Korean Job Discussion Forums

[loose_ends]

[Gopher]

[bacasper]

[Gopher]

Let us just say that you rarely distinguish yourselves from each other.

[Nowhere Man]

Part I. Semantics

To preface. arguing about the proper term for these proposals seems a bit futile, but it also appears nomenclature is being used to attack credibility in this debate. So here goes:

1. The 1st source document is clearly a memorandum.

2. The memorandum is being used to discuss proposals for something called NORTHWOODS.

3. One operation, codenamed MONGOOSE, is referred to in capital letters.

4. The single time NORTHWOODS is referred to, it is also in capital letters.

5. In a related document from the same era, two operations (QUICK KICK and BROAD SHOULDERS) are also referred to in capital letters:

http://tinyurl.com/6ce96h

6. Newspaper articles, the wiki entry, and the National Security Archives all refer to NORTHWOODS as an operation. If this is being done for partisan purposes, it must be a conspiracy

7. Memoranda are essentially communications. How do you scrap a memorandum? Moreover, do you codename memoranda?

Conclusion: We have read a memorandum about a proposed operation codenamed NORTHWOODS.

Part II. Who is responsible/to blame for NORTHWOODS?

1. The OP argues that Robert Kennedy is primarily responsible. While I wouldn't rule this out, the communications here are described as in response to the Secretary of Defense and the Chief of Operations for the Cuban Project. Maybe this is, as he suggests the other end of a phone conversation. Could be. RFK is probably a pivotal figure, but do we have proof that this is all his idea? No.

Note to future government members: If some crazy wants you to do crazy things, let the crazy do the proposing himself. That way, you don't appear to have complicity.

2. Was this operation planned by government agents? Maybe not real spies with pencils that shoot poison darts. However, and especially in consideration of the semantic shenanigans from Part I, these are agents of the government proposing these morally dubious acts. So, technically, I would argue the answer is yes.

3. Is it really important if it was one of the Kennedys or the JCS or whoever proposed it? "What" seems more important than "who".

Conclusion: NORTHWOODS was an operation proposed by the government to the government. The government is to blame for it. This much we know.

Part III Morality

1. This is just my opinion, but faking an attack on the US, its miltary, its interests, or otherwise as an excuse for war should be a high crime or misdemeanor. In other words, it should be an impeachable offense (here I am extending impeachment beyond the president to any high authority involved in such things).

2. Context might explain why one would want to do such a thing, but the idea that the Soviet Union and events in Latin America at the time would have made it OK to lie our way into war is, again in my opinion, wrong. This has parallels with current debate about torture. Moral relativism arguments just don't work for me here.

3. Should such a proposal be illegal? That's a difficult but interesting question. Consider it for a moment in civilian law. As far as I know, proposing murder is not illegal. Conspiracy to commit murder would only apply once you have agreed to kill someone. On the other hand, I think proposing to overthrow the government or assassinate the president might be illegal. I could go on, but since they didn't actually carry out said plans, I don't think there's a legal problem with what they did. Of course, I still see a moral one.

4. I think that one of the debaters here primarily wants to point out that he thinks such proposals are of a highly dubious moral nature. No more, no less.

5. The other debater suggests you don't vote for Obama if you don't like NORTHWOODS. Talk about partisan.


Conclusion: Operation NORTHWOODS is, without doubt, of a highly questionable moral nature. It doesn't appear to be illegal, but man is it shady.

Part IV Relevance to Current Events

1. I don't really see how the Church Committee's actions 30 years ago rule out an increase in the power or sliding of morals in modern covert operations. To be fair, I think its pretty much pure speculation on both sides as to the status of covert operations. We won't truly know until 30 years later when the documents start becoming declassified (or some scandal emerges).

2. I also don't see how this provides any evidence that the US government flew planes into the WTC.

Conclusion: We don't really know. We can only guess.

Part V Strawman arguments and ad hominem attacks

1. Bacasper never mentioned the "military-industrial complex".

2.

[loose_ends]

[Gopher]

This is more complete and utter nonsense. "The government" betrays an inability to be specific. "Governments" do not act; the people who direct and work for them do. Which people, exactly, drafted the NORTHWOODS memorandum and why? The Joint Chiefs of Staff, of course, responding, correctly and legally, via the chain of command, to JFK and RFK's demands that they "do something" about Cuba forthwith and while also prudently keeping their civilian leadership, the SecDef, informed about their direct talks with the White House.

And in this case, JFK appointed RFK to chair the Special Group (Augmented) and to oversee all Cuban operations post-Bay of Pigs, including MONGOOSE (that is, post-April, 1961). The President's advisor Richard Goodwin had suggested that "[RFK] would be the most effective commander," and the President accepted and acted on this advice (Goodwin to JFK, 1 Nov. 1961, cited in Church Committee's interim report, 139.) RFK in fact chaired these operations until November 1963. He hired and fired all personnel, even at the level of personally selecting which Army officers the program ought to sheep-dip. He micromanaged any and everything related to this program. The evidence on this is beyond question; it is also over thirty years old. The only ones who question this are those who have not reviewed the evidence or who have been made aware of it and are churlishly unwilling to confront it. (And, also, in this case, and this is flattering to say the least, unwilling to confront it because I, personally, am the one citing it.)

What, for example, did witnesses' testimony reveal at the Church Committee hearings on this point? Here is what one summary, under the subheading "The Control System for MONGOOSE Operations," has to tell us...

[Gopher]

By the way, reading the Church Committee's interim report again reminds me about Major General Edward Lansdale -- Graham Greene's "Quiet American," no less -- who served as liaison between RFK and the directors of the agency task forces on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and at CIA's JM/WAVE (look! my God! It is a CIA station that was code-named in all caps! Just like LINCOLN! That must make it not a mere station but an actual "operation," huh?). This allowed for the so-called fig-leaf of plausible deniability -- which, in this case, fell away a long time ago.

In any case, to get a better feel for just how far off the reservation the Kennedys and their people went where Cuba was concerned, let us listen to Parrott's description of another of their proposals that their people discussed but the President discarded...

[bacasper]

[Gopher]

Bacasper: NORTHWOODS is about JFK and RFK's hysteria re: Castro's Cuba. It records a brief moment and offers of snapshot when they were thinking one way, when they ordered their advisors on the JCS and elsewhere to join them in thinking outside the box and move Heaven and Earth to "do something," especially something replete with "boom-and-bang," about Castro. No more no less. To get at their advisors' reaction to this insanity and the President's ultimate decision to scrap these ideas, one has to get into Cold War-era historical context and other evidence from the time (I have cited it here in great detail).

Anything else would be about systematically putting your head in the sand in order to continue ignoring the document's historical-specific context in favor of your ahistorical and timeless interpretation about "the govt" and "govt agents" and their workings. Too bad you seem to have chosen this route. But c'est la vie.

[loose_ends]

[bacasper]

[Gopher]

I understand the hostility and dismissive attitude toward the evidence I present here. This threatens to overthrow your long-held, ahistorical, continuity-based paradigms about how the, you allege, repugnant to the conscience and sinister, American govt has always functioned and continues to function today. But your paradigms never rested on solid ground, Bacasper, Loose_ends, and ally.

[Nowhere Man]

Part I Further Semantic Issues


Apparently doubt is still being cast on whether NORTHWOODS was a proposed operation. The principle argument is that it was only a memorandum coupled with ad hominem insinuation that those who consider it to be a proposed operation are doing so:

a. For partisan purposes

b. To make it more than it is : A preliminary submission for planning purposes

c. Because they are "people like [Bacasper] who have never read the historicized document"

Issue has also been taken with the significance of NORTHWOODS being capitalized, specifically pointing out that a CIA station codenamed JM/WAVE also appears in capitals but was not an operation.

I'll begin by saying that it is unfortunate that several lines of my previous argument seem to have been ignored. Questions that could have been responded to were likewise ignored. As such, the response that I did receive is best characterized as cherry-picked.

Three further points I'd make that support the idea that NORTHWOODS was a proposed operation are as follow:

1. Logic

a. "Memorandum" is, quite simply, a term for a kind of formal inter-office communique. At a less formal level, an e-mail serves the same purpose. The argument we have here is: NORTHWOODS wasn't a proposed operation, it was a memorandum". That is basically the same as saying: "NORTHWOODS wasn't a proposed operation, it was an email".

The other argument is that it was "a preliminary submission for planning purposes". I could be wrong, but I believe that this is bureaucratic jargon for...a proposal.

Now, suppose I, via e-mail, preliminarily submit for planning purposes that my co-worker kill my boss. If someone then said,

"Hey, you proposed murdering your wife!", would it make any sense at all for me to say, "No, it wasn't a proposal to kill my wife,it was an e-mail." No. That would be a very silly argument for me to put forward. The same logic applies to suggesting NORTHWOODS was a memorandum and not a proposed operation.

b. Whatever you want to call it, THE JCS are suggesting fake attacks to justify an invasion of Cuba. How exactly were they going to plan and stage such attacks? Through a sock hop? An ice cream social? Was the memorandum going to sprout legs and go lob mortar shells itself? How exactly would one carry out the specified tasks if not via an operation?

c. I will pose for the second time questions that went unanswered:

How does one scrap a memorandum? Are memoranda codenamed?

2. Use of capital letters to denote operations

a. Another poster makes a valid criticism in that JM/WAVE is in caps but not an operation. Further investigation suggests that capitalization was (and I believe still is) being used denote codenames. Codenames are variously used to denote operations, projects, stations, technology, and agents among other things if you begin to include military uses such as OMAHA and SWORD. However, I haven't seen an instance of the US government using a codenames for a memorandum. It would be interesting to see evidence of such. Specifically, for the discussion here, it would be interesting to see a codenamed memorandum between the JCS and another high-level government office.

Suffice it to say that NORTHWOODS was not a station.

b. In the month preceding the memorandum on operation NORTHWOODS, Brig. Gen. Craig had already sent an internal Pentagon memorandum proposing a series of operations:

1. Operation SMASHER: disruption of communications in Cuba

2. Operation FREE RIDE: stirring unrest in Cuba

3. Operation TURN ABOUT: discrediting Castro as a revolutionary leader

4. Operation DEFECTOR: encouraging defections in Cuba's military

5. Operation BREAK-UP: sabotaging Cuban aircraft

6. Operation COVER-UP: convincing the Cubans that project MERCURY was actually a secret program directed at Cuba

7. Operation DIRTY TRICK: framing Cuba for sabotaging project MERCURY in the event that it failed

8. Operation FULL-UP: contaminating fuel supplies

9. Operation PHANTOM: convincing the Cubans that massive covert operations were already underway in Cuba

10. Operation BINGO: staging an attack on US facilities in Guantanamo Bay

http://www.indiana.edu/~oah/nl/98feb/jfk.html (document 5)

Note: summaries truncated by the poster

Clearly this is a list of proposed operations.

Some of these proposed operations were subsequently included in NORTHWOODS. So how, may I ask, do these proposed operations
suddenly become not proposed operations but instead a memorandum?

3. Characterization of NORTHWOODS throughout print and other media
The description of NORTHWOODS as an operation certainly did not start
on this board. On the other hand, the idea that it wasn't an operation does appear to have started here as I cannot find any other posts on the web making such an assertion. I invite any posters that do have links to such an argument to provide them.

a. A simple google of "NORTHWOODS memorandum" actually produces a long list of sites that refer to NORTHWOODS as an operation. Of course, some of the sites that come up are infamous for being biased (prisonplanet, for example), a couple are actually links to conservative websites (jhlconservative, christianparty), and one is a link to a Johns-Hopkins University that features an article entitled "Operation Northwoods: The Pentagon's Scripts for Overthrowing Castro" published by MIT Press. Hmm. Probably written by some guy like Bacasper.

Note: The MIT Press article is only available via subscription

b. Wikipedia's entry begins:

[Nowhere Man]

Part III Morality

1.