False flag operations are covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.
The ship was strafed relentlessly for hours in an apparent attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and draw the Americans into the Six Day War, but amazingly the crew managed to keep it afloat.
In 2007 newly released NSA intercepts confirmed that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, not an Egyptian ship as their cover story has maintained.
In the fall of 1999, a wave of bloody apartment bombings swept through Russian cities, killing 293 people and causing widespread panic.
Although blamed on the Chechen terrorists that the Russians were fighting in the Second Chechen War, FSB agents were caught planting the exact same type of bombs as in the other blasts later that month.
The government claimed that the bomb was part of a security exercise and Vladimir Putin came to power as the next Russian President on the back of the terror wave later that year.
In 2001, attacks in New York and Washington are blamed on Al Qaeda as a pretext for invading Afghanistan.
In the months leading up to the event, American negotiators had warned Afghanistan's Taliban that they were interested in securing right of way for proposed pipeline projects, and the US would achieve this with either a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs.
The Bush administration's first major national security directive, NSPD-9, a full-scale battle plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, including command and control, air and ground forces, and logistics, was drafted and sitting on the President's desk to be signed off on September 4, 2001, seven days beforethe 9/11 attacks.
The invasion proceeded as planned in October.
These are but a few of the hundreds of such incidents that have been staged over the centuries to blame political enemies for attacks that they did not commit.
The tactic remains in common use today, and will continue to be employed as long as populations still blindly believe whatever their governments tell them about the origins of spectacular terror incidents.
In naval warfare, a "false flag" refers to an attack where a vessel flies a flag other than their true battle flag before engaging their enemy.
It is a trick, designed to deceive the enemy about the true nature and origin of an attack.
In the democratic era, where governments require at least a plausible pretext before sending their nation to war, it has been adapted as a psychological warfare tactic to deceive a government's own population into believing that an enemy nation has attacked them.
In the 1780s, Swedish King Gustav III was looking for a way to unite an increasingly divided nation and raise his own falling political fortunes.
Deciding that a war with Russia would be a sufficient distraction but lacking the political authority to send the nation to war unilaterally, he arranged for the head tailor of the Swedish Opera House to sew some Russian military uniforms.
Swedish troops were then dressed in the uniforms and sent to attack Sweden's own Finnish border post along the Russian border. The citizens in Stockholm, believing it to be a genuine Russian attack, were suitably outraged, and the Swedish-Russian War of 1788-1790 began.
In 1931 the Japan was looking for a pretext to invade Manchuria. On September 18th of that year, a Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army detonated a small amount of TNT along a Japanese-owned railway in the Manchurian city of Mukden.
The act was blamed on Chinese dissidents and used to justify the occupation of Manchuria just six months later. When the deception was later exposed, Japan was diplomatically shunned and forced to withdraw from the League of Nations.
In 1939 Heinrich Himmler masterminded a plan to convince the public that Germany was the victim of Polish aggression in order to justify the invasion of Poland.
It culminated in an attack on Sender Gleiwitz, a German radio station near the Polish border, by Polish prisoners who were dressed up in Polish military uniforms, shot dead, and left at the station.
The Germans then broadcast an anti-German message in Polish from the station, pretended that it had come from a Polish military unit that had attacked Sender Gleiwitz, and presented the dead bodies as evidence of the attack. Hitler invaded Poland immediately thereafter, starting World War II.
In 1954 the Israelis hired a number of Egyptian Jews to plant bombs in American and British cinemas, libraries, and other civilian targets to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood or other malcontents.
The plan, known as the Lavon Affair, was part of an effort to convince the British to retain their military presence in the occupied Suez Canal zone. Several bombings took place, but the British were ultimately forced out after Nasser nationalized the canal in 1956.
In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff authored a document called Operation Northwoods calling for the US government to stage a series of fake attacks, including the shooting down of military or civilian US aircraft, the destruction of a US ship, sniper attacks in Washington, and other atrocities, to blame on the Cubans as an excuse for launching an invasion.
President Kennedy refused to sign off on the plan and was killed in Dallas the next year.
In August 1964 the USS Maddox, a US destroyer on patrol in the Gulf of Tonkin, believed it had come under attack from North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats, engaging in evasive action and returning fire.
The incident led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorizing President Johnson to begin open warfare in Vietnam. It was later admitted that no attack had occurred, and in 2005 it was revealed that the NSA had manipulated their information to make it look like an attack had taken place.
In June 1967 the Israelis attacked the USS Liberty (below video), a US Navy technical research ship, off the coast of Egypt:
The ship was strafed relentlessly for hours in an apparent attempt to blame the attack on Egypt and draw the Americans into the Six Day War, but amazingly the crew managed to keep it afloat.
In 2007 newly released NSA intercepts confirmed that the Israelis knew they were attacking an American ship, not an Egyptian ship as their cover story has maintained.
In the fall of 1999, a wave of bloody apartment bombings swept through Russian cities, killing 293 people and causing widespread panic.
Although blamed on the Chechen terrorists that the Russians were fighting in the Second Chechen War, FSB agents were caught planting the exact same type of bombs as in the other blasts later that month.
The government claimed that the bomb was part of a security exercise and Vladimir Putin came to power as the next Russian President on the back of the terror wave later that year.
In 2001, attacks in New York and Washington are blamed on Al Qaeda as a pretext for invading Afghanistan.
In the months leading up to the event, American negotiators had warned Afghanistan's Taliban that they were interested in securing right of way for proposed pipeline projects, and the US would achieve this with either a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs.
The Bush administration's first major national security directive, NSPD-9, a full-scale battle plan for the invasion of Afghanistan, including command and control, air and ground forces, and logistics, was drafted and sitting on the President's desk to be signed off on September 4, 2001, seven days beforethe 9/11 attacks.
The invasion proceeded as planned in October.
These are but a few of the hundreds of such incidents that have been staged over the centuries to blame political enemies for attacks that they did not commit.
The tactic remains in common use today, and will continue to be employed as long as populations still blindly believe whatever their governments tell them about the origins of spectacular terror incidents.
It was considered to be a legitimate ploy by the Greeks and Romans, where a military force would pretend to be friendly to get close to an enemy before dropping the pretense and raising its banners to reveal its own affiliation just before launching an attack.
In the sea battles of the eighteenth century among Spain, France and Britain hoisting an enemy flag instead of one's own to confuse the opponent was considered to be a legitimate ruse de guerre, but it was only "honorable" if one reverted to one's own flag before engaging in combat.
Today's false flag operations are generally carried out by intelligence agencies and non-government actors including terrorist groups, but they are only considered successful if the true attribution of an action remains secret.
There is nothing honorable about them as their intention is to blame an innocent party for something that it did not do.
There has been a lot of such activity lately and it was interesting to learn by way of a leak that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has developed a capability to mimic the internet fingerprints of other foreign intelligence services.
That means that when the media is trumpeting news reports that the Russians or Chinese hacked into U.S. government websites or the sites of major corporations, it could actually have been the CIA carrying out the intrusion and making it look like it originated in Moscow or Beijing.
Given that capability, there has been considerable speculation in the alternative media that it was actually the CIA that interfered in the 2016 national elections in the United States.
False flags can be involved in other sorts of activity as well...
The past year's two major alleged chemical attacks carried out against Syrian civilians that resulted in President Donald Trump and associates launching 160 cruise missiles are pretty clearly false flag operations carried out by the rebels and terrorist groups that controlled the affected areas at the time.
The most recent reported attack on April 7th might not have occurred at all according to doctors and other witnesses who were actually in Douma.
Because the rebels succeeded in convincing much of the world that the Syrian government had carried out the attacks, one might consider their false flag efforts to have been extremely successful.
The remedy against false flag operations such as the recent one in Syria is, of course, to avoid taking the bait and instead waiting until a thorough and objective inspection of the evidence has taken place.
The United States, Britain and France did not do that, preferring instead to respond to hysterical press reports by "doing something."
If The United Nations investigation of the alleged attack turns up nothing, a distinct possibility, it is unlikely that they will apologize for having committed a war crime.
The other major false flag that has recently surfaced is the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury England on March 4th. Russia had no credible motive to carry out the attack and had, in fact, good reasons not to do so...
The allegations made by British Prime Minister Theresa May about the claimed nerve agent being "very likely" Russian in origin have been debunked, in part through examination by the UK's own chemical weapons lab.
May, under attack even within her own party, needed a good story and a powerful enemy to solidify her own hold on power so false flagging something to Russia probably appeared to be just the ticket as Moscow would hardly be able to deny the "facts" being invented in London.
Unfortunately, May proved wrong and the debate ignited over her actions, which included the expulsion of twenty-three Russian diplomats, has done her severe damage.
Few now believe that Russia actually carried out the poisoning and there is a growing body of opinion suggesting that it was actually a false flag executed by the British government or even by the CIA.
The lesson that should be learned from Syria and Skripal is that if "an incident" looks like it has no obvious motive behind it, there is a high probability that it is a false flag...
A bit of caution in assigning blame is appropriate given that the alternative would be a precipitate and likely disproportionate response that could easily escalate into a shooting war.
