Most Americans have not heard of operation Northwoods. I had not heard of it before two years ago. I am bringing it up today in this article because I recently had one of those heated discussions with a Marine from my old unit about this on New Years Eve. The Marine did not believe me that Operation Northwoods was an actual proposed “false flag” approved by the highest levels of our government and military. I tried to explain to him that this was historical fact and he just shook his head cynically, smiling and acted like it was absurd idea and would not accept any evidence or sources as credible. I really empathized in a way. These historical truths change the way we view the world. Cognitive dissonance is often our only defense against such startling revelations. I would have probably said the same thing as the Marine few years ago. I would have said that such an idea was crazy. Our military generals would never conspire against the American people! This was something that other countries did, not us. This could never happen in an open democracy. Coming to terms with the facts of life are not easy. Dropping old belief systems and looking at the world as it is can be very difficult. Many people simply do not have the courage. I don’t blame them, the truth can be heart wrenching. This is especially true when those in power who are charged with protecting the public are guilty of high crimes against the very same public. It is worse when it is discovered that they seem to get away with it routinely. Today, let us look at Operation Northwoods, the betrayal of the public trust and what it means for us today.
Operation Northwoods was a formal military plan to stage terrorist attacks on American soil and waters. The objective of these staged attacks would have been to rally public support against Castro and give the military an excuse to invade Cuba Many of these proposed attacks involved killing of Americans or Cubans. One of the proposed attacks involved placing explosives in an American city and blaming the attacks on the Castro regime. Others involved the sinking of ships with Cuban refugees aboard. An other proposal was to sink a U.S. military ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame the Cubans. After the sinking of the U.S. military ship, causality reports could be placed into all the major newspapers of the U.S. for the purposes of creating national indignation against the Castro regime. It would create as the documents bluntly put it, a “remember the Maine” incident. Multiple other false flag attacks were considered as well in the Operation Northwoods documents. As reported by ABC news, Operation Northwoods was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and passed onto the Kennedy administration which thankfully rejected the plan. The document was released by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board in 1997.
After Kennedy’s refusal to use air support in Bay of Pigs and his rejection of the Northwoods plan, is it possible that members in the military and the intelligence community considered him too weak willed to stand up to global communism? Maybe, but what is obvious and chilling is how casually the highest members of the military could approve and recommend such appalling action as recommended in the Northwoods documents. It leads one to wonder what other Top Secret false flags have been proposed and carried out? What else is going on today?
Some people might think that these kind of public betrayals could only happen during the Cold War. Some people might even falsely believe that such action is necessary when the threat to the United States is as large as the Soviet Union. Some people claim that this is in the distant past and could not happen today. I would not be so sure.
With the recent criminal activity by the NSA, it is obvious that many parts of the government thinks of itself as above the law. Every assurance the NSA has made to what it has not been doing seems to turn out to be an lie and often turns out that the NSA is doing exactly whatever activity that it has promised not to do. I don’t know about the NSA, but I know it is illegal to lie to an FBI agent but apparently the NSA can lie to congress all day long about its activities with no repercussions. Another NSA whistler blower has claimed that the NSA has spied and specifically targeted congressman, Supreme Court justices, admirals, generals, and even Obama when he was senator. What could be done with this information? Obviously, the NSA could use it for blackmail just like J. Edgar Hoover did. The power to blackmail is the power to control the whole government structure. Elected officials would be mere assets for the intelligence community, to hell with democracy!
Criminality can often be found at the highest levels of government whether it was Operation Northwoods in the sixties or the NSA today. The more I read and research, it has become obvious that this corruption is systemic. It is not just a few isolated instances. High crimes by public officials are often ignored by the media and usually receive just a shrug of the shoulders by most of the public. Rarely is justice served because government officials will try everything to avoid policing their own.
In the end I think time is running out. The debts are piling up, the dollar is being debased, and our wars seemed to have turned into quagmires. Both the left and the right seem to have given up all intellectual core principles and seemed to defend whatever there man in power’s actions are. Only the a small group of intellectual libertarians offer any real alternative. The public is slowly waking up but it will probably not be in time to avoid catastrophe. In the end catastrophe might be a godsend because then the truth will be exposed. It will be then that the real intellectual battle will be waged. It will be then that people will be looking for answers. It will be then when the liberty minded public will have to stand up and offer an alternative. I am hopeful, I think this will happen. Time will tell.
The Declassified Operation Northwoods documents can be found here.