Is Operation Northwoods a Good Comp for 9-11?

I'm surprised I hadn't thought of this part earlier. Loose Change V2 makes a big deal out of Operation Northwoods from 0:51 to 2:30; indeed it leads off the film. Here's what Dylan Avery tells us about Operation Northwoods: (Transcript cribbed from this excellent debunking)

March 13th, 1962 Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presents a proposal to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, named Operation Northwoods.

The document proposed staging terrorist attacks in and around Guantanamo Bay,
To provide a pretext for military intervention in Cuba.

The plans included:
Starting rumors about Cuba using clandestine radio.
Landing friendly Cubans inside the base to stage attacks.
Starting riots at the main gate.
Blowing up ammunition inside the base, starting fires.
Sabotaging aircrafts and ships on the base.
Bombing the base with mortar shells.
Sinking a ship outside the entrance, staging funerals for mock victims.
Staging a terror campaign in Miami, Florida and Washington, DC.

And finally, destroying a drone aircraft, over Cuban waters. The passengers, federal agents in reality, would allegedly be college students on vacation. A plane at Eglin Air Force Base would be painted and numbered as a duplicate of a registered civil aircraft belonging to a CIA front in Miami. The duplicate would be substituted for the real plane and loaded with the passengers. The real plane would be converted into a drone. The two planes would randezvous south of Florida. The passenger laden plane would land at Eglin Air Force Base to evacuate its passengers and return to its original status. The drone would pick up the scheduled flight plan and, over Cuban waters, transmit a "mayday signal" before being blown up by remote control.

Okay, got that? Now try to overlay that on the conspiracy theory proposed in Loose Change. What are the elements of comparability?

1. Use of drone aircraft (apparently, see below)
2. The passengers are offloaded from the flight before it is sent to its final destination (again, apparently).
3. The purpose of the conspiracy was to provide a casus belli, to provide a justification for war.

What are the elements of incomparability?

1. Operation Northwoods did not involve killing thousands of Americans; indeed it involved killing nobody.
2. Operation Northwoods did not involve destroying American buildings worth billions of dollars.
3. Operation Northwoods is clearly a far milder plan, to address what was apparently a far graver danger (see 1 and 2 above). Yet despite this, it was not put into effect. Of course the CT crowd would have an answer for that: This just shows how evil Bush is!

Note: I say apparently above with regard to drone aircraft, because the film does not explicitly lay out the conspiracy theory. Do they really believe drones hit the World Trade Center? They don't say so in so many words; indeed the word drone only appears in this section. We also don't know what they think happened to the airplane used for Flight 93. They do claim at one point (1:05:00) that it was seen at Chicago's O'Hare Airport in 2003, but that's just nutty--you don't think United Airlines mechanics take detailed notes of every plane they service?

This is one of the other problems. Most people when they think about this conspiracy theory for a second say "But don't too many people know?" The response that Avery and company give on the road is that no, many people don't have to know. But if you buy this nutty theory about the plane used for Flight 93 still being in service, with the same identification number, then a whole lot of people at United Airlines would have to be aware of it, right?