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I couple of weeks ago I did some digging, asking ad nauseum to my elected officials and even some outside my district, specifically those in the DHS committee...One of which was Lamar Smith’s (R-Tx) office, who directed me to the actual DHS committee office...

I spoke to one staffer who was fielding these questions, and said that 16-17 of these MRAP’s were “given” to the DHS for their use, and retrofitted to their needs/specifications...

That aquisition was confirmed by the office of Jeb Hensarling (R-Tx), he happens to be on the House Finance committee who should have pretty good access/oversight on these matters, dispite that there has been no budget passed in over 4 years, and no real congressional oversight...

Now...Here is where I put a little reality into this equation...

Even thought I have heard from two credible (ahem) congressional sources, and two staffers from the actual DHS committee, one of which was a guy who is the DHS/ICE staffer...He is an ICE officer assigned to this staff as an advisor...

I am still skeptical of the validity of this information, but who does it benefit to deceive the public which is paying attention to these issues???

Knowing I could have simply asked my congressman Pete Olsen, who I think has had his pilot light blown out recently...I knew he would not have access much less get me an answer to a legitimate question...And I could have pinged Mike McCaul the chairman of the DHS committee...But I went to a couple of guys I have met and had a lot of success getting to the bottom of a few things in recent years...

But I still feel like we are being sold a bill of good here, and things are still not adding up...

My suggestion is to continue to keep out eyes and ears peeled and on the lookout for these vehicles and these SRT teams...They may not all travel in these easy to spot vehicles, but since I do not tweet on that twitter thing, the only recourse we may have is finding another possible place on the web to report these sightings, and other details, like vehicle tags, who is deployed in these vehicles, what they are doing as far as PR type work, which we have seen videos of recently...

Get a feel for where and what they are doing...

Thats about all we can do at this point, in my opinion...

So far, I have only heard of one vehicle and SRT team that is assigned to the El Paso, Texas area who’s area includes New Mexico and on up to Amarillo, Texas in its balliwick...

This sighting in Florida is new to me, and I have no doubt of its validity, and I am not so sure this is the same vehicle and crew from El Paso...

I believe the idea here is to simply get the ignorant people in this country to get used to seeing these vehicles, and disperse what few they have all around the country to make it appear that they have a lot of these teams running around, when they don’t for right now...

Make sure when they do any PR in your area, you note names, vehicle tags, unit numbers, and any other identifying characteristics to see if they do tend to change the deck and try to appear to be bigger than they are...

A suggestion till we may get a place to note this info, other than here, we start a thread with the tagwords “MRAPspotted”, and simply noted any details on who, what, where, when, and how many, etc etc etc...that way and archive search can gleen anyone the info they need to study this and draw your own conclusions...

Just my opinion...