Reply #82: Warren Pease had an interesting take about a similar operation in Portland.

[MinM]

Enumerating the reasons why Portland is a prime candidate for 'operations' such as these:

Why Portland?

Well, why not? Somebody's got to be the target. Putting random chance aside, there are several good reasons why Portland was chosen to host this year's main anti-terrorist event. We're told Portland's mayor and Oregon's governor actually requested that Portland be included in the exercises. I'm assuming those requests were made with one arm pinned behind their backs by an ex-pro wrestler turned spook who keeps raising the wrist just a tiny bit more...

So why is Portland on the short list for a simulated nuclear terrorist attack on a major American city that may just "go live?" First, it's reachable by water, which preserves the old "suitcase nuke delivered by boat to a harbor near you" scenario we've all heard for years. Second, it's among the bluest of American coastal cities and, while San Francisco must present a tempting target, it's home to several major banks, insurance companies and other GOP infrastructure favorites. Third, LA and Seattle, a couple more anti-GOP cities with bull's-eyes on their civic centers, are too strategic to what's left of the economy. And fourth, Portland's kind of . . . disposable...

And to top it off, people in Portland don't seem to respond with the appropriate levels of hysteria to things like Islamic radicals, phony wars on terror, color-coded alerts or the predictive rumblings of Chertoff's gut. They're more inclined to be concerned about the US shift from democratic republic to national security state, environmental abuse sanctioned and exacerbated by the Bush administration, the vanishing Constitution, massive corruption and profiteering both within the administration and among their favorite cronies -- and other stuff nobody's supposed to notice.

So, is Portland the scene of the "next 9/11?" This map depicts ground zero, the immediate kill zone, the less lethal surrounding areas and the projected path of the radiation plume. This is from a report called "The Day After: Action Following a Nuclear Blast in a U.S. City"] authored by a think tank at Harvard called the Belfer Center and released in May of this year. Interestingly, Portland is only identifiable by street names and knowledge of local geography. Two similar blast area maps from the same source are clearly labeled "Washington, D.C."...