First things first. Vince and MrsSkywalker, you two really scare me. I had never heard of Operation Northwoods until yesterday. A friend of mine sent me a link to this conspiracy theory website, and frankly, I thought it was complete bunk. So I did some googling and ABCnews happened to be the top link.
My thinking was, the United States would never orchestrate the mass murder of its own citizens as a pre-text for war. I believed the people saying the US did that on 9/11 were crazy. For as much as I've got problems with this country, being worried that the US military might take me and other citizens out to start a war with another country was something that I had never considered. That's not utopian thinking. And I'm sorry, but if that's us being naive (us being the people who are expressing shock at this whole thing), then this country is in worse shape than I thought.
You honestly would not care if the current US government was plotting to blow up cities in order to start a war with, say, Iran or North Korea? If *all* of the joint chiefs signed off on it?
I'm sorry, but when people put pen to paper and place their signature on it, it's no longer hypothetical. When the entire joint chiefs of staff sign off on it, they're doing their best to make it happen.
I don't know what I'm more appalled by. The fact that this occurred at all, or the fact that you two simply don't care.
p.s.: The date for the ABCnews article is May 1st, 2001. When I realized that, I could only mutter a "dear god....." and hope that 9/11 wasn't history repeating itself, but this time drawn out to its full conclusion.
After reading about Operation Northwoods, I can no longer discount that possibility. Who's to say 40-60 years from now when we're all old fuddies that we won't hear some report come out about 9/11 being orchestrated by our own government in order to start a "war on terrorism" that would finally give us a pre-text for taking out all of our enemies without the need for traditional reasons for war?
But I guess if that were the case people would be obscenely naive for being horrified by the mere thought of the US government doing such a thing.
I'm actually pretty surprised that stuff like this hasn't surfaced in the "mainstream" media. Or maybe I really shouldn't be too surprised since, unfortunately, there seem to be intelligent people who simply don't give a damn about it. "Oh they didn't actually kill anyone, so who cares."