With a little CIA sleight of hand, an apparently debilitated chief of state can be convinced to sign anything. Endowed with a “divine right” he can’t even perceive, our elected king can avert his unsteady gaze from a bloody ghost of America’s past while a corrupt national-security state continues to get away with murder at home and abroad. Figuratively speaking, of course.
In early 1962, the Pentagon conceived and approved a program called Operation Northwoods, involving “false flag” attacks to be staged on American territory and blamed on the Communist regime in Cuba. These would have constituted acts of terror, but hawkish members of the U.S. national-security state saw them as worth the price, since they would create the pretext for a full-scale invasion of Cuba and removal of its charismatic leader, Fidel Castro, whose CIA cryptonym was “AMTHUG.”
When presented with Operation Northwoods, President Kennedy rejected it. He had already nixed hawks’ exhortations to bomb Soviet military bases during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and in 1961 reportedly had walked out of a National Security Council briefing during the Berlin Crisis. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was explaining how the United States might launch a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union and survive the response. As he was leaving the room, Kennedy remarked to his secretary of State: “And we call ourselves the human race.”
