Senior US officials seriously proposed staging attacks on American citizens to justify war.

Evidence

Justifying military involvement is a common theme in real or suspected false flags, and it cropped up in 1962’s infamous Operation Northwoods. A proposal from the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Northwoods baldly floated the idea that the CIA commit acts of terrorism against American citizens and blame them on Cuba to justify pushing a simmering conflict into a full-scale war. The attacks involved a riot outside Guantanamo, the US naval base in Cuba, as well as shooting down airplanes or setting off bombs in US cities. President Kennedy vetoed the operation, but just two years later, in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, American forces insisted they had been attacked twice by a North Vietnamese patrol boat. But the second attack never happened, as documents declassified years later showed. They also demonstrated that then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara intentionally withheld evidence that might have led to a full investigation of the event and perhaps put a slight speed bump in the United States’ rush into the Vietnam War. — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in institutional trust and how states manufacture pretext — echoes the extralegal/secrecy dynamics in the diamond bourse chapters about how power operates outside public accountability.