Feb. 16, 2003. 01:00 AM

U.S. lies shouldn't be leading us into battle again

[ Source: The Toronto Star ]

MICHELE LANDSBERG

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So you wonder why so many Canadians are opposed to the U.S. plans to attack Iraq? It's not that we're weak-kneed wimps of Canuckistan, or bleeding-heart pacifists, or saps who actually believe Saddam, to repeat some of the more boorish epithets.

Whatever our other reasons for opposing the war, we're also skeptics, remembering the long history of official lies that have served as a smokescreen for U.S. government adventurism in other places and times.

Some of us remember Cuba, and how mighty America and its CIA planned an invasion of that little island after Fidel Castro came to power. Their tragically botched attack in 1961, when more than 100 commandoes died senselessly at the Bay of Pigs, is not forgotten.

I've been browsing some of the declassified documents that record the actual top-secret conversations of the most powerful men in America, then and afterward, in their obsessive and ludicrous attempts to invent a plausible reason to launch a major military attack on Cuba.

In March, 1962, for example, the top officials of the Joint Chiefs of Staff met in Washington to come up with ideas "which would provide justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba." Operation Mongoose, it was called. (Presumably, Castro was the cobra).

To destroy Castro was a government obsession. "...All else is secondary, no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared" said a White House memo.

They plotted to destroy Cuba's sugar crop or to contaminate food supplies, in order to provoke the lamentably "apathetic" Cubans to rebel, rise up and call in American troops to help them overthrow Castro. They thought of creating "at least the illusion of a popular [anti-Castro] movement," for want of a real one.

According to these archived documents, the Americans were prepared to do anything: invade Guatemala with soldiers disguised as Cubans, blow up one of their own warships in Guantanamo Bay and stage a fake funeral for the `victims', and even rig up an elaborate phoney attack on a tourist charter flight (complete with airplane debris floating in the ocean) to persuade the United Nations and world public opinion that the U.S. was "suffering justifiable grievances". They went so far as to consider mounting a terrorism campaign against Cuban exiles in Miami, even wounding some people and "widely publicizing" the incidents as caused by Castro. Or — and please listen to the jaunty language — "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)."

These covert operations, including "a build-up of seemingly unrelated incidents", would, they vowed, create an image of the Cuban government as "rash and irresponsible ... an alarming and unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere".

Does any of this sound hauntingly familiar? Is there any echo with the current depiction of Iraq as demonically dangerous?

For much of the last half of the 20th century, American presidents and their chief advisers and military leaders were directly involved in elaborate schemes of drug-running, manipulating public opinion through planted editorials and news stories, and illicit campaigns of what they themselves called "White propaganda," like the now-notorious episode of the hoked-up Iraqi atrocities against incubator babies in Kuwait, a crime invented by a powerful public relations firm and used to sway Congress to support the Gulf War.

I needn't remind Star readers about the government crimes of the Iran-Contra gun-running scandal, ruthlessly designed to overturn the elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua by organizing and arming the Contra opposition. Browse the National Security Archives and you can eavesdrop directly on these ruthless conspirators as they plotted to use the U.S. media to vilify their enemies and whitewash their chosen henchmen.

But don't stop there. Go ahead and read the transcript of the meeting at the White House in September, 1970.They were all there: Nixon, his vice-president, the heads of the CIA and the military. Henry Kissinger spelled out how they must "bring down" Salvador Allende, the newly elected democratic socialist president of Chile. They all agreed to subvert Allende by sabotaging the Chilean economy, while (and Nixon insisted on this) behaving publicly "in a cool and correct manner".

Allende, of course, was duly murdered three years later in a coup orchestrated by the CIA, which ushered in the 17-year bloody dictatorship by mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.

The history of U.S. foreign policy is paradoxical: so much bush-league covert action, so many lies, so many failures, so little understanding of consequences, so many botched interventions. And yet, such openness. What other regime would make its top secret documents available through freedom of information laws, to be read on the Internet by anyone with an inquiring mind?

Perhaps U.S. leaders can afford to be so open because they believe their citizens to be infinitely manipulable through the obligingly docile media. The patriotic American public, after all, bought the lies about the Gulf of Tonkin (a supposed attack on U.S. warships that actually never happened), precipitating the disastrous Vietnam War. They believed the TV version of the Gulf War, with "smart bombs" zipping through windows to kill only bad guys.

And for all I know, they believe the charade that Saddam Hussein is linked to Al Qaeda. The U.S. media have almost turned themselves into an arm of government propaganda.

They're still repeating the mantra that "Saddam gassed his own people," even though the senior CIA political analyst in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war has recently written — in the New York Times, no less — that the Kurdish civilians who died in that attack were killed by a poison gas that only Iran had at that time. They even believe that Saddam wilfully marched into Kuwait as some sort of unprovoked Hitlerian aggressor, despite the well-documented history of the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait that goes back at least to the time of World War I.

Most Canadians, however, don't buy the idea that Saddam, however vicious a dictator, poses an imminent threat to world peace or safety, any more than Fidel Castro did.

History is just too heavy with fateful lies — lies that led to too many millions of needless deaths — for skeptical Canadians to agree to go to war at the behest of George Dubya Bush.

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Michele Landsberg's column usually appears in The Star Saturday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is mlandsb@thestar.ca

Additional articles by Michele Landsberg

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Further Reading

Officially Declassified Operation Northwoods Documents. Straight from George Washington University's National Security Archive!

The Panama Deception: How the U.S. elite conspired to invade Panama and massacre civilians to regain control of the Panama Canal and the Central American drug trade.

The CIA and Drug Trafficking.

September Eleventh Questions—Resources for the Inquiring Mind:

From the Wilderness

The Emperor’s New Clothes: Piercing a Fog of Lies

A shocking exposé of the lies surrounding September 11th: The War on Freedom. From Media Monitors.

Portland Indymedia’s 9/11 Investigation Page: http://portland.indymedia.org/911investigation/.

Questions, questions: A review of alternative theories on current issues.

For those “debunkers” out there:

Debunking Conspiracy Theories

Could someone please direct me to Landsberg's "subtle allusions to the events of 9/11" apparently they are so subtle I missed them. I appreciate Lansdsberg's use of documentary evidence RE: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran-Contra, Allende, and Gulf War I, but I don't see how this text and this evidence relate to 9/11.

I put nothing past this administration, but to title this post "Toronto Star Column Hints at a Staged 9/11 as Pretext for War!" is intellectually dishonest.

If 9-11 wasn't an inside job or covert psyop by the criminal cabal in possession of the federal government, it would have been stopped before the strikes in NYC, at the Pentagon, and like the plane in Pennsylvania been shot down before hitting any such high profile targets. If you have not asked yourself, "where was the US Air Force on the morning of 9-11?" Then you only went into an emotional fit and never really analyzed what happened at all.

Amazingly, this question was conspicuously absent from the discussions before the US instigated invasion of Afghanistan, and remains so in the prelude to another US lead invasion of Iraq. It must be a conspiracy of silence by those controlling the microphones at the antiwar demonstrations for the past 15 months from LA to NYC and abroad, from what I can observe from even the "alternative media" including Pacifica Radio.

Yet, as well argued in the Toronto Star article http://la.indymedia.org/news/2003/02/30450.php , current historical precedent dictates that a fabrication of events is indispensable to the implementation of US aggression. The pretext are psychological warfare techniques treacherously aimed at the publics mind, to inhibit dissent to fain consent, and failing that, as we know, along comes COINTELPRO.

We know now the US fraudulently concocted the Gulf of Tonkin incident, resulting in mass murder of millions of people in Indochina. We know of the dozens of assassination attempts on Cuban President Fidel Castro, including those ordered during the Kennedy administration. We also know the JFK, MLK, and MLK were assassinated by covert actions by agents of the super-rich power elite in this country.

Further we know that the current regime gained power by a conspiracy that included the US Supreme Court and complicit congress. Then 9-11, and mind numbing sorry ruled over reason nationwide. Those who questioned the official scenario were isolated by liberals across the board and dismissed by "radicals" as "over-the-top!" -- I know this from personal experience.

But, most alarming to me is, that given what "we knew" before 9-11 and hold as fact since, that the allegations by this fascist cabal of war criminals (US govt), have been nothing but lies upon lies as witnessed at the United Nations by General Powell and the bogus fear-mongering by Ashcroft and Ridge; and yet, there is a DISCONNECT between the prevarications before 9-11 and after! Hello!!! A chronic liar is a lair -- and to believe these people on what happened and by whom and why on 9-11 is totally unacceptable from a rational point of view and indicts those who do buy into the cover-story as being accessory's after the fact for their wonton connivance with assassinations of those killed in NYC and since by the US imperial war machine.

I constructed an email of vital evidence - photographic, audio and print - that I will forward to those who request it. And further, I must add that also conspicuously absent in the antiwar discussion is the legislation pending in congress to enact the compulsory military draft. I take issue with all pragmatist who cynically maintain that it the solution to ending war by forcing people into it. So, I will boo those who merely ask for "peace and love" and don't speak to the ugly reality that 9-11 was and had to be an INSIDE JOB and that a military draft is tantamount to slavery as involuntary servitude!

This is the lynch pin of the entire
plot. Pull it and watch what happens.
Count to three and throw.
The singular event that could bring these
bastards DOWN!

"to title this post "Toronto Star Column Hints at a Staged 9/11 as Pretext for War!" is intellectually dishonest"

What's intellectually dishonest is to say you are confused
and that the hints were too subtle for you and then
go ahead and make this charge anyway.

While I believe that the poster misinterpreted
the catalog of U.S. deceptions as applying to 9/11
when the author actually was referring specifically
to actions pertaining to Iraq (such as Colin Powell's
presentation, or even the anthrax mailings that
were pinned on Iraq), such misinterpretations
do not constitute "intellectual dishonesty".

the toronto star! Canadian liberals! WHOOHOO!!!

Here, have a copy of the al-jazeera newsletter, it has a lot of credibility as well. Since 9-11 was all a conspiracy.

Heres a conspiracy, er, i mean true story i discovered as well: Liberals are all gay, so they formed cnn and when they cant get enough anti-war demonstrations on tv, they then make up their own shit, such as anthrax was done by america as well as 9-11 done by the government. Now the gay people (liberals) want to kill off all the straights, so they came up with this argument so that iraq can build nukes and then proceed to kill off all the straight people.

What? Dont believe me?

Here, let me list incredibly trustful sources such as:

www.imgay.com/article/killthestraights

www.imadirtyliberal.com/impenisteller,ieatcock

www.cocksucker.com/reasonswhywegaysneedtokillamericans

You just gotta love 'em, don't ya? These right wing thugs. They just contribute sooo much to our culture. Monster trucks, bad TV, bad beer, trailer parks, frat boys, GW Bush. Wow. What would we have done without them, all these years? Goose stepping around in their brown shirts, saluting anything that moves. I'm sure they miss the days of the Jim Crow south when they could put on the sheets and kill anyone who demanded they be treated with respect.

On that point, I've noticed the trolls have really ratcheted up their verbal attacks since the latest round of global protests, which I see as good: they are scared, and dangerous: they are scared and it won't be too long before they kill some one. That's just how the frothing right wingers do it here in America. They get all worked up on propoganda and fear, and kill someone. Be watchful.

And since they've labeled all anti-war protesters as "Anti-Mericun" we're all targets. They seem to hate Sean Penn the most.

Well, you see . . . Sean Penn does this thing that all totalitarians really hate. He thinks for himself. He also has something that right wing thugs REALLY hate . . . talent.

Sean Penn and these other Hollywood types critical of Bush could be held up by them as shining beacons of the success of the capitalist system: creative, hard working, competitive, wealthy. But once a brown-shirt, always a brown-shirt: They want everyone to be mediocre knuckle-draggers like themselves. So sad, so sad. Perhaps they envy his success?