorist attacks before they began and said that Rome, London, and possibly Washington, D.C. are next.

An alleged screenshot by Anonymous affiliated @AnonRevolt_ of the suspended user @isis_9966 appears to be a warning to Parisians at 10:34 p.m. Paris time on November 13.

The alleged tweet by ISIS also threatened that there would be attacks in London and Rome on November 14 or 15. This was noticed by @VestraPvP.

ISIS affiliated accounts on Twitter claiming the Paris attacks for the Islamic State are using the hashtag “Paris on Fire” in Arabic, the same hashtag ISIS used to celebrate the Charlie Hebdo terror attack.

Tim Ramadan, reporter for Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, states that further hashtags under “Paris on Fire” also include “London on Fire”, “Rome on Fire”, and “Washington on Fire.”

 

 

France Closes Borders, First Since 1944 Due to Attacks

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Barack Obama made a statement regarding the 8 attacks in Paris and included the word terror and it was an attack on humanity. Well the West is part of that humanity and the leader of France, Francois Hollande declared the borders closed. If any of the U.S. presidential candidates were smart they would declare our own borders closed immediately and call for some amendments to immigration law stopping birthright citizenship.

Who in America is invested in the fight against ISIS and the caliphate? Consider this on existing government leaders and those candidates.

It is said that all attackers are dead, that is yet something that needs to be challenged.

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  1. In July, ISIS called for attacks in Paris and blood will fill the streets.
  2. ISIS has finally declared responsibility for the attack in Paris.
  3. Just this past week in cooperation with British intelligence, a drone strike killed Jihadi John, the ISIS beheader. He has a son, born in Syria who is now a defacto citizen of the UK as his now dead father was.
  4. Former president of France, Sarkozy has called this a terror attack on France, it is.

    Sarkozy: ‘The Terrorists Have Declared War on France’

    Nicolas Sarkozy, the former president of France, wrote in a post on Twitter on Friday night, “The terrorists have declared war on France.”

    “Our response must express a firmness and determination at every moment,” he said.

  5. There will be more attack, on the heels of downing the Russian plane, the twin bombings in Beirut and now Paris.

    SINONE, Iraq — The Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for the catastrophic attacks in the French capital, calling them “the first of the storm” and mocking France as a “capital of prostitution and obscenity,” according to statements released in multiple languages on one of the terror group’s encrypted messaging accounts.

    The remarks came in a communiqué published in Arabic, English and French on the Islamic State’s Telegram account and then distributed via their supporters on Twitter, according to a transcript provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda.

    An earlier statement was released but was deemed unlikely to be authentic because of anomalies in the language used, as well as an error in a date provided, according to experts on jihadist propaganda.

    The statement was released on the same Telegram channel that was used to claim responsibility for the crash of a Russian jet over the Sinai Peninsula two weeks ago, killing 224 people. As in that case, it made the announcement in multiple languages and audio recordings.

  6. Doing forensic investigations on the attack locations in Paris, at least 3 different passports were found, France, Egypt and Syria.
  7. There are Americans among the injured from the Paris attack.
  8. The French intelligence and military are on the streets looking for accomplices.
  9. This attack was not an intelligence failure but more a failure to take the data seriously and with robust analysis. One attacker was a Frenchman and known terrorist due to fingerprint data.
  10. The most deaths and injuries occurred at the concert hall where the jihadis were calm and systematic in their executions.

How Emwazi, the ISIS Be-header Met his Demise

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Score one for the intelligence community and the drone strike…

How the US and UK tracked down and killed Jihadi John

The killing of Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John, was the culmination of 15 months of intensive intelligence work by MI6, GCHQ and the CIA

By Gordon Rayner, Chief Reporter

5:46PM GMT 13 Nov 2015

For Jihadi John, death could not have been more different than that of his victims. While his hostages suffered unimaginable horror as he beheaded them, for him the end came instantaneously and without warning.

For more than a year British and US intelligence agencies had been trying to gain live information on the whereabouts of the masked man whose first victim, the American journalist James Foley, was murdered in a video posted on YouTube in August 2014.

Their efforts finally paid off shortly before midnight on Thursday, when intelligence pinpointed him to a car in the centre of Raqqa, Syria, within a short walk of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s headquarters in the old governorate building.

Mohammed Emwazi – his real name was finally confirmed by David Cameron for the first time today – is understood to have been located by either MI6 or GCHQ, either through a human source on the ground or by monitoring his communications.

Emwazi beheaded (clockwise, from top left) David Haines, James Foley, Alan Henning, Peter Kassig and Steven Sotloff

The intelligence was passed on to the Pentagon, enabling the operators of an armed Predator drone already in the sky above Raqqa to spot the car in which he was travelling.

At 11.40pm Syrian time (8.40pm GMT) the order to kill was passed to the drone operators at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.

Controlling their drone via a satellite link, and using a second Reaper as a “spotter” plane, they selected their target and released a Hellfire missile from 10,000ft.

Experts say the Predator may have been several miles away at the time, invisible in the night sky. Its missile, travelling at Mach 1.3 (995mph) arrived at such speed that Emwazi would have known nothing before it struck. At 11.51pm the car, and its four occupants, were blown to pieces.

The result was described by one US official as a “flawless” strike, a “clean hit” that would have “evaporated” Emwazi, with no collateral damage. “We are 99 per cent sure we got him,” the official said.

Unconfirmed reports suggested another of those killed was another of the four British jihadis nicknamed “The Beatles” by their captives because of their English accents. Emwazi, 27, was given the nickname John after John Lennon.

Emwazi’s death, if confimed, was doubly symbolic for the allied forces that hunted him down. Not only was Isil’s main propaganda tool neutralised, but the location of the strike was within sight of two of the locations most strongly identified with the terrorist group.

The missile strike happened in or next to Clocktower Square, the roundabout chosen by Isil to carry out public executions.

In 2012, the roundabout was the location of the city’s first protests against Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, as a popular uprising spread across the country. By the summer of 2013, Isil had seized control of the city, and video footage from May of that year shows three rebel soldiers, blindfolded with a green rag reminiscent of the colours of the revolution, before being shot dead.

Emwazi is understood to have been travelling from the Isil headquarters, inside what was once the office of Raqqa’s city governor. He may also have been living in the building.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said its own sources had confirmed that a British jihadi had been killed in the strike. Rami Abdulrahman, director of the British-based group, said: “All the sources there are saying that the body of an important British Jihadi is lying in the hospital of Raqqa. All the sources are saying it is of Jihadi John but I cannot confirm it personally.”

A senior U.S. official said the drone strike was the result of “persistent surveillance” and that the Pentagon knew it was Emwazi when the shot was taken.

Drones routinely fly for 16 hours or more, and the drone that killed Emwazi could have been circling overhead for several hours, waiting for an opportunity, and is likely to have stayed overhead afterwards to see if anyone got out of the car alive.

Britain and America had always maintained they were working around the clock to find Emwazi, but the apparent extent of its surveillance capabilities over Raqqa had not been clear until now.

The strike suggests he was under tight surveillance, combining human informants with sophisticated technology.

 

The hunt for Mohammed Emwazi began at the end of 2012, when the security services first suspected he was in Syria. He had been reported missing by his family in August of that year, having left the family home in Queen’s Park, north London and lied about where he was going.

Jihadi John, the then unidentified Isil executioner, became a top priority for MI6 after his video of Foley’s beheading, titled A Message to America, was posted last year.

The first step was to identify the masked, black-clad figure in the footage. With only his eyes visible, intelligence officers on both sides of the Atlantic examined other clues, primarily his voice and accent, but also his skin colour, height, physique and vein patterns on his hands. By September 14 last year his name was known to the UK and US governments.

British and American special forces operating in Syria for the past year have been gathering human intelligence on senior jihadists, paying informers and carrying out snatch raids on low-level commanders who can then be interrogated.

Raqqa, however, has proved impossible for them to infiltrate, so instead an RAF Rivet Joint spy plane, based at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, has been crisscrossing Syria for more than a year, “hoovering up” calls and messages for analysis by spies.

Much of the communications chatter was analysed at Ayios Nikolaos, a top secret listening station in Cyprus and the largest UK overseas spy base.

Manned by UK military intelligence officers working for GCHQ, its highly sensitive dome shaped radars have the capability to “look out” over the horizon for up to 400 miles and pull in information from UK warships and submarines deployed in the region.

Despite reports that he had fled to Libya or had been expelled from Isil, the intelligence agencies remained confident he was still in Raqqa, even though he went quiet after his last beheadings, of two Japanese hostages in January.

An air strike targeting a German colleague of Emwazi last month may have been the first sign that Britain and America were hot on his trail, according to security expert Neil Doyle.

An air strike last month targeting a Denis Cuspert, a German associate of Emwazi who mixed in the same circles as him, may have been the first sign that Britain and America were hot on his trail.

David Cameron said Britain and the US had been working “literally around the clock to track him down”. He added: “This was a combined effort. And the contribution of both our countries was essential.”

Col Steve Warren, a spokesman for the US-led military coalition fighting Isil, said: “This is significant. He was somewhat of an Isil celebrity, somewhat the face of the organisation…he was a prime recruitment tool for the organisation. This guy was a human animal and killing him does probably make the world a little bit of a better place.”

He said coalition forces had been following Emwazi “for some time” and commanders had “great confidence” it was him before they gave the order to kill. The strike had been captured on video and there was no reason to believe any civilian casualties had been caught in the blast, Col Warren said.

White House, College Campuses, Rolling Stone Magazine

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Yup, I got a notion earlier today and with a few search terms and additional clicks….low and behold it seems it all began in 2013 and White House personnel and Joe Biden and Valerie Jarrett is at the core. The activists are invited to the White House to systematically launch protests at college campuses…..it is working.

From the White House website: Valerie Jarrett Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Senior Adviser and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement 

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  1. Remember that fake 9000 word fake rape story at the University of Virginia posted in Rolling Stone? White House Adviser Introduced Fake Rape Story’s Jackie to ‘Rolling Stone’   The story turned out to be a hoax; Jackie’s tale was fiction. Now, in court documents we learn that the author of the piece, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, learned about Jackie from Emily Renda, an adviser on the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, who told the Jackie story in Senate testimony months before the Rolling Stone story, Renda was also a UVA employee.  
  2. Then we have the Department of Education, which was headed by Arne Duncan and he recently stepped down. Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department’s civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Groves’ letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans’ report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article’s publication.
  3. Then we have Joe Biden and one of his top aides, Lynn Rosenthal. WASHINGTON — Vice President Joe Biden is losing his top adviser on violence against women, The Huffington Post has learned. Lynn Rosenthal, who has been a senior adviser to Biden since July 2009, will step down Friday. She is moving on to become the Vice President of External Affairs at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and will remain in Washington, D.C.

    Rosenthal has coordinated the White House’s efforts to reduce domestic violence homicides, address domestic violence in the workplace and raise awareness about the effects of violence on youth. She’s also served on the White House Council on Women and Girls.

    Violence against women is one of Biden’s signature issues. As a senator, he wrote the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, and he was instrumental in ushering through the law’s reauthorization as vice president in 2013, when House Republicans unexpectedly held it up over its inclusion of new protections for Native American victims of abuse.

    He regularly works to keep the issue in the spotlight. During remarks last month at the White House Tribal Nations Conference, he described domestic violence as an “epidemic” that “cuts to the very core of how we measure ourselves as a society.”

 

Drills on Homeland Have a Reason

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We are always suspicious and question what law enforcement is doing and why. We ask the same when it comes to the Department of Homeland Security and we do the same regarding the military. There were huge questions and theories when Operation Jade Helm was held in 5 Southern states this past summer.

Okay, it is good we question government, it is a duty yet there are reasons why events and activities do occur. Here are two reasons why which may help us come to understand motivations for exercises and training even in either rural or urban areas.

The fuel for a nuclear bomb is in the hands of an unknown black marketeer from Russia, U.S. officials say

The presence of identical fissile materials in three smuggling incidents indicates someone has a larger cache and is hunting for a buyer

With so many nuclear explosives held by governments around the world, US officials have long worried about the possibility of a terrorist-engineered nuclear or radiological blast within the United States. Multiple federal agencies have held almost 1,400 drills in cities around the country over the last decade to train local police and emergency personnel in how to behave after such a nightmare unfolds, according to a spokeswoman for the National Nuclear Security Administration.

CHISINAU, Moldova – The sample of highly-enriched uranium, of a type that could be used in a nuclear bomb, arrived here on a rainy summer day four years ago, in a blue shopping bag carried by a former policeman.

According to court documents, the bag quickly passed through the hands of three others on its way to a prospective buyer. It was not the first time such material had passed through this city, raising international alarms: It had happened twice before. And mysteriously, in all three cases, spanning more than a decade, the nuclear material appeared to have the same origin – a restricted military installation in Russia.

This news would quickly reach Washington. But that day, the first to pick up the blue bag was the wife of a former Russian military officer, who handed it off to a friend while she went shopping in this former Soviet city’s ragged downtown.

Not long afterward, a 57-year old lawyer named Teodor Chetrus, from a provincial town near the Ukrainian border, retrieved it and brought it to a meeting with a man named Ruslan Andropov. According to an account by Moldovan police, the two men had, earlier in the day, visited a local bank, where Chetrus confirmed that Andropov had deposited more than $330,000 as an initial payment.

Andropov next examined the contents of the bag: a lead-lined cylinder, shaped like a thermos. It was meant to be the first of several shipments of highly-enriched uranium totaling 10 kilograms (22 lbs), a senior investigator here said. That’s about a fifth of what might be needed to fuel a Hiroshima-sized nuclear explosion — but almost enough to power a more technically-advanced “implosion-style” nuclear bomb. The full story is a MUST read in its entirety and exceptional work from Public Integrity.

*** Then last week, there was yet another event off the coast of California that forced air traffic to be halted and re-routed as well as some automobile traffic. A peculiar set of beams of light were noted in the sky. Bigger questions were asked. Some thought the U.S. military was training to bomb the homeland. Ah….not so much.

There Is a Secret U.S. Spy Plane Flying Over the Pacific

Here’s what we know … and what we don’t

In 2013, the U.S. Air Force sent a secret spy plane out over the Pacific region. The unknown aircraft – possibly a drone – flew “national collection missions” – a euphemism for strategic intelligence against states like North Korea or China.

It was one of five different types of aircraft flying these missions. The Pentagon’s top headquarters asked the flying branch to use its U-2 Dragon Ladies and RC-135V/W Rivet Joints to take high resolution pictures and scoop up radio chatter, according to an official history of the Air Force’s Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency – a.k.a. AFISRA – for that year.

“Other USAF aircraft flying national collection missions included the RC-135U Combat Sent, the RC-135S Cobra Ball and the aforementioned [redacted],” the history stated.

So what is the mystery aircraft? The blacked-out portion of the document suggests the missing portion is five to seven characters long. With that in mind, the super secret RQ-170 Sentinel – a six character designation that would fit in the redacted segment – is one possibility.

Lockheed built an estimated 20 to 30 RQ-170s – also known as Wraiths– for the Air Force sometime in the early 2000s. The 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada owns all of these bat-winged pilotless spies.

In 2007, journalists first spotted the Wraith at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan, earning the nickname “the Beast of Kandahar.” On Dec. 4, 2009, the Air Force formally announced the Sentinel to the world … and little else.

That same year, the drones were flying missions in the Pacific from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam and Kunsan Air Base in South Korea, according to previous Air Force histories we obtained through FOIA. During the latter deployment, the Wraiths likely gathered information about North Korea’s nuclear, ballistic missile and space programs.

In December 2011, one RQ-170 crashed in Iran.

And as of April 2014, at least one of these stealthy flying wings was still on duty, according to an accident report in Combat Edge, Air Combat Command’s official safety magazine. ACC owns the bulk of the Air Force’s combat aircraft, including its spy planes and the RQ-170s.

If the RQ-170s are still in service, the flying branch would have every incentive to keep using them. And the Sentinels and their crews already had experience in the Asia-Pacific theater.

Of course, the censored plane could be something entirely new. For decades, the Pentagon and the CIA have repeatedly acknowledged advanced aircraft projects — after the fact — only to decline to release any significant information about them. Hat tip to War is Boring for doing the investigative work, the rest of the work is found here.