Dear professor Chomsky,

you recently said in an interview that "the concept of 'false flag operation' is not a very serious one".

Apparently, then, you don't consider it "serious" that the Soviet artillery in 1939 fired the famous Mainila shots into their own territory, blamed them on the Finns and used them as a pretext to start the Winter War against Finland. Historians have for long known that this was a false-flag operation. But you don't regard it as "serious". Why not? Don't you think its consequences -- 23,000 dead Finns and 127,000 dead Russians -- were indeed serious?

Recently declassified documents show that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the legitimation for the Vietnam War, was fictional. Don't you think that 50,000 dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese is "serious"?

What about the fact that Italian terrorism trials revealed operation Gladio, a Cold War project based on a "strategy of tension" in which NATO's stay-behind armies and Western intelligence agencies promoted and assisted right-wing terrorist groups, whose attacks, killing hundreds of people in several countries, were blamed on the political left? Should you not know about this, read, e.g., historian Daniele Ganser's book "NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe" (2005) or watch the following BBC documents:
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-4900756773650110959
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=430206682910394510
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=3409375633223151728

A final example -- and one resembling 9/11: the BBC document "Dead in the Water", linked below, deals with the attack on the American intellingence vessel "USS Liberty" during the Six Day War. People have wondered for decades why President Johnson recalled the fighter jets that were sent to defend this ship against the Israeli attack. Recent research has shown that the sinking of the ship was to be blamed on Egypt, which the USA was ready to attack. The conspiracy was foiled by the appearance of a Russian spy ship to observe the attack, which caused the prolonged attack to be interrupted and allowed the vessel to limp to safety. Dozens of sailors died; the survivors were ordered to keep quiet. If the ship had sunk, many more would have died -- and not only on that ship. To me that, too, looks extremely serious.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/dead_in_the_water.shtml
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5792753647750188322&q=terror+storm

In fact, as every historian knows, most wars have been started under the pretext of some kind of a false flag operation -- or conspiracy, if you like. Dear mr Chomsky, are you really serious when you say that the concept of false-flag operation is not serious?

Sincerely,
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