Comments on: Pretexts Are Easy

By: Mike Brown

Mike Brown — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:42:25 +0000

I didn't see anything in the documents I read that indicated the plan for a military state. And such a plan seems very out of character for the United States. (I don't think that we ever maintained a military state, or long term control, in any country we invaded during the 20th century.) However, those documents also seem very out of character for the United States, so who knows. That's hopefully part of the reason the plans never saw the light of day. But it is disturbing there were folks even asked to prepare such a proposal. An idea like that should have been able to have been ruled out out of hand.

By: Mike Brown

Mike Brown — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:34:33 +0000

But I should add that the plans did seem to favor staged casualties as opposed to actual casualties. And they were just brianstorm ideas.

However, the idea of staging such things in order to frame a country and deceive the American and world pubic is outrageous, even if the framed country, Cuba, represented a terrible evil. It seems that certain people ran amok with the idea of choosing the lesser of two evils, or fighting one evil with another. And even though I don’t doubt it was all well intentioned, I can’t see any justification for this. You start pulling crap like this, betraying the trust of the American public, you may win a battle, but you’re going to lose the war. There will be nothing left worth preserving.

By: Peter Williams

Peter Williams — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:27:33 +0000

I think the most important thing for any government to have is the consent of the governed. I do not care how “correct”, “good”, “kind”, “democratic” or any other adjective a government is, if it does not have the consent of the people being governed it is illegitimate. And it seems quite unlikely that any group of people would consent to be governed by an outside power which has just taken over their country., Which means that an occupying country just the military dictator of the occupied country. There are better and worse military dictatorships, but the better ones are still not good. The best that can be said of a military dictatorship is that it maintained order and did not last very long.

By: Mike Brown

Mike Brown — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 19:23:28 +0000

I located the actual report, and I must say, its contents are disturbing. They were prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the “Chief of Operations, Cuba Project,” whatever that was. It does make one wonder what the hell was going on.

By: Mike Brown

Mike Brown — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:03:57 +0000

If this story about these recommendations is actually true, it’s certainly good they were never acted upon. Fortunately, the US government has been designed to have de-centralized authority — unlike Communist regimes. The premise of the Founders was that men will always be tempted toward corruption, and therefore, to protect the rights of the people, it’s necessary to have checks and balances. This is one of our nation’s greatest strengths.

> Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not
> democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.
>
> “That’s what we’re supposed to be freeing them from,” Bamford says. “The
> only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians
> were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny,
> basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing.”

This, for me, is damaging to this author’s credibility. His story might be true, but he sounds here like he has an axe to grind, implying a moral equivalence between Castro’s government and the US government.