Now that's a conspiracy!

There aren't any nuclear secrets - atomic weapons are 1940's technology.

Having said that, the claim that the B-52 incident was an accident is not credible.

I cannot find this story crazy when we've got another sign we are being manipulated into war with Iran (i.e. some in the Pentagon now believe the vidoe showing speedboats circling a US warship were doctored -- the audio track was added separately and they question its authenticity.

I had my suspicions about the Iraq war that we were being rushed into it by parties that wanted war for reasons completely independent of Sept 11, which became a very useful justification for something already long desired.

It is hard to not feel like we're being set up again.

Could we know the truth if our leaders actually spoke it to us at this point?

The folks at Balloon Juice also linked to Edmonds' story, but expressed more skepticism about it than Rod, which is surprising considering how much they hate the Bush Administration. But they rightly applied Sagan's Rule here: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Edmonds' claims here are certainly extraordinary, but the only proof we have is her word, which is (meaning no offense to her) ordinary.

While no US papers have yet published anything on this, we can safely assume that they've all sent reporters sniffing after it, and we should find out soon whether there is any substance to it. Until we see something more, however, I'm filing this in the same category as UFO's.

Joel, I thought I was clear that this story is quite intriguing, but it calls for disbelief until and unless there are more sources backing up her allegations.

And for once, I'm going to leave Kim's tic about AIPAC up, because it's relevant to this story.

The B-52 story is quite suspicious and I can easily believe was part of some kind of cover-up. There was a case back in the 1980s of a helicopter or plane, I forget which, loaded with Special Forces guys crashing in the ocean off of Central America. No wreckage or bodies were ever found.

I was in the Army at the time. There were persistent rumors that they had actually been killed in some kind of undisclosed operation and the crash was staged as a way to explain the deaths.

The comment about unexplained deaths of pilots is weird. The author makes it as an aside, but the implications are huge. Before writing something like that he should have some sort of evidence or backstory on these deaths. He's basically insinuating they were murdered to cover something up, but throws it out there with no evidence...

"Overlapping corrobration" could only mean that some or all fo the whistleblower's account can be confirmed. But again, it's tough to say how far that goes-fully confirm, or simply confirm contacts between the traitor and the Turks. And could the contacts have been entirely innocent. But what would give me pause is 2 FBI guys and 2 CIA guys know that when they're so quoted on background, it's going to be touted as well beyond innocent or incidental and likely much more criminal and and traitorous.

As to the B-52 incident, a conspiracy is always _possible_, but in the absence of convincing evidence to that effect, I'll stick with my default presumption tends to be, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Even people handling nuclear weapons can make mistakes. ... and then many die of strange unexplained accidents or suicides over the next few weeks.

But they're just very very accident-prone there. Some of the one who would have been involved in the process and could have noticed something was wrong even managed to die in the weeks before. It's like a lethal Three Stogies movie over there in the nuclear device handling area, people were dropping like flies.

The B-52 thing is one of those literally insane X-File things that absolutely everyone was assuring couldn't happen by accident, but no one ever managed to explain it.

It's one thing accidentally fail to do something, it's another to go to where the nukes are stored, which isn't anywhere near anything else, pick them up without being challenged in anyway, which should be impossible, ignore the warnings all over them, and drive them to the plane and install them. Planes don't normally fly around in the US with even live conventional bombs. This is somewhat akin to 'accidentally' disassembling someone's car and reassembling it in their dorm room.

Check it out, people, if you don't know what happened with that B-52, it is the freakish thing we've ever heard, and all the deaths on top of it make it even weirder and are clearly a cover up of some sort, and no one ever even managed to come up with a plausible explanation of what was even being attempted.

..until now.

I'll bite. I'd say that the six warheads were already missing, and they were replaced somewhere between Minot and Barksdale.

Well, yes, if we assume that people high up in the government and military are stealing nuclear secrets, then, yes, it looks like we've been flim-flammed and what actually happened is that in all this nuke movement, twelve of them were used and six of them were actually stolen. Or, alternatively, six of them were going to be stolen, but the plan was foiled.

Before we knew about apparent traitors in the government, the sanest explanation is that this was some sort of secret planning for a military strike, although that made little sense, as there are plenty of nukes already on aircraft carriers.

The fact that the Bush administration is actively attempting to cover this up by silencing this person looks REALLY bad. I won't just to the conclusion that many people will, that they are behind this entire thing, but covering up treason and the attempted or actual theft of nuclear devices so you don't look bad is...I'm actually out of negative superlatives to describe this administration, but I'll come up with something eventually.