Operation Northwoods- some thoughts

[Turbineguy]

OK. Before I came to DU I had never heard of this Northwoods thing and certainly am not an expert now. But consider: The plan was to come up with a series of make believe attacks in order to create a hysteria and public demand to attack Cuba.

First: I think that such schemes are well within the brief of military planners, the idea being to have a large number of plans and simply pick the best one that fits the circumstances. I am pretty sure there is a detailed plan for attacking Lichtenstein somewhere on file.

Second: Operation Northwoods would give the impression that Americans had been killed, but none would actually be harmed. Even if it was found out later to be a hoax, by the time it came out, Castro would have been history. In the context of the Cold War, getting rid of Castro was not necessarily a bad thing.

But there's a compliment implicit in Operation Northwoods. The American public was deemed to be smart enough not to fall for some crackpot story and so an elaborate fake attack was needed. Compare this to how easily this Bush Administration lied us into attacking Iraq.

The fact is that the Government worked back then. The guy who came up with this up was fired as he should be.

Will this AF guy Wynn get the chop for "cooking" up this microwave weapon to use on US Citizens idea?

[Parche]

1. NORTHWOODS

They finally succeeded in their so called operation, it was known as Sept 11th 2001

[LSK]

2. to the dungeon in 3 2 1.....

[treestar]

3. If anything, it shows the propensity of the power-mad for going to

extremes to stage and control events.

We need these people out of government,as always.

Anyone who WANTS to serve in government should be suspected on that ground alone. We need the Jeffersonian types who have to be sent into leadership kicking and screaming.

[Octafish]

4. A friend of mine is an editor of a great metropolitan newspaper...

...his jaw dropped when I showed him Operation NORTHWOODS. With good reason, the Pentagon leadership was willing to lie America into a war. Sounds like Bush and Cheney and Rummy today with their sexed-up phony WMD pretext for the illegal Iraq invasion for oil and grand strategery.

In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”

MORE (plus PDF to actual remaining copy):

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/

My buddy's paper won't touch NORTHWOODS. They all want to keep their jobs, he said.

BTW: It does take into account civilian U.S. deaths.

[NewJeffCT]

5. I don't think the Iraq invasion was a 21st century Northwoods

Conspiracy theorists might think 9/11 was, however.

And, I would not put it past Team Bush to do a series of small types of terror attacks in October to rally the American people 'round the flag & vote Republican.

[Name removed]

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