False Flags: On & About This Week's Show

What is a false flag?
A false flag, generally speaking, is an operation conducted by the government but blamed on another party with the intention of justifying hostile action the government wishes to take against that other party. For example, 9/11 truthers think the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was a false flag operation conducted by the US government to justify ultimately invading Iraq. I am not a 9/11 truther both because I am not convinced by the evidence offered to support the claim and because I believe the operation was so large and so risky that the US government wouldn’t have taken the chance that the consequences would have been uncontrollable. I will continue to have an open mind on the subject, but for now I’m not convinced, but I am convinced in numerous other cases.

NATO 3
Three men were arrested recently on charges of terrorism for allegedly plotting to throw Molotov cocktails at police during the NATO Summit protests in Chicago last week. I have read reports, however, that there were police informants involved in the plot and that the lawyers for the NATO 3, as they have been called, claim the incident was a “false flag” to justify police brutality during the demonstrations. I’m not certain these guys were innocent, but I do smell a rat when a small, one-off operation is foiled by insiders who happen to be informants. I can understand how informants bust mobs and other large scale organizations after years of hard work and deep infiltration, but for an informant just to happen upon an amateurish plot seems too coincidental and almost always seems like entrapment to me and this case is no different.
A caller suggested I was defending terrorists in objecting to such entrapment but I maintain that the risk from terrorism is very small compared to the risk of being abused by government and our constitutional rights need to be preserved at all costs. Don’t forget, tens of millions of people were killed by their own governments (NOT in war) during the 20th century at the hands of such government leaders as Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and others, that preserving our defenses against government is paramount to our safety. In the immortal words of the great conservative-turned-philosophical anarchist Joseph Sobran, “The chances of being harmed by terrorists are mathematically minute. The chance of being robbed by your own government? That’s easy: 100%”
My sister, Booie, called with another example of entrapment in which the FBI actually provided the bomb to otherwise ineffectual would-be criminals. Booie followed up with me by email with another excellent point:

I thought your caller Brandon (who seemed to think it was OK to entrap wrongdoers) should have been asked if there weren’t enough motivated bad actors out there for the FBI etc. to arrest, rather than encourage more passive bad actors to commit crimes. Every resource used to entrap someone is a resource not used to capture self-motivated bad guys.

Excellent point, Boo! I always thought that if you need to entrap someone, maybe you were wrong about how dangerous he was in the first place and should focus your efforts elsewhere.
And just for the record, I don’t have much sympathy for the NATO 3, as I don’t for the Occupy movement generally nor for anarchists like Anonymous who give real anarchists (like me!) a bad name. Anarchism means no coercive, monopoly state, but for that to result in an orderly society, society must recognize natural law which is this: “Don’t touch me or my stuff.” This means total respect for private property and personal integrity. The Occupy anarchists, as the NATO 3 allegedly considered themselves to be, believe property should be held in common–of course that means an administrator which will end up being nothing more than a totalitarian state! As you can see by the Sumner quote elsewhere on this page, this kind of socialism is the exact opposite of true and just anarchism. It is the anarchism of chaos rather than the anarchism of stability and private law.
In addition, Occupiers can’t seem to tell the difference between crony capitalism and capitalism–if they did, they’d be occupying the Fed not Wall Street. And finally, I think the whole Occupy Movement was a set up by union organizers or worse. For more on my views on the subject, click on occupy wall street category on this page.
Arbabsiar
In my opinion, the most horrific false flag currently playing out was the arrest of the used car salesman Mansour Arbabsiar in Texas in October 2011. Apparently this incompetent, drunk pothead was hired by the highly organized Iranian special force Quds to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in DC as well as to bomb the Israeli Embassy in DC, which I assume is better defended than Fort Knox!
In keeping with Arbabsiar’s proven incompetence, he hired to carry out the plot a member of a Mexican drug cartel who happened to be a DEA informant and who promptly turned him in. At that point, the US set off on a path to escalating hostilities with Iran which (you may not remember) would have been strenuously opposed by the war-weary American public if it had been proposed honestly as the continuation of our plan to reshape the Middle East.
Obama himself calls for the prompt prosecution of Arbabsiar in this clip, and points out that this incident has given him a determination to teach Iran a lesson and take nothing off the table, which language is always a thinly veiled threat to use nukes.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBpYj-mV-dM]
So what happened to Arbabsiar? Is he being prosecuted as the President of the United States demanded a few short months ago? Not exactly. It seems the government is considering disposing of the case! I guess he served his purpose!
Underwear Bombers
I first learned of the expression false flag when I read a statement made by a victim at the sentencing hearing of the original underwear bomber in February. Kurt Haskell claims he saw the Underwear Bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab escorted onto the plane without a passport by a man in a tan suit. Apparently there is a video of this that the government won’t release and the Dutch government has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did in fact bypass security and board the plane without a passport. This information is beginning to convince me that this may have been a false flag to justify the TSA full body scanners that now seem to be in every airport in the country (even though they wouldn’t have stopped the original Underwear Bomber anyway! Kinda like Dodd-Frank wouldn’t have stopped the JP Morgan trading losses!)
Given that the original Underwear Bomber alerted me to the existence of false flags, my antenna went up when I heard about a second underwear bomber, and wouldn’t ya know it? A day or two after the first reports surfaced that a second underwear bomber was coming out of the same Yemeni al Qaeda cell as the first, it came out that UBII was a CIA Informant! Actually, he was a British Secret Agent and the Brits are PO’d that the US leaked the story! Apparently this secret agent asked Ibrahim al-Asiri, allegedly the original underwear bomb-maker, to make him an underwear bomb, promising to use it on a suicide mission. Maybe good suicide bombers are hard to find these days so they eased up on their screening process–I don’t know, but they let this guy in the cell and he got out with his explosive underwear and an explosive international tale.
Honestly, I can’t even figure out what this operation was about if not a false flag. It’s not like they were trying to get the identity of the bomb-maker–they already knew that; nor were they likely gathering evidence against the guy–we routinely assassinate people by drone (and the innocents they are having dinner with) without the fuss and documentation of trial.  In short, this big bust was a bust! This operation was not a sting at all, but was a set-up from the beginning from what I can tell.
False Flags in History
There have been numerous false flags that are well-documented in US history as well as the history of other countries, especially, from what I can tell, the UK. Check out these: Operations Northwoods and Mongoose (planning terrorist attacks against US citizens and others to blame on Castro and justify an invasion of Cuba) and Operation Ajax through which the US and the UK overthrew the democratically elected, secular prime minister of Iran–an illegal act that is at the root of our current tension with Iran and others. Also check out the Basra bombing–that one is pretty awful.
Some also classify as false flags actions taken to provoke an adversary into firing the first shot of a war. Alleged examples of this include: Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Lusitania.
Calls
Callers also brought up as possible false flags the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the USS Liberty attack by Israel–Drew suggested we read Assault on the Liberty. In addition, one caller objected to my revering the Founders as being right about everything–what I actually meant to convey is that they warned us about everything–central banks, foreign entanglements, the dangers of government–however I’m the first to admit they failed to protect us against any of it. Check out one of my favorite books, Our Enemy the State by Albert Jay Nock for more on the American Myth.
New Time!
The Monica Perez Show is moving to Sundays 1PM-3PM ET and will still be on 750AM, 95.5FM and right here online.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s show. If you missed it, check wsbradio.com for archives and podcasts.