WOULD AMERICANS ALLOW ATTACKS ON AMERICANS?

The WTC/Pentagon attacks certainly provided a convenient excuse to launch the pre-laid plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq. But were they simply allowed to happen or were they contrived provocations? Again the question arises: Would any American allow an attack on fellow Americans just to further his own business or political agenda?

Unfortunately, the answer is “Yes.” A case in point is “Operation Northwoods.” Noted earlier in this book, it's time for a closer look at this planned provocation that involved American lives.

This story came to light when, incredibly, 40-year-old government documents thought to have been destroyed long ago recently were made public. They show that the US military in the early 1960s proposed staging terrorist attacks in the United States and blaming them on Fidel Castro. Between the failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in April 1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, there was a time when the Pentagon was given authority over the ongoing, and mostly secret, war against Fidel Castro's Cuba.

The entire project was known as “Operation Mongoose” and was headed by Gen. Edward Lansdale, then deputy director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations. Mongoose was a gathering point for CIA agents, virulent anti-Castro Cubans, gung-ho military operatives and even organized crime figures, all of whom detested President Kennedy and thought him “soft” on communism and a threat to their own preser ves.

From this volatile fusion of violent elements came Operation Northwoods, which were to end up with then Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Today McNamara says, “I never heard of it.” However, the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had heard of it, for it was Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer who recommended that the Joint Chiefs oversee this plan to turn world opinion against Castro.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were going along with this pernicious program but President Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods. Senior military officers ordered the documents destroyed. But someone slipped up and ironically the papers were discovered in the early 1990s by the Assassination Records Review Board, created to look into Kennedy's assassination in the wake of the Oliver Stone film JFK.

These Operation Northwoods documents were discussed in a recent book on the National Security Agency (NSA) entitled Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency by James Bamford. After a careful study of the documents, Bamford concluded that the Joint Chiefs “proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.”

Following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, President Kennedy, angered by the inept actions of the CIA, had shifted responsibility for Cuba from that agency to the Department of Defense. Here, military strategists considered plans to create terrorist actions that would alarm the American population and stampede them into supporting a military attack on Cuba.

Under consideration in Operation Northwoods were plans to create “a series of well-coordinated incidents” in or around the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to include inciting riots, blowing up ammunition stores, aircraft and ships.

They also planned to “develop a Communist Cuba terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington” or to “…sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)…foster attempts on the lives of Cuban refugees in the United States…”

Other highlights of Operation Northwoods included the tactics of exploding bombs in carefully chosen locations along with the release of “prepared documents” pointing to Cuban complicity, the use of fake Russian aircraft to harass civilian airliners and “Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft,” even simulating the shooting down of a civilian airliner.

One proposed operation detailed in the Northwoods documents may have provided a prototype of the tactics used on September 11, 2001. On page 10 of the Northwoods plan it states: “An aircraft at Elgin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft…At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be boarded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone [remotely-controlled aircraft]… [From a] rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba the drone will be[gin] transmitting on the international distress frequency a ‘May Day’ message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal.”

It seems clear in the aftermath of 9/11 that Operation Northwoods was not forgotten. In fact, it seemed like covert and “black operations” programs might be making a comeback. Further, it appeared that the success of 9/11 as an inside job had opened a Pandora's box of follow-on covert and “black ops” programs.

In addition to the tremendous military buildup following the 9/11 attacks, the military affairs analyst for the Los Angeles Times reported “what may well be the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam Era.”

“The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities,” wrote William M. Arkin. “New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the ‘axis of evil.’”

In summer 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's Defense Science Board (DSB) conducted a “Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism.” The panel recommended “new strategies, postures and organization.”

One such new organization would be a super intelligence support activity called the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG), a unit combining the CIA, military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. One line of the classified study, which was leaked to the public by the Federation of American Scientists called for “preemption/proaction/interdiction/disruption/quick-response capabilities,” in other words, dirty fighting.

According to Arkin, the group would, among other things, “launch secret operations aimed at ‘stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction—that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to ‘quickresponse’ attacks by US forces. Such tactics would hold ‘states/sub-state actors accountable’ and ‘signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk.’”

Under the reorganized military, responsibility and accountability for the P2OG group would be held by a “Special Operations Executive” within the National Security Council (NSC). According to Asia Times writer David Isenberg, “The NSC would plan operations but not oversee their execution in order to avoid comparisons to past abuses, such as Iran-Contra operations runs out of the NSC by Oliver North during the Reagan administration. Under the board's proposal, NSC plans would be executed by the Pentagon or the CIA.”

Several commentators could not help but recall the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam and the Operation Northwoods plan of the Pentagon, which followed the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba, a joint military-CIA activity.

The thought of such past abuses prompted one writer, Chris Floyd, to rail against “…Bush and his cohorts [who] are plunging the world into an abyss, an endless night of black ops, retribution, blowback, deceit, or murder and terror…”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, citing sources in both the Pentagon and CIA, in 2005 agreed with previous writers that the Bush-dominated military would continue to expand its operations both at home and abroad.

“George W. Bush's reelection was not his only victory [in 2004]. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state,” Hersh wrote. “Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The CIA will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as ‘facilitators’ of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.”

Such are the chilling plans for expanded covert ops, but at least one such homegrown plot directed by the government against Americans may have been uncovered soon after 9/11 itself.

Late on Saturday, May 11, 2002, an astute deputy sheriff in Jacksonville, FL, stopped a speeding late-model pickup truck. The deputy was amazed to find the truck's driver dressed all in black, wearing a pistol in a shoulder holster and plastic pads on his elbows and knees. In the truck also were large knives, a 12-gauge shotgun, shotgun and pistol ammunition, four ammo magazines, a six-volt battery, duct tape, speaker wire and parts of an explosive device. He was further amazed to find the suspect was a soldier from Fort Stewart, GA.

He arrested Army Specialist Derek Lawrence Peterson. The arresting officer recognized Peterson's truck as one seen earlier parked near the main gate of a nearby Florida Power and Light station. Tracking footprints from where the truck had been parked, investigating officers discovered an explosive device beneath power lines.

The 27-year-old soldier explained he was practicing night reconnaissance tactics. A spokesman for Fort Stewart confirmed that Peterson had been stationed there for about a month with B Company, 1^st Battalion, 64^th Armored Division.

If Peterson were simply an idiot that somehow made it into the Army, one would expect widespread news coverage to demonstrate how seriously authorities were taking attempted bombings. On the other hand, if Peterson were carrying out some undisclosed covert military orders, one would expect the incident to be hushed up. The soldier was held in a Jacksonville jail without visitors in lieu of $5 million bail. Somebody was taking this case quite seriously, yet there was no national news coverage of this incident at a time of heightened fear and excitement over terrorist incidents and the initial court hearing for Peterson was postponed.

Next, consider the case of the man who tried to stop the first World Trade Center bombing.

According to the New York Times, in 1992 and early 1993 an FBI informant named Emad Salem was involved with Middle Eastern terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden. They were developing a bomb for use against New York's World Trade Center. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer, wanted to substitute a harmless powder for the explosive but his plan to thwart the attack was blocked by an FBI official who apparently did not want to expose the inside informant. The attack was allowed to proceed. The February 26, 1993 explosion in the WTC resulted in six deaths, more than 1,000 casualties and damage in excess of a half billion dollars.

Salem said he wanted to complain to FBI Headquarters in Washington but was dissuaded from doing so by another FBI agent. Salem said the agent told him, “I don't think that the New York [FBI] people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington, D.C.” It was also reported that the FBI repeatedly attempted to lay blame for the attack on the UN Mission from Sudan.

“[I]n 1992 and 1993, the New York City FBI informant and agent provocateur Emad Salem repeatedly tried to implicate the Sudanese UN Mission in his own ‘Islamic terror cell’ World Trade Center bomb plot conspiracy,” noted author Webster Griffin Tarpley. “Here we see how a false flag terror cell sheep-dips [covers up the true background of] its dupes [and brings them] into contact with a target, which then becomes the object of a police investigation, and possibly later of military attack.”

Tarpley also pointed out that when authorities searched the apartment of El Sayyid Nosair, suspected of the 1990 assassination of New York City Rabbi Meir Kahane, they found training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg and copies of teletypes going to the Secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Clearly, [Nosair] had a source in a sensitive position in the US military…” Tarpley wrote. “Much more likely, his terrorist controller occupied a sensitive position in the US military…”

False flag operations, the use of agents provocateur, misdirecting public opinion—we now see that fabricating crises to further political goals is a methodology well understood and utilized in the 20^th century. Was this the game on 9/11? Was Osama bin Laden merely substituted for Fidel Castro or some other enemy of the moment?