U.S. government once wanted to plan false flag attacks with Soviet aircraft

I agree with the general direction of your argument, but wholeheartedly disagree that this doesn't constitute "planning", and find your de-emphasis of 'using the aircraft in a covert operation to attack the US', disconcerting.

Perhaps the Soviets wanted to know how hard it would be for the US to replicate one of their birds, and got an embedded spy to commission an investigation to find out for them.

Only half joking.

A major problem with what you're writing here is that there is a very rich history of false flag attacks from nearly all governments, certainly including the US -- both planned and executed. For instance Operation Northwoods [1] was another false flag plan which would have the CIA carry out terrorist attacks against American civilian and military targets and then blame it on the Cuban government, to justify a war against Cuba. This plan made it all the way to JFK. Literally the one and only thing that stopped this plan from happening was JFK not cooperating with the CIA.

The 1953 Iranian coup [2] was organized by the US and CIA in particular. One of the many actions we were responsible for includes forming fake communist forces allegedly in support of the government. The government was not pro communist, but also did not actively crack down on them, so creating these fake groups who were both supposed to be communist and pro government worked doubly well. In any case these groups would then threaten and intimidate Islamic groups in the name of the government. This behavior culminated with these fake groups bombing the home of an influential Islamic cleric [3]. The whole idea being to turn the Islamic community against the government - and it worked. To this day the name of the individual who signed off on the operation is redacted, but it's rather evident that it was Eisenhower.

Ultimately governments tend to be consistently Machiavellian -- or at least populated by those willing to adopt such methods. And false flags are one of the most effective operations for shifting public opinion, creating justifications for war, and so on. The thing I find disappointing is how much people refuse to accept reality. Most people will not believe the two paragraphs I wrote above even though there is declassified material literally acknowledging exactly what happened. But it doesn't fit the way we naturally like to view our government, so most people resort to cognitive dissonance instead of acknowledging that their preconceived notions might not actually be correct.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

[3] - http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-...

Considering how Vietnam and more recently Iraq happened I'm not too convinced of the US government making the right choice.

I don't think this is a particularly big deal, and certainly less serious than other publicly known events in the 1960s (and 1980s) that almost started WWIII, however...

> But note that the documents do not describe the mental status of the authors, they're just listing facts.

Do government documents normally describe the mental status of the authors, rather than sticking to facts (whether true or not)?

> The US government is a very, very large organization, that asks a lot of questions and produces a lot of documents.

What percentage are serious enough to get discussed by the National Security Council and/or Attorney General?

> Within the Soviet government, someone else investigated what it would cost to procure some F-86 and F-4 aircraft

I haven't seen any documents on that, but did the Politburo discuss how US planes could be used in a false flag attack? If they did, how would it justify or excuse the US doing so?

> it would be irresponsible not to check

It's irresponsible of the US government to not look into the possibility of murdering Americans in order to start WWIII?

That was my first thought too. The Newsweek article does say "wanted to" in the beginning also. Irresponsible click bait.

I've had to do this. You don't take any toys. You take the kids and throw some dry food and clothes in the car.

Luckily, my youngest hasn't had to experience this. But his two older sisters have.

Read "War is a racket". Then you'll understand how we've bread these types of people.

> It is just terrible to know that people like this exist.

Which ones, the capitalist dogs or the commie bastards? If you dislike those people enough, you'll want to go to war with them if you're in a position of power.

I'm glad we have people in positions of power that can separate their emotions from the difficult decisions of governing.

This isn't a plan that was enacted.

Since those terrible people exist, that’s why we have people doing these sorts of plans. It’s naïve to think that if we just abolish militaries that bad people go away. Letting the Soviet Union even exist amounted to being an accomplice to mass murder. They were the most evil regime in the 20th century in terms of body count. And that includes Hitler. Just the way they shot their own retreating troops during Stalingrad should turn one’s stomach. That doesn’t even consider their progroms as well as famines caused by farm collectivization. Look at Mao as well — literally millions died because of his aversion to sparrows. This moral relativism casting the US as some evil empire is ridiculous. The alternative to US hedgemony in the 20th century would have been far worse than anything imaginable. All of Europe would have been like East Germany. Asia would have been comparable to North Korea. War is a horrible thing, but sometimes the alternatives are worse.

This is dismissive. I don't foresee any valid contingency scenario that validates a "false flag," the fact that individuals in the government would think this way only gives credence to the most cynical out there.

Sure they didn't do it, but that they felt they had the authority to consider it (in a democracy, where they answer to us) speaks volumes.

I only read your first link, but seeing how all it is is a contingency plan, so that the US would know how to proceed in a hypothetical war against Britain, I don't think I really have to look any further. The US likely has one for the EU, Russia, and China as well. And China and Russia definitely do, and the EU would if they had a true central military. It's just good planning.

> U.S government does a lot of contingency planning

But Puerto Rican hurricanes aren't on the radar apparently.

As someone who has spent time around Lajes Field, War Plan Gray is interesting seeing as how the U.S. de facto seized land on Terceira anyway. Much of my family came over around that time to make room for the military base.

Ironically, the Portuguese are very upset now that the U.S. is pulling more and more soldiers away from Lajes as it's leaving a hole in the local economy.

If you are one of those people who pride themselves on nuance, this is the time for it. Is everything that happens in the world a false flag? No, I seriously doubt it. Crazy people and evil people exist and do crazy and evil things rather distressingly often.

On the other hand, is being concerned about false flags intrinsically just being a nutter? Equally unlikely to be realistic. First, we do have historical evidence that it is a thing that has happened before, and second, it's not like it's that crazy an idea. Follow the money & benefits, and there's an awful lot of people today and historically that would have an awful lot of motivations to pull one off.

If you think everything is a false flag, you're too paranoid. If you think false flags never happen, or at least that it's impossible anyone would pull one on you, first, you're too trusting. Second, that very trust ironically increases the chances that someone will consider it a risk worth taking. False flags work best when the very idea that something would be a false flag is easily pooh-poohed and dismissed. Dismissing them out of hand is not a great strategy, IMHO.

The fact that there's an internet competition to be the first to declare something a false flag is simply meaningless. There's an internet competition to be the first to declare a movie a disaster, the first to declare that a game is a disaster, the first to declare that someone's Ask HN project is worthless... it's all just irrelevant noise, not evidence of anything in any direction.

It is equally irrational to believe that all conspiracy theories are true as it is to believe that all conspiracy theories are false.

False flag operations certainly happen[1]. It just takes a long amount of time for whistleblowers to leak information providing information to confirm such a fact.

[1]https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ever-growing-list-of-admit...

"Nutters" will find "proof" regardless of what they've been given.

What this _does_ prove is what the US is willing to even _consider_ doing to justify various things it wants to accomplish. So at some point you must at least consider that an event _could_ have been a false flag, don't you? Even if you come to the conclusion it wasn't, to write it off entirely without consideration is almost as irresponsible as claiming every major event is a false flag.

The term "conspiracy theorist" was promoted in the wholly-owned MSM (look up Operation Mockingbird) by the CIA after the JFK assassination (clearly a cover-up, as it's coming out now--recently released autopsy report shows bullet entrance wounds in front and rear) to discredit people who questioned the official narrative.

No, the Vegas shooting is strange enough to feed things by itself. The only hotel witness disappears for a to bit then does a weird interview on Ellen? If you pitched this as a TV episode it'd be rejected as too implausible. But that's probably true for lots of real stories.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that in hindsight, many of them turn out to be true.

That's not to say that there's anything to the 9/11 truthers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

news report confirms another instance of the US planning fake attacks on its own citizens for political purposes and your response is to chastise conspiracy theorists? your frustration seems a little misdirected.

which is the bigger offense?

So you should appreciate all the plans they consider? If they have a plan on how to stop a protest by killing the citizens with drones, or how to start a new war vs country X by killing children in a school and blaming it on X, this plan is fine, let's congratulate them for considering all possibilities including killing the citizens you are paied to protect. There are some things that you should not do, even war has rules.

It could start a war with anyone without repercussion from the one true power that can stop all war-making: its people.

It seems to have refined its ability to convince us of the need for war since then, however.

> Even just considering it is bad enough

The U.S. government is, as it should be, a paranoid bureaucracy. Everything is, and should be, considered.