Operation Northwoods – a 1962 plan that was proposed but not implemented where the US would justify a war by with Cuba by creating a false terrorist attack that killed cuban or american citizens and framing Cuba for it. It was never implemented, but it was considered seriously enough to propose it to President Kennedy. That link above is wikipedia, which may or may not be true; but here’s the pentagon documentswhich were declassified in 1997 - 2001.
And WTF?!?! If the US government really even just considered (without actually implementing) murdering its own citizens in a fake terrorist attack to invent support for a war, how did we not hear about this more when the docs were declassified? If this is true, it becomes a lot harder to dismiss the 9/11 conspiracy freaks, since there’s proof military types considered doing it before.
Except here’s the thing – wikipedia sounds like it really existed, and that declassified document looks real, but I can’t find any other evidence. Those declassified docs are hosted by gwu.edu rather than a government site. I can’t find anything about Operation Northwood on any .gov site, and there are no media reports about the declassified docs either – there are some ABC news reports from 2001 about it, but they all reference a book a guy wrote about the declassified documents, rather than the declassified documents themselves. I can’t find any other site for these declassified docs.
So either
a 50 year old proposal for the US government to murder its own citizens as propaganda to create a war, was upon its declassification, completely ignored by the media and all subsequent researchers,
those declassified docs are a hoax and wikipedia was taken in,
the docs are real, but were just some kind of thought experiment or hypothetical war game or something that they didn’t really plan to do, and I’m missing that context now 60 years later.
So is there any proof that Operation Northwoods was real? Ideally, I’d like to see that declassified document on a .gov server; or baring that, a mainstream media report about them (which doesn’t just refer to a book somebody wrote).
No, you’re thinking of the George Bush draft-dodging thing. Different set of (allegedly forged) documents, not relevant here. I haven’t seen anyone make the claim that these Operation Northwood documents have the wrong font. But I haven’t seen anyone mention them much at all.
A lot of the links and references on the WP page seem pretty TFH and woo-y, but reference #2 appears to point to original documents in the National Archives.
So whether it was something seriously considered or another “poison Castro’s beard” notion banged out in those heady CIA=GOD days, it does seem to have a basis in reality. I’d lean towards the latter. Who knows how many completely nutball, basement-paranoid ideas like this were bounced off walls in those years?
For what it’s worth, about 20 or so years ago there was a documentary (on ABC I think) which made use of the actual Oval Office audio recordings that were made during the Cuban Missile Crisis (they had been recently released). And although I don’t remember hearing the term ‘Northwoods’ mentioned, at one point Bobby Kennedy (the US Attorney General) does clearly state something along the lines of doing a modern day “blowing up The Maine” in reference to how the Spanish-American War started (the battleship USS Maine was probably destroyed in a boiler accident but it was blamed on a Spanish mine). So yeah, it certainly was considered, but I wouldn’t read much into that. In a situation like that *everything *is considered. The reason its existence isn’t a revelation of any kind is because desperate times call for (possibly) desperate measures.
And as far as any 9/11 comparisons, forget it. The two events are not similar in any way, shape or form. One involved the USSR stationing nuclear missiles 90 miles from US shores directly causing the absolute closest call we have ever had to a nuclear WWIII (the US govt has never had more at stake in its history), while the other was just a bunch of murdering religious yahoos using our own undefended civilian aircraft (which they could never build) as improvised, blunt-force weapons against undefended civilian skyscrapers (which ironically, they also could never build).
Near the end of WWII the British govt under Churchill actually drew up plans for a combined US/British/and newly-allied German attack on the Soviet Union (Operation Unthinkable) just in case. Again it was kept secret for years, but when it was finally released nobody cared (nor should they have)…
I agree with your first sentence, and you’re on track for most of the rest of it, but I could wear myself out posting pictures of very large, very tall, very sophisticated buildings in places where global terrorists come from.
Yea, but its not like the terrorists were really connected to the people building the skyscrapers. The first building on the list was built by some company called…oh, well, nevermind.
People forget that OBL was trained as an engineer, possibly up to the level of having an engineering degree (reports differ), and he targeted the WTC towers because his grasp of their structural design was sufficient for him to see the weaknesses and exploit them.
The purpose of the 1993 bombing was to bring down the one tower, hopefully into the other one.
There is quite a bit of evidence that the disaster happened exactly as planned - the selection of the aircraft involved included their massive fuel loads for their planned cross-country routes, and the target points on the buildings and the speed of the aircraft at the time of striking them were intended to damage the central core through impact and jet-fuel fire, causing at least the upper structures to crumble.
OBL may have been surprised at the exact outcome, but bringing those towers down was his goal for some ten years. About the only “better” outcome for him would have been the nightmare of leaving two gutted, fragile swords of Damocles hanging over Manhattan, even more of a symbol than the rubble that did result. I think his surprise is better interpreted as delight.
(And *my *delight is that, delayed as the act was, the SOB was indeed shot right between the eyes by an individual rather than blown up, vaporized, killed in a mass attack, etc. This outcome allows me the pleasurable thought that I might one day shake the hand that was on that trigger.)
Which didn’t work. That’s not much of an argument for their sophisticated understanding of engineering.
Of course the second tower hit was the first to collapse, specifically because it wasn’t hit head on, but along one edge. So if that was the plan, it’s another piece of incompetent planning by the Islamists.
I’m sure he was very pleased, but he isn’t directly linked to either WTC attack, so I don’t think we can assume he had a vendetta against those two buildings, or the World Trade Centre in general. Or a thing for the use of planes as weapons. Ramzi Youssef, he had a big plan to use planes as weapons which never came off and he was the one behind the first WTC attack, and maybe Kahane.
Engineering was his family business, but I’ve never seen any evidence he had anything to do with planning 9/11, or with picking targets. That claim seems to come down to one hotly contested translation of one of his videos, in which he may or may not claim responsibility.
It’s more likely that Mohammad Atta chose the targets. He, of course, was an engineering graduate from Cairo University, and then was recruited into a US-German student exchange programme.
As for Northwoods, yes it was planned. America really hated Castro. Inexplicably, still does. They had a programme to assassinate him, they launched the Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow him, they launched terrorist attacks on Cuba and ships operating in Cuban waters, and yes they planned to fake an attack by Cuba to justify an invasion. But they didn’t do it, and in context that is remarkably restrained.
If you want to argue they were all a bunch of smelly camel-jockeys barely smart enough to buy airline tickets, fine by me.
The 1993 bombing was botched in several ways and had a low likelihood of being successful with any amount of explosive that could have been positioned. I believe there are analyses that show it could have worked (given more materiel) and that the planning shows considerable engineering forethought. It was not just “make a big bang in the basement.”
No. If Northwoods was real, it, like the Bay of Pigs (which certainly was real), must have been something contemplated well before the Soviets started deploying missiles in Cuba. It would have been only to obviously crazy and dangerous to do any such thing after that, and of course the missiles went in, in large part, as an attempt to stop the United States trying any more of this crazy stuff. If we are making comparisons to 9/11 here, the Soviet Missiles in Cuba are the equivalent to the US invasions of Afganistan and Iraq, the (over) reaction after the initial provoking events.
The Defense Department (and before that the War Department) has people whose job is to make plans - for likely scenarios like North Korea attacking South Korea to unlikely scenarios like Ohio attacking Indiana. They’re supposed to consider every possible thing the United States military might be called on to do and have a plan on file. As recently as the 1940’s the United States had plans for invading Canada (and Canada had plans for invading the United States).
