As I go through life acutely aware of all the real problems we face I do my best to not fall into the trap of conspiracy theory. But it's hard to not entertain these thoughts when I read military memorandums crafted forty years ago detailing, in no subtle description, plans to fake an attack against the US by Cuban forces in order to justify an invasion against the Cuban government. It makes me wonder what we're really capable of.
I suggest you read it yourself, but the highlights of the top secret and now declassified memo are:
The suggested courses of action appended to Enclosure A are based on the premise that US Military intervention will result from a period of heightened US-Cuban tensions which place the United States in the position of suffering justifiable grievances. World opinion, and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible, and as an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere….
Reference is made to memorandum from Chief of Operations, Cuba Project, for General Craig, subject: "Operation MONGOOSE", dated 5 March 1962, which requested brief but precise description of pretexts which the Joint Chiefs of Staff consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba….
This plan, incorporating projects selected from the attached suggestions, or from other sources, should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States. The plan would also properly integrate and time phase the courses of action to be pursued. The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere….
You can almost entirely cross out Cuba and scribble in Iraq, right? And read the "suggestions" if you really want to feel sick to your stomach. Surely no one would want to think the government would purposely fake September 11th, purposely kill thousands and cost billions in destruction, cause damage to our economy, our world standing and our freedom. Surely they're not capable of such a demonic act.
But what if someone thought the ends justified the means? What if a couple thousand people was a justifiable amount if it got them the goal they wanted? And what goal would that be?
When I watch Bush lambaste the New York Times for reporting on how his administration is slowly revoking our civil rights, I wonder.
When government programs about illegal wiretaps are leaked to the media, I wonder.
When I see police conducting "temporary" searches in violation of the Fourth Amendment just so I can board the subway, despite the fact that the London attacks were months ago, I wonder.
When I read someone write a very reasonable essay on how Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, if he existed at all, was a bumbling idiot whom no one had heard of until months before the launch of the Iraq War, I wonder. I wonder when his face is all over every television and every newspaper; I wonder what they're trying so hard to prove.
When I read in the papers that our borders are no more secure than they were on September 10th, 2001 and that bombs still get through airport security easily, at first glance it seems like gross incompetence. When Bush harps on and on about how we can't let Mexicans into the country because they're terrorists, how we can't report on how the government is listening to our phone calls because then the terrorists will win, but then goes and sells our major ports to Dubai, it screams of Typical Bumbling Idiot.
But what if it isn't? What if our borders are no more secure than they were five years ago because there's no threat? And what if there's no threat because the government knows where and when the next attack will take place, because they've designed it? It hurts me to think that anybody would want to engineer anything that would kill innocent people, but more and more I think that's just human nature and my own naivety: I don't want to believe someone would be so evil.
And why would the administration work so flawlessly to pull off the next incarnation of Nineteen Eighty-Four? This essay also provides some interesting insight into the New World Order.
In my heart of hearts I fully believe that the best-case scenario is that someone got warning of 9/11 and threw it away, because they saw it as a chance to accomplish a lot of things they knew they wouldn't get away with if we weren't so busy taping .99 fucking flags to our cars to notice the Patriot Act pass so resoundingly that most senators didn't even read it. And at worst I think that 9/11 was completely fake, that thousands of people died for the most evil of reasons that have nothing to do with the Middle East.
I don't want to believe it.
But when I read things like this memo it's clear someone already had the idea long before I was around.
28 June 2006 at 10:46 pm | No Comments » 
bitching, in a category all its own, proselytizing
