Bear with me, if you will, as i lay out some past malfeasance while wondering if there is any reason to think it possible such things still occur. No big theory, just wondering aloud, and am not looking for my tinfoil hat thank-you-very-much.

 A number of "false flag" operations, planned or executed by our own government are now declassified and available on wiki and elsewhere. One of these that is well documented was "Operation Northwoods" from the period around 1962, which was about staging or making use of catastrophic events so as to rally public support for a takeover of Cuba. There were many 'ideas' put forth in the documents, one of which (from wiki) is as follows:

" 8. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone.

b. Take off times of the drone aircraft and the actual aircraft will be scheduled to allow a rendezvous south of Florida. From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Eglin 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 being 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. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to "sell" the incident. "

 And that was back in 1962! Wow. Another, called "Operation Dirty Trick" involved preparation of "evidence" that would "prove", in the event of a launch catastrophe for John Glenn's flight, that Castro had brought about the disaster by jamming NASA radio frequencies. These documents have become part of the public domain many years ago, and anyone can look them up and read them for themselves.

 The reason that i bring up such history is that there is now a story in the news about detailed plans for Marine One showing up on an Iranian computer. The story is that someone that worked in defense or intel installed a file-sharing program on their computer at work, and it happened to have detailed plans for Marine One on it, and that somehow those files got shared, and that somehow the Iranians were able to download them. Sounds plausible enough? Mmmm, not really, but thats the current story. And it has the happy by-product that the moral of the story is that file-sharing is wrong and even dangerous. Check.

 Many of my friends have had to get low-level civilian or even upper-level military security clearances over the years in the course of their employment, service, or University research. It is pretty clear to me that anyone with even the lowest level of security clearance would know that on a secured computer, NO software can be installed, much less any of the file sharing variety.

 The part of this story that doesn't make any sense to me is that we're talking about detailed plans for Marine One. Radar systems, defense capabilities, jamming equipment, everything. The security clearance necessary for a complete set of such plans would have to be very high, maybe "Top" or above.

 My civilian friends that had to get the lowest level clearance to work in a machine shop that made a part for a piece for some other project told me tales of their friends from junior high being contacted and interviewed about them. The upper levels are a great deal more invasive and excruciating than that. So anyone that would be qualified to even see such documents would have to be way up the security clearance food chain, and anyone accessing such documents would have to be higher still. Furthermore, there are very tight access restrictions put on such documents, and all attempts to access them are logged. There is most definitely a trail that can show exactly at what moment those documents hit that computer, where they came from, and who put them there - as none of that could have happened without a person way-up using their authority to access them in the first place

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 Thus, the question i have is this: is it at all possible that someone in the DoD or the intelligence community, by necessity someone with highest-level clearance, wishes both to harm our President, and also wants war with Iran? And if so, in light of numerous past such operations, clearly documented, would this have been perfect cover -- "proof" if you will -- that could have enabled them to pull off both at once? I for one certainly can't imagine any such person or persons in our government that would want to do such a thing, but there are quite a few examples of our government having done so in the past. Wiki "false flag" for more and see.
 

One of the amazing developments of the Bush era that we are just beginning to hear involves people in the defense and intel communities that stood up to the would-be dicatators at critical moments. Many of us never imagined that it would be those folks holding that line, as historically generals and spies have often been the source of mischief in democracies. Evidently in ours, there are a number of us that can be counted on to do right by their country when such potential situations arise, as Cheney was rather irritated to find out. I imagine there are others that we haven't heard about here on TPM and on Rachel that have paid a high price for doing right, and whose stories will never be known. I am humbled and inspired by the stories i've heard in this regard, and am personally grateful for them all, particularly those still in their jobs.

  And i know that news stories like this tend to catch their attention.

  Stories like this current security breach remind both them and us that the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance. Let's hope they continue to keep a watchful eye on our President, and also our nation from those inside or out that would do us harm.

 One more thing! This was a long story to show just one 'maybe' angle, and we may one day find out what the real deal was, or not. But if it turns out that there really are creeps high enough up in those corridors to have access to detailed plans of Marine One looking to do us all wrong in such a way, it is highly likely that they were also involved or advocated for the spying program that scoops up all of our everything going across cell nodes and the intertubes. Which, as it happens, is about the only way that these documents could have been discovered. If any higher-ups end up caught, tried, and convicted -- it would be due to their own grand design! Now that would be funny.