1. direct misinformation/disinformation/propaganda e.g
- Weapons of Mass Destruction 2003 (1,2):
- Gulf of Tonkin incident 1964 (1,2): On August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson went on national television and told the nation that North Vietnam had attacked U.S. ships. In fact, North Vietnam had not attacked the USS Maddox, as the Pentagon claimed, and the “unequivocal proof” of an “unprovoked” second attack against the U.S. warship was a ruse"(1).
- Reichstag Fire 1933 (1) : On 27 February 1933 an arson attack occurred on the Reichstag building in Berlin. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains an ongoing topic of debate and research but Marinus van der Lubbe, a young Dutch council communist was blamed for the event and executed. The Nazis accused the international Communists for the act. Some historians suggest that the Communist Party's counter-accusation was correct: that the arson was planned and ordered by the Nazis, then dominant in the government themselves, as a false flag operation. Whether the fire was indeed set by Van der Lubbe, the Nazis used the fire to solidify their power and eliminate the communists as political rivals.
- Lavon Affair 1954 (1): Failed covert operation by Israel in 1954. Aim to plant bombs in Egyptian, American and British-owned civilian targets and then blame the attacks on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Communists, "unspecified malcontents" or "local nationalists" with the aim of creating a climate of sufficient violence and instability to induce the British government to retain its occupying troops in Egypt's Suez Canal zone. Admitted to by Israel in 2005.
- Bagdad Bombings 1950-51 (1)
(Richards Sanders 2014, Kurt Nimmo 2012)
The aims of this blog is to document examples of false flag operations and other actions used by governments to create misinformation or disinformation in the pursuit of national interests, including to justify going to war or justify national foreign policy
What are false flag operations?
False flag operations are described by Geraint Hughes (Kings College London) as those acts carried out by "military or security force personnel, which are then blamed on terrorists." (p. 105).
"False flag (or black flag) describes 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" (Wiki).
"Operations carried out during peace-time by civilian organizations, as well as covert government agencies, may by extension be called false flag operations if they seek to hide the real organization behind an operation" (Wiki).
References
Geraint Hughes, ‘The Military’s Role in Counterterrorism: Examples and Implications for Liberal Democracies’, Strategic Studies Institute
U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA, May 2011
Geraint Hughes - biography (1)
Jeffrey St. Clair, ‘A Confidence Game on Iraq: War Pimps’, 13 August 2013
Peter Taylor, 'The spies who fooled the world', BBC, 18 March 2013
Richard Sanders, ‘How to Start a War: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents’, Global Research, 19 August 2014
Kurt Nimmo, 'A brief history of false flag attacks:or why governments love state sponsored terror'
Infowars.com, 14 August 2012
