Accidentally like a martyr

I don't know who killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. And I'd wager a guess that you don't, either, unless you had a hand in killing him. But I would like to raise a red flag or two, about false flags, before the Tehran Express gets shunted onto the Damascus Line.

There's that claim of responsibility by the "previously unknown militant group," calling itself, according to today's Globe and Mail, "Victory and Jihad in Greater Syria." ("Greater! Why, them's a fightin' word!) It's funny how it goes: these "previously unknown" groups always seem to go for the least likely soft targets, and with dubious motives that could injure their professed causes more than aid them. Also, they tend to blow things up real good. Better than most known groups which crow about their bombings.

And there's much precedent for doubt, especially in Lebanon. We're approaching the 20th anniversary of the Beirut suburb car bomb that killed more than 80 and wounded more than 200 - mostly those ubiquitous, innocent, women and children types. The target of the March 8, 1985 blast, Shia cleric Sheikh Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, escaped unharmed. As did the perpetrator, CIA Director William Casey.

Maybe you remember the image of the "Made in USA" banner strung across the blast site. And maybe you remember reading, several months later in The Washington Post, the confirmation that the explosion was the work of US-trained intelligence operatives. And perhaps you recall Casey's confession, via Bob Woodward, that he had cooked it up with the aegis of the Saudi government.

But probably, if you're like most, you don't. That's one of the damn shames about most people.

And here's another one: most people would think "false flag" terror - state-sponsored mayhem blamed upon an adversary - to be a paranoid delusion of conspiracy theorists. That's because they don't know history. Probably because it isn't taught to them.

I've referred a few times already on this blog to Operation Gladio, and I expect I will again. So I'm happy to see a new book in English on the subject: NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, by Dr Daniele Ganser. The "Strategy of Tension," funded by the CIA, supported vicious acts of right-wing terrorism which were in turn blamed upon the European left.

As a Gladio operative said, "You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security." [And by the way, Michael Ledeen is linked to Gladio, which ties into the Italian connection to the Yellow Cake caper. I wrote about it back in August, here.]

So maybe the Assad boy, our monstre de jour, really did have the poor fellow whacked, even though Hariri had never so much as called for Syrian troops to leave his country. Or perhaps other parties, in search of a pretext against Syria, found Hariri, out of office, more valuable dead than alive.

Like I said, I don't know. But you could say I have my suspicions.