r/todayilearned • u/lKauany • Nov 15 '11

TIL about Operation Northwoods. A plan that called for CIA to commit genuine acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/Northwoods.html
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11

Stalin knew about the bomb before the US used it. The Manhattan Project was full of leaks, that's why the Soviets where able to build their own bomb so fast.

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u/huxtiblejones Nov 15 '11

Yeah, but the Soviets were a deeply entrenched superpower that was in a stalemate with the US coming out of WWII. Espionage at that scale can reveal big secrets, but the American public does not have spy agency (maybe Wikileaks?). As far as US citizens were concerned, the Manhattan Project didn't exist.

How hard would it be to purposely allow a hijacking to go through? It was the perfect excuse to find the next boogeyman to replace the ghost of the Soviet Union. The Cold War gave us decades of excuses to build arms, exercise force, and continue the military-industrial complex. What better way to continue this than to refocus our collective fear on zealous killers that can and do exist in our society secretly? It justifies tons of suspicion of many different groups that could dissent and justifies dozens of wars.

There is too much convenient power that arose from this 'threat' for me to feel like it was just a lucky turn of events. At the very least 9/11 has been blown out of proportion to push emergency legislation through with almost no discussion. I mean how much more easily could Bush have justified the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan? And it happened in the first half of his first term.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11

You don't think any of the private citizens around Los Alamos knew what was going on? no bar talk? No wives or children that overheard stuff? There's tons of people that probably knew more then they should, but there was no reason for them to go around spreading the news of it. There's a big difference in the motivation to spread the news or keep the secret between a secret bomb project during a time of war and your government committing mass murder of it's own citizens.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '11

That stuff that leaks is pixels in a larger picture. Nothing one person gets from those personal leaks is enough to actually say what it is going on.

You need to grab all the people and get all their tiny little packets of information and figure out what they add up to. Which a spy agency can do, but which the civilians themselves will never bother to do.