Investigators now claim Hawaii employee who sent false alert thought attack was real
By
Joseph Kishore
31 January 2018
Federal and Hawaii state officials investigating the January 13 alert of an impending nuclear missile attack are now asserting that the employee allegedly responsible sent out the message because he thought a real attack had been launched. This directly contradicts previous claims that the employee, who is still unnamed, sent the warning inadvertently.
The false alarm was sent to the cell phones of hundreds of thousands of Hawaiian residents and was also transmitted over television and radio. For 38 minutes—the time between the initial message and a second message rescinding it—the population of the entire state thought that a nuclear explosion was imminent.
The story was quickly buried by the media, which accepted uncritically the initial claim of state officials that the mass terror was the result of a single employee who apparently clicked a wrong button, and then confirmed this initial error. Officials attributed the 38 minutes before a correction was notified to the failure of the state to have adequate procedures to correct a false alarm.
Preliminary findings released on Tuesday by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now assert that the employee deliberately sent the alarm.
The FCC report states that an unnamed midnight shift supervisor at the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) initiated a “no-notice ballistic missile defense drill” during the shift change at around 8:00 a.m. on January 13. The drill involved the placement of a call to warn officers purportedly from US Pacific Command announcing an attack. The FCC report asserts that the call began and ended with the words “exercise, exercise, exercise,” but it “also…