Tag Archives: Air Force

Top Secret military Vets refused government aid because there’s no record they worked at that base

Vets-denied-insurance

Important Takeaways:

  • Vets who served at top-secret Area 52 suffering from serious illnesses and can’t get health insurance
  • Air Force veterans who served at top-secret nuclear testing site Area 52 in Nevada say they are being denied health care after their time at the base left them riddled with tumors and other ailments.
  • Mark Ely, 63, said he is grappling with a litany of health problems from his assignment 40 years ago inspecting secretly obtained Soviet fighter jets stored in hidden hangars at the Tonopah Test Range, also known as Area 52, CBS News reported.
  • “It scarred my lungs. I got cysts on my liver. … I started having lipomas, tumors inside my body I had to remove. My lining in my bladder was shed,” he told CBS.
  • Even though a 1975 federal environmental assessment confirmed the presence of toxic radioactive material at the site, Ely said he is unable to get health coverage because his time at Area 52 — which he spent under an NDA — is not on his official service record.
  • In the 1975 report, the government reasoned that stopping work at Area 52 was “against the national interest” and that the ultimate “costs … are small and reasonable for the benefits received.”
  • “There’s a slogan that people say: ‘Deny, deny until you die.’ Kind of true here,” Ely said.
  • He has spent eight years looking for other veterans who worked at the site, and told CBS he came across “all kinds of cancers.”
  • While other government employees who were stationed in the area — mostly from the Department of Energy — have received $25.7 billion in federal assistance, Air Force vets like Ely and Crete don’t qualify for that aid because their time at the base is not on record, and they cannot prove they were there.

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World on edge of War; Biden cuts defense budget

Important Takeaways:

  • Russia is beating us in Ukraine. China’s Navy outnumbers the US. The Army is collapsing – and the Air Force is falling from the sky. So, as Biden inexplicably CUTS defense budgets, ANDREW NEIL blasts: Does he have a death wish?
  • From the very start of his State of the Union address last week, President Biden positioned himself as a war president.
  • He posed as the champion of freedom and democracy which are threatened across the globe by autocrats on the march
  • All the more remarkable then that, within days, the Biden administration produced plans for defense spending with all the hallmarks of a peace president who no longer thinks the US military need be a priority.
  • The autocrats must be both baffled and amused. The rest of us should be frightened and angry.
  • Biden proposes that defense spending should rise to $895 billion in the next (2025) financial year — an increase of barely 1 percent.
  • It’s not that there’s no extra money around. The Biden budget will add over a trillion to federal spending and take it to a record peacetime, non-pandemic share of GDP (25 percent).
  • Be in no doubt that the autocrats in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang are taking serious notice.
  • The Chinese Naval fleet is already bigger than America’s and is on target to be over 400-strong before the decade is out — a formidable armada that will undoubtedly be used to intimidate Taiwan.
  • Americans have rightly criticized the Europeans for putting welfare above military needs. But under Biden, America is doing the same — just another example of how he is ‘Europeanizing’ the USA.
  • Yet the Russian economy is now on a total war footing, able to resupply its invaders in Ukraine at a greater scale than we are resupplying Kyiv and, as America struggles to find an extra 1 percent for its military, China has just announced an increase of over 7 percent for its armed forces.

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Oh, one more thing! Chinese Balloon used US internet to communicate with China; Biden had no plans to tell public until it went viral

Jet-over-spy-balloon

Important Takeaways:

  • Intelligence officials have revealed a Chinese spy balloon that flew across the US for a week in February used an American internet service provider to communicate.
  • The balloon had drifted east and entered US airspace over Alaska on 28 January and was tracked as it flew over Malmstrom Air Force base in Montana, where nuclear assets are stored.
  • On 4 February, the Air Force sent an F-22 fighter jet armed with an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile to take the balloon down over water.
  • In a new report from NBC, the outlet cited two current and one former U.S. official familiar with the report as its source.
  • The report stated that the balloon was connected to a US-based company and communicating with China about its navigation.
  • It further stated that the connection ‘allowed the balloon to send burst transmissions or high-bandwidth collections of data over short periods of time’ to its home base in China.
  • The channel has not released the name of the company.
  • The unidentified internet service provider company has denied all such claims.
  • This comes days after it was revealed that officials in the Biden administration had planned to keep the Chinese spy balloon secret, with a top Air Force commander admitting the balloon exposed gaps in their intelligence gathering.
  • A source told NBC: ‘Before it was spotted publicly, there was the intention to study it and let it pass over and not ever tell anyone about it.’

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Ryan Graves Former F-18 Pilot and US Navy Veteran David Grusch will testify before congress on encounters with UFOs in the military

UFO Picture

Important Takeaways:

  • UFOs are an ‘open secret’ in the military: Whistleblowers to tell Congress TOMORROW that pilots are seeing unidentified craft all the time and share near-miss encounter with ‘dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere’
  • Unidentified flying objects are being seen so often they are an ‘open secret’ among US fighter pilots, whistleblowers will tell Congress tomorrow.
  • Three high-ranking Air Force and intelligence veterans will testify, under oath, about their first-hand knowledge about UFOs in a first-of-its-kind hearing in DC.
  • Lieutenant Ryan Graves, a former F-18 pilot with over a decade of service in the U.S. Navy, will testify that his squadron regularly detected unidentified craft while they were stationed off the coast of Virginia in 2014.
  • In his opening remarks, Graves will say that while most of the craft were detected on radar, they were also witnessed by pilots ‘occasionally up close’ with their own eyes. Lt Graves will say these became so common that, ‘over time, UAP sightings became an open secret among our aircrew.’
  • Along with the testimony from Graves, Congress will hear firsthand accounts from US Navy veteran fighter pilot Commander David Fravor, witness to the 2004 Nimitz ‘Tic Tac’ UFO.
  • Air Force and intelligence agency veteran David Grusch — whose jaw-dropping claims of an illegal UFO crash retrieval program operating within the classified world were made public this June – will also testify under oath.
  • Tim Burchett (R-Tenn), who is part of the committee, said: ‘The Pentagon and Washington bureaucrats have kept this information hidden for decades, and we’re finally going to shed some light on it.
  • ‘We’re bringing in credible witnesses who can provide public testimony because the American people deserve the truth. We’re done with the cover-ups.’
  • The congressman told the Event Horizon podcast this month that ‘we’ve been dealing [with government coverups] since 1947, probably since about 1897 in what was the Aurora Texas UFO crash.
  • ‘They [extraterrestrial craft] can travel light years or at the speeds that we’ve seen defy physics as we know it,’ Burchett said during the podcast.
  • ‘They can fly underwater and don’t show a heat trail.’
  • He continued to explain that if these otherworldly beings have technology unlike anything we know on Earth, then ‘they’ could ‘turn us into a charcoal briquette.’
  • ‘We are out of our league,’ the congressman continued. ‘We couldn’t fight them off if we wanted to. That’s why I don’t think they’re a threat to us, or they would already have been.’

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N.K. warplanes flew in formation of simulation of an air-to-ground attack near S.K. border

Revelations 6:3-4 “when he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 And out came another horse, bright red. Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people should slay one another, and he was given a great sword.

Important Takeaways:

  • North Korea flies 12 warplanes near South Korean border, prompting Air Force scramble
  • The South Korean military says it detected eight fighter jets and four bombers in the North Korean formation. South Korea’s flight of 30 warplanes did not engage the sortie, however, and only guarded the country’s airspace. The flight is only the latest aggression to come from Kim Jong Un’s regime, which has launched numerous ballistic missiles in recent weeks.

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Diversity Training at the Air Force Academy has cadets using Gender Neutral language

Romans 1:28 “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Air Force Academy diversity training tells cadets to use words that ‘include all genders,’ drop ‘mom and dad’
  • The slide presentation titled, “Diversity & Inclusion: What it is, why we care, & what we can do,” obtained by Fox News Digital, advises cadets to use “person-centered” and gender-neutral language when describing individuals.
  • “Some families are headed by single parents, grandparents, foster parents, two moms, two dads, etc.: consider ‘parent or caregiver’ instead of ‘mom and dad,'” the presentation states. “Use words that include all genders: ‘Folks’ or ‘Y’all’ instead of ‘guys’; ‘partner’ vs. ‘boyfriend or girlfriend.’”

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China sends fighter jets as U.S. health chief visits Taiwan

By Yimou Lee and Ben Blanchard

TAIPEI (Reuters) – Chinese air force jets briefly crossed the mid-line of the Taiwan Strait on Monday and were tracked by Taiwanese missiles, Taiwan’s government said, as U.S. health chief Alex Azar visited the island to offer President Donald Trump’s support.

Azar arrived in Taiwan on Sunday, the highest-level U.S. official to visit in four decades.

China, which claims the island as its own, condemned the visit which comes after a period of sharply deteriorating relations between China and the United States.

China, which had promised unspecified retaliation to the trip, flew J-11 and J-10 fighter aircraft briefly onto Taiwan’s side of the sensitive and narrow strait that separates it from its giant neighbor, at around 9 am (0100 GMT), shortly before Azar met Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s air force said.

The aircraft were tracked by land-based Taiwanese anti-aircraft missiles and were “driven out” by patrolling Taiwanese aircraft, the air force said in a statement released by the defense ministry.

China’s defense ministry did not immediately comment.

A senior Taiwan official familiar with the government’s security planning told Reuters that China was obviously “targeting” Azar’s visit with a “very risky” move given the Chinese jets were in range of Taiwan’s missiles.

The incursion was only the third time since 2016 that Taiwan has said Chinese jets had crossed the strait’s median line.

The Trump administration has made strengthening its support for the democratic island a priority, amid deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing, and has boosted arms sales.

“It’s a true honor to be here to convey a message of strong support and friendship from President Trump to Taiwan,” Azar told Tsai in the Presidential Office, standing in front of two Taiwanese flags.

Washington broke off official ties with Taipei in 1979 in favor of Beijing.

‘HUGE STEP’

Azar is visiting to strengthen economic and public-health cooperation with Taiwan and support its international role in fighting the novel coronavirus.

“Taiwan’s response to COVID-19 has been among the most successful in the world, and that is a tribute to the open, transparent, democratic nature of Taiwan’s society and culture,” he told Tsai.

Taiwan’s early and effective steps to fight the disease have kept its case numbers far lower than those of its neighbors, with 480 infections and seven deaths. Most cases have been imported.

The United States, which has had more coronavirus cases and deaths than any other country, has repeatedly clashed with China over the pandemic, accusing Beijing of lacking transparency.

Tsai told Azar his visit represented “a huge step forward in anti-pandemic collaborations between our countries”, mentioning areas of cooperation including vaccine and drug research and production.

Taiwan has been particularly grateful for U.S. support to permit its attendance at the World Health Organization’s decision-making body the World Health Assembly (WHA), and to allow it greater access to the organisation.

Taiwan is not a member of the WHO due to China’s objections. China considers Taiwan a Chinese province.

“I’d like to reiterate that political considerations should never take precedence over the rights to health. The decision to bar Taiwan from participating in the WHA is a violation of the universal rights to health,” Tsai said.

Azar later told reporters that at Trump’s direction, he and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had sought to restore Taiwan’s status as an observer at the WHA.

“But the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization have prevented that. This has been one of the major frustrations that the Trump administration has had with the World Health Organization and its inability to reform.”

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Yimou Lee; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Robert Birsel)

Military helps worn-out nurses, sicker patients in California COVID-19 effort

By Sharon Bernstein

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (Reuters) – All day long, as Air Force nurse Major Pinky Brewton cares for patients struggling to breathe in California’s COVID-19 ravaged San Joaquin Valley, fears for her family simmer underneath her cool exterior.

Once back in her Stockton hotel room, seeing her seven-year-old on Facetime, the relief is overwhelming.

“He’s breathing!” Brewton said. “That’s the first thing I see as a nurse. How well is my son breathing?”

Over the past two weeks, the U.S. Department of Defense has sent nearly 200 medics and logistics experts to the Valley. The military has also sent nearly 600 personnel to Texas, where a surge in COVID-19 cases is crushing hospitals along the Rio Grande Valley and elsewhere in the state.

The teams of nurses, doctors and technicians work extra shifts, treating sicker-than-usual hospital patients. Many are so weak from oxygen deprivation they can barely eat.

In the San Joaquin Valley agricultural region, intensive care units overflowed as cases surged earlier this summer. In some counties, as many as 28% of test results were positive.

At Dameron hospital in Stockton near the state capital of Sacramento, every nurse was soon deployed on a new COVID-19 floor, said Jennifer Markovich, the facility’s chief nursing officer.

“There wasn’t a slow ramp up. In the space of two weeks we just saw a significant increase in patients … and really started to see those staffing needs really escalate.”

CHAPLAINS, MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS

When staffing agencies lacked healthcare workers, the hospital turned to the state, Markovich said. Under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brewton’s team of 20 military nurses and respiratory therapists came on board in mid-July.

About 160 Air Force medical staff have been sent to California so far, with about 100 in San Joaquin Valley, coordinated by 25 U.S. Army logistics experts trained in responding to nuclear, chemical and biological attacks.

Chaplains and mental health experts were added to relieve stress in a system stretched to its limits.

The teams, mostly stationed at Travis Air Force Base north of San Francisco, were easily absorbed into the rotations and work cultures of the Valley hospitals, said Lieutenant Colonel Ryan Gassman, who commands the California teams.

“It’s not like we have any Air Force tents that are set up outside,” Gassman said. “We are truly jumping into the staff in each of these hospitals to help support in any way, shape or form that we can.”

In addition to five hospitals in the San Joaquin Valley, military teams have also been deployed to the Los Angeles area and Rancho Mirage in Riverside County east of Los Angeles.

COVID-19 cases in California began climbing after Memorial Day, which health officials attributed in part to family gatherings without masks or physical distancing measures. Statewide, cases have topped 500,000, and over 9,000 Californians have died.

California, Texas, Florida and Arizona are among several hotspot U.S. states for a second wave of coronavirus cases.

FRAGILE HOSPITALS

In the San Joaquin Valley, a perfect storm of cultural, political and economic issues led to a crush of cases in a fragile rural and smaller-city hospital system.

The region is heavily Latino, a group making up 39% of California’s population but accounts for 56% of COVID-19 infections and 46% of deaths in the most populous U.S. state. Agricultural businesses that have not provided protective equipment to workers, or implemented social distancing or rules requiring masks has led to increased infections. Large family gatherings and multi-generational households have led to fast and deadly transmission, often to vulnerable older relatives.

The Valley, which includes the oil drilling and agricultural area around Bakersfield, and farmlands around Fresno, is generally more conservative than the rest of the state, and many local and congressional leaders have opposed rules requiring masks and social distancing.

The resulting toll is stark. As of Friday, only 20 intensive care unit beds were available for new patients in all of San Joaquin County, which has a population of nearly 800,000.

“The first thing I saw were really, really sick patients,” nurse Brewton said, describing her first day at Dameron. “The acuity of these patients are far more than what we see on a typical medical floor.”

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; editing by Bill Tarrant and Richard Chang)

Air Force agents raid military landlord’s Oklahoma office, seize computers

By M.B. Pell

(Reuters) – Air Force investigators raided the Oklahoma City offices of a major military landlord Tuesday morning, seizing computers and other material, in what the company said was part of an investigation into asbestos contamination.

The landlord, Balfour Beatty Communities, has been the focus of Reuters reports describing how it falsified maintenance records at several bases, allowing the company to collect millions in incentive bonus payments while military families awaited repairs. One of the bases Reuters described was Tinker Air Force in Oklahoma, the subject of Tuesday’s raid.

Linda Card, chief of public affairs for the Air Office of Special Investigations, confirmed the raid took place in cooperation with other federal agencies, but said she had no further details to share.

In a statement, Balfour Beatty said the federal action was related to a subpoena issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The investigation is connected to the matter of asbestos flooring removal that was reported in September 2019. When that event occurred, BBC promptly and voluntarily reported the incident to the local Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality,” it said. “The company will continue to cooperate fully with the investigation.”

At Tinker, Reuters in June documented how one family was left for months with deteriorating asbestos flooring even as Balfour Beatty’s maintenance records said, incorrectly, that the problem had been quickly fixed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations have been investigating allegations of fraud at Tinker and two other Air Force bases where the company is landlord, John Henderson, the Air Force assistant secretary for installations, told Reuters last year. They are Travis in California and Fairchild in Washington State. Air Force agents are investigating additional fraud allegations at Mountain Home in Idaho and Lackland in Texas.

Balfour Beatty said it has hired an outside lawyer and auditor to examine the allegations.

Balfour Beatty Communities, based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, runs the military housing unit of Balfour Beatty plc, a London-based infrastructure company with annual revenue of $10.7 billion. The company earns $33 million in annual profit on its military housing operations, Balfour Beatty Communities President Chris Williams told Congress in February. The company operates 43,000 housing units at 55 Army, Navy and Air Force bases across the United States.

(Reporting by M.B. Pell in New York. Editing by Ronnie Greene)

U.S. senators call for banning, prosecuting ‘slumlords’ of military housing

By M.B. Pell

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. senators on Tuesday demanded the Defense Department crack down on private landlords who provide substandard housing at military bases with criminal prosecutions or contract cancellations, citing Reuters reports of slum-like living conditions and falsified accounting.

The top civilian and military leaders of the Army, Navy and Air Force appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee, in the latest hearing addressing substandard military housing.

On Tuesday, senators were presented with a new report from the Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog conducting a review of the housing program that was launched following the Reuters reports. Among the GAO’s core findings: Housing reports sent to Congress are often misleading, painting a falsely positive picture of housing conditions. The program also suffers from inaccurate landlord maintenance reports and lax military oversight, the GAO reported.

To read the GAO report, click: https://bit.ly/35UzZbC

Some senators asked whether the military’s two-decade-old program of having private landlords provide housing on U.S. military bases has failed.

“Are any of them not acting like slumlords at this point? Are any of them doing a good job?” asked Senator Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican and former U.S. Air Force combat pilot. “This pisses me off.”

For more than a year, Reuters has exposed lead, asbestos, mold and vermin contaminating homes where private landlords house thousands of military families on behalf of the Pentagon. More recently, the news agency disclosed how one major landlord doctored maintenance records at some of its bases to help it collect bonus incentive fees.

To read the coverage, click: https://reut.rs/2r1Bkim

Top Defense Department officials have long touted high occupancy rates and satisfaction scores on military family surveys as evidence the effort is generally successful, despite occasional hiccups. But Elizabeth A. Field, the GAO’s director of defense capabilities and management, told senators: “There’s clearly a problem here.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy defended the privatization effort, saying it allowed the military to tap private borrowing that would otherwise be unavailable.

“That doesn’t mean it’s worked out great,” added Acting Navy Secretary Thomas B. Modly. Some privatized housing is “fantastic,” he said, but other housing is not.

The secretaries cited reform steps already taken, including far-reaching inspections of military housing and a planned tenant bill of rights to empower military families.

Senators pressed the secretaries to do more to hold accountable military leaders and landlords.

Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked Air Force Secretary Barbara M. Barrett why she couldn’t “pull the plug” on Balfour Beatty Communities, one of the military’s largest landlords.

This year, Reuters quoted five former Balfour Beatty employees who said they filed false maintenance records at Air Force bases to help the company collect millions in bonus payments. Balfour Beatty, a unit of British infrastructure giant Balfour Beatty PLC <BALF.L>, has said that it is committed to improving its maintenance, and that it has tapped outside counsel and auditors to investigate.

Air Force Secretary Barrett said the Air Force has lost confidence in the company, but stopped short of committing to removing it from the program.

A company spokesman said Balfour Beatty plans this month to finish a “performance improvement plan” requested by the Air Force.

Democratic senators Richard Blumenthal, from Connecticut, and Mazie Hirono, from Hawaii, urged the military to refer instances of fraud for criminal prosecution.

“We probably need to make an example out of a couple of them,” said Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican.

(Reporting by M.B. Pell in New York. Additional reporting by Joshua Schneyer. Editing by Ronnie Greene)