When False Flags Go Viral

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
September 26, 2020

If you're reading this column, it's highly likely you're familiar with "false flag" terrorism. You've at least heard the term before, right?

As I've had cause to note in my work in the past, the 2013 Atlantic Wire article, republished by Yahoo! News under the headline "What is a 'False Flag' Attack — and Was Boston One?" was, for me, a clear sign that the 9/11 Truth movement had accomplished at least one extremely important thing. Namely, it inserted the term "false flag" into the public conversation about terrorism so effectively that the mainstream was forced to address it.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, The Atlantic Wire's answer to that headline question was a resounding "No." But that's not important. What matters is that they had to address the topic at all. No longer could the establishment press feign ignorance of the very concept ("buT wHy wOuLd thE goVernMEnt AttAcK iTseLf?"), nor could they pretend that the idea of false flag terrorism was so outlandish and so confined to the fringes of mainstream discourse that it could be safely ignored. No, by 2013 any spectacular terrorist incident was quickly followed by an establishment denial that the event had been staged.

That is a major step. An important tool of control, used to pull the wool over the eyes of the public for centuries, had gone from a laughable fringe "conspiracy theory" to an openly acknowledged (and vigorously denied) conspiracy reality within the space of a decade.

But have we really learnt the lessons of history about false flag terrorism? Do we even really know what that term means? And would we recognize it if that trick was employed again in a different context?

Let's explore these questions with a quick overview of the history of false flag terrorism, its use in the present day, and what we can expect to see as we move into the age of biosecurity.

What is a false flag attack?

Although it's a welcome development overall, the mainstreaming of any important concept inevitably leads to its dumbing down. The mainstreaming of "false flag terrorism" is no exception. Even some followers of the independent media have become so used to bandying the term around that it is often used for any incident of any sort—whether real or fake, staged or manipulated—Theywhere the officially accepted narrative explanation differs from the truth.

Although the term "false flag" has been used in a figurative sense since the 16th century to refer to some person or group disguising their true nature or intentions, its use in an adjectival sense ("false flag operation") derives from the annals of naval warfare, where ships would literally fly the flag of a different nation, pretending to be allies in order to slip past enemy defenses.

The ruse was successful enough that it was adopted for land and air warfare. No longer were literal flags necessary in order to carry out these "false flag" operations. Any use of deception in order to conceal the true origins and perpetrators of an attack could, by extension, be counted as a false flag operation.

It's a childishly simple tactic. But it works.

Take the case of Swedish King Gustav III. In 1788 he found himself hankering for a war with Russia. He had only one problem: the public didn't want to go to war with Russia. So he did what any great leader would do in that situation: he dressed his own soldiers up as Russian troops (complete with Russian coins in their pockets) and ordered them to attack Swedish forces in Finland. The public were enraged by the attack, and Gustav got to declare his "defensive" war on the dastardly Russians.

Or take the case of Seishirō Itagaki, a general in the Imperial Japanese Army who, by 1931, had risen through the ranks to become the Chief of Intelligence in the Kwantung Army, Japan's largest army group. Itagaki had a problem: he wanted to invade Manchuria, but the Japanese Minister of War wouldn't allow it. So Itagaki and a small cadre of rebels within the Japanese Army did what any brave, patriotic soldiers would do: they detonated some explosives on a railway track near a Chinese garrison and blamed the incident on the Chinese themselves. The next day, the Japanese began their attack in response to the "Chinese" provocation and Itagaki got his Manchurian invasion.

Or take the case of the Manning memo. This document records the discussions that took place between US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House on January 31, 2003. They were themselves hankering for a war with Iraq, but they had a problem: they didn't have any actual reason for invading Iraq. So, Bush did what any brave Decider-in-Chief would do in such a situation: he proposed painting a U2 spy plane up in United Nations colours and flying it low over Iraqi airspace in the hopes that it would be shot down by Iraqi air defense. Blair reportedly balked at the idea, but the pair did agree that the invasion would go ahead regardless of whether or not any weapons of mass destruction were ever found, war crimes be damned.

There are many such examples of this tactic throughout history. But the tactic isn't an old, dusty relic of the distant past. It very much pertains to the world of the 21st century . .

False flag terrorism

It seems inevitable, in hindsight, that the idea of a "false flag" attack would be adapted from its literal use in naval warfare to a more general tactic of deception in military engagements. After all, why bother inventing new tricks when the old ones work so well?

So it's not surprising at all, then, that the concept was further abstracted from a stratagem of warfare to a tool of spycraft. With the rise of the age of terror came the rise of false flag terrorism: spectacular acts of violence designed to look like they were acts of one's political enemy. Once again, the trick is simple but effective.

In the early 1950s, the Israelis were concerned that the British would withdraw their forces from the Suez Canal zone, strengthening Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and, by extension, Pan-Arab nationalism. Realizing that the only thing that would keep Britain committed to the region was an ongoing state of emergency, they hit upon a simple solution: a false flag terror operation.

Officially codenamed Operation Susannah (but today known as the Lavon Affair), Israeli military intelligence staged a number of bombings around Egypt, hoping to blame the acts on communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, malcontents, or other convenient scapegoats. The plan was foiled by Egyptian authorities, several members of the Israeli cell were captured and the Israeli defence minister was forced to resign over the incident. It was never officially admitted until 2005, when Israel officially honoured nine of the spies that had helped carry out the bombings.

But the era of false flag terrorism kicked off in earnest on September 11, 2001, when the neocons in the Bush administration and their accomplices in the military-industrial complex and the intelligence services of multiple countries found an excuse for their longed-for invasion of Afghanistan. Prized as a pipeline corridor, Afghanistan was also the linch pin of the global heroin trade and an important base of operations for the forthcoming War on Terror. In fact, so important was the country to the Bush administration that it made the full-scale plan for invading Afghanistan the subject of its first national security directive, NSPD-9. The plan was ready and delivered for presidential approval on September 4, 2001, one week before the events that would supposedly justify such an invasion . . . a justification that has since been exposed as a complete lie.

I hardly need to explain everything that unfolded from the foundational false flag event of 9/11. The creation of the homeland security state. The murderous wars of aggression to reshape the middle east. The expansion of the military-industrial complex even beyond its Cold War excesses. The formation of the information-industrial complex. We have all watched that nightmare unfolding over the course of the past two decades.

And just as the 9/11 myth seemed to finally be relinquishing its grasp on the public psyche, another event has come along to send the public back into a state of irrational fear. This time, the emergency is predicated not on the Muslim bogeyman, but the invisible bogeyman: SARS-CoV-2.

But, as we have already seen, the advent of new forms of warfare inevitably bring new opportunities for war planners to adapt the false flag strategy fore new battlegrounds. And so it is that we find ourselves on the cusp of a new era of false flag operations.

False flag bioterrorism

As it turns out, 9/11 may not prove to be the most long-lasting and world-changing false flag event to take place in the fall of 2001. The anthrax attacks that followed on the heels of "the day that changed everything" may in fact have more to say about the COVID-1984 world in which we find ourselves.

Viewers of my recent work on COVID-911 will already know about one of the remarkable "coincidences" linking the anthrax attacks of 2001 with the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2. Namely, that both events were preceded by a "simulation" that mirrored the real-life incident—Dark Winter in the case of the anthrax attacks and Event 201 in the case of the current scamdemic—complete with fake news segments dramatizing the real-life emergencies that would unfold on our tv screens months later. As you will also know, those events weren't just co-hosted by the same organization (the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security), but actually featured some of the same players who would go on to lay the groundwork for and participate in the US government's COVID-19 response.

But those "coincidences" really only scratch the surface of the anthrax false flag. The real story of the anthrax attacks is much bigger than we can do justice to here, but it includes:

• The revelation in the pages of the New York Times that the US government was running an illegal biological weapons program that was working to—among other things—genetically engineer weaponized anthrax (a revelation that was published on September 4, 2001, but quickly overshadowed by other events).
• The death of Vladimir Pasechnik, a microbiologist who had worked on the Soviet germ warfare program weaponizing anthrax and other biological agents before defecting to Britain in 1989, who was hired by Britain to conduct his own research into anthrax antidotes at the UK's secretive Porton Down bioweapon laboratory, and who died just weeks after the anthrax attacks took place.
• The murder of Dr. David Kelly, who debriefed Pasechnik after his defection and offered him the job at Porton Down, and who had told his friend that he was going to write a book exposing what he knew about the bioweapons program before "killing himself" on Harrowdown Hill.

. . . and much, much else besides.

But for today, it serves merely to note that the anthrax attacks were indeed a false flag attack. In those first chaotic days of the attack, ABC's Brian Ross began reporting from his "anonymous well-placed sources" that the anthrax spores contained traces of bentonite, a "troubling chemical additive" that just happened to be a " a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program." Of course, this turned out to be a complete lie (a lie that Ross has never clarified or retracted to this day).

As was later confirmed, the spores in question were actually derived from the Ames strain, a strain of anthrax whose virulence makes it the "gold standard" for research into the bacterium by the biological warriors at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. This made the attack almost certainly an inside job (although, it should be noted, the Ames strain is available to researchers in a number of laboratories around the world, including Porton Down).

Inevitably, the FBI "Amerithrax" investigation into the deadly anthrax letters—the largest investigation in the history of the Bureau—set its sights on a series of "lone wolves." After failing to even bring charges against "person of interest" Steven Hatfill—a bioweapons expert who was awarded nearly $6 million in taxpayer money after years of harassment—and ultimately landed on Bruce Ivins, a patsy who conveniently killed himself before ever even being charged for the monumental crime that was ultimately blamed on him.

The anthrax false flag killed multiple birds with one stone:

• It associated the terror attack of 9/11 with a subsequent bioterror attack that was quickly connected to Saddam Hussein and Iraq. That association was still strong in the minds of many Americans (some who may still have erroneously blamed Iraq for the attack) during the build up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003.
• As Whitney Webb points out in her exhaustive report on the event, the anthrax attack also saved Bioport, the crony-connected DoD contractor that supplied the US military with the highly controversial Anthrax vaccine. Facing growing concerns about the safety and efficacy of their vaccine, Bioport faced financial ruin . . . until the anthrax attacks happened and demand for their questionable product skyrocketed. Later rebranding as Emergent Biosolutions, the company benefited from the largesse of the Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, and, as Webb notes, the company "is now set to profit from the Coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis."
• And, it also gave a gigantic shot in the arm to another major wing of the military-industrial complex: the "biodefense" sector. With the signing of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, biological weapons development was forced underground. Of course, it still went on, but now it was carried out under the mantle of "defense." After all, one could never trust that those damn *Insert Bogeyman Here* would really get rid of their bioweapon stockpiles, and one needed to create bioweapons in order to understand how to protect against them. But such research was necessarily sidelined and shrouded in secrecy.

Before the anthrax attacks, bioweapons research had been sidelined and shrouded in secrecy. After the attacks, however, the US government—and indeed every government in the world—had a perfect excuse to vastly expand its biological weapons programs in the name of "biological security." As Jonathan King, a professor of microbiology at MIT, explains:

"[The] response to the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism initiative has been to launch a nationwide, billion-dollar campaign to 'defend us' from unknown terrorists. But the character of this program is roughly as follows: You say, 'Well, what would the terrorists come up with? What's the nastiest, most dangerous, most difficult-to-diagnose, difficult-to-treat microorganisms that we can think of. Well, let's go bring that organism into existence so that we can figure out how to defend against it.' The fact of the matter is, it's indistinguishable from an offensive program in which you would do the same thing."

Thus we get such innovations as the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology's reconstruction of the 1918 Spanish flu from the tissue of a victim buried in the Alaska permafrost. Or the USAID-funded 2015 research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that weaponized bat-derived coronavirus in experiments that even other molecular biologists warned was presenting the world with a "clear and present danger." (Oh, and the USAID funding for the research was technically illegal at the time, but who's keeping track, hey?)

The long story short is that we have indeed arrived at another, potentially even more dangerous era of false flag attack. At this point it isn't the scary bearded Muslim suicide bombers who we are supposed to be afraid of, though. It's scary bearded Muslim biologists. Or something like that. Maybe it'll be the Russkies. Or the ChiComs. Or some shadowy terror group that arises from nowhere and starts claiming responsibility for Bill Gates' threatened "Pandemic II."

The point is that bioterrorism is now very much on the table and don't think for a second that the globalists won't resort to more spectacular bioterror attacks to keep the current biosecurity hysteria going.

The ridiculous Skripal affair and its even more absurd low-budget sequel (the Navalny hoax) are just a taste of what we are likely to see in the near future. We may scoff at the amateur theatrics of these false flag test runs, but it would be the same as someone in 1993 dismissing the first World Trade Center bombing as a ridiculous, bungled FBI op, instead of the first taste of much bigger attacks to come.

Conclusion

They say forewarned is forearmed, and I think that adage is especially apt when it comes to the subject of false flag attacks. The entire reason that these operations have been used by country after country for centuries is that they are so effective. And they are only effective because throughout those centuries the general public was unable to wrap their minds around a trick so devious and downright evil.

"But why would the government attack itself?" is not just the question of a brainwashed simpleton; it's the question of an innocent and trusting soul who could never in a million years imagine doing something so underhanded.

But this is not 1800. It's not even 2000. It's 2020. The world has cottoned on to the trick.

Now we have to completely break the spell that governments have cast over the public. In the event of every spectacular terror attack (biological or otherwise), we have to take the history of false flag operations into account and put the government at the top of the list of suspects. When enough of the population has adjusted their thinking in this way, the trick will have lost its effectiveness and the globalists will have to abandon it altogether.

The only question is: Can we wake enough of the public up to these false flag tricks before Gates and his ilk get their "Pandemic II?"

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