Loose Change
Back in August, 2008 I came across an article on the Information Liberation website, regarding a statement made by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh about an idea put forward by Vice President Dick Cheney to dress U.S. Navy Seals as Iranians and shoot at them to provoke war with Iran. The following is a video-clip of the interview.
The article rang a bell because I’d recently reread this report from Iraq about two British undercover SAS soldiers disguised as Arabs, driving an explosive-laden booby-trapped car heading for the centre of Basra, who opened fire when stopped by Iraqi police. The men were detained by the police and refused to say what their mission was. British forces then used up to 10 tanks, supported by helicopters, to smash through the walls of the jail and free the servicemen. The same provocation strategy was also put forward by Limen Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a proposal dated 13th March 1962 to Secretary of Defense, Robert Macnamara titled Operation Northwoods. The document proposed staging a variety of terrorist attacks in and around Guantanamo Bay to provide a justification for a military invasion of Cuba. The unclassified document is shown in the following film, Loose Change, a revealing documentary that examines in detail the Reichstag fire-style provocation strategy that topped them all, the destruction of the World Trade Towers and other incidents of that day.
Those watching the film should also read this analysis by Michael B.Green. Although critical of the film and its makers, Mr Green raises some valid points and observations, and astutely describes how, “the intelligence agencies that do the crimes try to control the counter-community's response by infiltrating moles that infect it with large falsehoods and impossible-to-prove technical questions (micro-analysis). The large falsehoods are designed to prove the community wrong and nuts if the need arises. The microanalysis into pointless or unanswerable questions, or into just plain dumb ones, is to divert its energies from using the clear hard facts to tell the story simply and clearly.” I am of the opinion that Loose Change and documentaries like it revealing suppressed information to the public makes them ripe targets for discrediting manoeuvres by intelligence agencies. This fact should move us to view information of the kind communicated through films like Loose Change with an inquiring mind to be able to pick out disinformation and misinformation if and when it occurs. As the makers of Loose Change themselves say, ‘Ask questions, demand answers.”
