The release of JFK classified documents has brought to the forefront the nature of Washington relationship to Cuba. The secret documents pertaining to Operation Northwoods were declassified more than ten years ago. This article was first published in 2016.

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Under a secret 1962 US Joint Chiefs of Staff entitled Operation Northwoods, civilians in the Cuban community in Miami were to be killed as part of a covert operation. The objective was to trigger a “helpful wave of indignation in US newspapers”.

The killings and “acts of terrorism” were then to be blamed on the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.

The objective of this sinister plan –which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and  President J. F. Kennedy– refused to carry out, was to drum up public support for a  war against Cuba.

“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.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and,“casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.” 

…. The documents show “the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” writes Bamford. (U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba – ABC News emphasis added. This Secret Pentagon document was declassified and can be readily consulted (See Operation Northwoods, See also National Security Archive, 30 April 2001)

It was a false flag operation: kill civilians in US cities and blame it on the communist government of Fidel Castro with a view to providing a pretext to invade Cuba on humanitarian grounds.

Do the terror attacks in Brussels and Paris have a similar logic?  Civilian death used to buttress support for the implementation of police state measures against ISIS, an illusive enemy based in Raqqa, northern Syria?

The Northwoods 1962 document was titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba”. ”

The Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals – part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose – included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States,developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),”faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.”

(http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf, emphasis added)

The underlying premise still prevails under the US sponsored war on terrorism.

While the implementation of Operation Northwoods was shelved, its fundamental (diabolical) premise of using civilian deaths (described by the Pentagon as a “massive casualty producing event”) as a justification for military intervention (“on humanitarian grounds”) or the implementation of far-reaching police state measures is still of utmost relevance.