CHENEY CONSIDERED KILLING AMERICAN SERVICEMEN

[Duane Daman]

"AMERICANS UNITE The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh reveals how the neocons convened around Dick Cheney and brainstormed ways to kick off World War IV, as they fondly call their pet project to take out the Muslims and foment a contrived "clash of civilizations."

According to Hersh, this meeting occurred after the neocons failed miserably to stage a rehashed version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Strait of Hormuz, mostly because it is no longer 1964 and such Big Lies — thanks to the internet and bloggers — are far more difficult to float. "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there," quipped LBJ about the imaginary act of North Vietnamese boats supposedly attacking U.S. ships, leading to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and undeclared war in Southeast Asia, ultimately resulting in the death of nearly 60,000 Americans and around 3 million Southeast Asians.

In an exclusive Think Progress story, we learn the meeting took place in Cheney's office and the subject on the table was "how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington," part of an ongoing effort to provide an excuse to attack Iran. "There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war," Hersh explains. "The one that interested me the most was why don't we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up."

Hersh would have us believe this scenario did not play out because "you can't have Americans killing Americans," an absurd explanation considering the fact the attacks of September 11 were just that — "Americans killing Americans," a calculated and cold-blooded act of mass murder carried out by elements in the U.S. government as a "new Pearl Harbor," a cynical pretext to launch the "war on terror," now grinding into its seventh year.

Ominously, these "ideas" hark back to Operation Northwoods, the JSC plan to stage a false flag terror event — or a number of events — designed to provide a pretext to invade Cuba and take out Fidel Castro. Such "ideas" included "friendly Cubans" attacking the U.S. base at Guantanamo, shooting down a drone disguised as a chartered civil airliner and blaming it on Cuba, inciting riots and staging terror attacks in Miami, and other terrorist acts. Fortunately, then Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, put a kibosh to this insane plan.

More recently, in January, 2003, in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion George Bush and Tony Blair discussed painting planes in United Nations colors "in order to provoke an attack which could then be used to justify material breach" and thus set in motion an invasion, according to Philippe Sands, a leading British human rights lawyer (see Revealed: Bush and Blair discussed using American Spyplane in UN colors to lure Saddam into war, Channel Four News).

In fact, the neocons have not rested in their effort to foment war and force the support of the American people by way of deception. On May 16, 2008, Paul Joseph Watson, writing for Prison Planet, noted confidential recordings released under the Freedom of Information Act revealing the efforts of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and top military analysts to cook up another terrorist attack on America in order to gain support for their ambitious plans to decimate Muslim culture. "The most extraordinary exchange takes place when Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans shrinking political support for Neo-Con war plans on Capitol Hill and suggests that sympathy for the Bush administration's agenda will only be achieved after a new terror attack," writes Watson. "Rumsfeld agrees that the psychological impact of 9/11 is wearing off and the 'behavior pattern' of citizens in both the U.S. and Europe suggests that they are unconcerned about the threat of terror." Rumsfeld characterizes Bush as "a victim of success" because America has not suffered "an attack in five years" and for Rumsfeld and the neocons this state of affairs is indeed lamentable.

Obviously, the neocons will stop at nothing — including the murder of more Americans in a false flag terror attack — to realize their agenda.

Finally, Sy Hersh casts suspicion on himself during the interview when he admits he did not bother to write an article on the neocon casus belli brainstorming session because it did not go forward. "So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they're mice training to be rats.... But the point is jejune, if you know what that means." It was "jejune" because Hersh believes the "American public, if you get the right incident, the American public will support bang-bang-kiss-kiss. You know, we're into it."

[Jack White]

.....

[Duane Daman]

[Len Colby]

Dupe

Edited November 19, 2010 by Len Colby

[Len Colby]

There are few problems with this. Foremost is Hersh himself. On one hand he is one of the greatest investigative reporters of the last few decades on the other he has at times been careless with facts. He has admitted that he is sometimes less than truthful when he speaks, he told New York magazine “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people. I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say” and “I get paid to do speeches. . . . And I’m not there to be on straight. I’m there to tell, you know, give somebody, exchange views with people.”

From the article:

It also seems clear that, more than just thinking out loud, Hersh is often reporting out loud from the lecturer’s podium. One notorious example: At Berkeley in October, Hersh described a phone call from a soldier who informed him that another platoon had massacred “30 or so” friendly Iraqi guards. Hersh advised the soldier to keep quiet about it: “You’re gonna get a bullet in the back.” The speech—and the subsequent flurry of breathless blog items—prompted the New York Observer’s Tom Scocca to theorize that Hersh “appears to be running some sort of impromptu combination of a notebook dump and an assignment meeting, challenging other reporters to pick up his loose ends and surplus tips.”

Hersh basically confirmed as much when he told Scocca that some comments he made about Guantánamo Bay abuses were an effort to get some new sources to contact him: “At some point, Army reservists were sent down to Gitmo. And they didn’t like what they saw. And that’s where I’m trying to go—I’m trying to find these guys.”

In a speech to the ACLU he implied that he had seen a videotape of Iraqi boys being sodomized by US troops but when he committed the story to print he said “An attorney involved in the case told me in July 2004 that one of the witness statements he had read described the rape of a boy by a foreign contract employee who served as an interpreter at Abu Ghraib. In the statement, which had not been made public, the lawyer told me, a prisoner stated that he was a witness to the rape, and that a woman was taking pictures.”

But he has strayed from the facts in print as well his book about JFK is a prime but hardly the only example:

In 1981, while he was working on his Kissinger book, Hersh wrote a 3,000-word, front-page retraction in the Times as penance for having mistakenly named Edward M. Korry, the former U.S. ambassador to Chile, as a collaborator in the CIA-backed 1973 coup.

his next book, 1991’s The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, relied heavily on a source whom Hersh later characterized in an interview as a xxxx.”

http://nymag.com/print/?/nymetro/news/people/features/11719/

That was not the only time he relied on an unreliable source, from Wikipedia with citations.

In March 2007 Hersh asserted in a piece in The New Yorker that the United States and Saudi governments were funding the terrorist organization Fatah al-Islam through aid to Lebanese Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.[37] Following the publishing of the story journalists in Beirut uncovered that Hersh put forth the claim without any reliable sources. Hersh had heard the unconfirmed story from Robert Fisk who had, in turn, heard the story from former British intelligence agent Alastair Crooke. Crooke had only heard it circulated as rumor and no one had fact checked the claims before Hersh ran the story[38] which prompted a variety of criticisms.[39]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh#Link_between_the_US_government_and_Fatah_al-Islam

Even the author of the article Duane posted questions Hersh’s credibility: “Finally, Sy Hersh casts suspicion on himself during the interview when he admits he did not bother to write an article on the neocon casus belli brainstorming session because it did not go forward”

So the basis for this story is a reporter who has been careless with the facts in the past especially when he speaks and who has relied on questionable sources claiming a source told him this. I wouldn’t put something like this past Bush and Cheney but the story makes little sense, with the US already so obviously over extended I doubt even they would be foolish enough to provoke a war with a far more powerful enemy.