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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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