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.
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