Our Ignorance, Their Want

by Maureen Farrell

"Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here," exclaimed the ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dreaded.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. . . ." -- Charles Dickens

* * *

By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will," Body of Secrets author James Bamford told ABC News "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."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html

Sound familiar? Just wait.

Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state."

Our Ignorance, Their Want

by Maureen Farrell

"Oh, man, look here. Look, look, down here," exclaimed the ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meager, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dreaded.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit, are they yours?' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom. . . ." -- Charles Dickens

* * *

By now, many are familiar with Operation Northwoods, the U.S. plan to wage terrorist attacks against American citizens and blame Fidel Castro as a pretext for war. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document read. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation," it continued. Developed through the far-right stewardship of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer, in an early '60s atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia, Operation Northwoods was approved by all Joint Chiefs of Staff, but nixed by the civilian leadership. "The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will," Body of Secrets author James Bamford told ABC News "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."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/jointchiefs_010501.html

Sound familiar? Just wait.

Though President Kennedy assured Lemnitzer that America would never overtly attack Cuba, military ideologues met one month after submitting Northwoods and wrote a memo to Robert McNamara claiming that the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who saw "no prospect" of Castro being overthrown through "internal uprising or external political, economic or psychological pressures," felt that "military interventions [would] be required to overthrow the present Communist regime." The memo indicated that the Joint Chiefs believed that this could be "accomplished rapidly enough to minimize communist opportunity for solicitation of U.N. action" and that after U.S. forces assured "rapid essential control of Cuba, continued police action would be required." In other words, they would bypass the U.N. and America's military would keep Cuba's peace. "[W]hat Lemnitzer was suggesting," Bamford wrote, "was not freeing the Cuban people, who were largely in support of Castro, but imprisoning them in a U.S.-controlled police state."