The Gleiwitz incident

By Capt. Fogg

False-flag terrorism is an old and effective way to justify acts of aggression that would be hard to justify otherwise. In our conspiracy-loving country, events such as the World Trade Center attack are often given as an example, the premise being that our administration staged it in order to justify a war against Iraq.

Famous examples are the Berlin Reichstag fire in 1933 that gave Hitler reason to demand emergency powers and the completely phony attack on the Gleiwitz radio station used to justify Hitler's invasion of Poland the following day. A corpse wearing a Polish uniform was arranged outside of a radio station in Silesia, anti-German messages were broadcast, and the public told that Poland had attacked.

It shouldn't really surprise anyone that there is speculation as to what exactly happened in Karbala on January 20th. The official story that the men wearing American uniforms who carried out the kidnapping and murder of American troops were just too good to be Iraqis or even members of al Qaeda is everywhere, but the source is hard to pin down.

Iran involvement suspected blares the headline on CNN. Unnamed "sources" say "We believe it's possible the executors of the attack were Iranian or Iranian-trained." "People are looking at it seriously," says another "official" whose use of the "people say" trope reminds me so much of Fox News' favorite method of launching fabricated rumor. Just who is doing the suspecting here and why should we be convinced that it isn't propaganda?

Anything is possible and of course it is also possible that the perpetrators were Iraqis or others looking to get the U.S. involved in an attack on Iran, and "people are saying" that it's entirely possible that U.S. interests directly or indirectly linked to the administration would love to use this as an excuse and were directly involved in facilitating or carrying out this attack.

False-flag terrorism or not, this speculative linking of Iran with an increasing number of incidents and unverifiable stories of sudden progress in the making of nuclear weapons looks a lot like the run up to the fake state of emergency that precipitated the invasion of Iraq. Of course it is possible that Iran is involved, if not in this incident at least in other incidents in Iraq, but we are dependent upon the testimony of proven liars for our information. Does the Bush administration have enough credibility to be able to convince us that we need another war on another front? Does George really care what we think anyway? People are talking.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)