Operation Dark Winter

Wikipedia coverage: Read the full Wikipedia article, including its references. The material below is the existing Deep Politics Wiki article.

Washington DC,Andrews Air Force Base

 Operation Dark Winter link(Terrorism exercise, Biological weapon/Preparation, Planning exercise) Campfire Wiki Sourcewatch

Date	22 June 2001 - 23 June 2001
Location	Washington DC,Andrews Air Force Base
Interests	Terrorism, Smallpox, 2001 Anthrax attacks, Event 201, Crimson Tide, Atlantic Storm, War on Terror
Description	An exercise where senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis. Uncannily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks and other narratives. Held June 2001.
Planners	Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Analytic Service, Tara O'Toole
Participants	Robert Kadlec, Sam Nunn, David Gergen, R. James Woolsey, John White, John Tilelli, Margaret Hamburg, Frank Wisner II, George Terwilliger, Jerome Hauer, William Sessions, Frank Keating, Dan Mahoney, Jim Miklaszewski, Mary Walsh, Sian Edwards, Judith Miller, Lester Reingold, Tara O'Toole,Tom Inglesby,Randy Larsen,Mark DeMier,Sue Reingold,Dennis Reimer,John Hamre
Sponsors	Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Operation Dark Winter was an "exercise" on 22-23 June 2001 "wherein senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis", where "terrorists" started a smallpox outbreak in the US.

{{#subobject: |Has superobject=Operation Dark Winter |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=Whitney Webb|+sep=, |Has text=“Dark Winter not only predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks, but some of its participants had clear foreknowledge of those attacks.” |Is about=Operation Dark Winter,Dark Winter, Amerithrax, foreknowledge|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=1 April 2020 |Sourced from=Document:All Roads Lead to Dark Winter |Has sourceDetails= |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName=Document:All Roads Lead to Dark Winter |Has sourceURL=

}}

“Dark Winter not only predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks, but some of its participants had clear foreknowledge of those attacks.”
Whitney Webb (1 April 2020) 

The simulation eerily predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks that happened just 3 months later, and also the initial government narrative of those attacks. It also reinforced other narratives, such as an imminent threat from international supervillain Bin Laden, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had "WMDs", and that the two had joined forces.

Name

The name for the exercise derives from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, who participated in the script created for the exercise, when he states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America."

Simulation

The two day exercise simulated a bioterror attack in the form of aerosolized smallpox targeting 3 shopping centers in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. By the end of the second week, there were 2,000 cases in 15 states, then turning into a pandemic killing millions. The panic and hysteria in the ensuing national crisis causes food riots and National Guardsmen firing on citizens.

The culprit of the attack in this imaginary scenario was Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, but one of the very last lines of the scripted drill is a fake broadcast reporting ‘there is a very high probability this attack was conducted by either state or a state sponsored international terrorist organization’ and that ‘A prominent Iraqi defector is claiming that Iraq arranged the bioweapons attack on the US through intermediaries’.

Participants

File:Robert Kadlec in Operation Dark Winter 2001.jpg

The participants in Dark Winter not only had deep ties to U.S. intelligence services and the Pentagon, but also later became key leaders in similar exercises, like Event 201 and Crimson Contagion.

Some of these same individuals would also play a role in the FBI’s “sabotaged” investigation into the subsequent Anthrax attacks and 19 years later, are handling major aspects of the U.S. government’s response to the Covid-19 situation.

One of the participants, Robert Kadlec, was put in charge of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entire Covid-19 response efforts, while other major players in Dark Winter are key drivers behind the “biodefense” mass surveillance programs being implemented.

Media participation

Watch on YouTube

A news broadcasts set up for dramatization, in which shoots are fired at the border between Texas and Oklahoma during a time when travel has been stopped by the governor of Texas.

The simulation seeded the idea of an anthrax threat in the national imagination. For example, Judith Miller of the New York Times soon after co-authored an article on Pentagon plans to develop a more potent version of weaponized anthrax, entitled U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits, and in October a book, “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War".

As part of Dark Winter, corporate media outlets, including the New York Times, were sent anonymous letters that threatened renewed attacks on the U.S., including anthrax attacks, if the U.S. did not withdraw its troops from the [[Middle East]. In this simulation, those letters contained “a genetic fingerprint of the smallpox strain matching the fingerprint of the strain causing the current epidemic.”

During the - real world - Anthrax attacks that would occur just a few months after Dark Winter, Judith Miller and other U.S. reporters would receive threatening letters with a white powder presumed to be Anthrax. In Miller’s case, the powder turned out to be harmless.

Censorship and Martial Law

Dark Winter warns of “dangerous misinformation” spreading online selling “unverified” cures and making similarly “unverified” claims, all of which are deemed as posing a threat to public safety. It further discusses the suppression and removal of civil liberties, such as the possibility of the President to invoke “The Insurrection Act”, which would allow the military to act as law enforcement upon request by a State governor, as well as the possibility of “martial rule.” This presaged the Covid censorship project which was rolled out in earnest in March 2020.

The Dark Winter script also discusses how options for martial rule “include, but are not limited to, prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [i.e. arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional.” This presaged the "Covid response" project which was rolled out later in 2020.

Successors

Dark Winter was the first in the series of events which included Event 201 about a novel fast spreading fatal coronavirus.

External links

• University of Pittsburgh - Exercise Overview
• Johns Hopkins - Center for civilian bio-defense strategies
• Algora blog article: Yes, Biowarfare
• Covid’s Dark Winter: How Biological War Games Stole Our Freedom

References