Operation NorthWoods
Imagine a government devising plans to attack its own country and innocent citizens! Plans that include attacking heavily populated retail centers, hijacking U.S. civilian planes, blowing-up naval ships, and sinking boatloads of immigrants en-route to to a more desirable country. These incidents perpetrated for the sole purpose of blaming the actions on a foreign nation and garnering public and international support for a war.
Well, you don’t have to try and imagine this scenario. This was actually a plan that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed to John F. Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense. The plan was called, Operation Northwoods. The plan was part of an effort in the 60’s to combat a growing communist influence in the United States from foreign actors like the Soviet Union and Cuba. Luckily for all us, President Kennedy and the Secretary of Defense thought the plan was fucking insane! They rejected the plan and canned the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Lyman L. Lemnitzer who approved, signed and presented the proposal.
People familiar with this incident unfortunately refer to it as an example of the extremes the U.S. will go to in order to accomplish strategic national interests. Whether it's the Bay of Pigs Invasion where the U.S. facilitated an failed civil invasion of Cuba; Iran-Contra Affair where the U.S ran cocaine and crack in the U.S. and used the money to fund a war against communist parties; or the Fast and Furious gun-running shenanigans where the U.S. allowed the sale of thousands of assault weapon to Mexican Cartels.
These events make it hard for people to believe what's true or not, so they label anything extraordinary a conspiracy.
If you want the truth though, you gotta look. Check out the now declassified memos in the National Security archive below for more details.
And, here's a document that outlines the ultimate decision to not do it - at least we got this part right:
2nd war with Chechnya
Between 1996 and 1997 a series of attacks were perpetrated by Chechnya-based separatists that resulted in the deaths of 100+ Russians, 68 were families of Russian military forces living in a segregated complex. The incidents obviously spurred fury across Russia's civilian and political groups calling for war with Chechnya, but those calls were eventually arrested as the attacks were from separatists and not a central government entity.
Starting on September 4th through the 16th of 1999, three apartments complexes in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk were blown up in terrorist attacks, resulting in the unfortunate deaths of 300 people and injuries to thousands more. The incidents were quickly blamed on Chechnya separatists as a result of on-going tensions with the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB (new KGB) where the two had been fighting tit-for-tat skirmishes for years.
At that time Vladimir Putin was the Secretary of the FSB. Russia was also still recovering and rebuilding itself from the collapse of the USSR, and had its eye on reclaiming much of the territory it lost in the collapse. Like we've seen recently with Georgia and Ukraine, Chechnya was among the first series of strategic pieces of land Russia needed to maintain full and unfettered access to the Caspian Sea.
Blaming Chechnya for the events instantly garnered support for retaliation and the war drums began beating at a break neck pace for an invasoin. As history now tells us, Chechnya is now part of Russia and the rest is history. The immediacy of the action allowed Vladimir Putin to garner support and eventually win the bid for the Russian presidency.
Here's where things go bat shit crazy!
What many Russian people didn't know at the time though was that an FSB officer was arrested placing a fourth bomb in another apartment complex in Russia. If it wasn't for hyper-vigilant citizens who on edge from earlier attacks, a fourth apartment complex, and many more civilians, would have died. The FSB agent that was arrested was immediately pulled out of jail by the FSB, and the event was claimed as a training exercise using a real bomb material - yeah sure.
Interestingly, anytime a serious journalist investigation started looking into allegations the FSB coordinated the attacks on its own soil, the journalist ended up dead. Click the pic below to read a gripping story on this incident.
You can also read a little more about the ruinous war between Russia and Chechnya by clocking on the Foreign Affairs pic below.
What was my purpose with sharing these stories? Well, they shocked me when I first came across them. My intention wasn't to bash either the US or Russia. It just reminds me of the need to not believe everything I read and hear in the news.