From JFK's Murder, to "Operations Northwoods," to 9/11, or Welcome to Fascist America

From Goon Squad, by Greg Bacon

The Perfidy of Government: Evidence v. Denial 

Kennedy had not gone along with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, calling off the U.S. air support. He had nixed the Operation Northwoods project conceived by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to conduct black ops terrorist operations against American citizens in Miami and Washington D.C., to hijack and shoot down American airliners (“real and simulated”), to strafe and bomb Cuban refugee ships headed for Florida and to blame it all on Castro in order to create public support for “regime change” in Cuba.

When Kennedy signed the nuclear test ban treaty with Khrushchev, it brought him more condemnation from within his own government. In the eyes of the Joint Chiefs, the CIA, and the Secret Service, America had a national security risk in the White House who was selling out the country to Soviet deceptiveness.

The decision was made to eliminate the security risk. Douglass presents in fascinating detail every inch of the story. I can’t reproduce it here. Suffice it to say that Oswald was on both the CIA and FBI payrolls. He was set up as the patsy without realizing it until he was in the Dallas jail where he was shot by Jack Ruby, another CIA asset.

The FBI at headquarters level was not part of the plot, although local offices were infiltrated by the CIA. The CIA had set the assassination up so that the patsy, Oswald, was linked to a KGB assassin and to Castro. The goal was to use Kennedy’s murder to enrage the American public and to attack Cuba and the Soviet Union. I know, it sounds to naive Americans like a farfetched conspiracy theory, but I have never seen a better proven case.

After JFK’s assassination, J. Edgar Hoover clued in Lyndon Johnson that the linkages of Oswald to the KGB and Cuba were fabricated by the CIA.

The problem for President Johnson was that the CIA had assassinated Kennedy in a manner that was too transparent. The CIA had overdone its setup of Oswald, for example, to the point that it was transparently a CIA operation.

What to do? If Johnson ordered the arrest of the CIA operatives responsible, the responsibility rose high up into the ranks. What would be the effect on the American public during a difficult time of the cold war if they learned that they could not trust their own government not to murder their own president? In addition, liberals were concerned that if the truth came out, Americans’ trust in their government would evaporate. Heaven forbid!

Johnson made the decision to cover up the crime and that was the task assigned to the Warren Commission.

Edgar Hoover knew the truth, but went along with the coverup.

Johnson and Earl Warren were thinking short-run and did not understand the unintended consequences of the coverup. They thought that by blaming Oswald as a lone deranged assassin, that they had done service by eliminating the CIA plot to implicate Cuba and the Soviet Union. Johnson did not realize that he had handed the U.S. government over to the CIA, and that he would soon be involved in an escalating war in Vietnam--a war that JFK had ordered wound down--which would deny him a second term.

Evidence continues to pile up that the Warren Commission covered up JFK’s murder by a conspiracy within the U.S. government. In his multi-volume Inside The Assassination Records Review Board, Douglas P. Horne, Chief Analyst for Military Records, Assassination Records Review Board, provides voluminous incontrovertible evidence that fraud was introduced into the autopsy reports that served as the basis for the Warren Commission’s conclusion that JFK was shot from behind by a lone gunman.

Out of JFK’s assassination came Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, and 9/11.

From strafing drones supposed to be filled with college students, then blaming the simulated murders on Cuba to using drones again(?) to hit the WTC, and staging more mock funerals?

We have lost complete control of our nation, our destiny and our heritage.

Operation Northwoods Information Center

Follow the links provided below to declassified Pentagon documents and an ABC News article on Operation Northwoods. Approved by the top Pentagon chiefs, Operation Northwoods proposed fabricating terrorism in US cities and killing innocent citizens to trick the public into supporting a war against Cuba in the early 1960s. Operation Northwoods even proposed blowing up a US ship and hijacking planes as a false pretext for war. First coming to light in the year 2000 through a Freedom of Information Act request, key excerpts from the Operation Northwoods documents are provided below.

As you read, ask yourself if similar tactics to those listed below could have been used in regards to 9/11.

15 pages of declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff documents on Operation Northwoods as posted on the National Security Archive of George Washington University:

Pages 10-11 of 15-page GWU file on Northwoods (page 7-8 of Joint Chiefs report)

A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.

A. Incidents to establish a credible attack:

(1) Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
(2) Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.
(3) Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
(4) Start riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
(5) Blow up ammunition inside the base: start fires.
(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
(7) Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base.
(8) Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
(9) Capture militia group which storms base.
(10) Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires – naphthalene.
(11) Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mock-victims.

Page 13 of 15-page GWU file on Operation Northwoods (page 10 of Pentagon report)

Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba.

It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday.

An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At the designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual aircraft would be converted to a drone.

More on "Operations Northwoods" available here:

The War Party’s Atrocity Porn

From LewRockwell,  | March 1, 2011
By William Norman Grigg

“This is a massacre,” the frantic Libyan woman, speaking by telephone while cowering in her apartment in Tripoli, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I hope you know that people around the world are watching and praying and wanting to do something,” Anderson told her, as if he were a stage prompter hinting at a performer’s next line. Whether or not she had been given a copy of the script, the caller performed as expected: “[T]he first step [is to] make Libya a no-fly zone. If you make Libya a no-fly zone, no more mercenaries can come in…. There needs to be action. How much more waiting, how much more watching, how much more people dying?”

It’s entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that the subject of Cooper’s interview was simply a terrified but resolute woman who risked her life to describe the violence devouring her country amid the death throes of Khadaffy’s police state.

It’s likewise possible that her call for international action to impose a no-fly zone was a desperate plea from a victim, rather than an act of media ventriloquism in which an anonymous figure endorsed the first plank of a military campaign proposed by the same neo-conservative kriegsbund that manipulated us into Iraq.

Surely it was a coincidence that the “Cry in the Night” from Libya was echoed on the same network a few nights later by Iraq war architect, former World Bank president, and accused war criminal Paul Wolfowitz, who several days prior to Cooper’s dramatic broadcast called for a NATO-enforced “no fly zone” over Libya.

In fact, the day following that interview, an ad hoc group calling itself the Foreign Policy Initiative, which coalesced from the remnants of the Project for a New American Century, published an “open letter” to Mr. Obama demanding military intervention – beginning with a no-fly zone – in Libya.  The neo-con framework for managing the Libyan crisis would create a regional protectorate administered by NATO on behalf of the “international community.” This would nullify any effort on the part of Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, and others to achieve true independence.

On previous experience with media campaigns on behalf of humanitarian conquest, my incurable cynicism leads me to hear in Cooper’s “Cry in the Night” a faint but unmistakable echo of the tearful, palpably earnest testimony of “Nayirah” –   the wide-eyed Kuwaiti girl who, using an assumed name to “protect her family,” described what had befallen her country in the wake of the Iraqi invasion.

Bravely composing herself as she recounted horrors no human eyes should behold, the precociously self-possessed 15-year-old volunteer nurse related to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus how Iraqi soldiers stormed into the al-Addan Hospital, tore newborn infants from incubators, and hurled them to the floor. A short time later this testimony was “confirmed” by others who offered similarly anguished testimony before the UN Security Council.

During the three-month build-up to the January 1991 attack on Baghdad, the image of Kuwaiti “incubator babies” was endlessly recycled as a talking point in media interviews, presidential speeches, and debates in Congress and the UN. A post-war opinion survey found that the story of the “incubator babies” was the single most potent weapon deployed by the Bush administration in its campaign to build public support for the attack on Iraq.

This atrocity account was particularly effective in overcoming the skepticism of people espousing a progressive point of view.

“A pacifist by nature, my brother was not in a peaceful mood that day,” recalled Christian Science Monitorcolumnist Tom Regan, describing his sibling’s reaction to “Nayirah’s” testimony. “We’ve got to go and get Saddam Hussein – now,” Regan’s brother insisted.

“I completely understood his feelings,” Regan pointed out. After all, “who could countenance such brutality? The news of the slaughter had come at a key moment in the deliberations about whether the U.S. would invade Iraq. Those who watched the non-stop debates on TV saw that many of those who had previously wavered on the issue had been turned into warriors by this shocking incident. Too bad it never happened.”

“Nayirah” was not a traumatized ingénue who had witnessed an act of barbarism worthy of the Einsatzgruppen; she was actually the daughter of Saud Nasi al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States (and a member of the emirate’s royal family). Her script had been written by the Washington-based PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which – under the supervision of former Bush administration Chief of Staff Craig Fuller – had put together a campaign to build public support for the impending war.

It wasn’t difficult to convince the public that Saddam was a hideous thug. Selling the idea of a major war in the Middle East was a more daunting proposition. In late 1990, Hal Steward, a retired Army propaganda officer, defined the problem for the administration: “If and when the shooting starts, reporters will begin to wonder why American soldiers are dying for oil-rich sheiks. The U.S. military had better get cracking to come up with a public relations plan that will supply the answers the public can accept.”

The image of newborn Kuwaiti infants being ripped from incubators was an updated riff on a classic war propaganda theme performed by British intelligence – and its American fellow travelers – in their efforts to provoke U.S. intervention in World War I.

The WWI-era equivalent of the Kuwaiti “incubator babies” were the Belgian infants who were supposedly spitted on bayonets by hairy-knuckled Huns in Pickelhaube helmets. German soldiers did this to amuse themselves once they could no longer sate their prurient interests by raping Belgian women and then amputating their breasts. So the American public was told, in all seriousness, by people working on behalf of a secretive British propaganda committee headed by Charles Masterman.

In 1915, an official Commission headed by Viscount James Bryce, a notable British historian, “verified” those atrocity stories without naming a specific witness or victim. This didn’t satisfy Clarence Darrow, who offered a reward of $1,000 to anyone who could produce a Belgian or French victim who had been mutilated by German troops. That bounty went unclaimed.

“After the war,” recounts Thomas Fleming in his book Illusion of Victory, “historians who sought to examine the documentation for Bryce’s stories were told that the files had mysteriously disappeared. This blatant evasion prompted most historians to dismiss 99 percent of Bryce’s atrocities as fabrications.”

War emancipates every base and repulsive impulse to which fallen man is susceptible. So it’s certain that some German troops (like their French, Belgian, British, and American counterparts) exploited opportunities to commit individual acts of depraved cruelty. But the purpose of the war propaganda peddled by the Anglo-American elite, as Fleming observes, was to create a widespread public image of Germans as “monsters capable of appalling sadism” – thereby coating an appeal to murderous collective hatred with a lacquer of sanctimony.

I’ve described agitprop of this variety as “atrocity porn.” It is designed to appeal to prurient interests and manipulate a dangerous appetite – in this case, what Augustine calls the libido domimandi, or the lust to rule over others.

The trick is to leave the target audience at once shivering in horror at a spectacle of sub-human depravity, panting with a visceral desire for vengeance, and rapturously self-righteous about the purity of its humane motives. People who succumb to it are easily subsumed into a hive mind of officially sanctioned hatred, and prepared to perpetrate crimes even more hideous than those that they believe typify the enemy.

Rhetoric of that kind abounded during the French Revolution, particularly the Jacobin regime’s war to annihilate the rebellious Vendee. It also figured prominently in the Lincoln regime’s war to conquer the newly independent southern states. However, it’s difficult to find a better expression of that mindset than the one offered in an editorial published in 1920 by Krasni Mech (The Red Sword), a publication of the Soviet Cheka secret police:

“Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute, because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles … Blood? Let blood flow like water … for only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever.” (Emphasis added.)

In pursuing his Grand Crusade for Democracy, Woodrow Wilson was squarely in that tradition, extolling the supposed virtue of “Force without stint or limit … the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion in the dust.” To fortify the American “war will” through a steady diet of atrocity porn, the Wilson administration created a Department of Public Information that liaised with its British equivalent, as well as quasi-private British propaganda fronts such as the Navy League. That organization, Fleming points out, included “dozens of major bankers and corporate executives, from J.P. Morgan Jr. to Cornelius Vanderbilt.”

Through absolutely no fault of his own, Anderson Cooper is a great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Of considerably greater interest is the fact that as a student at Yale, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at Langley in a CIA program designed to cultivate future intelligence operatives.

When asked about Cooper’s background with the CIA, a CNN spokeswoman insisted that he chose not to pursue a job with the Agency after graduating from Yale. The same can be said, however, of many of the CIA’s most valuable media assets.

As Carl Bernstein documented decades ago, the CIA “ran a formal training program in the 1950s to teach its agents to be journalists. Intelligence officers were ‘taught how to make noises like reporters,’ explained a high CIA official, and were then placed in major news organizations with help from management. ‘These were the guys who went through the ranks and were told, ‘You’re going to be a journalist,’ the CIA official said. Relatively few of the 400-some [media] relationships described in Agency files followed that pattern, however; most involved persons who were already bona fide journalists when they began undertaking tasks for the Agency.”

By way of an initiative called “Operation Mockingbird,” the CIA built a large seraglio of paid media courtesans. This was carried out through the Office of Policy Coordination, which was created by Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner – the latter being the official who went on to organize coups (and the attendant propaganda campaigns) against governments in Iran and Guatemala. (Wisner’s son and namesake, incidentally, was a vice chairman at AIG – the CIA’s favorite global insurance conglomerate – until 2009; more recently he was tapped by the Obama administration to serve as a back-channel contact with Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.)

The tendrils of “Operation Mockingbird” extended through every significant national media organ, from the Washington Post and Newsweek to the Time-Life conglomerate, from the New York Times to CBS. As a result, according to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, the Fourth Estate “has been captured by government and corporations, the military-industrial complex, the intelligence apparatus.” It is, in everything but name, an appendage of the Regime. This is clearly seen every time the Regime decides the time has come to mount another campaign of humanitarian bloodshed abroad.

Having “learned nothing from the horrors that they cheer-led like excitable teenage girls over the past 15 years, these bohemian bombers, these latte-sipping lieutenants, these iPad imperialists are back,” sighs a wearily disgusted Brendan O’Neill in the London Telegraph. “This time they’re demanding the invasion of Libya.”

On O’Neill’s side of the Atlantic, the Fleet Street Samurai are peddling “rumors of systematic male rape” in Libya. Others insist that the prospective war in Libya would in no way resemble “the foolishness of the Iraq invasion” – just as similar self-appointed sages promised that the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, each of which has lasted at least as long as the Vietnam War, would not be “another Vietnam.”

For some reason, this brings to mind the image of Bullwinkle repeatedly trying to pull a rabbit from his hat, blithely batting aside Rocky’s complaint that the trick “never works” by exclaiming, “This time for sure!” This time, we’re supposed to believe – or at least, pretend to believe – that the atrocity accounts are true, that military action sanctified by the “international community” is a moral obligation, that warlust and hatred are virtuous, and that the impending bloodshed will be a cleansing stream.

As is the case, one supposes, with any other variety, war pornography is nothing if not predictable. However, unlike Bullwinkle’s inept attempts at thaumaturgy, war porn is a trick that seems to work every time.

~

“All war is based on Deception” – “in war, the first casualty is truth“; Sun Tzu’s Art of War

William Norman Grigg [send him mail] publishes the Pro Libertate blog and hosts the Pro Libertate radio program.

Copyright © 2011 William Norman Grigg

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The Anti-Empire Report The Enduring Mystique of the Marshall Plan by William Blum March 1, 2011 - Amidst all the stirring political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East the name "Marshall Plan" keeps being repeated by political figures and media around the world as the key to rebuilding the economies of those societies to complement the political advances, which hopefully will be somewhat progressive. But caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware. During my years of writing and speaking about the harm and injustice inflicted upon the world by unending United States interventions, I've often been met with resentment from those who accuse me of chronicling only the negative side of US foreign policy and ignoring the many positive sides. When I ask the person to give me some examples of what s/he thinks show the virtuous face of America's dealings with the world in modern times, one of the things mentioned — almost without exception — is The Marshall Plan... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75465

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Davis Arrest Throws US Undercover Campaign in Pakistan into Disarray Dave Lindorff March 1, 2011 - The ongoing case of Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor facing murder charges in Lahore for the execution-style slaying of two apparent agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, is apparently leading to a roll-back of America’s espionage and Special Operations activities in Pakistan. A few days ago, Pakistan’s Interior Department, which is reportedly conducting a careful review of the hundreds of private contractors who flooded into Pakistan over the last two years, many with "diplomatic passports," and many others, like Davis, linked to shady "security" firms, arrested an American security contractor named Aaron DeHaven, a Virginia native who claims to work for a company called Catalyst Services LLC... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75461

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Imperialist hands off Libya! Patrick Martin March 1, 2011 - The United States and the European powers are moving towards direct military intervention in Libya. They are seeking to exploit a legitimate popular uprising against the 41-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi, preempt any possibility of a more radical regime emerging, and install a colonial-style puppet in place of the discredited dictatorship. The pace of the shift in American policy, in particular, is extraordinary. Washington has moved from relative silence on the movement against Gaddafi to leading the charge for outside intervention... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75453

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Israel Issues Eviction Orders to 600 Palestinian Bedouins in Jerusalem Area Sergio Yahni March 1, 2011 - Hathem Abdel Qader, responsible for Jerusalem in the Fatah movement, warned yesterday of an Israeli plan to deport some 600 Palestinian Bedouin residents of the Wadi Abu Hindi area, located between the settlements of Maale Adumim and Keder, south-east of Jerusalem. Abdel Qader noted that the Israeli military issued evacuation orders to tens of Bedouin families in Wadi Abu Hindi. According to the orders, the families must leave the area by the end of March. According to Yacoub Odeh, from the Land Research Centre, this is not the first time that this community receives evacuation orders... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75459

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Yemen leader blames protests on US AlJazeera.net March 1, 2011 - Yemen's president has hit out at Israel and the US, accusing them of destabilising his country and the Arab world as protesters demanding his ouster press ahead with demonstrations. Ali Abdullah Saleh's comments on Tuesday marked his harshest public criticism yet of the US, a key ally with which his government is battling al-Qaeda pockets in the Arab Pensinsula. He said "there's an operations room in Tel Aviv with the aim of destabilising the Arab world" and that it is "run by the White House"... Saleh, speaking to faculty at Sanaa University, accused the US president of meddling in the Middle East. "Mr Obama, you're the president of the United States; you're not the president of the Arab world," he said.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75458

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No to imperialist intervention in Libya by Fred Weston March 1, 2011 - Rebels in the Libyan city of Az Zawiyah (close to the capital) have fought back an attempt by Gaddafi’s forces to retake the city. According to eyewitness reports there were six hours of fighting during the night as the two sides struggled for control of the city. As one anti-Gaddafi activist explained, "We managed to defeat them because our spirits are high and their spirits are zero."Both camps are heavily armed, as much of the military has sided with the masses that have risen up, while Gaddafi still has some crack forces loyal to him. The rebel forces have tanks, machine guns and anti-aircraft guns. In fact rebels in the city of Misurata downed one of Gaddafi’s military aircraft on Monday... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75457

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Spanish Court Gives Go-Ahead for Guantánamo Torture Investigation to Continue Andy Worthington March 1, 2011 - On Friday, the Spanish National Court (Audiencia Nacional) gave hope to those seeking to hold accountable the Bush administration officials and lawyers who authorized torture by agreeing to continue investigating allegations made by a Moroccan-born Spanish resident, Lahcen Ikassrien, that he was tortured at Guantánamo, where he was held from 2002 to 2005. Spanish courts are empowered to hear certain types of international cases, but following a limitation placed on the country’s universal jurisdiction laws in November 2009 (very possibly with pressure from the US), the cases in question must have a "relevant connection" to Spain.... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75456

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Gaddafi in bid to reassert control AlJazeera.net March 1, 2011 - Muammar Gaddafi, Libya's embattled leader, is defying mounting calls to step down and has instead dispatched forces to several far-flung regions in a bid to reassert his control that has been threatened by the uprising sweeping the North African nation. Barely 12 hours after the United States said it was moving warships and air forces closer to Libya, Gaddafi's forces re-asserted their presence at the Dehiba border crossing in the country's west on Tuesday, decorating the border post with green Libyan flags... Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=75454

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