Just a reminder that the people in charge of the United States are totally content with killing US citizens if it advances their objectives.
This was authorized by the Joint Chiefs. This would have happened if Kennedy hadn't vetoed it.
Food for thought.
dude For starters, we're talking 50 years ago. Telex was state of the art. Now? Now we get to find out how John Podesta cooks risotto. And we're talking about one of several hare-brained proposals floated to deal with Castro at the time, others of which included shit like poisoned cigars and exploding conch shells, except no, those weren't proposals, we actually tried that shit so you're literally talking about a situation where Robert McNamara said "yeah, I can totally see dusting Castro's scuba gear with tuberculin toxin but false flag shit? Yeah, that'll come back to bite us." For another thing, this says the opposite of what you think it says - it says that the US drew up some plans that involved killing Americans and then were totally NOT content with doing it. Finally, the text of the cover letter that was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff clearly says "we thought of this, we bet a bunch of other people did too, what do you think?" which is a great way of removing sneaky-ass cointelpro shit off the table in a concise and definitive manner. Remember - Bay of Pigs had just happened. It had allowed Curtiss LeMay (chief of staff) to not only get Richard Bissell (CIA) fired, it had convinced Kennedy to give the CIA U-2 and A-12 program to the Air Force. It's entirely possible that LeMay or someone else suspected the CIA of working with the Mafia et. al. to blow up some nightclubs to foment insurrection and wanted a ruling from the President on whether or not that kind of shit was off the table. it was. Off the table. The guy who drafted the memo asked Kennedy about it two days later and Kennedy told him that there would be no military action against Cuba. Period. He went on to become the supreme allied commander of Europe so it's not like he spent the rest of his career planning other misadventures in skullduggery. But do please go on. Anything to say about FEMA trailers? Chemtrails? Loose change?
No discussion of wacky CIA schemes is complete without Acoustic Kitty.
Frickin' MKULTRA-era CIA was a wild and crazy place. They were literally making it up as they went along, with a tradecraft tradition not-quite 20 years old. Me? I've always loved BF Skinner's very own pigeon-guided missile.
Dude. I understand wargaming. I understand considering all possible approaches to a problem. I understand formulating hypotheticals to get a feel for what is and is not acceptable. BUT. There are things that moral actors do not do. Like commit false flag operations. Or give serious consideration to committing false flag operations. I have nothing to say about conspiracies. I am talking about history, something that actually occurred and potential lessons it can teach us. Like 'Don't trust the government to not do evil shit.'
No one seriously considered a false flag operation. They seriously got a rejection of a false flag operation on the record books. You're not saying "don't trust the government to not do evil shit." You're saying "trust the government to do evil shit" by being deliberately alarmist about interoffice politics 50 years gone.
You understand why this might not sit well with me. Evil shit has been perpetrated by 'authorities' in the past. It is naive to assume that the same thing is not occurring now/will occur in the future.No one seriously considered a false flag operation. They seriously got a rejection of a false flag operation on the record books.
Let's take a step back, shall we? Several years back I set forth to determine what was so tricky about the Middle East. After all, Europe is staunchly anti-israel but for some reason everyone in the US bends over for AIPAC at the slightest provocation. What's going on? And 40 books in, I still find nuance and fresh insight into why, exactly, Israel and the Middle East are an intractable problem. it gave me the perspective that if you can draw an immediate conclusion that favors action where the prevailing mood of experts favors inaction, it doesn't mean the experts are wrong... it means you don't understand the problem. What did you find? You found a memo. A 55-year-old memo revealed in 1998 that, of its 12 pages, spends half a page on spitballing ways to foment outrage via terrorism and four pages talking about how shit could be done by the Air Force to make things look like a MiG attack. The unseriousness of this memo makes the recent AHCA look like the tax code. False pretext for war? I mean, we waltzed into the Cuban Missile Crisis just six months later. the Jupiter missiles in Turkey that prompted it were already in place. The Bay of Pigs invasion wasn't supported by the Air Force in no small part because LeMay wanted to ass out Bissell and the CIA - the guys in favor of carpet bombing are generally not so up on clandestine shit. But that's the nuance of it. Those are the broad strokes of the background, the environment in which this memo was written. One has to delve deeper than "evil shit has been perpetrated by 'authorities' in the past." Here's the thing - if you can't ascribe malfeasance to a proper noun, you don't fully understand the situation. Conspiracies exist but they consist of people with names acting in concert, not in a shadowy handful of illuminati out of central casting. You wanna meet the guy who created the Taliban? Here he is. Explaining that will take me a thousand words, but I can do it. And every step along the way, there are good people acting under good intentions and causing short-term victories for truth, justice and the American way and not a one of 'em set out to "perpetrate" "evil shit." I know it's easier to rage against the machine but the road to hell is paved with good intentions and if you aren't willing to think harder than "government is bad" you will always cower in fear of the misunderstood skullduggery that greets you at every turn. There's plenty to be outraged about without jumping at shadows.
Klein, I'm jumping into this very late, but I generally agree with your assessment of this story-- it was a bad idea that someone high up had that was rejected at the proposal stage. I was pleased to see that JFK removed Lemnitzer from a position of authority. This article did get me thinking though. What about the Tonkin Gulf incident? It's not the same thing but it seems apparent now that the US used a minor or non-existent confrontation as a pre-text to launch the Vietnam War. There's clearly a difference, no one on the US side got hurt and the incidents were not pre-planned. However, there is a similarity, deceiving the American people to start a war. I tend to think that the Tonkin Gulf is a good indicator of how amateur hour the US military and intelligence communities are. A truly sinister group would have come up with something better. You know like Putin killing 1000+ people by having the FSB plant bombs in civilian housing across Russia in 1999. Now there's a false flag op!
Yeah I had to read way back to figure out what was being talked about! Gulf of Tonkin was a repeat of the USS Maine. We're big on excuses; that's probably one reason the US has always acted so provocatively. If it hadn't been the Maddox it would have been something else; we spent something like 40 years flying loaded bombers up to the edge of Soviet air defense just to see if we could provoke them and boy howdy if you don't think we would have used that for boons had they plugged one... That P3 that crashed into a Japanese fighter in April 2001? The fact that Bush just backed down and ate shit was, in my opinion, a factor that led to the overreach after September 11. Somebody had to show the world he was tough; it's one thing to back down from the Chinese but a whole nuther thing to let a bunch of cave dwellers push you around. And then it felt gooooood. The '60s were a decade of amateur hour. Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, the Diem assassination, Gulf of Tonkin...
I agree with your comparison of the USS Maine ad Tonkin Bay but I think the Cold War use of bombers had a different purpose. We were not trying to provoke a nuclear war but to prevent one. Having NORAD bombers always in striking position was a reminder the Soviets that they could not initiate nuclear war without us having a prepared response. As a technical point, the P-3 collided with a Chinese fighter, I think you made a typographical error there. I have never read and do not agree that Bush's response to 9/11 was related to that incident. I also don't know what Bush could have done about the P-3 incident. It was not a provocation to war and to have blown it out of proportion would have had far reaching economic, political and possibly war consequences that were not worth pursing. I would say restraint was the right response. Bush's action in Afghanistan was necessary and proper given the fact that the Taliban gave Osama bin Laden a haven to train the 9/11 terrorists. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan as well and Bush had an obligation to try and capture/kill him. My personal opinion on Iraq was that it was not really about WMDs but an effort to create a democracy in the Middle East to counteract fundamentalist Islam. It was messy and Obama was premature in pulling out which gave is ISIS. Whether it was a good idea in the first place is another matter.
I did NOT say that the US was attempting to provoke the Soviet Union into nuclear war. What I said was "we would have used that for boons". There was nothing defensive about our probing; we were examining Soviet defensive positioning and strategy which isn't at all useful when dealing with Soviet incursion. Be that as it may, take a step back - I'm arguing that the US has always acted provocatively and you're arguing that a P-3 hitting a Chinese fighter is different from a Chinese fighter hitting a P-3. Look - an American ELINT/EW craft was 70 miles offshore of sovereign Chinese territory. That's provocative. The Chinese responded by buzzing the P-3. That's provocative. The P-3 didn't back down - that's provocative. And then the Chinese crashed into it, they had to land, and the Chinese took it apart. That's provocative. It's like last week when Turkey blockaded the Italians from approaching Cyprus for oil exploration, despite the fact that Turkey only lays claim to half of Cyprus - nobody's negotiating there, they're provoking. And US foreign policy has been provocative since the end of WWII. Clinton had strikes in Afghanistan. He had covert ops. So did Bush I, so did Reagan. The only reason bin Laden was there is we invited him; our covert adventures in South Asia are legendary. GWB went to war because the Taliban were harboring bin Laden, who ended up in Pakistan. Obama didn't go to war with Pakistan, he sent in special ops. Bush's actions were disproportionate on an even grander scale than Reagan's invasion of Granada. If the goal is to get bin Laden, the method doesn't start with saturation bombing. I'm not interested in getting into the goodness/badness argument of American foreign policy. The fact of the matter is, the US throws its weight around and has since the Monroe Doctrine. Post WWII, we've flown around with a chip on our shoulder. What kind of shitshow would it be if a Chinese EW aircraft cruised 70 miles off the coast of Miramar? Nobody else does that but us; even the Soviets pretended their boats were winkwink nudgenudge fishing trawlers.
The Chinese do all sorts of provocative things and they have since their inception. And the Soviets did too. Probing Soviet defenses is useful for defensive purposes. The Soviets know we are looking for weaknesses which means we are ready to defend ourselves if they attack. That was part of MAD-- demonstrating the potential for offensive capability served defensive purpose in making sure the Soviets knew they could not win. Further, the US didn't barge onto the world stage in 1945 and start acting like a big bully. We got involved to stop Nazi and Japanese imperialism, which the rest of the world could not. Then we had the Soviet Union aggressively taking over Eastern Europe and pushing communist revolution around the globe. We could no longer retreat into isolationism. We made mistakes and did some bad things. Everyone complains about how the US screws up the world but where would the world be without the US? If the Chinese and/or Soviets were dominant things would be better? To criticize the US is fine, but who would have done better for more people in the last 70 years than the US? As for all the rest, I am mystified by your assertion that the invasion of Afghanistan was disproportionate to 9/11. I'm not a big fan of Bush II's foreign policy, but taking out the Taliban was a no brainer. I think any of the other presidents you mentioned would have done the same thing under the same conditions. And bin Laden was in Pakistan from 2002 on, the policies Obama followed re: Pakistan were Bush's. Obama caught heat for that.
You're getting all wrapped up in justification, validation and morality. Just a small example: Bush invited Taliban delegates to the White House in 2000 for their work in eradicating opium. I'm not fan of the Taliban and have been actively not a fan since 1997; Glamour Magazine (of all places) suggested embargoes against Afghanistan for their treatment of women five years before 2001 but their calls fell on deaf ears (those were our freedom fighters we were talking about). Benezir Bhutto warned about the Taliban before they were the Taliban in a speech to the UN in 1991 (something something "sowing dragon's teeth"). Nobody cared. That doesn't mean the Taliban aren't objectively bad. I'm not here defending the Taliban. I'm here pointing out that there were ample reasons to knock out the Taliban before September 11 but nobody gave a shit. I'm arguing that if the purpose is to get Osama bin Laden, invading Afghanistan was a failure. I'm arguing that if the purpose was to dethrone the Taliban, invading Afghanistan was a failure. My point - which you seem uninterested in engaging- is that the US practices aggressive, provocative foreign policy that gives us a lot of USS Maine/Gulf of Tonkin outcomes whenever we need them. "the Chinese do all sorts of provocative things" is the kind of statement you need to back up - China, since the fall of Chiang Kai Shek, has been focused domestically and on its surrounding territories. They've invaded Vietnam, yeah - but they sure haven't invaded Panama. They haven't invaded Grenada. Our foreign policy is not defensive. I'm an American. I benefit from this aggressive foreign policy. But I also know there are two sides to every story and that the good/evil narrative put forth by Americans is not held in high esteem in the rest of the world. It's much easier to understand someone's actions when you put yourself in their shoes and the shoes of every other country on the planet get their toes stepped on unequally by America. We're a big-footed dance partner. I'm happy to discuss that. But if you'd rather wave the flag than discuss specifics, I don't see that there's much point in talking.
I'm trying to address specifics with you. But I disagree with the way you present the factual basis of your argument. You were saying or implying that Bush overreacted regarding the P-3 incident and that the invasion of Afghanistan was an overreaction that other US presidents refrained from. The Taliban supported and aided bin Laden. Bin Laden attacked the US on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people here, more than the attack at Pearl Harbor. It's not flag waving to recognize that the US had a compelling interest in removing the Taliban from power. Pakistan was and is more complicated. The government is not in control of the mountainous region bordering Afghanistan. They are also a nuclear power. We knew that there were elements in the Pakistani intelligence that were helping bin Laden. Because the situation was different, we acted differently. One of the issues I wanted to raise with you was your criticism of American policy, the notion we "throw our weight around." It's easy to criticize, it's much harder to come up with a solution. It's not necessary to label the US as "good" or "bad" to recognize that there is a difference in many places where the US exerts influence and where it doesn't. Compare Western Europe to Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1989, or South Korea to North Korea. It's not just you that has benefitted from the US being an international power. Consider Germany and Japan in 1940 with the US in isolation: two of the most aggressive and repressive nations in the world, Germany attacked almost every neighbor they had, east or west. Japan was 10 years into a genocidal war in China. Today, both Germany and Japan are vibrant and peaceful democracies who are a threat to no one. Objectively, that's a good thing isn't it? And you still haven't answered my basic question: what would the world look like if the US had withdrawn in 1945 the way we did in 1918? I contend the world is a better place (not a perfect place, a better place) with the US involved. I'll close with this. I am not intending to frustrate you by throwing up empty patriotic rhetoric. You seem like an intelligent person with a different worldview and I respect that. If I didn't I would not have responded. I have enjoyed this exchange and find what you write to be thought provoking and engaging. I wanted to engage you on specifics without writing a book length response. I hope you will see my posts in this light even if we do not agree.
If you want to engage me, don't start with "what do you think about the Gulf of Tonkin" and then spool yourself up to "Consider Germany and Japan in 1940 with the US in isolation." You're not having a conversation. You repeatedly deflect. And you're lecturing me. I'm not going to block you, but no - whatever spirit you think you're presenting this discussion in, you're failing. I haven't enjoyed this exchange in the slightest. You've put words in my mouth, you've changed the subject numerous times away from the discussion at hand and when I tell you - point blank - my opinion about something utterly unrelated to the original question, you still can't pay attention long enough to acknowledge what I'm saying rather than what you want to hear. I see your posts in the light of someone who wants the whole world to know that he's right. And I have absolutely no reason to engage with that.
As long as this thread is all dug up: Save a thousand words. Is Charlie Wilson's War a/the book to read about that? What is? Give a list if you've got time.You wanna meet the guy who created the Taliban? [Gust Avrakotos]. Explaining that will take me a thousand words, but I can do it.
Here's your list. Charlie Wilson's War is a great read and it contains a lot of jaw-dropping narrative. It's lean on context, however, and presents itself more as a "holy shit these guys did some gonzo stuff!" book than a "in a world full of gonzo stuff, a small team in Washington added to the dogpile" book. It sits nicely with Legacy of Ashes (rofl at the title considering what a phoenix has risen) and Fred Burton's Ghost. Of all the books I've read, Ghost best outlines just how mad, blind and defeated the American intelligence adventure was in the Middle East after 1979. You don't understand just how mad the CIA is at Iran until you've read it. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/11480v/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-fred-burton