Pentagon
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The Pentagon has accused Russia of planning a false-flag provocation in order to provide a pretext for invading Ukraine. The Pentagon said such a ploy was "right out of their playbook".

By "their", it was meant to mean "Russian". But in an amusing way, the double entendre actually conveys "American", that is, "our playbook".
Because let's face it, and history proves it, nobody does false flags like the United States when it comes to creating pretexts for criminal aggression.
To select just a few short examples out of a long, sordid history, we can point to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 to launch the Spanish-American war; the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 which was used to justify ramping up the US war against Vietnam; and the deception over alleged weapons of mass destruction that enabled the Anglo-American genocidal destruction of Iraq beginning in 2003.

The pairing of the Americans and British in psy-ops is the "dream team" for the black arts of deception. When a State Department spokesman got flustered over the claims about Russia and Ukraine this week, he let it slip that British intelligence was also involved with the Americans in formulating the accusations.

The Anglo-American dream team has the necessary amoral Machiavellian imagination, as well as expertise from years of practice and the widespread "news" media control. The latter is vital for selling the false flag to the public and thereby generating acceptance of the follow-up aggression.

An honorable and rare exception to media control was seen this week when Associated Press reporter Matt Lee questioned the latest US claim about a planned Russian provocation in Ukraine. Lee simply and rightly asked for some evidence to back up the extraordinary claim. He was stonewalled and slapped back with the snide insinuation that he was siding with the Russian government.

Given the criminal history of the US and its British accomplice staging war provocations, journalists and the public have every right to demand evidence when these disreputable parties make any such claims. For such reasonable questioning to be then smeared as treasonable only illustrates the untrustworthiness of the "authorities". In short, beware, they're at it again.

Another suspicious thing about the US false flag claim this week is the ornate level of speculative detail, which was unintentionally revealing. There was no evidence provided (of course) but there was plenty of lurid detail.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and State Department claimed that Russia would produce "a very graphic propaganda video" which would include corpses and actors depicting mourners, and images of destroyed locations as well as military equipment supplied by the US and NATO to Ukraine.

Russia rejected the accusation of planning such a provocation. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed it as "nonsense".

Washington and London are literally projecting what their own intelligence agencies are adept at doing. The hypothetical atrocity scenario attributed to Russia has been played out over and over again in Syria by the United States and Britain using the so-called White Helmets group. The group has been exposed by investigative journalists like Vanessa Beeley and others for staging chemical weapons attacks that have been falsely attributed to the Syrian government. Those provocations, which include the apparent poisoning of children and other harrowing scenes, have been used as justification for US and British bombing of Syria in an attempt to overthrow Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. That covert regime-change war was defeated by Russia's legal intervention to support Damascus. Strangely enough, the White Helmets have mysteriously disappeared from Western media coverage.

But the nefarious techniques of deception authored and disseminated by the US and Britain in Syria with the White Helmets have an uncanny echo in the latest false-flag prediction for Ukraine.

The question is: why now? Why have the US and the British pushed the false-flag envelope for Ukraine this week?

It seems partly due to public fatigue from the baseless narrative of "imminent invasion" by Russia. For more than two months, the US and the Western media have been flogging the claim that Russia was going to invade Ukraine with mechanized battalions allegedly massing on the border. Two months later there is no invasion, just as Moscow has repeatedly said there wouldn't be - precisely because it has no intention of attacking its eastern neighbor. Those Western claims were themselves a sort of false-flag provocation against Russia for the purpose of driving up Cold War tensions.
The bigger purpose of that is to damage Russia's international image, justify crippling sanctions and increased NATO militarization, boost US weapons sales and to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 gas project between Russia and Europe.
The "imminent invasion" narrative hasn't panned out, as the White House indirectly admits. And so, the narrative managers are moving the props and scenery for another creative play. This one is based on claims that Russia is planning to stage an atrocity.

The wicked genius of the latter "innovation" is that it actually gives the US and its accomplices some control over the staging of a provocation as opposed to the non-event "invasion" threat. American and British intelligence operatives are on the ground in Ukraine, as are extremist Neo-Nazi brigades under their direction. It would be easy to inflict an atrocity, and then with twisted Machiavellian plotting, say the atrocity was carried out by the Russians - as predicted.

History has shown time and again that with the criminal rogue regimes in Washington and London, anything is possible, and indeed to be expected.
About the Author:
Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromising Integrity in Journalism (2019).