Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Fwd: False Flag Ops - Some History

--- In v911t@yahoogroups.com, "Ahmed" <Ahmedq@...> wrote:

False Flag Ops - Some History

By Mac McKinney


>From time to time I'm going to throw out a few terms, definitions and
expositions on the political science (or political voodoo) subject
one might call Modern Machiavellianism 101, the principles (or
unprinciples) of which form the modus operandi of the Bush
Administration. Today's term is "false flag operation", a term most
readers are familiar with, but not all, so here is how Wikipedia
briefly defines it:

"False flag operations are covert operations conducted by
governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed
to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities. The
name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors;
that is, flying the flag of a country other than one's own."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag)

I guess the old Hollywood pirate movies would be a perfect example of
literally flying a false flag, when a pirate ship would hoist an
innocent-looking national ensign as it approached its intended
victim, beguiling the crew, and then haul up the Jolly Roger at the
last minute as it attacked. In real history, a classic example would
be the German Raiders of WWII, vessels which had hidden guns and
torpedo-launchers on board what were converted merchant ships flying
false flags as they approached other vessels. They would raise the
German flag at the last moment, demand the other ship's surrender
through signal flags, or some other means, to give the crew a cursory
opportunity to escape if the German captain was feeling gracious, and
then strive to sink it whether it surrendered or not.

But the type of false flag operation I am specifically referring to
today is when one entity commits a crime or stages what looks like a
crime while pretending to be another entity, so as to have all the
blame cast on the second entity. For example, the infamous Reichstag
Fire in Germany in 1933, which was originally blamed on the mentally
challenged communist, Marinus Van der Lubbe, who also confessed,
after Nazi interrogation, to the fire, is now widely accepted as
an "inside" job by the Nazis themselves to promote a murderous purge
against German communists and catapult Hitler to dictatorial power
through the Enabling Act.

It was later revealed that an underground tunnel running from Hermann
Goering's residence to the cellars of the Reichstag allowed storm
troopers, led by SA leader Karl Ernst, to steal undetected into the
building to engage in their own significant arsonist activities while
Van der Lubbe, clueless, apparently ran amok, half-naked, using his
shirt as a torch. Indications are that undercover Nazi agents had
befriended him and knew the time of his arson attempt.

The Nazis also employed a sinister false flag op against Poland in
1939, staging an attack on the Gleiwitz radio station on the German
border with Poland. One of several slightly different historical
accounts has the Nazis dressing up several German-held convicts in
Polish uniforms, shooting them and then arranging their bodies as if
they had attacked the station. A German agent then read anti-German
polemics over the air in Polish, conjuring up, across Germany's air
waves, the imagined scenario that Poles had overrun the station.
German citizens were outraged and Hitler dutifully invaded Poland the
next day, citing this and several other alleged incidents as
justification.

False flag operations have been used repeatedly throughout history,
dating back to Nero framing the Christians for the great fire of Rome
and beyond. And there are now widespread arguments that this
Machiavellian technique has become an ongoing tool in both the
American and British Establishments' clandestine bag of dirty tricks,
the Gulf of Tonkin incident with North Vietnam often cited as one
prominent example, not to mention the historical controversy
surrounding the justification for the American invasion of Mexico in
1846, as well as the controversy surrounding the sinking of the USS
Maine in Havana Harbor that led to the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Currently, there are powerful allegations that both 9/11 and the
London Terror Bombings also fall into the false flag category, as
shock and awe catastrophies designed to jerk the public's chains in
the United States and Britain and then manipulate them into the
frenzied service of war. Various draconian terror alerts
and "uncovered" terrorist plots also raise questions, particularly in
those cases where we learn that government agencies had conducted
surveillance operations on suspects for months or even run sting
operations against them. A good case in point is last year's
melodramatic announcement of a "Liquid Bomb Plot" against some 14
airliners, a case which has slowly been unraveling as various
suspects both in Britain and Pakistan have been quietly released or
had their charges downgraded for lack of serious evidence, as opposed
to mountains of dubious circumstantial "evidence". The assassination
of Harik Hariri in Lebanon may also be a classic false flag op,
tarring Syria with the murder while many, including French
Intelligence officials, now believe Israeli operatives were behind
it. I am sure viewers of this website have their own opinions on all
of this.

What is worse is that there are now heightening rumors and
predictions that a new false flag operation is underway to justify
retaliatory attacks or full-scale war against Iran and/or Syria. The
recent storming of a de facto Iranian consulate in Arbil in Kurdish
Northern Iraq is, quite possibly, a trial run in this direction, an
escalation beyond the arrest and later release of Iranian diplomats
in Baghdad last December. Five Iranians, although in Arbil at the
invitation of Kurdish authorities and recognized as diplomats by the
Iraqi government, were arrested and accused by Americans of being
Republican Guard types clandestinely supplying Iraqi insurgents with
weapons, etc. Never mind that the Iranian government is Shiite and
the insurgents, as the US military defines them, are Sunnis involved
in hostilities with the Shiites - reality is the last consideration
in splashy propaganda operations by an Imperialist power.

Let us hope that a false flag disaster with a made-in-USA Iranian
pennant hoisted over it is simply overwrought paranoia, for the very
last thing the planet needs is another bloody war. But if another
major terrorist attack does occur, let us not be shocked and awed
into stupidity, but start to analyze the event immediately with a
healthy dose of skepticism.

--- End forwarded message ---