Am I paranoid? This morning I put a post up for moderation about Operation Northwoods, which Chalmers Johnson mentions on p. 301 in my copy of his book, The Sorrows of Empire. It was "...a proposal...that the military clandestinely shoot innocent people on American streets, sink boats carrying refugees from Cuba, and carry out terrorist attacks in Washington, Miami, and elsewhere and the pin the blame on Cuban agents. the intent, after the failed Bay of Pigs operation, was to provide an excuse for a new invasion of Cuba. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed off on it. McNamara silently refused to act on it and a few months later forced the retirement of General Lyman Lemnitzer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs."

Where did my post go? Was it rejected that fast? I don't think the general public knows about Operation Northwoods. I thought it would be important to know how it might effect our perspective on the JFK assassination, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Bush's statement to Tony Blair that he was considering a provocation against Iraq to use as an excuse to invade, and possible provocations Bush might be considering to provoke a conflict with Iran.

Your thoughts?

I had forgotten about this quote from our idiotic former Secretary of Defense. tomdispatch.org is running a good piece on Rumsfeld. It emphasizes how Cheney and Rumsfeld both emerged from the shadows under good 'ole (not so) harmless Gerald Ford.

At a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels in June 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no 'knowns.' There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."

Tom