HOW 9/11 NEARLY HAPPENED IN THE 1960'S

by Connie Cook Smith
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A few months before September 11th, a seemingly kooky and irrelevant news story was circulated by ABC. It was about James Bamford's book, "Body of Secrets," which featured declassified documents that revealed a shocking plot by the U.S. Joint Chiefs 40 years earlier.

In an official proposal to President Kennedy, our top military men sought approval to hijack American airliners, blow up an American troop ship, and kill American citizens with "terrorist bombs." (Entire ABC news story at link below.)

I say kooky and irrelevant because obviously, that never happened, and who cares about something that never happened 40 years ago? But in retrospect of 9/11, which occurred only a few months after the ABC report, the kooky becomes plausible, and the irrelevant becomes all too significant.

The purpose of the outrageous 1962 plan, named "Operation Northwoods," was to blame Cuba and Castro for numerous deadly acts on American soil. This then would create national and international support to invade the island, eliminate Castro -- and restore Cuba to the U.S. corporate, mob, and military profits that had flourished there before Castro rose to power.

Oh, yes, and "wipe out a communist state so close to our shores." This angle was the only reason for hostility towards Cuba that the American public was allowed to hear. Every other day or so, newspapers and newscasts and school-teachers and some religious leaders fearfully expounded upon the danger to us, now that the communists had gotten so close.

But it just wouldn't do for the predatory profit motives to be bandied about. Would the American people be willing to jump on a war-wagon if they knew the mob just wanted their casinos and brothels back? Would we care enough to invade over Nixon's losses because Castro took over his Pepsi plant? Would we want to attack Cuba for the sake of then-little-known George H.W. Bush and the security of his Zapata Offshore drilling rigs?

I don't think so. So "the communist threat" angle was hammered away at. All it would take would be a trigger event for the revved-up American public to lock and load and head off to throttle Castro, with the Joint Chiefs being sure that "Castro's terrorist acts" would do the trick -- would succeed in sending our blood and treasure off to war on a false pretext.

As an example of how to nail this down, the Joint Chiefs eagerly blathered: "We could blow up a U.S. ship (with its crewmen) in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba" -- "casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation."

Helpful. This is what our top military men in 1962 believed was "helpful." Upon leaving office in January of 1961, President Eisenhower had warned us about the "military-industrial complex" trying to take over our nation. Now we know what he was talking about!

It's not known if President Kennedy directly nixed the nefarious plot. But it got as high as Defense Secretary McNamara, who stamped it "return to sender."

This was, however, only a continuation of U.S. covert efforts to re-own Cuba. Vice-President Nixon and CIA Bush (although he denies it) had both been involved in planning and procuring materiel for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which was to appear as a Cuban exile movement to take back their country. And certainly, former wealthy Cuban owners of land-and-peasants were as motivated as crooked American interests were, to get back their island fiefdom and cash cow.

The Bay of Pigs plotters had been at work on this almost from the first day Castro took over in 1959. Nixon as VP was planning on ascending to the presidency in 1960 and would then have the commander-in-chief powers to see the invasion through. When JFK won the election instead and inherited the covert operation, he agreed to allow it as long as U.S. Marines and Navy jets were not officially involved.

The plotters thought that when push came to shove, JFK would cave after all and "send in the Marines," as NIxon had planned to do. But Kennedy refused to commit outright acts of war when the time came, in April of 1961, and Bay of Pigs disastrously failed.

Then in 1962 his administration shot down the next plan -- the Joint Chiefs' Northwoods domestic terrorism plot -- and well, it's easy to see how the Nixon-Bush-mob-military-and-Miami-Cubans' hatred for JFK became suspects in his assassination the following year. Was that the next operation designed to get what they wanted -- or at least to "remove an obstacle" to what they wanted? The hit may have been one of their plots that finally succeeded.

And what does all this have to do with the September 11th attacks, 40 years later? Very simply, another outrageous plan was afoot in 2000, entitled Project for a New American Century (PNAC). And even though George H.W. Bush's son would lose the popular vote for the presidency, this time there would be no upset in the plans as to who would be in office to help carry it out.

Gov. Jeb Bush's lieutenants in Florida had employed a system designed to target opposition voters as "felons," to prevent them from voting. Agitators were hired and brought in to disrupt the vote recount. Then a corrupt force within the Supreme Court sealed the deal and anointed George Jr as U.S. President.

The "right" president was now in place to see matters through for the NEW Operation Northwoods, for the NEW plan to commit terrorism on American soil in order to generate support for invasion of lands and resources that the military-industrial complex now desired -- such as the oil in Iraq and the heroin poppies in Afghanistan.

(Why DO they call him "Poppy" Bush anyway?)

Jeb Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others had signed on to this PNAC proposal to shift U.S. spending away from domestic programs for the American people, to military and corporate booty for the elite -- this time in the Middle East. And the document openly suggested that "a new Pearl Harbor" would be necessary to prod the nation and the world onto their war wagon, to do the fighting and the dying.

Right on cue, George W. Bush called it "a new Pearl Harbor" when the domestic terrorism occurred on 9/11. They even took a page directly from Northwoods -- by hijacking airliners and ensuring that "casualty lists would cause a wave of helpful indignation."

Indignation indeed. We immediately waged war upon (invaded/occupied) Afghanistan, where Castro, I mean, Osama bin Laden supposedly was. And when Saddam Hussein could in no way be linked to 9/11, then came the propaganda of what a threat that debilitated Iraq was to our nation.

At least Cuba actually did become a threat with Soviet missiles placed there -- and the military madmen became practically orgasmic that their much-wanted war on Cuba was now justified. But Kennedy's concerns about not triggering a U.S./Soviet all-out nuclear annihilation prevailed, and thus our world was safe.

In 2001, however, with the "right" president in place, the American evildoers got their war. And they gleefully, I mean direly, predict that this one -- as a war on terror, a war of terror, everywhere they can provoke it -- will go on and on and on.

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching go the armaments profits -- the armaments profits that Samuel Bush learned to promote on the War Board in World War One. The arms profits that Prescott Bush's bank arranged with Hitler leading up to World War Two. The arms profits that George H.W. Bush attempted with Cuba, succeeded with in Operation Desert Storm, and reaps today as spokesman for The Carlyle Group. The arms profits that George W. Bush ensures by taking our nation to war on false pretenses. What a lovely American family!

Most Americans (and definitely the rest of the world) see by now that Arab radicals could not have arranged for our multi-billion-dollar, state-of-the-art U.S. defenses to stand down on September 11th. But PNAC signers Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were in key positions in the Pentagon and the White House that day. They could have intercepted what Rumsfeld called "the missile" that hit the Pentagon. But they didn't.

And close on the heels of this realization comes the understanding that blaming Muslim extremists -- just as Operation Northwoods wanted to frame "Cuban terrorists" -- provides the excuse they needed to rape and pillage and plunder the Middle East.

That was precisely the PNAC plan -- as outrageous as the Operation Northwoods plan -- the PNAC plan that Jeb Bush, William Kristol, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William Bennett and other cynical profiteers signed onto for a New American Century.

But there's nothing new about it. It's the same old criminal consciousness from 1962 that wanted to callously kill American citizens, blame it on others, then use our soldiers and our taxes to enrich themelves and to impoverish us.

JFK prevented all that at the time, and probably paid the price. But on September 11th, 2001-- with a number of Kennedys eliminated by then -- it finally was pulled off -- against the American people, and against all peace and decency in the world.

The question now is, what are we going to do?

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662