The sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan on 26 March was an American false flag operation aimed at creating a dispute with China to use as a pretext to raise barriers to Chinese imports, suspend interest payments on US debt held by the Chinese and force Beijing to revalue the renminbi to reduce China’s trading advantages.
Hillary Clinton, who seems to do nothing but threaten other countries, wants the international community to join with the US in punishing North Korea.
A South Korean naval boat, the Cheonan, has sunk through an explosion. The first report from the South Korean news agency Yonhap was of two items:
The South Korean navy shot at an unidentified ship in the direction of north
A ship in the same area was sinking after a possible torpedo attack
Subsequently, a naval spokesmen said:
The Cheonan had sunk with loss of 46 lives,
North Korea was not involved; it had no ships in the area,
Another South Korean ship had fired shells at a flock of birds that it had thought to be a North Korean ship that had torpedoed the Cheonan.
One might well imagine that the second South Korean ship, the Cheonan’s sister ship, the Sokcho, had fired on and sunk the Cheonan. This gunfire by the Sokcho is very curious. Did the Sokcho fire a torpedo at what it imagined to be an enemy ship?
There are reports that a joint South Korean-American naval exercise was in progress at that time. Is this the case? Where were the American ships or submarines? There are also reports that early internet items and photographs have been censored by the government.
The timing of the Sokcho’s gunfire has not been made known relative to the explosion that sank the Cheonan. The Cheonan explosion is precisely timed at 9:21:58 p.m. by the South Korean Geophysical Institute which detected the shock waves but the navy kept changing its time between 9:22 and 9:45 for several days. Can the time of the Sokcho’s gunfire be independently confirmed? It seems extraordinary that the Sokcho opened fire on an unidentified target.
There are some on-line images of the Cheonan sinking but not of the explosion. The images are apparently from an automatic infra-red coastal monitoring video so it is not clear why this is the case. The government says that other images are not helpful and has not released them.
For some weeks speculation centred on the possibility of the Cheonan striking a mine from previous conflicts while not ruling out a North Korean attack. The US then produced some well-corroded junk from a torpedo that looks as if it has been in the sea for a year or more. Photographs show the edges of the alloy propellers scalloped with corrosion.
From a single Korean character on a piece of metal the US has accused North Korea of sinking the Cheonan.”We will recall the lies about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear programme, chemical and biological weapons and mobile chemical factories in justification of the Iraq war that killed one million persons and created four to five million refugees.”
Explosive residues found on the Cheonan when it was raised, are of German origin. How this relates to a North Korean torpedo or one of Russian or Chinese origin is not clear.
Now, the United States is in command of South Korea’s armed forces – as it is NATO. Any information that we are given by the military is what the US wants us to have, and we have experience of this.
We currently hear a stream of accusations that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme, contrary to the views of the US’s own security services and without foundation in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspection reports. As in the case of the CIA coup against the Mossadeq government, the US is attempting to justify invasion and seizure of the Iranian oilfields. There’s worse.
In 1962 the US Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared plans for “Operation Northwoods” or “‘The Cuba Project” as a pretext for the invasion of Cuba. Documentation is in the National Security Archive at George Washinton University.
This was a false flag operation that proposed, among other things, planting plastic bombs on the US mainland, shooting anti-Castro Cubans in Florida, sinking a boatload of Cubans and using a US aircraft disguised as a Soviet fighter, to shoot down an airliner flying from the US over Cuba.
For the last, “The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons…” This plan was presented to the White House but was not implemented.
It demonstrates US thinking, however.”There can be no doubt that the United States government is perfectly willing to undertake false flag operations as well as other practices such as aggressive warfare, kidnapping, torture, assassination, killing on the word of informers, imprisonment without charge, false evidence, hiding evidence, destruction of evidence – the list is endless.”
Immediately prior to the Iraq war, George Bush proposed to create an incident by flying a US aircraft disguised as a UN aircraft either in the hope of the Iraqis shooting it down or for the US itself to shoot it down as a cause for war against Saddam. In a rare outbreak of conscience or failure of nerve, Anthony Blair allegedly dissuaded Bush from this.
There can be no doubt that the United States government is perfectly willing to undertake false flag operations as well as other practices such as aggressive warfare, kidnapping, torture, assassination, killing on the word of informers, imprisonment without charge, false evidence, hiding evidence, destruction of evidence – the list is endless. It is now impossible to think of an illegal practice that the US government does not undertake.
An interesting departure from the US originating death and destruction is a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine. The opinion of the security printing industry is that for many years the CIA has been printing US dollars at a location in the US and using them to finance its operations.
The banknotes are considered by the industry to be of such high quality that countries such as North Korea, that the US has from time to time accused of printing them, would not have the capability. North Korea evidently does not have the ability to print its own currency. We should probably add international forgery to the US’s crimes.
The Cheonan sinking is probably aimed at putting pressure on China to take action that it does not wish to take. The US would like a serious dispute with China in order to:
1. Raise barriers to Chinese imports in order to revive manufacturing in the US.
2. Suspend interest payments on US debt held by the Chinese.
3. Force the Chinese to revalue the renminbi to reduce China’s trading advantages.
As I have explained in the article “The mystery of the Afghanistan war”, the US economy is in terminal decline. The US strategic response is to:
1. Dominate Europe through its military bases and NATO, both to parasitize its economy and prevent European economic integration with Russia.
2. By creating disputes, recover value-added jobs from Asia and in particular, China.
3. Seize the Middle Eastern oilfields in order to monopolize the world’s major sources of exportable energy.
The US ideal is a new cold war situation in which Russia and China are economically “contained”.
There is no good reason for North Korea to attack and sink a South Korean ship. It has been speculated that this has been done to “get attention”. This is out of character and the wrong sort of attention. The North Koreans like demonstrations such as a rocket or nuclear test that show that they are dangerous but do no actual harm.
It demonstrates that they have something to bargain with in order to get benefits, for example oil or food, both of which they need. Sinking the Cheonan is not a bargaining move. It cannot possibly lead to any benefit. For this reason and because of America’s proven record of lies and willingness to undertake false flag operations, even involving deaths, it is most likely that the Americans, not the North Koreans, sank the Cheonan. The American economy is in desperate straits and American militarism reflects this.
The US is clearly engaged in a programme of using the United Nations in order to further its own political and economic objectives, initially centred on the Middle Eastern oilfields but also involving Europe, Russia and China. Its actions only make sense if viewed within a strategic framework of what benefits the United States, not its fictions that it is fostering democracy, acting as world policeman or fighting terrorism. The United States itself, with its foreign bases, armies and the CIA, is the world terrorist.
Japan has found that it cannot get the US Futenma base moved off Okinawa. Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway and Belgium have asked the US to remove its nuclear weapons from Europe. The US has refused this, saying that it is a NATO matter, not one for individual countries.
As it happens, South Koreans do not regard the North to be the enemies that the US does. They consider themselves to be one fraternal country and want unification as East and West Germany did. Some of us can remember the trouble that the open border caused the Walter Ulbricht regime. If you do not know who he was do not bother looking him up. He was merely a lackey, now best forgotten, as Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton will be.
By Christopher King
2 June 2010