Who sprung the nukes?

Some interesting observations and pertinent questions by David Lindorff on the mysterious Minot-Barksdale nuclear weapons flight:

at least two people, since it’s long been a basic part of nuclear security that every action involving a nuclear weapon has to be done by two people working in tandem—had to deliberately and consciously disable those alarms......

we’re asked to believe that some low-ranking ground crew personnel at Minot AFB simply walked out of a nuclear weapons bunker with six nuclear armed Advanced Cruise Missiles, not knowing what they were carrying, and labored for eight hours to mount those missiles and their launch pylon on the wing of a B-52 strategic bomber without ever noticing that they were armed with nuclear weapons. We’re asked to believe that none of those electronic alarms and motion sensors built into the system went off during that whole process....

Who disabled the alarm systems on those [nuclear] weapons and on the bunker itself?

Who mounted six nuclear weapons on the noses of six cruise missiles and put those missiles onto a B-52 launch platform?

Who authorized them to perform this operation?

Who moved the armed weapons out of the Bunker at Minot AFB and mounted them on the wing of a B-52 bound for Barksdale AFB? (Barksdale, it should be noted, bills itself as the main staging base for B-52s being flown to the Middle East Theater.)

Were the six missiles flyable? Were they fueled up and ready to fire, or were they not fueled at the time of the Minot-Barksdale flight?

Was there targeting information in the missile’s guidance computers and if so, what were those targets?

What happened to the three military whistleblowers who blew the whistle on this incident and reported it to a journalist at the newspaper Military Times?

Why hasn’t the Air Force or the FBI investigated the 6-8 untimely deaths including three alleged suicides, one of a Minot weapons guard, one of an assistant defense secretary, and one of a captain in the super-secret Air Force Special Commando Group, as well as alleged fatal vehicle “accidents” involving four ground crew and B-52 pilots and crewmembers at Minot and Barksdale?

Could any of this strange cluster of deaths have been related to the incident? The Air Force “investigation” didn’t even mention these incidents, and my investigation, reported in the Oct. 24 issue of the magazine American Conservative, found that none of the police investigators or medical examiners in those incidents had even been contacted by Air Force or other federal investigators.

Lindorff point the finger at Cheney as the chief suspect based upon his track record of shady dealing and intelligence manipulation. I doubt though that Cheney is the only one. Iraq was not solely a Cheney plot and neither is Iran. So if he did it, then it is probable that many others in the Bush junta were aware and approved of it.