Boston Holds Their Biggest Urban Shield Drill Ever This Weekend

Lucas Bowser
Activist Post

Boston will host their biggest Urban Shield training exercise yet, starting today, May 3rd. The 24-hour drill will involve, “about 2,000 state and local personnel,” and feature several scenarios including, “a hostage rescue of elected officials at Boston City Hall.”

Officials now see last year’s attacks on the Boston Marathon as proof that the drills are a necessary part of crisis management. “The Urban Shield Program, as we’ve learned over the last year, is essential to our city’s safety at any time of crisis,” claims Mayor Martin J. Walsh.

Other drills planned for this year’s program involve a school shooter drill, an injured officer in Cambridge, an explosive device on a transit system, and “a simulation of a terrorist takeover at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.” Authorities say that residents should not be alarmed, “if they see an increased police presence Saturday.”

Boston has hosted the training exercise since 2011, and has had teams of police participating in it as far back as 2007. The exercise continues to be surrounded in secrecy with officials giving the public minimum notice ahead of its schedule date and declining to give details about the drills “to avoid tipping off participants.”

But what about the details of last year’s drills? Surely the public can be informed of the exercise plans that are more than a year old. Officials have yet to provide an explanation of the Boston Urban Shield 2013 exercises which were quietly canceled after the attacks on the Marathon. The only reason we know anything about them at all is because an anonymous law enforcement official leaked the plans to a Boston Globe reporter who wrote a single article about it. But what we learned from that one article was so interesting, many found it odd that it gained virtually zero traction in the rest of the mainstream media and was never followed up on.

The article revealed that, at the time of the bombing of the Marathon, officials in Boston were planning Urban Shield scenarios that were “frighteningly similar” to the actual attacks. The drills involved a domestic terrorist group that would plant backpacks full of explosives around Boston, requiring the same type of police response that we saw unfold after the bombings took place. The Globe reported that, “in the scenario, the terrorists would flee police in stolen cars…” and investigators, “would have to track down footage of the bombers caught by street surveillance cameras and the phones of ‘witnesses.’ The anonymous official told the Globe, “the real thing happened before we were able to execute.”

Although the use of multiple “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) to cause mass casualties on US soil was called a first and considered to be a “watershed moment,” it seems that officials in Boston had been intensely exercising this very scenario leading up to and possibly during the Marathon. One month before the event, officials ran exercises drilling a scenario of an IED explosion during the Marathon, and then the week before they ran another drill that included a bombing scenario. These are just the examples I know of and are admitted.

For those who view the threat of false flag, synthetic terrorism as unreal, the coincidence of the concentration of these exercise scenarios and their actual manifestation should still be of great concern. Maybe it would be easier for them to consider the possibility that their bogeyman of choice could infiltrate these plans and turn them live. If you don’t believe it is possible that a rogue network inside the national security system could use the drills as a means to carry out terror attacks, how about Al Qaeda? A real bomb gets traded for a fake bomb and Al Qaeda (or you name it) has turned an exercise into a real attack. Bare minimum, the IED exercises beg questions of foreknowledge and advanced warning, but over a year later officials are remaining quiet on the canceled 2013 Urban Shield exercise, and are saying very little about any other drills.

Instead these types of drills will only increase in Boston and nationwide, as the Marathon attacks are hyped by the establishment as evidence that they are necessary. Urban Shield will likely expand into other major cities and along with it, the SWAT teams, armored police vehicles, and “shelter in place” commands. All the while authorities will be announcing that we should not to be alarmed if we notice an increased police state.

A new coalition called Stop Oppressive Militarized Police (STOMP) has been formed by community groups and is scheduled to meet on May 4th as the Urban Shield program wraps things up. STOMP plans to host a speak out against police militarization and hopes to, “begin to build a long term movement against repressive police action.”

Lucas Bowser writes for Victory Post, where this first appeared.