Why trust the generals? 

One Man's Web > Politics and Ethics > Iraq War > Why trust the generals?
7-3-2003

Not a few of the smart bombs in Iraq went astray and hit civilian targets in 1991.  One wonders what happened with all the non-smart bombs... which comprised most of what was dropped.  All that depleted Uranium in the shells is raising cancer rates in Iraq today.  Low civilian casualties?  Will this war really be any different than before?

Jan notes in passing the Bush/Blair/Howard rhetoric about naughty Saddam building his bases near civilian populations.  For the record he wants to say he can hear the air force running its engines up at night doing routine maintenance.  He can walk to the base fence in under ten minutes from his house.  Jan's son goes to visit a friend who lives under the same air force base's flight path. 

I read this week of the Northwood conspiracy. You can find the full article by John Whitehead on the Razormouth Website. In the era of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

"General Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs Staff  of the US "drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. 'In the name of anticommunism," writes James Bamford in Body of Secrets (Doubleday, 2001)., "they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba."

Code-named Operation Northwoods, the plan had the written approval of the chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs... It called for "innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere." Moreover, as Bamford documents, people "would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked." And using phoney evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro. This was to give Lemnitzer and his staff the excuse, as well as the public and international backing from an outraged world they needed to launch a war against Castro's Cuba.

[They even planned]  to "create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route 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." 

It is good that Lemnitzer was denied a second term as Joint Chiefs chairman, but scary that they sent him to be chief of NATO! And later President Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Whitehead concludes "In light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it is clear that deceiving the public and trumping up wars Americans fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. But are Pentagon military leaders still capable of such deceit? Hopefully, we won't have to wait another forty years to find out."

Given this kind of suspicion, why would you trust the US military and a President who is part of Big Oil on an invasion of Iraq? 
 
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