Post #5115

Drone Panic in El Paso: Homeland Theater at 18,000 Feet The Trump administration just shut down the sky over El Paso like it was 9/11 because of what it now calls “Mexican cartel drones” — then quietly lifted a 10‑day ground stop within hours, offered almost no detail, and declared the “threat neutralized” with a bald‑eagle meme. The FAA’s NOTAM turned the airspace above a metro area of nearly 900,000 into “national defense airspace” up to 18,000 feet, warned that violators could be intercepted and detained, and suggested this could last until Feb. 20. By Wednesday afternoon, the same system said: never mind, all clear. ​ Drone incursions from Mexico are not new. For years, they’ve been used by smugglers to scout U.S. military and CBP positions along the border and have never triggered a full commercial shutdown of a regional hub. El Paso’s own member of Congress, Veronica Escobar — who sits on the House Armed Services Committee — said flatly she saw “nothing extraordinary” that could justify an immediate or 10‑day closure and learned about the stop from a random federal employee, not from the FAA or the Pentagon. Local officials and airport management were left in the dark, while Washington posted a laser‑and‑eagle graphic. ​ Democrats on the House Transportation Committee called the whole episode “unacceptable” and “chaotic,” blaming new language the White House jammed into the defense bill that gives the Pentagon wide latitude to declare and police chunks of public airspace. An aviation professor in Britain called a complete no‑fly zone over a civilian airport “very odd” and “very rare” — especially when the stated threat is a few small drones that, until yesterday, were treated as an annoyance, not an air‑defense emergency. ​ So what actually happened? The administration won’t say when the drones crossed, how many there were, or why this incursion suddenly required freezing all commercial traffic in and out of the “gateway to West Texas, Southern New Mexico and Northern Mexico.” Instead, it offers a simple story: cartel drones breached, the military acted, the homeland was defended. Mission accomplished, no follow‑up questions. For people who actually live at the border — where drones, smugglers and federal uniforms have coexisted for years — the bigger story is uglier: Washington just test‑drove a new emergency power over civilian airspace, then wrapped the beta test in the language of security and patriotism. ​ #usa#border#drones#trump#surveillance#fakeDemocracy 📱American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸