Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambda | Hacker News Reader

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And you missed including these items:

  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.

  2 years before, American Senator George Smathers had 
  suggested that the U.S. make “a false attack made on 
  Guantanamo Bay which would give us the excuse of actually 
  fomenting a fight which would then give us the excuse to 
  go in and [overthrow Castro]“.

  And Official State Department documents show that – only 
  nine months before the Joint Chiefs of Staff plan was 
  proposed – the head of the Joint Chiefs and other high-
  level officials discussed blowing up a consulate in the 
  Dominican Republic in order to justify an invasion of 
  that country. The 3 plans were not carried out, but they 
  were all discussed as serious proposals

While he included the disclaimer at the end "the 3 plans were not carried out", he mixes this in with a list of actual false flag operations, and if you didn't know better when reading these items, you may believe that these were actually carried out by the US government.

Mixing real false-flag operations with things that were at some point discussed as possible options is fairly misleading at best; couple with all of the other examples you quote, I would call this post downright dishonest.

Between the paranoia about "false flag", and the line "People are slowly waking up to this whole con job by governments who want to justify war", this is veering dangerously close to "wake up sheeple!" territory.

False flag operations are the bread and butter of conspiracy theorists, and I'd like to show this list to some I know...

This may not be an ideal list, but it describes things that actually occurred. The false-flags that involved the US are the exceptions that prove the rule. You can see how far these proposals typically get in the US government.

> The false-flags that involved the US are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Are they? They are certainly rare, but so are actual terrorists attacks in the United States. If you choose at random an attack on the US outside of a combat zone within our lifetimes, you have a nontrivial probability that it was an admitted false flag operation. And that's just counting the ones they've admitted.

This isn't to say that we should fall in with the "9/11 was an inside job" people, but rather that we should be extraordinarily skeptical when there is some kind of an attack and self-interested parties come out of the woodwork with complicated one-sided proposals to ensure "never again" (even though they can ensure no such thing), which just so happen to secure to the proponents an unfathomably large quantity of tax dollars.

> If you choose at random an attack on the US outside of a combat zone within our lifetimes, you have a nontrivial probability that it was an admitted false flag operation.

Really? What are the admitted false flag operations against the US, forgetting about how old any of us are? If I look at the list from the article, the ones involving the US are either not false flag operations (my post), operations never put into action, or actual false flag operations but against a foreign country (Iran, Italy).

Obviously if you go down this road you end up in conspiracy theory land because everybody has their own version of historical events even after the parts that everyone admits happened, but here are a couple of incidents not on the list:

FBI had an inside man in the 1993 WTC bombing but chose not to thwart the bombing by substituting the explosives for inert powder (allegedly to preserve the inside man's cover): http://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/28/nyregion/tapes-depict-prop...

Second gulf of Tonkin incident famously used to justify the Vietnam war never actually happened. Government now admits it never happened, doesn't admit to intentional fabrication. (Is it a false flag operation to falsely claim there was an attack or provocation without properly verifying the truth of it before going public? Because if it is then we also get to put the Iraq WMDs on the list. For that matter, if we want to go that far back, the sinking of the USS Maine which was used to justify the Spanish-American war was also subsequently shown to not have been an actual attack: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Incident#Investigations).

I don't mean to make the argument that the US is often in the business of bombing itself in order to drum up business for the defense industry, but rather that the defense industry will use anything that looks like an attack to opportunistically drum up business for itself. Only after they've finished lining their pockets with our money does it come out that the original justification evaporates upon scrutiny.

The distinctive thing about hardcore conspiracy theorists is that they don't base their ideas on reality (reality as perceived by non-conspiracy theorists). They are not truly skeptics, because their skepticism is selectively applied. They are typically willing to believe anything they hear, just so long as it comes from another conspiracy theorist who shares the belief that everything the government says is a lie. So skepticism isn't the issue; the issue is staying in touch with reality -- specifically a reality that a variety of people can agree on.

There's no such thing as "reality".

Until a short time ago, the idea that some state would extensively spy into his and other countries people's communications would have been labelled as a conspiracy theory.

Now that the documents have uncovered what's going on, it's not a conspiracy theory anymore.

I understand that some people have ideas based on extremely unlikely scenario. But nonetheless, the reality you write about is based on what's available.

How do you know what's not available?

The article is confusing, but it has a point, and it's that the governments of the countries listed (there is clear winner in numbers...) have essentially sold their morale for political purposes, regardless of it having the form of faking of terrorism, or masking war crimes. I think that some of them arrived to the point of thinking that sacrificing a few (dozens? hundreds? thousands?) of their citizen for such purposes, would be reasonable.

Hold on, yes there is such a thing as 'reality'. It's the independent and objective causality chain. The tree falling in the woods is reality.

Conspiracy theorists really drive me nuts for so many reasons. We invaded Iraq after spending months trumpeting it in the press and the perpretators used it as a plank in elections. The worst crimes are just not secret. They do it in our faces and there are many, many people who think it's great. A secret trade deal may let companies sue for something or other in foreign countries? There are people getting elected on a platform of denying evolution and climate change!

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