‘NEWS & VIEWS

Mohammad Jamil

HISTORY is rife with false flag events, whether they are officially recognized or not, but by identifying the signs and understanding the objectives of the perpetrators, one can reach the truth. A false flag event takes its name from the ancient days of piracy. Before taking over a ship, pirates used to sail the flag of a nation that was known to be friendly to their targeted ship. When they got close enough, the pirates raised their flag showing their true identity and commandeer the unsuspecting ship taking all its valuables and killing its crew. Today’s false flag operations are much more subversive and don’t give their victims the chance of knowing they’ve been duped. However, declassified documents revealed that the US governments were involved in many false flag operations, while more than 60 such operations were admitted by the government functionaries in other countries.
India has resorted to false flag operations many a time including attack on Indian Parliament and Mumbai attacks that were intended to malign Pakistan. Indian media had carried a report stating that a former Home Ministry officer alleged that a member of the CBI-SIT team had accused incumbent governments of orchestrating the terror attack on Indian Parliament and the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai. RVS Mani, who as Home Ministry Under-Secretary signed the affidavits submitted in court in the alleged encounter case, had said that “Satish Verma, until recently a part of the CBI-SIT probe team, told him that both the terror attacks were set up with the objective of strengthening the counter-terror legislation”. In fact, because of India’s false flag operations, two nuclear states India and Pakistan were on the verge of a war, as India had moved its troops to the forward positions on the border.
Former President Barack Obama during his tenure had more than once said that 9/11 attacks were planned in Pakistan tribal region, which was travesty of the truth, as none of the attackers were from Pakistan or Afghanistan yet the US trying to make Pakistan a scapegoat. In Vietnam also, when America was losing the war, it had declared that all the support to Vietcong guerillas was coming through Cambodia; and it was on this basis that Cambodia was pulverized with massive bombing. America’s own declassified documents, objective accounts and analysis by their own historians, including war veterans, bear testimony to the fact that the Vietnamese resistance was wholly indigenous and the war was fought by the Vietnamese themselves. Even the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which the American warlords had made the casus belli for their Vietnam War, had turned out to be a big hoax.
Incontrovertible evidence has come out from declassified American documents that no US naval ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese Navy, and in fact no action had taken place on the night of August 2, 1964 nor any American ship was assaulted. Even Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and his touted links with Al-Qaeda that American conservatives and militarists had made the pretext for invading and occupying Iraq was a pre-planned conspiracy. The reason for invading Afghanistan was ascribed to Al-Qaeda; and it was proved beyond doubt that all those involved had been living in the western countries, studied in western universities and got training in American aviation academies. State Department’s Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism Daniel Benjamin, in a briefing to the experts in Washington acknowledged that it was not Pakistan but there were other places where planning for terrorist acts was done.
An expert in investigative reporting had summed it up in these words: “There are some key characteristics that can be indicative of a false flag event. The catalyst is typically an explosive, spectacular event which is followed by immediate media saturation. Within a relatively short period of time a scapegoat will be named, establishing an enemy with little to no trial or investigation into other possibilities. The case will be closed, government action will ensue, and on a much more subversive level, someone will reap profit. And often those who profit are large corporations or military contractors that make exorbitant revenue through war and conflict.” In the US, Operation Northwoods was a plan prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intending to garner support for an unprovoked war against communist Cuba through subversive plans that ranged from blowing up US naval ships to hijacking commercial airliners and crashing them. But the plant was rejected by the then President John F Kennedy.
Among the numerous instances of false flags, one event that became synonymous with the term and effectively led to one of the most atrocious outcomes was the Reichstag Fire supposedly committed by Marinus Van Der Lubbe who had set fire to the parliamentary Reichstag building, under the guise of a communist radical. While he was known to be eccentric and a mental patient, his behaviour during the subsequent trial as well as the extenuating circumstances surrounding German government at the time, tell a different story. Before the Reichstag fire, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany during its nascent democracy. He of course wanted authoritarian power, which could only be attained by invoking an emergency clause called the Enabling Act. He needed a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag, as the Nazi Party only controlled 32 per cent.
—The writer is a senior journalist based in Lahore.

Mohammad JamilHISTORY is rife with false flag events, whether they are officially recognized or not, but by identifying the signs and understanding the objectives of the perpetrators, one can reach the truth. A false flag event takes its name from the ancient days of piracy. Before taking over a ship, pirates used to sail the flag of a nation that was known to be friendly to their targeted ship. When they got close enough, the pirates raised their flag showing their true identity and commandeer the unsuspecting ship taking all its valuables and killing its crew. Today’s false flag operations are much more subversive and don’t give their victims the chance of knowing they’ve been duped. However, declassified documents revealed that the US governments were involved in many false flag operations, while more than 60 such operations were admitted by the government functionaries in other countries.
India has resorted to false flag operations many a time including attack on Indian Parliament and Mumbai attacks that were intended to malign Pakistan. Indian media had carried a report stating that a former Home Ministry officer alleged that a member of the CBI-SIT team had accused incumbent governments of orchestrating the terror attack on Indian Parliament and the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai. RVS Mani, who as Home Ministry Under-Secretary signed the affidavits submitted in court in the alleged encounter case, had said that “Satish Verma, until recently a part of the CBI-SIT probe team, told him that both the terror attacks were set up with the objective of strengthening the counter-terror legislation”. In fact, because of India’s false flag operations, two nuclear states India and Pakistan were on the verge of a war, as India had moved its troops to the forward positions on the border.
Former President Barack Obama during his tenure had more than once said that 9/11 attacks were planned in Pakistan tribal region, which was travesty of the truth, as none of the attackers were from Pakistan or Afghanistan yet the US trying to make Pakistan a scapegoat. In Vietnam also, when America was losing the war, it had declared that all the support to Vietcong guerillas was coming through Cambodia; and it was on this basis that Cambodia was pulverized with massive bombing. America’s own declassified documents, objective accounts and analysis by their own historians, including war veterans, bear testimony to the fact that the Vietnamese resistance was wholly indigenous and the war was fought by the Vietnamese themselves. Even the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which the American warlords had made the casus belli for their Vietnam War, had turned out to be a big hoax.
Incontrovertible evidence has come out from declassified American documents that no US naval ship was attacked by the North Vietnamese Navy, and in fact no action had taken place on the night of August 2, 1964 nor any American ship was assaulted. Even Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and his touted links with Al-Qaeda that American conservatives and militarists had made the pretext for invading and occupying Iraq was a pre-planned conspiracy. The reason for invading Afghanistan was ascribed to Al-Qaeda; and it was proved beyond doubt that all those involved had been living in the western countries, studied in western universities and got training in American aviation academies. State Department’s Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism Daniel Benjamin, in a briefing to the experts in Washington acknowledged that it was not Pakistan but there were other places where planning for terrorist acts was done.
An expert in investigative reporting had summed it up in these words: “There are some key characteristics that can be indicative of a false flag event. The catalyst is typically an explosive, spectacular event which is followed by immediate media saturation. Within a relatively short period of time a scapegoat will be named, establishing an enemy with little to no trial or investigation into other possibilities. The case will be closed, government action will ensue, and on a much more subversive level, someone will reap profit. And often those who profit are large corporations or military contractors that make exorbitant revenue through war and conflict.” In the US, Operation Northwoods was a plan prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, intending to garner support for an unprovoked war against communist Cuba through subversive plans that ranged from blowing up US naval ships to hijacking commercial airliners and crashing them. But the plant was rejected by the then President John F Kennedy.
Among the numerous instances of false flags, one event that became synonymous with the term and effectively led to one of the most atrocious outcomes was the Reichstag Fire supposedly committed by Marinus Van Der Lubbe who had set fire to the parliamentary Reichstag building, under the guise of a communist radical. While he was known to be eccentric and a mental patient, his behaviour during the subsequent trial as well as the extenuating circumstances surrounding German government at the time, tell a different story. Before the Reichstag fire, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany during its nascent democracy. He of course wanted authoritarian power, which could only be attained by invoking an emergency clause called the Enabling Act. He needed a two-thirds majority in the Reichstag, as the Nazi Party only controlled 32 per cent.
—The writer is a senior journalist based in Lahore