Only 'Lone Wolves' Commit Terror?
by Russ Baker Recently by Russ Baker: War, Syrian-Style? Has Assad Ordered Mass Rapes?
Just before the opening of the London games, a former Olympic Committee executive declared in a New York Times interview that he had confidence in how this year’s spectacle would unfold:
As they say…some lone wolf. If that gives you chills, you aren’t alone. We’ve had enough experience to know that these statements shouldn’t be taken lightly. Nor should the underlying principle go unchallenged: that only deranged individuals provoke mayhem by design. Media reports and government statements pretty much reduce terror sponsors to two types: the “lone wolf,” and countries and entities in current ill repute. To be sure, for many, the archetype of Olympic terror is the organized attack: Palestinian Black September members taking the Israeli team hostage at the 1972 Munich games, and the bloody climax. Since then, we’ve also had our share of lone (or allegedly lone) gunmen and bombers, and of (allegedly) sponsored terror by identified enemies.
Certainly, Western countries are quick to accuse disfavored regimes, with uneven levels of accuracy, of atrocities that those regimes quickly deny. Recently, Iran has been accused of fomenting numerous acts of terror, including bombing a bus full of Israelis on vacation in Bulgaria, and unverified allegations of planned massacres and mass rapes have been effective tools in building public support for war in Libya and Syria. History has shown us, however, that acts of violence, with or without declared sponsorship, are not the exclusive province of crazy loners or renegade regimes. In fact, we know from experience that, as horrendous as it sounds, those in power have sometimes terrorized their own populace while blaming the violence on others. The reasons for this vary widely, but include justifying retributive acts abroad or domestic repression. One classic technique of creating disorder to justify subsequent repression or military action is the “false flag” attack, so named to describe a ship’s flying an enemy flag while attacking one of its own country’s vessels. The cases in which such attacks were intended to become the basis for a severe reaction could fill a book. Here are a few:
As should be clear from this list, the use of deadly “false flag” operations to gain strategic political advantage is not exclusive to regimes of any particular ideology. The lone wolves, meanwhile, are certainly out there, but they’re not all as solitary as they might appear. Reprinted from WhoWhatWhy.com. August 3, 2012 Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter. He has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Village Voice and Esquire and dozens of other major domestic and foreign publications. He has also served as a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. Baker received a 2005 Deadline Club award for his exclusive reporting on George W. Bush’s military record. He is the author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (Bloomsbury Press, 2009); it was released in paperback as Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. For more information on Russ’s work, see his sites, www.familyofsecrets.com and www.russbaker.com. Copyright © 2012 WhoWhatWhy.com
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