When the largely geriatric city of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is not putting residents who feed the homeless in jail, it is playing host to U.S. Special Operations Command troops who used the city to stage mock urban warfare assaults.
WMR’s sources in the city nicknamed “Fort Liquordale,” where “happy hour” extends in some bars from 12 noon to 8 pm, confirm that on the evening of March 26, U.S. Special Operations Command Blackhawk helicopters hovered around downtown Ft. Lauderdale, alarming many local residents and businessmen.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Department and local police departments aided some 200 members of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force in carrying out the urban warfare operation, according to a press release from the Broward sheriff’s department.
The exercises, coordinated by the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, were to have concluded on March 27. The exercises were, according to the U.S. Special Operations Command, not to be held in “large population centers.” Fort Lauderdale has a population of 175,000 and sits within a narrow urban strip that extends from Miami to West Palm Beach where 5 million people live.
One Fort Lauderdale businessman told WMR, “I went outside, shouted obscenities at them [the helicopters] and flipped them the bird.”
Some websites mistakenly reported that the Fort Lauderdale exercise was part of Operation Jade Helm. However, that domestic counter-insurgency exercise is not scheduled until July 15 to September 15 of this year in several western states, including Texas, Utah, Colorado, and Nevada.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2015 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
I too remember shouting obscenities and flipping the bird at a Blackhawk helicopter–only that was a few years ago. It was a helicopter carrying the then pResident GWB,the Idiot Son, as it (the helicopter) flew over my house and made a straight V line to fly over the parking lot of a Publix Supermarket on Federal Highway where I had just parked my car. L’Enfant was going back to his, “nobody-can-get-to-me” place after visiting a church in Pompano beach.
When I saw that helicopter and the other ones that were guarding it flying over the roof of my house and make a v-line towards the parking lot where I was parked, I opened the door to my car and started shouting to the top of my lungs. They could probably not hear what I was saying, but I do hope to God that the Idiot Son did see the bird I was flipping him and his holy guarded hypocrisy of “compassionate conservatism.” The same hypocritical meme Jeb now claims for himself.
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