Iowa Exercise in Arcadia Canceled

It’s for sure now.  The Des Moines register is reporting it.

“This was completely blown out of proportion,” Kohorst said. “They were going to come through and meet with the townspeople and just practice going in and out of their homes. They were never, ever going to confiscate guns or anything like that.”

I agree that it was blown way out of proportion.  The Mayor seems to not quite understand the objections to the exercise.

Talk show host Alex Jones of Austin, Texas, whose syndicated radio program is carried on about 60 stations, said he had received phone calls on and off the air from people in Arcadia and nearby towns who objected to the plans.He said he believes oil companies, in concert with central banks, are creating a worldwide economic crisis to set up a world government.

“This is part of an acclimation for martial law,” Jones said of the National Guard’s plans.

If that’s his paranoia, I don’t understand it either.  There are certainly good reasons to object to the military using civilian communities in exercises, but that it’s part of an internationalist conspiracy is not among them.

Company A is an infantry unit that served in Afghanistan for 13 months in 2004 and 2005, and it is expected to receive orders to return overseas within the next 24 months, Hapgood said.

OK, so I was wrong about one thing.  They were training for Afghanistan rather than Iraq, as I speculated over the weekend.

“We have been doing training in our communities for decades, so this is very routine business for us,” Hapgood said. “We were quite surprised when we received e-mails from out of state criticizing the event. We have a responsibility to have our men and women ready to go into combat, and we are not going to change that.”

Well, that’s what they’re saying now, of course.  After the paranoidosophere blew the lid on their secret plans, what else are they going to say?

A man who described himself as a “Nevada citizen” wrote that it was good the exercise was called off: “It is possible that there would have been some dead Iowa Guardsmen.”

Way to win hearts and minds, good citizen of Nevada!

13 thoughts on “Iowa Exercise in Arcadia Canceled”

  1. alex jones is insane. And I can say that. Watch any one of his videos that’s if you can stomache the BS in it for more than 10 minutes. That says it all. Problem is droves of people who are probably the least intellectually discerning people on the planet flock to him and people like him. And there are many many people in the country that will find one issue and blow it up like this. It’s like 9/11 truthers but alex jones is one of those too.

  2. Dang, Sebastian, there ya go pooping all over a perfectly good conspiracy theory.

    If it was just for training, then more power to them, although I do beleive they undergo some refresher training prior to deployment.

    Around here, the (Reserve/NG) troops go to a nearby traiining area for a few weeks prior to deployment.

    Not that more training isn’t better, but what they were doing was a bit too big brother-ish for me.

  3. I think as conspiracy theories go, this one could be better. There have been some really good ones out there.

    I once pondered a conspiracy by which Europe was faked by the airlines and travel agencies, and that they had, for years, been flying people to secret locations all around North America where people were paid to be Europeans, and had concocted an entire history around selling Europe as a tourist destination. They would even go so far as to plant some of them from among us, to make it seem believable, and to tell stories and get people liking the food so they would want to go. But the whole thing was a sham. They were all really paid actors.

    Now _that_ is a good conspiracy theory, if you could get some people to buy into it.

  4. Jones really is a kook! All I have to say is that if he’s right, and we are all destined for the FEMA camps, well, if FEMA is in charge, I don’t think I’m going to worry a whole lot.

  5. I once pondered a conspiracy by which Europe was faked by the airlines and travel agencies, and that they had, for years, been flying people to secret locations all around North America where people were paid to be Europeans, and had concocted an entire history around selling Europe as a tourist destination.

    Dang! They really work hard on this–why, we spent ten hours on the plane from Chicago to whatever place that they made look like mythical “England” for nothing!

    I think you have the core of a bestselling book with this. I would not be surprised to see you get tens of thousands of true believers if you could just get some media coverage for this brillant expose of the conspiracy!

  6. That Europe thing is not true — however most people don’t know what’s really happening with “elevators.” They don’t actually go up and down — they just change the rooms around while you’re in the “elevator.”

  7. Yes, Hank. That Elisha Otis really figured out a way to rearrange time and space. They keep it a secret, because if it got out, well, all kinds of awful things would happen.

  8. Wow… just wow… I am not sure which is worse – what Jones said, or what the “Nevada citizen” proposed. I guess there really is one born every minute.

    I will certainly agree that this entire situation smelled kind of funny… but “kind of funny” in no way equates to “military takeover of America”. The reality is, Training Officers (speaking from a little experience being one) have a very hard time finding things for their troops/sailors to do that they have not done hundreds of times before, and the last thing you want is complacency. This was, as countless other people have already proposed, just the brainchild of a stressed TO with poor prognostication skills, trying to find something “different and unique”.

    At least it gave the Public Affairs Officer something to do…

  9. About five years ago, I recall seeing an ad in the “help wanted” section of my local newspaper which sought actors for some sort of mock training exercise at Fort Dix, New Jersey. In addition to some other scenarios, I think the actors were also needed to play the Iraqis who would be inside their homes within a mock Iraqi village while being searched for weapons and suspected insurgents by American troops.

    Just for the sake of staving off any paranoia among the general public, I feel the Iowa National Guard should have shown some more sensitivity when proposing their own exercise, even if it meant that they would have to travel elsewhere to find a suitable place to do it, such as an actual military installation or base, rather than an actual town populated by actual civilians.

  10. Listen, Kook or not, Alex Jones fights with us to protect our second amendement right. I mean think about it… He reaches alot of people. Sure, he’s not really the poster boy for gun rights, but he is a strong voice for it.

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