Excerpt: In the early 1960s, America's top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

“Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, 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.

Excerpt: The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

Excerpt: The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants.

Excerpt: The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

“Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic].

Excerpt: …the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

Excerpt: …President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

“The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism.

Excerpt: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a considerable danger in the education and propaganda activities of military personnel had been uncovered.

Excerpt: Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan pretext operations at least through 1963.

Excerpt: One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

Excerpt: Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

Note: Some additional declassified documents from the National Archives on Operation Northwoods can be found here:

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Excerpt: Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission…

Excerpt: We to this day don’t know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us, said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. It was just so far from the truth. … It’s one of those loose ends that never got tied.

Excerpt: For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

“In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Excerpt: These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials said.

Excerpt: I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described, John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. … This is not spin. This is not true.

Excerpt: This paper discusses four separate dust samples collected on or shortly after 9/11/2001. Each sample was found to contain red/gray chips.

Excerpt: That thermitic reactions from the red/gray chips have indeed occurred in the DSC (rising temperature method of ignition) is confirmed by the combined observation of 1) highly energetic reactions occurring at approximately 430 °C, 2) iron-rich sphere formation so that the product must have been sufficiently hot to be molten (over 1400 °C for iron and iron oxide), 3) spheres, spheroids and nonspheroidal residues in which the iron content exceeds the oxygen content. Significant elemental iron is now present as expected from the thermitic reduction-oxidation reaction of aluminum and iron oxide.

Excerpt: Ordinary thermite ignites at a much higher temperature (about 900 °C or above) and gives a significantly broader trace than super-thermite [21].

Excerpts: A report on an April 2001 conference discloses who was known to be working on such explosives at that time:

The 221st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society held during April 2001 in San Diego featured a symposium on Defense Applications of Nanomaterials. One of the 4 sessions was titled nanoenergetics… This session provided a good representation of the breadth of work ongoing in this field, which is roughly 10 years old.… At this point in time, all of the military services and some DOE and academic laboratories have active R&D programs aimed at exploiting the unique properties of nanomaterials that have potential to be used in energetic formulations for advanced explosives… nanoenergetics hold promise as useful ingredients for the thermobaric (TBX) and TBX-like weapons, particularly due to their high degree of tailorability with regards to energy release and impulse management [20].

The sol-gel process is very amenable to dip-, spin-, and spray-coating technologies to coat surfaces. We have utilized this property to dipcoat various substrates to make sol-gel Fe2O3/Al/Viton coatings. The energetic coating dries to give a nice adherent film.

Excerpt: The carbon content of the red material indicates that an organic substance is present. This would be expected for super-thermite formulations in order to produce high gas pressures upon ignition and thus make them explosive. The nature of the organic material in these chips merits further exploration. We note that it is likely also an energetic material, in that the total energy release sometimes observed in DSC tests exceeds the theoretical maximum energy of the classic thermite reaction.

Excerpt: …we conclude that the red layer of the red/gray chips we have discovered in the WTC dust is active, unreacted thermitic material, incorporating nanotechnology, and is a highly energetic pyrotechnic or explosive material.

Excerpt: NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the [FBI] bureau's informants had a close relationship with two of the [9-11] hijackers: he was their roommate.

Excerpt: The two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were hardly unknown to the intelligence community. The CIA was first alerted to them in January 2000, when the two Saudi nationals showed up at a Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Excerpt: Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell NEWSWEEK, a tested undercover asset who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas.

Excerpt: Newly declassified documents have provided more evidence the Johnson administration faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to escalate the Vietnam War. The alleged 1964 attack on U.S. warships by North Vietnamese was used as a pretext to increase bombing and troop deployments in Vietnam. But a report from the National Security Agency concludes no attack happened that night.