THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
July 30, 2001
The Wisdom Fund

Deadly Deception, Pretexts for War

U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff approved plans for 'launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country'

by Enver Masud

WASHINGTON, DC—Scott Ritter, former UN Special Commission inspector, claims that Richard Butler, former chief UN weapons inspector, "deliberately planned UN inspections in 1998 to orchestrate a confrontation between Iraq and the UN so the United States could carry out its threats to bomb Iraq." Ritter makes the allegations in a documentary film, "In Shifting Sands: The Truth About UNSCOM and the Disarming of Iraq," shown to journalists at the UN reported Ronni Berke (CNN, July 19).

Ritter's revelation should come as no surprise. The alleged pretext for bombing Iraq, was just one more act of deadly deception, by the U.S. and its allies, designed to rally the public against the "enemy." Some examples:

The annual commemoration of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, invariably includes these words from the speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan." But, few Americans know, and they're seldom told, that, "The U.S. believed that war with Japan was inevitable, and that 'the United States should provoke it at a time which suited U.S. interests.' Analysts recommended an eight point plan designed to provoke a Japanese attack," according to Robert Stinnett, writing in Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. The plan included military provocations, and a recommendation to "Completely embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo by the British Empire."

The embargo was in place, and the U.S. had made several provocative military moves, at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Britain and France had their plan for taking back the Suez Canal after it was nationalized by President Nasser of Egypt on July 26, 1956. "France secretly enlisted the help of Israel," writes James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century. Mr.Bamford was Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, and has written investigative cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

"The intrigue involved Israel launching a war against Egypt," writes Mr. Bamford. Then, once Egypt began defending itself, England and France would go in as 'peacekeepers.' As part of the 'peace,' the canal would be taken from Egypt and kept by Britain and France. Israel would capture the Sinai from Egypt." The plan was agreed to by Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, defense minister Shimon Peres, and armed forces chief Moshe Dayan, and Britain's prime minister, Anthony Eden.

Following the failed, Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961, by 1,300 members of a CIA-supported counter-revolutionary Cuban exile force, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) drew up and approved plans for "launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba." Mr. Bamford writes:

"Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan . . . called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer [Chairman JCS] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war."
Accidents, writes Mr. Bamford, were to be used to advance U.S. interests. Had the February 20, 1962 launch of John Glenn—the first American to orbit the earth, later a U.S. presidential candidate—not been successful, the JCS were prepared to use John Glenn's possible death as a pretext for war.
"The flight was to carry the banner of America's virtues of truth, freedom, and democracy into orbit high over the planet. But Lemnitzer and his Chiefs had a different idea. They proposed to Lansdale [U.S. general in charge of Operation Mongoose—covert operations against Cuba] that, should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, 'the objective is to provide irrevocable proof that . . . the fault lies with the Communists et al Cuba [sic].' This would be accomplished, Lemnitzer continued, 'by manufacturing various pieces of evidence which would prove electronic interference on the part of the Cubans.'"
In 1963, writes Mr. Bamford, the JCS proposed secret U.S. attacks on Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago. "Both were members of the British Commonwealth; thus, by secretly attacking them and then falsely blaming Cuba, the United States could lure England into the war against Castro."

The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, that sparked the Vietnam War, was also deliberately provoked. "Restless from a decade of peace," writes Mr. Bamford, "out of touch with reality, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were desperate for a war, any war."

In the 1960s, as Britain was dismantling its colonies, the U.S. conspired with Britain to receive secretly, gratis, and for 50 years, the Chagos Archipelago. Between 1965 and 1973, to clear the largest island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, for a listening post for the U.S. National Security Administration, every man, woman, and child was physically removed from the islands, and placed bewildered and frightened, on the islands of Mauritius and Seychelles, wrote a British writer, Simon Winchester.

While falsely blaming their "enemies," the U.S. government, and American "free press," have covered-up for their "friends."

Three days after Israel launched its June 5, 1967, surprise attack on Egypt, it carried out a deliberate and sustained attack on the USS Liberty, with the objective of leaving no survivors.

Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, former Chairman JCS, in a memo dated June 8, 1997 wrote, "I am confident that Israel knew the Liberty could intercept radio messages from all parties and potential parties to the ongoing war, then in its fourth day, and that Israel was preparing to seize the Golan Heights from Syria despite President Johnson's known opposition to such a move."

Mr. Bamford describes the attack:

"Within the first few hours Israeli jets pounded twenty-five Arab air bases ranging from Damascus in Syria to an Egyptian field loaded with bombers, far up the Nile at Luxor. Then using machine guns, mortar fire, tanks, and air power, the Israeli war machine overtook the Jordanian section of Jerusalem as well as the west bank of the Jordan River and torpedo boats captured the key Red Sea cape of Sharm al-Sheikh."
Based on declassified transcripts of radio communications, survivor accounts, and interviews with others in the chain of command on the day ot the attack, Mr. Bamford writes:
"On the morning of June 8, the Israeli military command received a report that a large American eavesdropping ship was secretly listening only a few miles off El Arish. At that same moment, a scant dozen or so miles away, Israeli soldiers were butchering civilians and bound prisoners by the hundreds, a fact that the entire Israeli army leadership knew about and condoned, according to the army's own historian. . . .

"At the time, Israel was loudly proclaiming—to the United States, to the United Nations, and to the world—that it was the victim of Egyptian aggression and that it alone held the moral high ground. Israel's commanders would not have wanted tape recordings of evidence of the slaughters to wind up on desks at the White House, the UN, or the Washington Post."

The Gulf War of January 16, 1991, is yet another example of U.S. deception. "Iraq's war against Iran may have cost as much as $500 billion," write Alan Geyer and Barbara G. Green in Lines in the Sand: Justice and the Gulf War. Postwar economic problems and reconstruction costs were $280 billion or more. Saddam Hussein was in a position to be manipulated.

In a July 25, 1990 meeting with U.S. ambassador April Glaspie, Saddam Hussein was informed, "We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Meanwhile, the U.S. encouraged Kuwait to continue its slant drilling into Iraqi oil fields. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Ever since the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s, the U.S. had been seeking an opportunity to dominate the Middle East. Now the public had to be rallied to the "just war."

A high point of the public relations campaign against Iraq, was the testimony of a Kuwaiti refugee, before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 15, 1990, who told of Iraqi troops removing over 300 babies from incubators in Kuwait City hospital, and dumping them on the floor to die. On January 6, 1992, John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine, revealed that "Nayirah," the alleged refugee, was the daughter of Saud al-Sabah, Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, and that Hill and Knowlton, a large public relations firm, had helped prepare her testimony, which she had rehearsed before video cameras in the firm's Washington office.



[James Bamford is the best-selling author of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies" (2004) and "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" (2001).]

William Rust, "Viet Nam: The 'phantom battle' that led to war; can it happen again?," usnews.com, July 23, 1984

[Tatum's resignation from Pegasus followed his refusal to "neutralise" a leading US political figure in the 1992 US presidential elections. . . .

A plan had been drawn up at the highest levels of Nixon's administration. Team Red Rock were to enter Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, in secret and attack the airport and military and civil installations, wreaking as much havoc as possible. The plan called for the team to parachute into the outskirts of Phnom Penh, carrying captured NVA "Sappers" with them. Taken in unarmed and alive, the Sappers would be "sacrificed" and their bodies left to be discovered by Cambodian forces. A furious Lon Nol would assume North Vietnam was to blame. It was hoped that such an act would stiffen Lon Nol's backbone. With nowhere else to turn, the US puppet would urgently seek US hardware to strengthen his forces and continue the battle.

The team members were not told that they, too, were to be sacrificed by their President to ensure that word of the operation never reached the light of day. . . .

The "Contragate" years teem with well-documented accounts of illicit wholesale gun-running and dope-smuggling. . . . Tatum says that North's "Enterprise" not only set up the cocaine factories and "ran" the Colombian cartels, but was also responsible for masterminding the massive shipments of narcotics into the US.--"THE PEGASUS FILE: A former CIA deep-cover agent turns whistleblower at great risk," Nexus Magazine, April-May 1997]

Enver Masud, President Clinton Misrepresented Iraq Threat," The Wisdom Fund, November 16, 1998

Enver Masud, Millions Spent Subverting "Enemies," Stifling Dissent," The Wisdom Fund, February 15, 2001

[Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban emigres, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.--David Ruppe, U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba," ABC News, May 1, 2001]

Bin Laden's Mountain Fortress Rumsfeld, "Bin Laden's Mountain Fortress," NBC Meet The Press, December 2, 2001

[When George H. W. Bush ordered American forces to the Persian Gulf - to reverse Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait - part of the administration case was that an Iraqi juggernaut was also threatening to roll into Saudi Arabia.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid-September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border - just empty desert.--Scott Peterson, "In War, Some Facts Less Factual," Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2002]

["A Persian Gulf War POW accuses the United States and Britain of being hypocritical about Saddam."--"'A War Waiting for a Pretext'," Newsweek, September 27, 2002]

The Papers That Cried Wolf: Brian Whitaker looks at how the American media are softening up public attitudes to war with Iraq," Guardian, December 16, 2002

[". . . a new Pentagon bureau, the Office of Strategic Influence, was considering ways to plant false information with unwitting foreign journalists."--"White House Plays Down Propaganda by Military," New York Times, December 17, 2002]

[". . . the 'Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)' -- will carry out secret missions designed to 'stimulate reactions' among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to 'counterattack' by U.S. forces."--Chris Floyd, "Global Eye--Into the Dark," Moscow Times, November 1, 2002]

[When Greene, a veteran of British intelligence, used his contacts in French security services to investigate the Saigon bombings of January 1952, he discovered a US campaign to create a "Third Force," opposed to both Communism and colonialism and designed to evolve into a US-backed "democracy" in Vietnam. Any resemblance to recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq is hardly coincidental.--H. Bruce Franklin, "Our Man in Saigon," The Nation, February 3, 2003]

["We know from experience that politicians about to go to war are not above manipulating information to heat up public opinion. They have manufactured international incidents - the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin "clash", for example, which President Johnson used to deceive the Senate into giving him a declaration of war against North Vietnam. They can be the simple peddling of "evil Hun" stories, as with the discredited accounts of Iraqi soldiers pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators."--"Don't Let the Facts Get in the Way," The Guardian, February 6, 2003]

Andrew Gumbel, Growing Evidence of Deception by Washington," Independent, April 20, 2003

Michael E. Salla, "The Black Budget Report: An Investigation into the CIA's 'Black Budget' and the Second Manhattan Project," American University, November 23, 2003

Pat Shannan, "OKC Bombshell Implicates Feds In Murrah Blast: After nearly a decade, shocking, suppressed evidence emerges," AmericanFreePress.net, January 7, 2004

[Britain secretly and brutally expelled the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean - so that the US could build a military base there.--Arun Kundnani, "Stealing A Nation: A Special Report By John Pilger," IRR News, September 29, 2004]

Phillip Yardley, "Did Israel attack the United States with Chertoff's aid?," indymedia.org, February 11, 2005

Jason Leopold, "From Watergate to the Downing Street Memo: When Presidents Lie," CounterPunch, June 1, 2005

[The US National Security Agency has kept secret a 2001 finding by its own historian that its officers deliberately distorted critical intelligence during the Tonkin Gulf episode that helped precipitate the Vietnam War.--Scott Shane, "Washington hid damaging Vietnam finding," Sydney Morning Herald, October 31, 2005]

[Saddam . . . was also quietly assured by the United States that it would have no objection to his claiming his prize - Kuwait - once he defeated Iran.--George Friedman, "America's Secret War," Broadway, October 11, 2005]

VIDEO: Barrie Zwicker, "The Great Conspiracy: The 9/11 News Special You Never Saw," greatconspiracy.ca, November 5, 2005

[Rendon is a leader in the strategic field known as "perception management," manipulating information - and, by extension, the news media - to achieve the desired result. His firm, the Rendon Group, has made millions off government contracts since 1991, when it was hired by the CIA to help "create the conditions for the removal of Hussein from power." . . . Rendon was guarded about the details of his clandestine work - but he boasted openly of the sweep and importance of his firm's efforts as a for-profit spy. "We've worked in ninety-one countries," he said. "Going all the way back to Panama, we've been involved in every war, with the exception of Somalia." . . . The seventy-four-page document, titled "Information Operations Roadmap," also calls for psychological operations to be launched over radio, television, cell phones and "emerging technologies" such as the Internet. In addition to being classified secret, the road map is also stamped noforn, meaning it cannot be shared even with our allies.--James Bamford, "The Man Who Sold the War: Meet John Rendon, Bush's general in the propaganda war," Rolling Stone, November 17, 2005]

VIDEO: Alex Jones, "Terror Storm: A Chronicle of False Flag Terrorism," Prison Planet TV, July 12, 2006

[The ploy was to invent Baghdadi, . . . install him as the head of a front organization called the Islamic State of Iraq--Michael R. Gordon, "Leader of Al Qaeda group in Iraq was fictional, U.S. military says," nytimes.com, July 18, 2007]

David Ray Griffin, "9/11 and Nationalist Faith: How Faith Can Be Illuminating or Blinding," davidraygriffin.com, October 19, 2007

VIDEO: Howard Zinn, "The Uses of History and the War on Terrorism," democracynow.org, November 24, 2006

[Israel and our government, in this 2 hour attack, had come up with a plan to sink our ship, blame it on Egypt and bring the U.S. into the Six Day War.--Phillip F. Tourney, "TREASON ON THE HIGH SEAS," ussliberty.wordpress.com, December 9, 2007]

[The tragedy sparked anti-German fervor that eventually drew the United States into World War I.--Anne Goodwin Sides, "New Clues In Lusitania's Sinking," npr.org, November 22, 2008]

"10 false flags operations that shaped our world," kennysideshow, December 3, 2008

John Hudson, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans," foreignpolicy.com, July 14, 2013

Kevin Barrett, "Hersh revelations and false-flag talk in media," presstv.com, December 11, 2013

George Washington[sic], "The First Question to Ask After Any Terror Attack: Was It a False Flag?," zerohedge.com, January 11, 2015 -- BRIEF HISTORY OF FALSE FLAG ATTACKS

Boston Bombing: Naomi Wolf Exposes Fake News/False Flags, Jan 15, 2015

Nick Turse, "U.S. Special Ops Forces Deployed in 135 Nations," tomdispatch.com, September 24, 2015

Matt Agorist, "JFK Files Prove US Gov't Planned to Set Off Bombs Inside US, Kill Innocent People in Cuban False Flag," thefreethoughtproject.com, October 28, 2017

Paul Street, "The American Sea of Deception," truthdig.com, August 5, 2018

"Inside America's Meddling Machine," grayzoneproject.com, August 20, 2018

THE WISDOM FUND: News & Views
[Before Pearl Harbor, there was an elaborate British influence operation of forged documents, fake news, and manipulation.--Hunter Derensis, "The Campaign To Lie America Into World War II," theamericanconservative.com, December 6, 2019]

Patrick Cockburn, "The Cruel, Dishonest and Shameful Story of Britain's Last Colony may be Coming to an End," counterpunch.org, December 5, 2022

How The U.S. Stole This Paradise Island, AJ+, July 5, 2023

"False Flag Terrorism," wanttoknow.info

Copyright © 2001 Enver Masud - All Rights Reserved. An edited version of this article is scheduled to appear as a book review in the August 2001 issue of Impact International published in England. A PDF version is available.
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