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Preface: U.S. President James Madison said:

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

Everyone knows that “truth is the first casualty of war“. And one of the most highly decorated American soldiers of all time said that “war is a racket”.

FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, constitutional law expert professor Jonathan Turley, Time Magazine, Keith Olbermann and the Washington Post have all said that U.S. government officials “were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”. Indeed, the former Secretary of Homeland Security – Tom Ridge – admits that he was pressured to raise terror alerts to help Bush win reelection.

A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that the war on terror is “a mythical historical narrative”. In terms of a possible “why”, remember that psychologists and sociologists have demonstrated that fear of terrorism makes people stupid and easy to manipulate and control.

As I noted last year:

War is always sold to it’s people by artificially demonizing the enemy:

Countries need to lie about their enemies in order to demonize them sufficiently so that the people will support the war.

That is why intelligence “failures” – such as the following – are so common:

• The U.S. Navy’s own historians now say that the sinking of the USS Maine — the justification for America’s entry into the Spanish-American War — was probably caused by an internal explosion of coal, rather than an attack by the Spanish.

• It is also now well-accepted that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which led to the Vietnam war was a fiction (confirmed here).

• And two lies were used to justify the 1991 Gulf War: the statement that Iraqis murdered Kuwaiti babies and the statement that a quarter of a million Iraqi troops were massed on the border with Saudi Arabia (see also this article)(technically, the statement about Kuwaiti babies did not come from the U.S. government, but from a public relations firm hired by the government).

Indeed, in a newly-released documentary, U.S. soldiers admit that if they accidentally kill innocent Iraqis and Afghanis, they then “drop” automatic weapons near their body so they can pretend they were militants:

As I noted last year:

On Monday, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Hugh Shelton told told Jon Stewart that a Clinton cabinet member proposed letting Saddam kill an American pilot as a pretext for war in Iraq:

The Daily Show – Exclusive – Hugh Shelton Extended Interview
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(And see this; and this excerpt from General Shelton’s book).

This might seem, at first glance, like just an odd, one-off suggestion.

However, as reported by the New York Times and other newspapers, George W. Bush also suggested to Tony Blair that a U.S. plane be painted in United Nations colors so that – if Saddam shot it down – it would create a casus belli. As the Times wrote in 2006:

The memo [confirmed by two senior British officials as being authentic] also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire ….

Indeed, the former director of the National Security Agency said:

By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism – in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation.

(audio here).

Former FBI station chief Ted Gundersen also says most terror attacks are committed by our CIA and FBI:

Specific Historical Examples

The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister.

The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism. As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security” (and see this)(Italy and other European countries subject to the terror campaign had joined NATO before the bombings occurred).

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. Official State Department documents show that – only nine months before – the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high-level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of that country. Neither plan was carried out, but they were both discussed as serious proposals.

Nine months earlier, a false flag attack was apparently discussed in order to justify an invasion of the Dominican Republic. Specifically, according to official State Department records, Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles wrote on June 3, 1961:

The Vice President [Lyndon Johnson], [Attorney General] Bob Kennedy, Secretary [of Defense Robert] McNamara, Dick Goodwin [who was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs], [head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General Lemnitzer, Wyn Coerr, and Ted Achilles were here. Bob McNamara and Lemnitzer stated that under the terms of the contingency paper, they were required to be prepared to move into the island on short order if required to do so, and this, in their opinion, called for substantially more troops that we had in the area. After some discussion we considered two more aircraft carriers, some destroyers, and 12,000 marines should be moved into a position some one hundred miles off the Dominican Republic shore…

The tone of the meeting was deeply disturbing. Bob Kennedy was clearly looking for an excuse to move in on the island. At one point he suggested, apparently seriously, that we might have to blow up the Consulate to provide the rationale.

His general approach, vigorously supported by Dick Goodwin, was that this was a bad government, that there was a strong chance that it might team up with Castro, and that it should be destroyed–with an excuse if possible, without one if necessary.

Rather to my surprise, Bob McNamara seemed to support this view …

The entire spirit of this meeting was profoundly distressing and worrisome, and I left at 8:00 p.m. with a feeling that this spirit which I had seen demonstrated on this occasion and others at the White House by those so close to the President constitutes a further danger of half-cocked action by people with almost no foreign policy experience, who are interested in action for action’s sake, and the devil take the highmost …

[At a subsequent meeting], Bob McNamara went along with their general view that our problem was not to prepare against an overt act by the Dominican Republic but rather to find an excuse for going into the country and upsetting it.

When Congress was originally asked to pass the Patriot Act in late 2001, the anthrax attacks which occurred only weeks earlier were falsely blamed on spooky Arabs as a way to scare Congress members into approving the bill. Specifically:

• The FBI was actually told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

• High-level government insiders pointed towards Iraq as the source of the anthrax, even though there was absolutely no reason to think that the anthrax had come from Iraq

Indeed, many people have questioned whether or not the anthrax was intentionally sent to scare people. For example:

• The anthrax letters attempt to link 9/11 and the anthrax attack and pretend to be from radical Muslims and be anti-America and anti-Israel

• Would Arab terrorists have targeted only Congress men who were likely to oppose the Patriot Act and other tyrannical measures? Would they have gotten that specific in their targeting? In order to terrorize America as a whole, wouldn’t real Arab terrorists have sent anthrax to the Congressional leaders of both parties, regardless of their political postures towards particular legislation? Shouldn’t it have been obvious to the FBI that the killer was pro-tyranny, rather than being simply Anti-American? The “war on terror” and Iraq war were largely based on the claim that Saddam and Muslim extremists were behind the anthrax attacks (and see this and this)

• Senator Patrick Leahy said:

And I think there are people within our government — certainly from the source of it — who know where it came from. [Taps the table to let that settle in] And these people may not have had anything to do with it, but they certainly know where it came from.

• The FBI gave its consent in October, 2001 for the remaining samples of the Ames anthrax strain to be destroyed, thereby permanently destroying crucial “genetic clues valuable to the criminal inquiry”. Why would the FBI allow the Ames samples to be destroyed, other than to prevent fingers from being pointed toward the real killer, someone who worked for the U.S. government and had access to U.S. bioweapons?

• The American bioweapons expert who actually drafted the current bioweapons law (the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989), who holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard University, and teaches international law at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, served on
  the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court, and who “advised the FBI in its initial investigation of the anthrax letters”, is convinced that the anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the Patriot Act and the later Military Commissions Act. He has said:

  Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, come these anthrax attacks.

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. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

As Chris Floyd and many others have noted, this plan has gone live.

United Press International reported in June 2005:

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. The numbers do not appear to have been physically removed; the pistols seem to have come off a production line without any serial numbers. Analysts suggest the lack of serial numbers indicates that the weapons were intended for intelligence operations or terrorist cells with substantial government backing. Analysts speculate that these guns are probably from either Mossad or the CIA. 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.

There is substantial additional evidence of hanky panky in Iraq.

We’re not alone. Countries around the world have played this terrible game for thousands of years.

If We Don’t Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat It

Indeed, many former high-level officials are warning that it could happen again:

• A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.

• A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:

“We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want.”

The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to “play fast and loose” with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag.

• Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said “if there is another terror attack, “I believe the president will get what he wants”, which will include a dictatorship

• Scott Ritter, the former UN Weapons Inspector (an American) – who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction – is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government

• And a member of the British Parliament stated that “there is a very real danger” that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically

Postscript: Most serving in our military are good and honorable people who want to protect America and her people. It is only rogue elements within civilian and military circles who carry out false flag attacks.