False Flag Terrorism: A Thumbnail History

False flag operations are used around the world to frighten the population, and precipitate an otherwise unjustifiable war. (The term comes from the military idea of flying the flag of a country, other than your own.)

Here’s a list of a few historically accepted examples of false flag terrorism in US history.

1846 Mexican-American War: President James K. Polk sends General Zachary Taylor and 1,500 American troops to the Mexican border along the Nueces River, where he is ordered by the President to cross over into disputed territory to bait Mexico into attacking. They quickly fell for the bait and were easily repelled by US forces. Polk took advantage of this single, miniscule conflict to get Congress to declare war on Mexico and to mobilize public support for the war.

1898 Spanish-American War: The US sinks it's own battleship, the USS Maine, in a harbor in Havana and blames it on Cuba. Newspapers, under the guise of the US government, help sensationalize the story to bolster public support for war against Cuba.

1915 Sinking of the Lusitania: German submarines are blamed for sinking the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner. What the public wasn't told is that all the passengers on board the Lusitania were merely human shields to protect a shipment of US ammunition headed towards Great Britain during WWI, which is why the German's sank the ship. Many historians believe that Britain meant for the Lusitania to be attacked to get the US on their side in WWI by baiting Germans into sinking it, or that they might of sunk the ship themselves, seeing US involvement in WWI detrimental for not losing.

1931 Mukden incident: Japanese officers fabricate a pretext for annexing Manchuria, which was under Chinese control at the time, by blowing up a section of their own railway and blaming it on the Chinese.

1939 Gleiwitz incident: The Nazi's fabricate evidence of a Polish attack to mobilize German public opinion, and to fabricate a false justification for a war with Poland.

1939 Shelling of Mainila: The Soviet Union shells it's own village of Mainila on the Finnish border, faking casualties, and blames the attack on Finland to justify a war.

1941 Pearl Harbor: The US military decodes a message they intercepted from the Japanese outlining the attacks of Pearl Harbor weeks before the attacks. The message was a response to an insulting ultimatum that the US sent Japan that got the US the response they wanted, and attack on Pearl Harbor. "The question was: how we should maneuver [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot.”, Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

1962 Operation Northwoods: A plot authored by the Joints Chief of Staff, thetop brass of the Pentagon, that involved scenarios such as hijacking a passenger plane and other staged terror attacks and campaigns that would be used to blame Cuba to mobilize public support for a war. It was never carried out since Kennedy refused to authorize the operation, and was later declassified under the Freedom of Information Act.

1964 Gulf of Tonkin: President Johnson accuses North Vietnamese PT boats of attacking strike carries in the gulf, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. Documents and tapes released due to the Freedom of Information Act shows that President Johnson knew that there were no PT boats and no attacks, but still went ahead with lying to the American public on national TV to garner support for escalating the war in Vietnam.

1970's Operation Gladio: Italian secret service agencies, under the training and direction of CIA and NATO forces, launch countless staged terror attacks that kills thousands and are used to blame leftist opposition groups and scare the public into supporting the right wing government.