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UK National Archives Divulge Secrets
Sunil Sood writes "Yes, its that time of year again - no, not the New Year but when the UK National Archives release a whole lot of previously "classified" information (many govt papers in the UK, with only a few exceptions, are classified secret for a 'standard' 30 years) As normal, you have the usual combination of the amusing: The design of a coin to mark the UK joining the EEC was changed, after Prince Philip said he did not like the 'little p', and the more serious: it was believed the USA had plans for US airborne troops to seize the oil installations in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1973."
And it makes refrence that British Intel thought it would be likely that the US would invade, not that they were planning a direct attack. Its kind of a misleading headline.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
ours is 50 years, though. there was a /. post a few months back, regarding the unclassification of the documents from roswell on the date of the "alien landing". if i remember correctly, it reported the weather, and had nothing about little green men in a saucer...
As usual, a grab bag of interesting things to be gleaned from declassified documents, although perhaps more interesting for their social context than for their political content, like the stuff with Massey-Ferguson and the ministerial scandal where the first thought was "Is this a security risk" rather than "Lets spin this to make it look good." We notice that resignations occurred. these days, the guilty parties would be given a slapped wrist and told to be more careful next time.
How times change.
"How fine you look when dressed in rage."
How on earth did your post get modded informative? Sadly the Freedom of Information Act does nothing or else we would be able to see the fifty year old military documents that the government likes to hide so much.
biased-bbc.
The US military has plans for all sorts of things, to be more exact the War Colleges work out detailed plans for all sorts of things.
I read in Crusade that the Army War College had a detailed set of plans for the US response to a summer invasion of Kuwait by Iraq with a long pause on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti-Saudi frontier. The plans were in 2 or 3 filing cabinets in a Federal warehouse down in Florida in case Central Command ever needed them.
Now this Nixon Administration plan was a little closer to being put into motion, but I think the coverage by the Media and Talking Heads isn't looking at the big picture.
The Soviet Bloc was on the rise, the Soviets and Americans came really close to throwing troops into the Middle East and going nuclear, then the Oil Embargo kicked in, since no one knew how far the Embargo would spread and since a military operation takes a while to organize, I think the Nixon Administration had to look at "alteratives" like an invasion.
Wait, I thought Bush was going into Iraq to avenge his father's war? Who's this Nixon guy, and how do we prove his real name is Nixon Bush?
You mean the middle east has been a political hot spot since before any of us were born? I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
No.
The fact that this guy willfully taped all of this stuff is even more amazing than the content.
You are aware, of course, that influential members of the current administration have called for the US to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars" in order to maintain American military dominance.
Interestingly, this 'call to arms' was made well before September 11 2001.
US backs long-planned attack on Syria
We do. It's called the Freedom of Information Act
I dunno, the Brits seem to just dump out a document box after 30 years without much regard for what's in it.
The U.S. gives reporters who beg for a document pages and pages of blacked-out lines, with readable sentences here or there.
I think the US pays lip service to freedom of information, but it looks like our friends across the pond are more true to the concept.
I checked his journal, some posts, his homepage. I didn't see much to complain about, in spite of his claim to be "right wing", or his defensive denial of antisemitism. If he wants Israel to dump Sharon, and to find a better Palestinian policy than mass punishment for their terrorist army, I agree. If he's sensible enough to see that Israel is severely limited with the hypocritical, murderous tyrant Arafat at the top of the Palestinian meatgrinder, I'm with him. When people want the bravely out-of-range rightwing demogogues in charge of the Israeli and American military to get out of the way of their peoples' desire for peace, I'm with them. When they feel the same way about Arab left-right-whatever-they-call-it-today tyrants warring to mislead away from their own tyrannies, I'm with them. The truth about these monsters is bad enough without reversing history, like the relentless Arab military attacks on Israel, so I have to comment. But the more important truth is that we're all being set against one another in the name of geopolitics that is just a way for rich old men to make a buck at our expense, at the risk of the civilization that decent people have miraculously scrabbled together.
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make install -not war
My favorite theory is that someone just said "Catching terrorists is too hard, be we have to be seen to do something - lets get Saddam".
By enacting regime change in Iraq, and trying to get something vaguely democratic and, theoretically, West-friendly, in that country, Iraq becomes a friendly source of oil. This means there's a limit to what its neighbours can do if they choose to withhold oil, as they did twice during the seventies. It also puts Iraq's neighbours on the defensive, because they know what happened to Iraq could, if the US feels mean enough, happen to them too.
Unfortunately too many critics of the war simplified the argument to "The US is just after Iraq's oil", which as you say, makes little sense.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Sometimes, life is stranger than art, I suppose.
I think you fail to grasp the simple fact that Nuclear Weapons have changed this equation. You might one day see another country assume the World leadership role that we currently have (I'd wish them all the luck in the world -- I'm sick of my country having to bail out the rest of the world all the time), but you will never see the US "fall". Before that would happen we'd drag the rest of you down with us.
Same goes for Russia. Sure they aren't a superpower and they won't be marching to the Bay of Biscay anytime soon. But do you see anybody (China comes to mind) being stupid enough to attack them knowing that they have thousands of nukes sitting in silos waiting to be launched?
And BTW: My country isn't an "empire".
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Proof of what?
All he's saying is that fifty year old military documents are being witheld by the government -- which is true. In fact, many documents are being held back. The FOIA has been weakened greatly since Bush took office, simply by the adminstration's outright refusal to release documents.
The only proof we have is that the government has documents which they are unwilling to release. The fact that we can't prove anything is exactly the point because we don't have the information to do so.
There's no conspiracy theory, because there's no information that a conspiracy exists, other than the suspicious reticence of the government. If you can hide all proof that your conspiracy exists, does to not exist anymore?
You're right to be skeptical of any conspiracy theory claims. But you're foolish to believe that no conspiracy exists because the only information that could prove or disprove it is in the guarded posession of those who would be involved in the conspiracy.
The FOIA is one of the greatest Acts in American history, IMHO. Information is the ultimate power, and that power should be held by the people. When the government witholds that power, you should be afraid.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm glad someone recognizes that there's no such thing as a "liberal media". Some of these dopes are just so INSISTANT. If you try to explain things to them, they don't listen. It drives me nuts.
The media is too dumb/lazy to be liberal. They'd much rather just listen to whatever the Bush administration has to say and take at face value.
Yeah, maybe some kind of "plausible deniability" of any charge of blocking the Pentagon's warlust. Especially when it was subsequently revealed that the CIA had sent former ambassador Wilson to Niger, where he easily demonstrated the crudeness of the forgery, including long-gone official signatures and near-total ignorance of other agencies in the chain of "authority" there of that letter.
I want to see some of the Britons who are righteously stepping up to their obligations to rein in their berzerk lying PM, Blair, exorcise their own intelligence fabricators. The UK has a central role in creating the Iraqmire, and its citizens have the power, and the responsibility to eliminate the corrupt agents who have abetted the nightmare we're prosecuting there. Or they can follow the convenient rolemodels of the French, whose introductory century of butchery in Vietnam set the stage for the American savagery and defeat there, offering little but totalitarian slavery to the abandoned Vietnamese people. It's not too late to banish the criminals from the chain of command, and protect the hope of autonomy and self determination in Iraq from craven war profiteers on all sides.
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make install -not war
Blockades have been considered acts of war since time immortal. During the Civil War Lincoln was reluctant to actually declare a blockade against the South because that would have implied that the South was actually a nation-state. We called the blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis a "Quarantine" and sought a FAS unanimous vote to made it "legal" (at least in the eyes of the world if not the letter of the law).
And therefore Cuba would have been justified to launch the nukes based in Cuba because the US conducted an act of war? (The blocade)
The minute an act of war is committed by one nation upon another nation that nation is justified in taking whatever means are necessary to defend itself. Even the UN charter says that.
Please produce the section in the UN charter that defines a blockade of a waterway that a country does not control as an act of war.
(Geez, you people are the kings of rationalization...)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Nuke the Russian tank divisions with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles while they're still in the process of occupying Finland. Provide military assistance to Sweden and make a stand in Norway and in the northernmost Sweden (for Kiruna and the other mines).
This is why I am amazed why our last two governments have been talking the public to accept that we must NATO for our safety's sake.
The owls are not what they seem
These are the related documents released this week that I've found so far, though I'm still digging:
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office have reportedly held back all documents relating to the day of the coup, however. I assume they are waiting until Kissinger and other US parties who supported and assisted the coup die of old age, before these are released.
The overthrow of President Allende in Chile presented the Foreign Office with a refugee problem. "The usual fellow-travelling civil rights organisations will do their best to confuse the distinction [between] respected democratic socialists and undesirables further to the left," a department minute noted. "In view of the growth of terrorism in this country we really cannot knowingly risk admitting terrorists as refugees."
So calling inconvenient refugees "terrorists" is nothing new, e.g. abandoning thousands on the Chilean left to be murdered by the Pinochet regime, and slamming your doors to legitimate asylum seekers fleeing from "valued trading partners".
The US gave Japan an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from China or we'll stop selling you oil. Realpolitik considerations about American business in China aside, pressuring Japan to end their war of conquest and exploit in China was the right thing to do. Japan could have forsworn militarism and ensured their oil supply from America; instead, they chose to expand the war by attacking the US. This was a decision that led to the eventually ruin of Japan. It was a decision made by Japan, not America. It's easy to say "America should have known they'd make that decision" but it apparently wasn't so obvious at the time.
I'm not generally an apologist for US foreign policy. But in the specific instance you mention, I feel obliged to set the record straight. Whatever the root causes of WWII, America was not trying to goad Japan into war. Japan chose to attack America as part of an expansionist campaign to secure the resources of the East Asia and the Pacific; the terrible consequences of that decision must be laid first and foremost on Japan.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Try googling for Opereration Northwood, one that did get declassified. Basically, your gov. wanted to shoot down civilian planes and shipping to justify a pre-emtive invasion of Cuba. It went all the way up to Kennedy, who was the only one that thought it morally reprehensible, and stopped it.
Quote from the original document:
The sad thing is, this all sounds strangely familiar...
And remember, this is one of the few that did get declassified. God knows what else your country has done. Despite the image presented by Hollywood, the USA is one of the most morally reprehensible countries on the planet. Your self-denial and ignorance of the problem makes it even worse.
We've had some bad moments, but 'most morally reprehensible' is incredibly ignorant. The ONE example you could come up with actually shows how incredibly good our system of government is (as is the oil example cited in the article above). Through a series of checks and balances these crazy ideas never saw the light of day. Just because a few people in goverment planned it, the proof is in action and both of these cases resulted in neither.
I can come up with thousands of instances of my government doing truly good works across the globe. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Have we had some really bad moments? You bet.. hell we've had some true monsters run this country for brief periods (Lyndon Johnson most recently). Yet, overall, our record is actually pretty damn good. We do look out for our own best interests most of the time (as does your country, whichever that is), but after all that is the job of government.
It's to bad that hating my country is so fashionable right now. We're actually a pretty good bunch. But people always need an enemy, and I guess we'll be it for awhile.
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