Today is April 19th. Today is the 20th anniversary of the dreadful end of the Waco Siege and Massacre, when Janet Reno and Bill Clinton cleared Federal agents to set fire to the Branch Davidians' compound in Waco, Texas, killing all 76 men, women and children inside.

Today is also the 18th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in downtown Oklahoma City was blown up, killing 168 people. The blast was so powerful that 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius were destroyed or damaged, 86 cars were burned, and glass shattered in 258 nearby buildings. Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death for his role in the attack, although how a 'truck bomb loaded with fertilizer' caused so much damage remains a mystery. We were told he did it to avenge the Waco massacre and oppose the Federal Government's 'gun control measures'. The Oklahoma City Bombing went down in history as a case of 'domestic terrorism' by wannabe revolutionaries, but everyone ought to know by now that that was a 'Noble' Lie.

Four days ago on April 15th 2013, Tax Day in the U.S., someone set off two shrapnel bombs at the Boston Marathon. The resulting carnage is identical to that seen in Baghdad day in, day out for 10 years. The Boston Tea Party was a key turning point in the growth of the American revolutionary movement. The annual Marathon is always held on the third Monday in April - Patriots' Day - a public holiday in Northeastern U.S. states to commemorate the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War - the Battles of Lexington and Concord - on April 19th, 1775.

What appear to be private contractors, wearing unmarked, matching uniforms and operating an unmarked SUV affixed with communication equipment near the finish line of the Boston Marathon shortly after the bomb blasts - can be seen beforehand, standing and waiting just meters away from where the first bomb was detonated.

The contractor-types had moved away from the bomb's location before it detonated, and could be seen just across the street using communication equipment and waiting for similar dressed and equipped individuals to show up after the blasts.

Image: An already widely distributed photo showing the contractor-types on the bottom left, just left of where the bomb was placed and detonated. The men are wearing matching, unmarked uniforms, large black bags, and appear to be waiting, separately, and "behind" the rest of the crowd. In the upper left corner, a wooden structure forming one half of a temporary photography "bridge" over the finish line can be seen and serves as a useful reference when establishing the contractor-types' position in other photos.

The first simulated test of a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant was a success, federal officials said on Friday of the event that was coincidentally scheduled a day after the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday.

The test's location at Three Mile Island outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania - the site of the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history - had no special significance, according to state and federal officials.

The test on Tuesday simulated an attack by a group of eight armed men, according to Peter Herrick Jr., spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In November 2011, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission required that the country's 65 nuclear power plants test their preparedness for terrorist incidents every two years.

The second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings was taken into custody Friday night, bringing to an end a massive manhunt in the tense Massachusetts capital worried by warnings the man was possibly armed with explosives.

After announcing the arrest on Twitter, Boston police tweeted: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."

Authorities confirmed the man in custody is 19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who escaped an overnight shootout with police that left his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- the other man wanted in the bombings -- dead.

The younger Tsarnaev was in serious condition, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said at a news conference. He was being treated at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, hospital spokeswoman Kelly Lawman said.

Boston bombings suspects are 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who remains at large. His brother, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnayev, was killed after a police car chase. Their family originates from Russia's North Caucasus - but settled in the United States more than a decade ago. RT talks to the mother of the two suspects Zubeidat Tsarnaeva.

Heavily armed FBI and police SWAT teams combed through Watertown, Mass. in a massive manhunt for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Video: YouTube/Scott Sassone, YouTube/David Tamang.
Authorities said they captured the 19-year-old suspect in the deadly marathon bombings late Friday after one of the biggest manhunts in U.S. history paralyzed an entire metropolis.

Police and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents converged on a house in the Boston suburb of Watertown late Friday, and took into custody Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers alleged to have exploded two homemade bombs in downtown Boston, killing three people and injuring more than 175.

Residents who have been on edge and trapped inside of their homes all day burst into applause upon hearing the news. As police pulled away from the scene where Mr. Tsarnaev had been trapped and surrounded by law enforcement for hours scores people lined the street clapping and screaming.

"We are so happy, we are relieved," said Ashot Davtian. "I feel bad for the people who lost their lives but I am happy it's over."

After the bombings that killed and maimed so horribly at the Boston Marathon, our country's politics and mass media are awash in heartfelt compassion - and reflexive "doublethink," which George Orwell described as willingness "to forget any fact that has become inconvenient."

In sync with media outlets across the country, the New York Times put a chilling headline on Wednesday's front page: "Boston Bombs Were Loaded to Maim, Officials Say." The story reported that nails and ball bearings were stuffed into pressure cookers, "rigged to shoot sharp bits of shrapnel into anyone within reach of their blast."

Much less crude and weighing in at 1,000 pounds, CBU-87/B warheads were in the category of "combined effects munitions" when put to use 14 years ago by a bomber named Uncle Sam. The U.S. media coverage was brief and fleeting.

One Friday, at noontime, U.S.-led NATO forces dropped cluster bombs on the city of Nis, in the vicinity of a vegetable market. "The bombs struck next to the hospital complex and near the market, bringing death and destruction, peppering the streets of Serbia's third-largest city with shrapnel," a dispatch in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on May 8, 1999.

And: "In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood. A dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots."

Pointing out that cluster bombs "explode in the air and hurl shards of shrapnel over a wide radius," BBC correspondent John Simpson wrote in the Sunday Telegraph: "Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of modern warfare."

In my article last February entitled "Coming to a City Near You? Assassination and Sanction Blowback," I wrote:

But there is another point that Americans need to ponder. That point is that the U.S. government's assassination program in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere and its sanctions program against Iran might well lead to "blowback" in the form of another major terrorist attack on American soil.

While it's still undetermined as to who committed the Boston Marathon bombings and why, at the top of the list of suspects has got to be people who are retaliating for what the U.S. national-security state has been doing and continues to do to people in foreign countries, including the drone assassinations, the 12-year occupation of Afghanistan, the sanctions against Iran, and the support of brutal Middle East dictatorships.

Is it all worth it? That's what Americans need to be asking themselves.

In the process of reflecting on that question, Americans need to rid themselves of the propagandistic nonsense that the U.S. national-security state has been spouting ever since 9/11 - like "The terrorists just hate us for our freedom and values" or "We're killing people over there to keep Americans safe.

This is the first part in Barrie Zwicker's 12-part series on false flags. The next installment is Maximum Illusion Time.

Everyone has seen a False Flag Operation, but few have recognized one. The classic example is 9/11, seen by millions on TV but not recognized for what it really was - a treasonous inside job.

Unlike 9/11 and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin "attack" (that never took place) and the 1933 torching of the Reichstag, the German parliament building, by Hitler (but which he blamed on "the communists") not all False Flags are both large and brazen. In this series I will try to give some idea of the dizzying array of forms that False Flags take: false flag events, false flag pseudo-events, false flag front organizations and false flag operators. You can barely open a newspaper without seeing the telltale markings of a False Flag - if you know what these markings are.

What all False Flags have in common is that they are deceptions, a category of phenomena too ambitious for this series. But I will argue that historically, materially and politically the False Flag is the most important and damaging type of deception.

The word deception and the concept it describes are familiar because of the fact, again known by everybody, that deceptions abound.

Equally important, if you stop to think about it, is that there's this well-established word, deception, that names the phenomenon. It has a well-grooved place in our neural pathways. The concept and its emotive and other nuances can be instantly retrieved when we encounter an obvious deception.

In contrast, the term False Flag is not yet widely known. No well-grooved neural pathway leads to a mental storage area.

Additionally, those familiar with the term offer similar but varying definitions of what it means. (The sizable definitional issues will be addressed later in this series.).

© AP Photo / Inset via Twitter
The Richards family home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston where 8-year-old Martin Richards (inset) lived.

Killing Americans at play resonates differently than attacks on economic and military targets.

Call it "terrorism" if a label helps you make sense of this madness. Find who did it and squash him - or them - with what President Obama called "the full weight of justice." But in the broad scheme of things, such loose ends matter less than this: Life in America changed with the Boston Marathon bombings - again, and as with past attacks, for the much worse.

The Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were knee-buckling blows that led to an obsession over domestic security and foreign wars that will mark - and mar - our generation. The last mass terrorist assault on U.S. soil was carried out by Maj. Nidal M. Hassan, an Army psychiatrist with loose connections to al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, who fatally shot 13 people and wounded 30 more at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.

There were attacks thwarted by the swelling ranks of federal police: The so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid; an attempt to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009; and an unexploded car bomb in Times Square in 2010.

Boston is another bridge too far. The Boston Marathon and its competitors reflect the best of America - always striving, forever resilient, and, as measured by population and cultural significance, enormous.

You might say it's unfair to compare Boston's relatively low death toll to 9/11 and Oklahoma City, much less to the thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the daily total of gun deaths on U.S. streets.

But the Boston attack is notable not for the number of deaths, but for its social significance. It's one thing - a dastardly, evil thing - to strike symbols of economic and military power. It's another to hit the heart of America. Death at the finish line in Boston makes every place (and everybody) less secure.