Prominent Lebanese Christian Assassinated: Myth-Busting, Pt. III

Exactly when Iraqi Prim Minister Al-Maliki was in Tehran opening up official relations between his country and Iran, which had been cut off for 25 years, the world's attention was drawn to the assassination of Pierre Gemayel, son of a former president of Lebanon, nephew of a former prime minister, a Christian. Sic Semper Tyrannis, as usual, has some of the best open analysis and comments on the subject. Obviously, this is bad for Lebanon and may very well touch off a civil war, like it was clearly intended to. US actors like Undersec of State Nick Burns and Raging Ambassador John Bolton came out to effectively and explicitly blame Hezbollah of the murder, and the Western Mainstream Media (MSM) have mostly lined up behind them like the obedient sheep-shills they are. One small problem: neither Hezbollah or Syria are responsible.

Let's play "Follow the Money." Who benefits? Israel, first off. And Israel has lots of overlap with the people who run the President of the United States (POTUS). There's your motive, enough motive to be straight out of a Godfather movie, with the trademark "Leave the gun, take the cannoli" level of calculation. The means were excellent marksmen--Gemayel's convoy was ambushed by gunfire while driving through a Christian neighborhood. The golden opportunity was Maliki eluding his Agency handlers (you bet he has them) for long enough to visit Tehran and publicly stab the US in the chest. This assassination was a classic false flag operation, and a very well-timed one.

False flag ops are ones in which you make your enemy look bad by attacking something they dislike, and which your side holds dear. They will be seen as the guilty party. Devious things like these rarely happen, except, when, you know...when it's convenient. Like in the Gleiwitz incident in 1939, when German spymaster Reinhard Heydrich fabricated evidence of a Polish attack to enlist public support for a war with Poland. Or the Mukden incident, in 1931, when Japanese officers blew up a section of railway as an excuse to invade Manchukuo (Manchuria). Back in 1962, the most rabid anti-coms (Poppy Bush amongst them) became fairly upset when JFK turned down a plan to execute Operation Northwoods, which featured Cuban exiles "hijacking" a passenger jet and flying it by remote control into a high-value building, as a means to generated public support for invading Cuba. (For more on this, see James Bamford. And of course, turning down the plan had no negative consequences for Kennedy, and all those who suggest they might have are rabid conspiracy theorists.)

I would've been less quick to lay blame in this case had the same crowd not done it within the past couple of months. The attack on the US Embassy in Syria enjoyed similarly nice pre-election timing. At killed at least two birds with one stone, with a low risk of blowback. Except Syrian police disabled the getaway car with return fire, killing three of the four gunmen who had sprayed the embassy with bullets; the fourth, they interrogated, and they learned who hired him.

Chaos can be the cheapest way of maintaining a status quo, especially when everything else you've tried is failing miserably. In this case, the false flag makes Hezbollah and Iran look bad just as they're scoring a monumental victory (resuming relations with Iraq), and stirs up real outrage against Hezbollah and Syria in Lebanon, who were walking with a swagger from kicking Israeli ass. There's a better than 50-50 chance of (yet another) civil war starting in Lebanon; if it starts, it will spill over into Syria, and that in turn will give pretext to Israel and NATO to jointly invade Syria. To establish stability, you see. And of course the first move will be to have the UN investigate the killing and stumble upon the desirable evidence.

There's a twist on the false flag operation: stage an attack on someone you dislike, repel it, and take credit for doing so. Pro-Israeli pundits put this spin onto the US embassy attack. It is true that Syria could've used this method for achieving results, but, having won the last engagement in Lebanon handily, they didn't need to. Over at the Counter Terrorism Blog they describe the technique (quite inaccurately crediting the KGB for its invention--of course it's far older), and enumerate how Syria supposedly benefitted from it. The dictum goes like this: "If the equation is to your disadvantage, create a new problem, offer to solve it, obtain recognition; and by that you'd change the equation." Nice try, but the equation in question had played very much to the recent disadvantage of Israeli and US interests; it is they who desperately wanted change, and they were perfectly willing to kill an innocent Christian ally in order to get it.