This list is quite confused and several of the examples are not false flag operations. As Wikipedia's definition says, it has to be carried out with the purpose of pinning blame on another group and tarnishing their reputation.
> Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials.
Is the author suggesting that the US government in fact organized the anthrax letters? That's a long stretch from the evidence that the letters were sent by a government employee. It's unfortunate that the government would try to blame al Qaeda, but it's just opportunistic dishonesty since they didn't plan the attack.
> Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization."
This seems to be taken from an op-ed, which is a pretty terrible place to plan a false flag operation if you think about it. Yoo seems to be suggesting disrupting al Qaeda through disinformation, but I guess the name leads people to assume that something more evil must be going on.
> U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. ... Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.
Pretty speculative and doesn't fall under the category of "government admissions." In any case, even if true, it's questionable whether it's qualifies as a false flag operation.
> A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat
War crime, followed by cover-up. Not false flag.
> U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.
Same as previous.
> The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – admitted last the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.
I don't even understand how this could be confused with a false flag. Just a threat of using a proxy force, and who knows if it's true.
Then to further confuse things the author defines "false flag terrorism" as "a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames." I don't know why the author includes "its own people" and that the purpose must be to start a war, because neither of those appears in the Wikipedia definition and each is violated by several of his examples. But it just goes to show the sloppy thinking that went into putting together this list.
Look, many of these incidents were despicable and those responsible deserve to be called out, but the list is such a mixed bag of actual violence, planned violence, or speculation of planned violence, sometimes by the military, sometimes by police forces, sometimes by radicals. I don't see what the message is supposed to be by listing all of these together.
As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified
documents show that in the 1960′s, the American Joint
Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN
airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the
switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist
acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans
in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the
following ABC news report; the official documents; and
watch this interview with the former Washington
Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with
Peter Jennings.
2 years before, American Senator George Smathers had
suggested that the U.S. make “a false attack made on
Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually
fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to
go in and [overthrow Castro]“.
And Official State Department documents show that – only
nine months before the Joint Chiefs of Staff plan was
proposed – the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-
level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the
Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of
that country. The 3 plans were not carried out, but they
were all discussed as serious proposals
While he included the disclaimer at the end "the 3 plans were not carried out", he mixes this in with a list of actual false flag operations, and if you didn't know better when reading these items, you may believe that these were actually carried out by the US government.
Mixing real false-flag operations with things that were at some point discussed as possible options is fairly misleading at best; couple with all of the other examples you quote, I would call this post downright dishonest.
Between the paranoia about "false flag", and the line "People are slowly waking up to this whole con job by governments who want to justify war", this is veering dangerously close to "wake up sheeple!" territory.
False flag operations are the bread and butter of conspiracy theorists, and I'd like to show this list to some I know...
This may not be an ideal list, but it describes things that actually occurred. The false-flags that involved the US are the exceptions that prove the rule. You can see how far these proposals typically get in the US government.
> The false-flags that involved the US are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Are they? They are certainly rare, but so are actual terrorists attacks in the United States. If you choose at random an attack on the US outside of a combat zone within our lifetimes, you have a nontrivial probability that it was an admitted false flag operation. And that's just counting the ones they've admitted.
This isn't to say that we should fall in with the "9/11 was an inside job" people, but rather that we should be extraordinarily skeptical when there is some kind of an attack and self-interested parties come out of the woodwork with complicated one-sided proposals to ensure "never again" (even though they can ensure no such thing), which just so happen to secure to the proponents an unfathomably large quantity of tax dollars.
> If you choose at random an attack on the US outside of a combat zone within our lifetimes, you have a nontrivial probability that it was an admitted false flag operation.
Really? What are the admitted false flag operations against the US, forgetting about how old any of us are? If I look at the list from the article, the ones involving the US are either not false flag operations (my post), operations never put into action, or actual false flag operations but against a foreign country (Iran, Italy).
Obviously if you go down this road you end up in conspiracy theory land because everybody has their own version of historical events even after the parts that everyone admits happened, but here are a couple of incidents not on the list:
Second gulf of Tonkin incident famously used to justify the Vietnam war never actually happened. Government now admits it never happened, doesn't admit to intentional fabrication. (Is it a false flag operation to falsely claim there was an attack or provocation without properly verifying the truth of it before going public? Because if it is then we also get to put the Iraq WMDs on the list. For that matter, if we want to go that far back, the sinking of the USS Maine which was used to justify the Spanish-American war was also subsequently shown to not have been an actual attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Incident#Investigations).
I don't mean to make the argument that the US is often in the business of bombing itself in order to drum up business for the defense industry, but rather that the defense industry will use anything that looks like an attack to opportunistically drum up business for itself. Only after they've finished lining their pockets with our money does it come out that the original justification evaporates upon scrutiny.
The distinctive thing about hardcore conspiracy theorists is that they don't base their ideas on reality (reality as perceived by non-conspiracy theorists). They are not truly skeptics, because their skepticism is selectively applied. They are typically willing to believe anything they hear, just so long as it comes from another conspiracy theorist who shares the belief that everything the government says is a lie. So skepticism isn't the issue; the issue is staying in touch with reality -- specifically a reality that a variety of people can agree on.
Until a short time ago, the idea that some state would extensively spy into his and other countries people's communications would have been labelled as a conspiracy theory.
Now that the documents have uncovered what's going on, it's not a conspiracy theory anymore.
I understand that some people have ideas based on extremely unlikely scenario.
But nonetheless, the reality you write about is based on what's available.
How do you know what's not available?
The article is confusing, but it has a point, and it's that the governments of the countries listed (there is clear winner in numbers...) have essentially sold their morale for political purposes, regardless of it having the form of faking of terrorism, or masking war crimes. I think that some of them arrived to the point of thinking that sacrificing a few (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) of their citizen for such purposes, would be reasonable.
Conspiracy theorists really drive me nuts for so many reasons. We invaded Iraq after spending months trumpeting it in the press and the perpretators used it as a plank in elections. The worst crimes are just not secret. They do it in our faces and there are many, many people who think it's great. A secret trade deal may let companies sue for something or other in foreign countries? There are people getting elected on a platform of denying evolution and climate change!
> Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials.
Is the author suggesting that the US government in fact organized the anthrax letters? That's a long stretch from the evidence that the letters were sent by a government employee. It's unfortunate that the government would try to blame al Qaeda, but it's just opportunistic dishonesty since they didn't plan the attack.
> Former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested in 2005 that the US should go on the offensive against al-Qaeda, having “our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization."
This seems to be taken from an op-ed, which is a pretty terrible place to plan a false flag operation if you think about it. Yoo seems to be suggesting disrupting al Qaeda through disinformation, but I guess the name leads people to assume that something more evil must be going on.
> U.S. intelligence officers are reporting that some of the insurgents in Iraq are using recent-model Beretta 92 pistols, but the pistols seem to have had their serial numbers erased. ... Analysts speculate that agent provocateurs may be using the untraceable weapons even as U.S. authorities use insurgent attacks against civilians as evidence of the illegitimacy of the resistance.
Pretty speculative and doesn't fall under the category of "government admissions." In any case, even if true, it's questionable whether it's qualifies as a false flag operation.
> A Colombian army colonel has admitted that his unit murdered 57 civilians, then dressed them in uniforms and claimed they were rebels killed in combat
War crime, followed by cover-up. Not false flag.
> U.S. soldiers have admitted that if they kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants.
Same as previous.
> The highly-respected writer for the Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard says that the head of Saudi intelligence – Prince Bandar – admitted last the Saudi government controls “Chechen” terrorists.
I don't even understand how this could be confused with a false flag. Just a threat of using a proxy force, and who knows if it's true.
Then to further confuse things the author defines "false flag terrorism" as "a government attacking its own people, then blaming others in order to justify going to war against the people it blames." I don't know why the author includes "its own people" and that the purpose must be to start a war, because neither of those appears in the Wikipedia definition and each is violated by several of his examples. But it just goes to show the sloppy thinking that went into putting together this list.
Look, many of these incidents were despicable and those responsible deserve to be called out, but the list is such a mixed bag of actual violence, planned violence, or speculation of planned violence, sometimes by the military, sometimes by police forces, sometimes by radicals. I don't see what the message is supposed to be by listing all of these together.