The Wolf Who Cried Wolf – A Brief History of False Flag Operations

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

As George Bush once infamously said: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me twice…the fooled man can’t get fooled again.”

The point he was trying to make—albeit unsuccessfully—was that one should not believe a known and documented liar.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the biggest liar of them all?

One of my greatest ambitions is to count the number of lies the United States government has told the American people. From little baby fibs like Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal to giant whoppers like the NSA domestic spying program, the government’s predilection for deception is pathological, consistent, and shameless.

One of the more heinous kinds of government deceptions is called a “false flag”. The semi-reliable source known as Wikipedia defines false flags as “covert military or paramilitary operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities, groups or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them”.

In other words: governments kill people, blame the attack on somebody else, and use it as a pretext for war. False flag operations have utilized an array of lethal tactics—including (but not limited to) blowing up ships, burning down entire cities, inciting riots, and old-fashioned covert assassinations—a veritable horn of plenty of government-sponsored terrorism!

In such operations, governments often kill their own citizens, in a kind of South Park version of real-politic: “We have to kill them or else they’ll die”. No one should be particularly shocked by this kind of action; after all, according to a University of Hawaii study by R.J. Rummel, governments have killed 262 million people in the twentieth century alone, including vast droves of their own citizens –and that’s not counting the deaths of soldiers during wartime. Democide, or murder by government, is responsible for so much death, that according to Rummel “if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times.”

So let’s first take a look at a modern version of this kind of democidal false flag operation; thankfully, it’s one that never came to fruition.

Operation Northwoods

The Cold War was a proxy war where the US and the Soviet Union fought for global hegemony using satellite countries like Hollywood actors use stunt doubles. In 1962, Cuba—a Communist nation only 90 miles from the coast of Florida—became the focus of the conflict.

The U.S. wanted war, and they would try just about anything to achieve it.

Operation Northwoods was the plot by the U.S. Department of Defense to instigate such a war. The Joint Chiefs of Staff authored the documents related to the operation. They were charged by the Chief of Operations to “indicate pretexts that would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” The goal was to blame Fidel Castro and communist Cuba for the attacks, and “stir up national indignation”.

Here are some of the excerpts for the various proposals:

*“A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.”

*“A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms: a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba…”

*“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington.”

*“The terror campaign could be pointed at refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans in route to Florida (real or simulated)…”

*“Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions…”

*“Create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner in route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday.”

Fortunately, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara rejected the various proposals and the operation never took place.

However, there are other plenty of other False Flag Operations that were executed. We’ll take a look at those next.