US’ Uncorroborated Allegations About Moscow’s False-Flag Attacks Could Mask Its Own Plans

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Such accusations are part of the current American propaganda campaign to shape public opinion against Russia.

Written by Uriel Araujo, researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

At a press briefing on February 3, while discussing the current Russian-Ukrainian crisis, State Department spokesman Ned Price declared Russia seeks to “create a false flag operation to initiate military activity” and is considering producing a “propaganda video (…) with graphic scenes of false explosions – depicting corpses, crisis actors pretending to be mourners”. Price made such claims without providing any evidence whatsoever. This was not well received by journalists who repeatedly and emphatically asked for any corroborating evidence during the entire briefing.  Such allegations are not new, though: Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary had already stated on January 18 that Washington has evidence indicating Moscow was planning a false-flag operation in the Donbas region at the Russian-Ukrainian border.

After Saddam Hussein’s supposed “weapons of mass destruction“, which were never found and yet justified the British-American invasion of Iraq, both London and Washington have lost a lot of credibility. Ironically, this crisis of credibility also fuels the popularity of conspiracy theories because many people are led to think that if their government and mass media lied about Iraq, then they could also lie about many other things.

It is also interesting to note that State Department now mentions as a casual fact the existence of so-called “crisis actors”  and “false flag operations”, something which was usually deemed as “conspiracy theories” (CT).  Such a word choice prompted Associated Press journalist Matt Lee to say that Price was going into “Alex Jones territory”, referring to the controversial American  radio show host.

Psychology and social sciences experts have explained CTs as narratives people employ to make sense of difficult realities. Usually, social scientists do not take into consideration their factual merit or content, but rather look at them as a kind of “sign” that tells a lot about a society’s psychosocial atmosphere and its anxieties. Analyzing them would thus be similar to making sense of rumors, urban legends, and perhaps even dreams and myths.

This is a valid approach. There certainly exists a conspiracist and paranoid style of thinking that is clearly not useful for any serious analysis of political and military scenarios. However, in daily usage, virtually anything may be labeled as a “CT”. Such a label is often employed as a purely accusatory category. In fact, many accusations that used to be described as CTs may later be proven correct when new data comes to light.

One example is the US unethical and criminal medical experiment officially called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (1932-1972), which infected over 400 African American men with syphilis, obviously without their consent or knowledge. It was conducted by the  United States Public Health Service  and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although it was originally dismissed as a CT, today we know that the men were purposely not given treatment and about 100 died as a result of that.

The problem is that it is not clear at all how exactly a “conspiracy theory” that has been proven correct differs from a completely false one. A more neutral manner of defining a “conspiracy theory” perhaps would be the following: any hypotheses that try to explain an event by invoking a secret plan – usually immoral – carried out by a group of individuals (that is, a “conspiracy”). Conspiracies do exist and are, with some differences, described in criminal law also, but of course not every allegation about a conspiracy is true – and many are false.

It is widely known that in the real world, the armed forces and intelligence agencies do engage in active measures and psychological warfare (PSYWAR) by means of psychological operations (PsyOP) aimed at influencing emotions, and behavior of target groups or populations. For example, the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne), also known as CAPOC is headquartered at Fort Bragg and was founded in 1985. In 2008, a scandal broke when it came to light that many military analysts often portrayed in the US news as independent experts were in fact retired officers still under the tutelage of the Pentagon in a campaign to shape the public opinion.

One can also recall 15-year old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ’s widely publicized testimony  before the US Congressional Humans Rights Caucus on 1990. She falsely claimed that during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in a hospital, leaving them to die. She was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador and the whole speech was war propaganda and a psychological operation to justify Washington’s military incursions in Iraq, even though not going so far in this case as to employ “crisis actors” or fake videos.

As for false-flag operations, it is widely known that  Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich in 1939 fabricated evidence of a Polish attack against the III Reich so as to influence German public opinion for war with Poland. This is known as the Gleiwitz incident. In 1962, the US Department of Defense devised and proposed (but never executed) the incredibly immoral Operation Northwoods which would involve fabricating the hijacking of or even shooting down American planes and then blaming Cuba for it so as to justify war with Havana.

Agent provocateurs, false flag operations (some perhaps even involving “crisis actors”) and other such operations do exist in the real world – and they often take place in a gray area, both morally and legally. However, any allegation about it, to be taken seriously, must provide at least some evidence or clues – or else it must be seen as part of a narrative war or propaganda.

Mr. Price’s uncorroborated allegations are thus ironic on many levels: there is in fact plenty of evidence suggesting Washington and Kiev are preparing a series of provocations and false-flag events to foment war, with multiple reports about toxic chemicals being stockpiled in some Donbas villages. Provocations and false-flag events: this has been indeed the American modus operandi since at least the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident involving the USS Maddox destroyer (which led the US to engage more directly in the Vietnam War), as writes James Bamford in his 2001 book Body of Secrets.

Therefore, Price’s allegations about Russian false-flag operations should be interpreted as yet another American provocation and as part of Washington’s own psychological warfare aimed at influencing public opinion against Moscow. Ironically, such statements are given while the US, by means of its mercenaries in Ukraine, is possibly preparing its own false-flag attacks.

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