How the hell do you murder people with LSD?
It was 1967 and there was no relationship then to speak of. Meaning, no, not really.
Really? The most sophisticated intelligence ship? In international waters? Service men murdered and wounded to a 60% rate of ship personnel? I don’t buy that on principle.
Ah, yes, the “incompetence” argument – a refuge of a scared believer. Pitiful!
Discussion is not did Israel do it - it’s about why did they do it.
This one has been as done to death as “9/11 was an inside job” as has as much validity. The USS Liberty was attacked in error when it was misidentified as an Egyptian vessel by the Israelis. There is no deeper conspiracy and the attack was not intentional or deliberate. Why would Israel possibly care about the US monitoring the IDF advances into the Sinai and the Golan, much less care enough to deliberately attack an American vessel and risk retaliation or war from the US? The idea that it was an attack in collusion with the US government to “take Israel “away” from Russian influence” is even more deeply in tinfoil hat consipracy land. There was no Russian influence in Israel. The Soviets were arming Israel’s Arab neighbors and were interested in having them as client states, they had no interest in making Israel a client state and Israel had no interest in becoming a Soviet client state.
Whatever the reason, reasoning and expectations, I don’t think there’s any question that the IDF knew the *Liberty *was a US ship. (Just possibly they didn’t know on the first attack; it’s not believable given the duration of the event and number of passes.) Keeping the US from monitoring battle communications is the only argument that has a shred of plausibility, but I’ll concede it doesn’t make sense on any larger scale. Nothing about it makes any sense and I suspect that the real explanation will never come to light.
You’ll get no argument from me on the rest of your statement, which addresses newcomer’s comments, not mine.
Which is why it’s the most plausible.
The problem is, nine times out of ten when the Liberty comes up, it is cited to reveal some dark, hither-to never revealed event brought to our attention by only the most acute examiners of the ungratefulness and outright murderous intentions of Zionists (or, depending on the analyst, Jews) relative to the Americans.
We had trouble with the Germans and Japanese also, if I recall.
Understood. It makes good anti-semite fodder and - unfortunately - it’s just obscure enough that you can always shock someone in an audience with it.
The incident deserves full investigation and explanation, but we are not likely to ever get it.
It was more than one crazy person, but still, by the looks of it, this document was the result of a brainstorming session after someone asked them to come up with ideas about how to justify the use of force against the Cuba problem (and to them at the time, it was a huge problem).
doubled - you’ve made the claim now a couple of times that the plan called for the killing of US citizens, but I don’t recall seeing that. It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, but as I recall, it brought up the possibility of injuring or even killing some Cubans, but not USians. Is my memory incorrect?
To be fair, they never injected anyone with syphilis. They took a group of people who had syphilis already and watched it progress naturally, when they could have treated it. Still pretty messed up, but they never took someone who didn’t have syphilis and gave it to them.
After all, if Iraq/Saddam had hit a US Navy ship out of the blue and claimed it was an accident, the USA would not have ignored the probelm and not retaliated, would they?
Basically, the CIA would have been throwing around all sorts of ideas. Castro had started confiscating property from th rich, the Mafia, and US corporations - all of whom were screaming to the nearest US government people they had influence with.
The US government tried a “popular uprising” with the Bay of Pigs, and that redefined “fiasco” in a whole new way. I assume Northwood was a reaction along the lines of “well, that didn’t work, I suppose the only thing that would work would be to give the guy an exploding cigar or figure out a way to justify using full US military might.” Even in those days, a fake USS Maine probably would be exposed quickly, and if Castro apologized profusely, then how do justify an invasion? The days of “surrender or else” (A good way to start a WW, as 1914 taught us) probably would not have worked.
The reaction of Castro to Bay of Pigs and such was to cozy up even stronger to the USSR. Put Soviet troops and missiles on the island and Kennedy would never dare attack them.
IIRC, the settlement with the Cuban Missile Crisis was “OK, you remove the missiles and we promise not to invade Cuba. But, we can embargo any interaction with the Island.” That worked great aas long as Castro pretty much embargoed the USA too, but when he let anyone who wanted to leave the island, and in fact emptied his social problems from prison onto the boats, the USA was put on the defnsive. however, the people who had lost everything during nationalization have kept the pressure up to try and embargo Cuba… kind of useless when people from Europe and Canada happily visit for tourism, and Venezuela gives them cheap oil.
So I think it was pie-in-the-sky planning, and everyone who looked at the plan realized that killing innocent people at home would bite the perpetrators in the butt pretty fast.
From my understanding not only that, but they knew people had syphillis and didn’t tell them what it was while it was treatable, and allowed them to infect their spouses and others.
I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. There is no evidence that the IDF knew it was an American ship at any time during the attack. Again, if they discovered at some point that they were attacking a US ship what possible reason would they have to continue attacking it?
A full investigation was conducted. As you say, the only reason you can think of with a shred of plausibility behind it doesn’t make any sense. So the question remains, if Israel knew it was a US ship, what possible reason would they have for attacking it?
I missed this the first time; gross misidentification of ships by pilots is extremely common, there’s nothing odd about mistaking it for a ship half its size. For example, during the first day of the Battle of Coral Sea the US attacked and sank the light carrier Shōhō believing they were attacking the Japanese main body. The Shōhō displaced 11,000 tons, the carriers Shōkaku and Zuikaku in the actual Japanese main body displaced 32,000 tons. For thier part, the Japanese launched on and sank what was identified by them as a battleship and an aircraft carrier. What they actually attacked and sank was the oiler Neosho which they misidentified as an aircraft carrier and the destroyer Sims which they misidentified as a battleship. The Sims displaced 2,200 tons, the smallest US battleships displaced 28,000 tons. Bear in mind that these ships were misidentified by scout aircraft from aircraft carriers whose pilots were trained specifically for ship identification.
See the link to the Operation Northwood documents in the OP – the incriminating stuff begins six pages from the bottom. Much of it discusses sabotaging the Guantanamo military base (“Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires” and “We could blow up a US Ship inside Guantanamo”) and I suppose you could hypothesize they intended to evacuate the people first so as to avoid casualties. But then they get into “Highjacking attempts against civil air and surface craft”. Several of the suggestions do explicitly refer to “real or simulated” deaths – so they clearly considered merely faking the murder…but they also clearly considered doing it for real.
Asking why Israel kills people is like asking why bears shit in the woods - it’s what they do.
The question to ask is why the US continues to blindly support them.
The US military (I believe army, don’t feel like looking it up) attacked the San Francisco peninsula in the early 1950’s with a biological weapon - a very rare bug that presents as a common cold. Doctors were advised of the symptoms and how to determine positivity if the patient had this bug, and to report all cases.
They were testing their ability to disperse such weapons. Some people died.
It was for NATIONAL DEFENSE and anyone objecting would answer to Joe McCarthy and Dick Nixon (yes, that was how he got on the ticket).
Don’t be so surprised that people who get paid to kill find ways to get paid.
See “WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!” - trumped-up wars are as old as war.
Oh wow, I didn’t believe you…but then found this article in the wall street journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1003703226697496080.html
There’s been extensive discussions of Northwoods in many skeptic sites. Here’s a pretty good breakdown of the common misunderstandings of what the plan actually involved.
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?postid=2007531#post2007531
The most import take-away is that the plan does not actually call for murdering American citizens. That’s a (deliberate?) misunderstanding of the plan propagated by the CTist usual suspects who are more interested in finding propaganda for their beliefs than in finding out the real truth.
Cite? They use the phrase “real or simulated” in relation to the sinking of a boatload of Cubans on the way to Florida (Annex to Appendix to Enclosure A, point 4, page 9 in the original numbering, page 12 of the pdf file). That is the only occurrence of this phrase I can find. All references to death are clearly faked deaths.
Oh, ok, so instead of murdering innocent american civilians to invent a fake excuse for a war, they’re murdering innocent cuban civilians to invent a fake excuse for a war. Well, that’s OK then! I take back my objections.
Come on, look at many of the other points described in the document (“Blow up ammunition inside the [US Guantamo military] base; start fires”, “Lob mortar shells from outside the of base onto base”, “Sabotage ships in harbor; large fires – napthalene”, “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident”, “Blow up a US ship in Guantamo Bay”, etc) – you really think those wouldn’t involve american deaths? It would look mighty suspicious if they ordered the crew of a US warship to 100% evacuate the ship/base shortly before a bomb went off. Even if they did evacuate the soldiers, what about the fire fighters sent to put out the blaze, or all the people who could die if the fire spreads?
But let's say you're right and all the deaths in this plan to invent a fake excuse to start a war were just fake deaths. Even so, they're inventing a fake excuse to start a war! You don't have a problem with that? The constitution says only congress can declare war, but you are not horrified by the idea of the CIA/military forcing a war on their own?
Finally, the whole point of the exercise was to invent a fake excuse for a war that would not have been necessary otherwise. Once war broke out (possibly even leading to world war III with nuclear missiles flying between the US and USSR), you think THOSE deaths would have been "fake deaths"?
Yes, I think everyone here would have a problem with that. Fortunately, then plan didn’t get any farther than a very rough outline, then it was properly scuttled.
Look, I’m not trying to whitewash it. Whoever suggested this cockamamie scheme should have been sacked. It’s just that the plan never made it any farther than it did, because enough people in the government could see it for what it was.
I’m sure the threat of thousands/millions of deaths from a war with the USSR is what motivated the plan in the first place. The guys at the time were scared to death of the Red Menace, and here were the commies right on our doorstep! They felt they had to do something, and were desperate. The plan to take back Cuba was meant to avoid war with the USSR.
See “Bay of Pigs”
Those Cubans who got slaughtered on the beach were trained by the US for a counter-revolution.
It is my understanding that they were promised US air support.
Instead they were dumped on the beach and told to go free their homeland all by themselves.
The problem was that everybody in Latin America knew of the training base and everyone was expecting an American led counter-revolution.
Then Kennedy became President instead of Nixon. Kennedy wanted nothing to do with such a plan.
But he had a boatload of Cubans who, if simply told to “go home, no revolution after all”, whould spread the word that the US had betrayed them. The US wasn’t particularly loved in Latin America anyway.
Realpolitik: What do YOU do with those “Free Cuba!” types? Turn them loose? Quietly kill them and toss the bodies in the Gulf? Give them nice houses in AZ and buy their silence forever?
You’re JFK - aside from hating Eisenhower (and esp Nixon - this kind of mess was something he’d come up with)? You have to do something with them, and you sure as hell ain’t going to bomb a Soviet client.
Moderator Note
usedtobe, political jabs are not allowed in GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator