CIA left explosive material on school bus after training exercise

[Octafish]

One unimagined reason why the CIA was chartered to operate only overseas.

CIA left explosive material on school Loudon bus after training exercise

By Clarence Williams and Moriah Balingit
The Washington Post March 31 at 7:25 PM

The CIA left “explosive training material” under the hood of a Loudoun County school bus after a training exercise last week, a bus that was used to ferry elementary and high school students to and from school on Monday and Tuesday with the material still sitting in the engine compartment, according to the CIA and Loudoun County officials.

The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and the CIA said in statements Thursday that the explosive material was left behind after a training exercise at Briar Woods High School during spring break. The CIA said it was a training scenario for explosives-detecting dogs.

CIA officials said in a statement that the material “did not pose a danger to passengers on the bus,” which was used on March 28 and 29. Authorities held a joint training program at Briar Woods from March 21 to 24.

Loudoun schools spokesman Wayde Byard said the CIA indicated the nature of the material but asked the school system not to disclose it. Byard described it as a “putty-type” material designed for use on the battlefield and which requires a special detonator; such putty, or plastic, explosives — including the well-known C-4 — are used in demolition and are considered stable.

SNIP...

CIA officials acknowledged the error in a statement and confirmed that an agency canine unit ran a training exercise with local agencies last week in the county. Agency officials said they were notified by Loudoun officials Wednesday and coordinated with them to recover the material.

CONTINUED...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/cia-left-explosive-material-on-loudoun-school-bus-after-training-exercise/2016/03/31/428f9824-f78d-11e5-a3ce-f06b5ba21f33_story.html

PS: This is an example of why President Truman said the CIA was created to gather intelligence. Period.

[LiberalEsto]

1. Another fine result from the George Bush Center for Intelligence

[Octafish]

2. Always wondered why they named it after a guy who headed the organization for 11 months...

...and 20 days. Poppy must have done something else to earn the honor.

Here's what former President Harry S Truman had to say just after the assassination of President Kennedy -- at a time when NO ONE EXCERPT ALLEN DULLES (and Friends, of course) knew about the 1960 CIA-Mafia assassination contracts "targetting" Fidel Castro and Cuba's leadership.

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

One month after the assassination, President Truman expressed public concern CIA had strayed off the reservation from intelligence gathering of foreign news sources to cloak-and-dagger operations. Time -- and the Church Committee -- has since shown CIA operated, illegally, domestically.

[eridani]

3. CIA Plastic Explosives Found in Virginia School Bus Engine Compartment by District Mechanic

http://www.nationofchange.org/news/2016/04/03/plastic-explosives-found-virginia-school-bus-engine-compartment-district-mechanic/

If the goal is testing the ability of dogs to detect hidden explosives, there is no need to run that test in a real school and in the engine compartments of real buses that transport real children, or to place such charges, as the CIA also reportedly did, in hidden locations inside a real school building. (Actually, since what’s being tested is the dogs’ smelling ability, real C-4 wasn’t needed either — only objects that had been in placed in contact with the compound, or wrappers from the charges that would have carried the odor on them.) People may benefit in training exercises when the tests are tricked out to appear more real-life, but dogs don’t need that kind of reality-theater environment to hone or test their skills. Any old bus, or for that matter a rental truck, could have been used for the job. The engine compartment for a truck is exactly the same as for a bus, and dogs don’t care whether the body color of a vehicle being searched is yellow or not (they’re color-blind after all!), or whether it has a big box behind the cab, or two rows of seats. Ditto to using a functioning school building. Any building, including one of the CIA’s own buildings at its Langley headquarters, or on “The Farm” where agents are trained, would serve as well as a hiding place for explosive charges.

At best, using a real local school and real schoolbuses was an idiotic decision by CIA administrators.

Plastic explosive, as the Washington Post explained in a lengthy if fairly credulous article on the incident, while highly explosive, is also quite stable, requiring both a very high temperature and a shock wave to explode. The compound is, however, also flammable, and even if it didn’t explode if ignited, would act as an accelerant if there were an engine fire on a bus, or somewhere in a school building, making such a fire far worse and far harder to control. Plus, while this is being called a test, and while we are being assured that there was no detonator included along with the planted charges, how do we really know that is true? After all, the whole idea of using a real school and real schoolbuses was to simulate reality. How far did the testers want to take that reality?

Did the same people who thought it was important for the K-9 dogs to have yellow buses to work with think they should also see wires and detonators hooked up to the charges they were sniffing for? When something this apparently stupid is done, anything is possible, and given the CIA’s obsessive secrecy, we’re not going to get an answer unless some public body (Congress?, a Virginia legislative committee?) investigates and demands answers under oath.

[Octafish]

4. Why is the CIA conducting ''K-9'' operations in the USA on school buses?

The whole thing stinks. And Lindorff raises THE issue:

The CIA is the last agency that should be relied on to investigate itself about anything.

Excellent analysis on WHY something stinks so very much when it comes to secret government.

Thank you, eridani!