What is a 'False Flag' Attack — and Was Boston One?

During the Boston Police Department's final press conference of a confounding and deadly day, someone in the audience asked if Monday's bombing was a "false flag" attack. We can both explain and answer that question.

What is a "false flag" attack?

The term originates with naval warfare. For centuries, ships have sailed under a flag identifying their nationality. During times of war, ships would sometimes change the national flag they flew in order to fool other vessels that they sought to attack or escape from. They would fly, in other words, a "false flag." The term then expanded to mean any scenario under which a military attack was undertaken by a person or organization pretending to be something else.

Radio host Alex Jones blames shadowy globalist forces for just about every major cultural event, except, apparently, the rapid rise of Glenn Beck. That, Jones says, only happened because the Fox News host is a hack and a jerk and totally stealing Jones's act.

According to New York magazine, Beck's calls for a boycott of Google have particularly annoyed Jones. “He’s like a fiddler crab that grabbed the shell off my back and scurried over me,” complains Jones, who says he exposed the search engine as a CIA-NSA front long before Beck arrived on the scene. "It’s very, very painful to see this biological android, a complete actor, reading off teleprompters and singing and dancing around and prancing around, a fairy dancing and prancing around, using my material.”

One piece of material Beck likely won't be stealing: this new-ish video in which Jones calls Beck a government plant and a "facsimilie of what I am" designed to discredit Jones's conspiracy theories.