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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| You You | |
| you you | |
| Hello everyone and welcome to Operation Vigilant Guard. | |
| I'm Rob Due. | |
| Jason Douglas. | |
| We were in Chicago from June 12th to the 17th covering this Operation Vigilant Guard terror exercise. | |
| Military exercise, international policing apparatus. | |
| Yeah, it pretty much went the gamut from local agencies all the way up to national agencies working together to save us from the terrorists. | |
| So, we're going to start off with June 13th. | |
| It was a terror drill in Oak Lawn. | |
| Simulated plane crash. | |
| We're just going to let these guys talk because they pretty much tell the story. | |
| This is about 30 minutes long, so sit back and hope you learn something. | |
| My name is Dr. Sandler Block and I'm the director of the Cook County Medical Disameters Disaster Response Team. | |
| And we are here to participate in a statewide drill with the National Guard. | |
| We are starting off this exercise. | |
| The initial event today would be a plane crash. | |
| A plane is coming into Midway Airport and explodes over the municipality of Oak Lawn. | |
| There are 350 fatalities. | |
| We've been requested to come out here and assist them in the recovery and the identification | |
| of the victims. | |
| Come this way! | |
| We start off this initial Vigilant Guard event, the National Guard event, and we will demobilize today. | |
| There'll be other events occurring during the next three days in different areas of Chicago and Cook County. | |
| It's approximately two to three hours it takes us to set up an off-site morgue. | |
| It's called the MEDU, the Mobile Emergency Disaster Unit. | |
| It's stationed out at O'Hare International Airport. | |
| It is available to not only the county but also coroners in the state should they need it for a catastrophic event. | |
| Obviously there would be some challenges if we were to have an incident, but this exercise helped us work through those | |
| challenges and work better as a team. | |
| Okay, perfect, and so far so good. | |
| So far so good, yeah. | |
| It has the 56-member disaster response team that also helps to assemble the unit before we go out in the field for recovery. | |
| There we go, yeah. | |
| So Jason, what were your thoughts while shooting this footage? | |
| What were you thinking? | |
| Well, we weren't really supposed to be there. | |
| Most media checked in and we were kind of just gonzo journalist-ing. | |
| There was lots of military walking around and being official. | |
| It was their first day, so I think they were, you know, kind of not knowing what was going on and putting it together. | |
| As we saw later on, there was a little bit of disorganization going on. | |
| We finished with that and went into Chicago and shot some stuff. | |
| Jason spotted this great seal in a federal building. | |
| He almost wrecked the car. | |
| So I jumped out and went and shot it. | |
| I paused it here at the bottom. | |
| You can actually see it says Novus Ordo Seclorum. | |
| Here comes the next day. | |
| We went to Toyota Park, which is a stadium, a big soccer stadium, and that's where the National Guard had set up a staging ground. | |
| We interviewed a colonel there and this is what he had to say. | |
| I'm Johnny Miller. | |
| I'm a colonel at Illinois National Guard. | |
| Toyota Park is mainly the location where we receive all of our logistics support for this operation. | |
| All the National Guardsmen will come here, and so we know all the players we have involved in the operation, and then they'll move out to subsequent locations from here. | |
| Having places like this available in any of the areas, any part of the state we're at, is critical for us to be successful. | |
| It's a good venue for parking. | |
| We have plenty of places to stage logistics, stage personnel, stage equipment. | |
| We can bring soldiers here to sleep. | |
| They can be fed here, showered, and then move on out to conduct operations. | |
| Our partner country with Illinois is Poland, so we'll have Polish military folks here that's getting ready for the World Cup in 2012 there. | |
| And we'll also have people from their agencies that are similar to our civilian agencies with their learning police activities for some of the operations we're doing are more law enforcement than military in nature. | |
| And whenever an opportunity comes up like that, we let that be known. | |
| to the Polish military, and they share it with their other Polish government partners. | |
| And we heard, of course, from law enforcement, and like we have Illinois Counterterrorism Task Force, and Poland has a version of that, and so they're interested in these types of exercises to better train their personnel. | |
| So we just use it as an opportunity to share the shared experiences and make all of our agencies better. | |
| There'll be some in uniform, and some will be civilians. | |
| We have some that are, for example, I think it's listed in here. | |
| For the International Agency, we've got folks from the Polish Consulate here in Chicago. | |
| Land Forces, which is the Polish Army, they'll be here. | |
| Polish National Fire Service, they're getting some experience here. | |
| Ministry of the Interior Administration, and the Bureau of Counterterrorism Operations. | |
| So they're sort of like the FBI. | |
| You know, is it okay for us to be working with foreign military and foreign powers in order to police our own citizens and territory? | |
| do a lot of partnership with them as well. | |
| And this seems like the biggest bone of contention for the entire project, you know, is it okay | |
| for us to be working with foreign military and foreign powers in order to police our | |
| own citizens and territory? | |
| Also foreign police. | |
| Foreign police, foreign military, foreign, you know, secret governments. | |
| Hey, I'm Sgt. | |
| 1st Class Mark Ballard with the Illinois National Guard. | |
| I am one of the exercise controllers who is running the simulation cell for this exercise. | |
| Here out of the sim cell, we will just be providing guidance, directions, requests for information from the responding forces to keep the information flowing between the response agencies in Bensonville up through the area command and whatnot. | |
| This is IEMA's Unified Area Command Trailer. | |
| It's a new piece of equipment that the state's acquired in the last year. | |
| And it's been brought in to just test out, make sure its capabilities are working. | |
| It's able to communicate with all the other elements that are out there. | |
| The forces from Poland that are joining will be integrating into some of the civil military units that are participating in this exercise. | |
| The state of Illinois has an alliance, a state partnership program with the Republic of Poland and across the last several years we have been doing integrative training and coordination with them, sharing information and learning from one another as part of the state partnership for peace program. | |
| Bringing them over and incorporating them into the civil military domestic response role is just increasing that awareness and visibility of what the role of the National Guard is and is helping them to understand how their military forces can integrate with their civilian forces in the event of a civil situation that takes place. | |
| The Illinois National Guard has a no-fail contract with the state of Illinois to provide services protection to the citizens of the state and in working with our partner agencies to respond to these types of situations We have to train and exercise with them as much as possible. | |
| Training and exercising is the cornerstone of successful response in an emergency situation. | |
| So increasing the visibility or making us think that this is what the responsibility of our negativity is. | |
| Right. | |
| The National Guard is supposed to work with foreign governments to promote peace throughout the world. | |
| I didn't know that was their job. | |
| Here's some more fabulous Douglas B-roll right here. | |
| The troops getting ready and setting up their decom tents for the various exercises on the 14th. | |
| It's the 14th of June. | |
| So then we go on to the meth lab takedown. | |
| Day 3. | |
| I'm Captain Joe Bright. | |
| I'm the I'm the Program Manager for the SERV-P program for the Illinois National Guard. | |
| I'm here with Major Lejciak from the Polish Epidemiological Response Center of the Polish Armed Forces. | |
| We're here participating in a Homeland Security exercise. | |
| We'll be working on military support to civil authorities as part of a terrorist scenario where they have a biological weapon. | |
| Major Lejciak and the Polish Armed Forces We have a partnership program with the Illinois National Guard. | |
| We do cooperative training and exercises and it's been very beneficial to both of our services in helping us develop our capabilities. | |
| The exercise today, and what you'd expect to see, will be some terrorist scenarios in which there are multiple casualties. | |
| We'll have a search and extraction team that will be extracting casualties from different facilities. | |
| Those personnel that are extracted would be contaminated potentially with a biohazard. | |
| So we'll have a mass casualty decontamination team that will decontaminate them and we have a medical triage and treatment team that will provide medical care to them before they are moved by ambulance if necessary to a long-term hospital or other type of long-term care facility. | |
| You'll see the National Guard cooperating with civilian authorities Typically when we respond, we only fall under a civilian incident commander because we're in the states. | |
| We respond to their needs, their requests. | |
| We're basically a force provider and bring specific skills to the table to assist local law enforcement and civil authorities in providing the services and protection to the people in their areas. | |
| My name is Major Emi Idishak. | |
| I'm from We are here with my soldiers to make a next step in our cooperation with soldiers from Illinois National Guard. | |
| This cooperation started five years ago. | |
| Last year we had a big exercise in Poland near Warsaw and this year we have a great opportunity to participate in exercise in Chicago. | |
| That's a partnership between Illinois National Guard and the Polish. | |
| The state of Illinois is a partnership for Poland. | |
| We have good connections and this is the reason why we train together from five years. | |
| So here it's 12 and the second group is 10 and they are designated to a civil support team in another place so we are divided to do groups to learn as much as possible. | |
| Okay, and is it just Polish Army or are there other? | |
| Yeah, we have also participants from our Do you have American forces in Poland? | |
| from fire state of Poland and from Polish FBI and there are also another group from police. | |
| Do you have American forces in Poland? Do you do exercises with them there? | |
| Actually, we... now we have American soldiers, but they have no connection with us | |
| because there is some special forces in our country. | |
| But that was very telling, you know, so we have special forces in Poland training with their troops. | |
| from Illinois National Guard during the last four years. | |
| But that was very telling. | |
| So we have special forces in Poland training with their troops. | |
| And day four, Bentonville, terror involving the police. | |
| Today's activities are starting with a notional event that occurred this morning | |
| with the Bentonville Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies. | |
| National Guard assets are being brought in to provide Level A hazmat teams, decontamination, surveillance, presumptuous identification of suspicious material to determine if this is part of the overall anthrax scare that is taking place or not. | |
| Intelligence that was gathered From the plane crash that took place on Sunday is leading to this area which will also be in the Bensonville area. | |
| They will come to a distribution facility. | |
| There will be a hostage situation. | |
| They will determine that this was a staging area for distribution of an anthrax product. | |
| Boy Scouts of America are providing some volunteers that will be serving as victims of the chemical events and the contamination to provide people that can actually go through the medical triage, the decontamination apparatus, and those types of events. | |
| So they're basically the role players for the exercise. | |
| Fire! | |
| Help! | |
| Uh-oh! | |
| Get on the ground on your knees! | |
| Everybody on the ground, on the ground! | |
| Put your hands on your face! | |
| On the ground, on the ground! | |
| Put your hands on your face! | |
| On the ground, on the ground! | |
| Do not move! | |
| Cover your face with your hands! | |
| Cover your face with your hands! | |
| Pretty big exercise. | |
| Probably, you know, 16 Boy Scouts down there with their Scoutmasters and whoever else wanted to come along. | |
| Notice they have them lying face down in the anthrax powder. | |
| It's a very real life situation. | |
| Everyone lie down in the anthrax powder. | |
| Hostages, you are expendable. | |
| Please put your face directly in the powder. | |
| Yeah, all of a sudden the Polish BOA is participating in this exercise, which they didn't mention at all before that. | |
| It's just, they're here to observe, they're here to observe. | |
| Hey, it's BOA. | |
| Bureau of Operational Anti-Terrorism, is what I think it stands for. | |
| I don't know, this was a hard one to swallow, watching these guys training with the Boy Scouts. | |
| It definitely looks like acclimation. | |
| You've got Boy Scouts, which are kind of your perceived civil leaders in the community, being trained. | |
| This is what it's like to be a hostage. | |
| This is what it's like to be a prisoner. | |
| Well, and really, if you think about it, the Eastern Bloc countries are probably used to situations that are somewhat like this. | |
| But who is this acclamation for? | |
| Is it for the Polish? | |
| Is it for Americans to get used to foreign voices telling them what to do? | |
| Yeah, I don't know. | |
| I mean, it's a complex issue. | |
| And they're definitely working together, and they're working more together than they used to. | |
| The exercises are getting bigger. | |
| You know, all the states have a partner in either Eastern Europe, Africa, or Central and South America. | |
| And pretty soon, there's a movement towards having one of each. | |
| Yeah, so right now some may have two, some may have one. | |
| There's a map we showed you earlier that listed all the countries and you can search that online. | |
| You know, read up on it. | |
| Do you think this is a good thing, that our National Guard is training with foreign governments? | |
| Why would they need to train with foreign governments? | |
| For one, the President's using them in combat situations, which, I don't know if that's good, because then you're bringing guys back who are supposed to be guardians of your borders. | |
| And they're, you know, hardened Iraqi veterans now. | |
| They've been on several tours in dangerous situations. | |
| And they're used to people saying, you know, get out of my country, I'm a citizen. | |
| Right. | |
| And now they're going to be immune to that. | |
| Or you, you know, bring in guys from other countries to do the dirty work and then your National Guard just kind of does infrastructure and transports them and the real dirty work's done by the other soldiers who, you know, They don't have a vested interest in the well-being of the United States. | |
| Well, the only thing we have at this point is the idea that our National Guard, who, you know, is just filled with great people. | |
| It was like my brother or sister was there with them. | |
| No, they were all very nice. | |
| You know, you're getting to this point where we have to believe that if given contradictory orders to, you know, incarcerate U.S. | |
| citizens, to take away their guns, to imprison and kill them, that at some point they will stand up and say, no, that, you know, that goes beyond what I signed up to do. | |
| You would hope that when it comes to that point that they'll actually, you know, be oath keepers and say, no, You know, that's not part of the oath, is to take Americans' guns and put them into concentration camps. | |
| And I think there's going to be a big test coming up in the Gulf with what happens. | |
| We got some intel in that they're going to be shipping soldiers there soon. | |
| But it hasn't been confirmed. | |
| That was just a soldier in Iraq telling someone here stateside that they got orders to deploy into Louisiana. | |
| So we'll see what happens. | |
| So here they are lining up, getting ready to go through the decontamination process, which that's what 95% of the National Guard was there to set up decomm units and to wash people down and provide that infrastructure, search and rescue. | |
| And then there were some military police that were there guarding Toyota Park. | |
| They were guarding the stations where they were doing this exercise. | |
| And so there's some more shots of beautiful Chicago. | |
| It is a lovely city. | |
| This was the one moment where, you know, up until now we had been given the red carpet to pretty much go anywhere and film anything that we wanted to. | |
| This one was like your normal, you know, media-controlled situation. | |
| My name is Jose Santiago. | |
| I serve as Executive Director of the Office of Personnel and Communications. | |
| Today we're having a disaster that will take place here. | |
| What we have actually happened is that we have a subway train that has derailed. | |
| And we've had people injured inside the train. | |
| So we have a response of police and fire. | |
| Due to the fact that certain things are going on in the world right now, we're going to make sure that that was a natural accident. | |
| We'll have the police teams go in there, sweep the area, but we do have simulated injuries and contaminants taking place on some of the individuals. | |
| This is a full-blown DHS drill that Chicago is working out with the National Guard, police, fire. | |
| And other agencies. | |
| How many government agencies are taking place? | |
| On this total exercise, which has been going on for about a year, we're looking at about 50 agencies. | |
| Earlier today, we were at an exercise. | |
| Polish military in particular were involved in the exercise. | |
| Is that going to be the same with this exercise? | |
| Right now, the Polish folks that were involved in this particular exercise, they were there as observers. | |
| They're visiting the country. | |
| And they are one of our sister of cities that we go ahead and we train with all the time. | |
| So they came in and they were observing and watching how we handle our stuff and then | |
| you know sharing information back and forth of what happens in Europe as opposed to what | |
| happens in America. | |
| But are they going to be involved in this particular exercise today? | |
| No. | |
| No, not this. | |
| Not this. | |
| It seems very adamant about it. | |
| I mean, you asked the question twice just to clarify. | |
| There would be, you know, no participation. | |
| So, obviously, you know, this is one of those things where you think about this large organization like FEMA or these even larger organizations working together, and there's so much misinformation. | |
| There's so many things that aren't being relayed to each side of the organization that's going on. | |
| Right. | |
| How are they going to have your best interests in mind? | |
| So while we were in Chicago, I was shooting the Willis Tower, which used to be called the Sears Tower. | |
| And I looked down, and Chicago has these roads that go underneath the main street level. | |
| And I noticed they were closed off right underneath the Sears Tower. | |
| I don't know if it's odd or not, but I went down to shoot some video just to prove that they have blocked off the streets under there. | |
| Looks like they're doing some work, but there was nothing going on that day. | |
| And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a security guard appears. | |
| In a suit. | |
| A well-dressed security guard. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I'm just walking around shooting stuff in the city. | |
| What's going on? | |
| I can't log in from our entrance right here. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Are you with somebody? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I'm just walking around shooting video footage. | |
| Okay, uh, what is it for? | |
| I put videos on YouTube and stuff like that. | |
| Okay. | |
| Or I'm visiting Chicago. | |
| Okay. | |
| So I'm just shooting the Sears Tower and I was just shooting, you know, stuff like that. | |
| Yeah, you know, you can take as many shots as you like of the building, but I can't allow you to panel with that camera. | |
| Oh, gotcha. | |
| Okay, that's fine. | |
| What are y'all doing down here? | |
| Just construction, or? | |
| Yeah, this is just construction. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Alright. | |
| So now we're going to show you a few shots from Naoko. | |
| At the end we caught a plane the morning of this drill. | |
| So we went there at about 3 in the morning and hung out and waited. | |
| They seem to be behind schedule most of the weekend. | |
| They were way behind schedule. | |
| Or most of the week I guess we should say. | |
| So they were supposed to be set up by 4. | |
| Here's the sun coming up and they weren't set up yet. | |
| Nowco is the company that supplies BP with Correxent, the dispersant that they're using. | |
| So all the government agencies are working together. | |
| Everyone's in bed together. | |
| That's what you realize when you start really researching this stuff. | |
| It's either somebody owns the company or they're best friends with the owner of the company. | |
| Or they're on a board with another guy in the company. | |
| Or this is all you'll need to do in order to get into the company. | |
| So here they're applying fake blood. | |
| They really ran them through the ringer on this exercise. | |
| Here they are actually explaining what their symptoms are, what they should be acting like, if there's anything that they're trying to hide from the people that are trying to help them. | |
| These guys were fast. | |
| They were pretty good. | |
| They were doing person after person in there. | |
| It reminded me of doing haunted houses. | |
| It's not so much quality, it's quantity. | |
| That's right. | |
| Lots of fake blood. | |
| And in addition to the people, they also had a multitude of Of 150 pound dummies scattered around with various symptoms. | |
| So they were pulling out a lot of people, but unfortunately we weren't able to stay. | |
| For that we had to go back and catch a plane. | |
| By the time we left it was about five hours overdue? | |
| Yeah. | |
| As I mentioned, you're unable to get up there. | |
| I saw some dates on, you know, the paperwork that was strewn about it. | |
| That place was vacated in 1994. | |
| Right. | |
| So you have this building. | |
| It's now 2010. | |
| You're walking around this building. | |
| It's as if the world ended in 1994. | |
| It was just creepy. | |
| And this is, I guess, an abandoned building in the middle of this huge plant in a suburb of Chicago. | |
| Which was operating. | |
| We drove around it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of other stuff going on there. | |
| And this is about it. | |
| We got the Polish troops were on hand, of course, observing. | |
| I'm going to put that in quotes. | |
| Lightly participating. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Should this be a mission of our National Guard? | |
| Should they be working with foreign governments, foreign police agencies, on these exercises? | |
| And they obviously think so. | |
| That's a culture that they need to drill, drill with as many people possible. | |
| Each exercise had a designation that basically made you think, yes, this is what the National Guard should be doing. | |
| Oh, a plane crash. | |
| Yes, that's what they should be doing. | |
| But in addition to the plane crash, there's also a terrorist link in there, and they're getting terrorist information. | |
| Every exercise had some sort of, you know, alternate plotline that included terrorist plot, homeland terrorist plot, civil insurrection. | |
| Yeah, it was homegrown. | |
| They did one exercise that was not anywhere in their literature and at Toyota Park they were going to have a civil disturbance that night, the night we were at 15th and Clark. | |
| And that was pretty interesting, because they didn't list that anywhere. | |
| Right, it was at the last moment. | |
| Things had been very transparent for us with the National Guard. | |
| They filled in a lot of the blanks. | |
| But every step along the way, there was always that one missing part, or you would find out just moments before it happened. | |
| And that's completely understandable, but to have all of this literature that's printed out, But not include the fact that you're doing this civil insurrection and civil containment. | |
| Right, at the place where you're setting up your staging area. | |
| That's your command center. | |
| And we did specifically ask, was anything going to be happening around here? | |
| Right. |
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