Just a little over one year after giving the evasive response to CBS News about the reported secret tunnel under the Russian Embassy, Dick Cheney’s neighbors began to complain about a construction project at the Vice President’s residence that created repeated, huge blasts that were rocking their neighborhood – and the explosions emanated from Dick Cheney’s own house! Now, it should be said that the Vice-President of the United States lives in a mansion on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, D.C., just off of Massachusetts Avenue, and the location is surrounded by expensive homes in a wealthy section of town.

So you can imagine the concerns that residents of the neighborhood had when they began to hear loud explosions 2 or 3 times a day, early in the morning, as well as late at night. When neighbors complained about the continuing blasting, the Naval Observatory Superintendent, David W. Gillard, sent out a letter, in which he said:

Due to its sensitive nature in support of national security and homeland defense, project specification is classified and cannot be released. In addition, please understand we are severely constrained by operation requirements to perform this project on a highly accelerated schedule…

Gillard went on to say that the blasting could last for another eight months, and also said that the Navy had tried to create less noise on the construction project (whatever it was) by “silencing backup alerts on trucks and removing most diesel-powered electric generators from the construction site.” A Navy spokeswoman further characterized the work as “infrastructure and utility upgrades.” Local residents speculated that the work may involve underground excavation or tunneling. I am inclined to agree with this view.

Put this in perspective: when is the last time you tried setting off high explosives at your house? Especially in these troubling times of Homeland Security? For most people, that sort of activity would probably earn a swift trip to a prison cell – but not for the Vice President of the United States, whose house needed hundreds of explosive blasts over a period of many months!

Now, any thinking person can plainly see that while all this blasting was going on, Vice-President Cheney must certainly have been somewhere else. Perhaps down in the labyrinth of tunnels that underlies Washington, D.C., since presumably Cheney – the consummate Washington, D.C. insider – would already have known about the tunnels and, more than likely, would have regularly been using them himself.

But the highly unusual level of heavy construction activity at the Vice Presidential mansion clearly indicates a more serious kind of undertaking – perhaps going deeper, much deeper? In this regard I cannot help but think back to the Golden Eagle Award that Dick Cheney received in 1996 from the Academy of Fellows of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME). Two Golden Eagle Awards are given each year to “engineers who have made singularly distinctive contributions to the profession of military engineering and to America’s defense establishment.” In 1996, Cheney shared the honors with Steve Greenfield, the Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc., perhaps the premiere underground construction and tunneling company in the United States. The interesting thing about this engineering honor is that while Cheney is a past Secretary of Defense, he is not an engineer. His official biography plainly states that his academic training is in political science, and his adult career has been in the political arena. It is also interesting that Cheney received this honor along with the Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc.

Did Cheney and Greenfield perhaps work together on a major, clandestine, underground project, with Greenfield handling the hard engineering side of the project, while Cheney pulled the levers of power in the smoky, back rooms of the black budget world that clandestine movers and shakers navigate to get big, secret things done? I don’t know, but there are 3.3 trillions of dollars (that would be 3.3 thousand billions) unaccounted for in the American black budget, and Parsons Brinckerhoff, Inc. has popped up in my research more than once, as has Dick Cheney. When a non-engineer such as Dick Cheney receives a prestigious engineering award, that is an interesting turn of events and begs the question: for what?