False Flag? That’s everything the state does,

False Flag?
That’s everything the state does,

Bungled Operations, Not False Flags

When domestic “criminal justice” feds orchestrate, finance, and put into motion their dramas related to killing, bombing, and other organized crime, they do it for self-aggrandizement.  They rarely start out with a scheme to attribute their entire involvement to someone else—or to deny it completely.  An after-action strategy develops on-the-fly when things tragically turn out as they were planned.  The idea is to stop things before the paper bloodbath turns into a real one.

Devise a gruesome heart-wrenching plan that will cement the state’s place in society as bogey-man repellent; pay for the hardware, the location, the transportation, and the personnel through third parties; then, execute a raid and take down the whole mess at the precise moment that there is evidence that the ball is rolling—but before the ball hits the pins at the end of the alley.

OK gents, time to go public.  We, now have opportunity, manufactured motive derived from a couple of out-of-context sound bites, and some tangible evidence.  Let’s trot out our patsy and get some fame.  The problem is that sometimes patsies do what they are instructed to do, what they are enticed to do, what they are paid to do.

Even in the foreign arena, the spooks rarely intend, and plan for, a false flag outcome.  They just go about their business doing their illicit activity to raise money running guns or drugs; killing people; defaming people; or putting perpetual “intelligence gathering” criminal operations into play with no game plan on how to terminate them.  It is easier in the foreign arena since there isn’t an army of defense attorneys demanding discovery of notes, reports, phone calls, etc.  You can just back away and abandon an exposed scandalous operation; never to mention it again.


The foreign black ops exist to feed impotent oligarchs in D.C. who want to be in the game; the pet senator or agency director who loves his side-briefings on black-bag operations.  He winks to his colleagues, smiles, and tells everyone, “You don’t want to know” as he exits private briefings portraying himself as a major player wielding the patriotic, purifying forces of death and destruction.

Sure, agencies try to hide their footprints after their domestic and foreign shenanigans turn sour, but they rarely have an intricate false-flag, spy-novel game-plan from the beginning to make it look like their political enemy did it; even when funding sources are fairly well concealed.  The bureaucracy and internal players want to view themselves as noble; as not being dastardly and underhanded; as having checks and balances; and as being patriotic.  But, not as double-dealing.

Having a plan to conduct a future false flag is rarely, if ever, a successful way to procure funding or to perpetuate an operation.  Black ops that are approved and get funding are ones that are written up in extensive detail (behind an agency S.A.R.C. wall – Sensitive Activities Review Committee) that promise to “identify the extent of criminal activity by following the tentacles of organizations using proactive investigative methods to include undercover operations, reverse undercover operations, communications intercepts, international controlled deliveries, smurfing of government funds through money laundering channels, etc. to identify and prosecute involved individuals.”

This basically means that feds gain approval to undertake criminal activity to identify other (supposed) criminal activity through the use of their own secretive internal protocols.  The intent, from the beginning, is rarely to do a false flag (other than the undercover activity itself).  If domestic operations are taken down as intended, they are reported through normal public relations channels complete with corresponding indictments and televised perp walks.  If they are not, or if the whole thing blows up, they are never disclosed.  Preservation of “methods, tactics, and sources” will become the excuse for perpetual redactions of documents provided via FOI requests.  “Public safety, preservation of integrity of ongoing operations, safety of witnesses, officer safety, and national security” will be the refrain sung during content-free testimony to Congress regarding bungled operations.  Blame will not be admitted.

We usually hear “false flag” from the liberty community at times when state fingerprints are detected on criminal activity.  In reality, “bungled provocateur operation” would be better terminology because it describes the more likely scenario.  That’s really what we are talking about.  Some horrendous criminal activity was finalized by a state provocateur as planned by the state.  This cannot be admitted to.

It is rarely (and could not get funding, traction, bureaucratic, or employee support as such) an internally articulated plan to cause  harm to innocent third parties, allow the involved feds to disappear, and discredit another entity in society by leaving them holding the bag for the entire action.  The minions of state employees handling these operations— from those processing travel vouchers, to IT personnel, to bookkeepers, to file clerks—would not unanimously agree to  keep their mouths shut.  Juicy stories of intentional “false flags” would come out with plenty of leaked supporting documentation if a false flag was the planned and intended outcome.

Psychopathic managers could turn operations in new “false flag” directions and may successfully require and gain loyalty and silence from a small group of subordinates, but their personal redirected vision is not encapsulated in the official plan. The state is too dumb and has too many disgruntled employees to keep a lot of moving parts headed in the right direction while hiding a sinister plan to portray its actions as those of a third party.  Official employees want to think of their actions as beneficent and not merely as a ruse to assign blame to someone else.  State employees generally like the recognition for doing things they were told were good, needed actions.

There are grotesque exceptions when the original intent was a false flag (like when CIA personnel put powdered concrete in the milk of school children in Cuba), but when these intentional false-flag activities occur, often involving some personal creative interpretation of admittedly criminal general orders, they are almost universally in the foreign arena.  The domestic occurrences we call false flags are almost always bungled operations involving some “really smart” G-Men who were seeking personal notoriety by pretending to ferret out illegal activity “just in time” — which they actually sponsored and facilitated.

On a global scale, usage of “flexible flags” with incidents is glamorous and seems to appeal to the masses.  “Flexible flags” are often used to confuse and sway public opinion to attain state goals.  Sometimes random events, unexplained events, fake events, purposeful events, or no event (e.g.  Gulf of Tonkin, Russia-gate, World Trade Center  / Pentagon incidents, U.S.S. Maine, R.M.S. Lusitania, gas attacks in Syria) are hyped endlessly and may be portrayed flexibly as foreign flag  A, foreign flag B,  domestic flag, or private operations to get a desired result—like a new war, regime change, new laws on the books, etc.  We should be wary of this tactic and see the dark deeds of those who claim to have the right to enslave us and steal from us based on such emotional ploys.

Although the term “false flag” is generally used to mean state activity that is made to appear as though it is completely private criminal activity or activity carried out by a foreign state entity, I am also fine with calling all provocateur activity “false flag” activity since state-sponsored criminal activity is used to make people appear guilty of things they may not have intended to do.  And certainly, in the larger sense, everything the state does is a big gigantic false flag since it is perpetually assigning blame, taking credit, hurting people, and taking things under false pretenses.



By David Hathaway