[Marxism] More from Cockburn

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Counterpunch website has an expanded version 
of the piece I posted the other day. It gets into 
the Pearl Harbor question. Maybe Alex read Jacob Levich's post!

Cockburn:

Naturally, there are conspiracies. I think there 
is strong evidence that FDR did have knowledge 
that a Japanese naval force in the north Pacific 
was going to launch an attack on Pearl Harbor. 
Roosevelt thought it would be a relatively mild 
assault and thought it would be the final green 
light to get the US into the war.

Of course it?s very probable that the FBI or US 
military intelligence, even the CIA, had 
penetrated the Al Qaeda team planning the 9/11 
attacks; that intelligence reports ? some are 
already known ? piled up in various Washington 
bureaucracies pointing to the impending onslaught 
and even the manner in which it might be carried out.

The history of intelligence operations is profuse 
with example of successful intelligence 
collection, but also fatal slowness to act on the 
intelligence, along with eagnerness not to 
compromise the security and future usefulness of 
the informant, who has to prove his own 
credentials by even pressing for prompt action by 
the plotters. Sometime an undercover agent will 
actually propose an action, either to deflect 
efforts away from some graver threat, or to put 
the plotters in a position where they can be 
caught red-handed. In their penetrations of 
environmental groups the FBI certainly did this.

Long before the Yom Kippur war, a CIA analyst 
noted Egyptian orders from a German engineering 
firm, and deduced from the type and size of 
equipment thus ordered that Egypt was planning an 
attack across the Suez canal. He worked out the 
probable size of the Egyptian force and the 
likely time window for the attack. His superiors 
at the CIA sat on the report. When the Egyptian 
army finally attacked on October 6, 1973 the CIA 
high command ordered up the long-buried report, 
dusted it off and sent it over to the White 
House, marked ?current intelligence?. Was there a 
?conspiracy? by the CIA high command to allow 
Israel to be taken by surprise? I doubt it.

Bureaucratic inertia and caution prevailed, until 
the moment came for decisive CYA acitvity. The 
nuts make dizzying ?deductive? leaps. There is a 
one particularly vigorous coven which has 
established to its own satisfaction that the 
original NASA moon landing was faked, and never 
took place. This ?conspiracy? would have required 
the complicity of thousands of people , all of 
whom have kept their mouths shut. The proponents 
of the ?fake moon landing? plot tend to overlap with the JFK and 9/11 nuts.


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