A spy blimp run by the US military and tethered near NSA headquarters just outside Washington, DC broke its moorings and drifted across Pennsylvania, causing NORAD jets to scramble just like they ... didn't on 9-11, and giving us all a laugh at at this glitch in the nation's massive domestic spying program, writes ThisCantBeHappening's Dave Lindorff

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By Dave Lindorff

Most Americans living in the northeastern and Midatlantic region of the country probably didn't realize that for the last year or so they've been being spied on from the sky by a sophisticated 'eye-in-the-sky' blimp tethered to the ground in Maryland's Aberdeen Proving Ground.

Air Force jets, which notoriously were not scrambled as four jets were commandeered and flown into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, were scrambled quickly in this case to track the wayward blimp as it drifted with the wind into Pennsylvania.

It just goes to show you that the military can do the job when it wants to.

It will be interesting to see what they do when this thing comes down. It's big enough to do some damage, but my guess is the feds will do a good job of keeping the public from getting too close to it.

As it is, they're not saying much about what this thing was doing in the first place.

The Army has claimed the purpose of this and a second blimp has been to defend the US against an attack by cruise missile, but that seems strange, given that most of its cameras point groundward. According to a December 2014 report in Intercept magazine, these two blimps, built by Ratheon Corp. have the ability to scan 300 miles in all directions, covering an area the size of Texas, and to see and track vehicles within that range.

Ominously, while one blimp has high definition radar equipment, the other is equipped, according to the Army, to provide detailed "targeting information."

I'm wondering where spotting and defending against cruise missile attack, which after all would likely come from the ocean, not from a 360-degree radius, comes into any of that...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/2896

Authors Website: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

Authors Bio:

Dave Lindorff, winner of a 2019 "Izzy" Award for Outstanding Independent Journalism from the Park Center for Independent Media in Ithaca, is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper www.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006).