The Black Flower

The Black Flower is unique among the concepts listed here in that is has no verifiable sources. It is a policy initiative which is rumoured to have been created by the CIA and further rumoured to be now commonplace among western intelligence agencies. The Black Flower is designed primarily to counteract the greater transparency which has resulted from the growth of the world wide web.

So why am I including a concept which might well be nothing more than the delusional creation of conspiracy theorists? Well, because The Black Flower is indeed an interesting concept, one which, even if it isn’t in use now, will surely be used at some point or in some form in the coming years.

The thinking is as follows. The power of governments in the past has been heavily dependent upon the restriction of information. If a government or, more specifically, a government agency such as the CIA, wanted to carry out operations without public interference, the relevant information could simply be withheld from the media and the population beyond. The emergence of the world wide web naturally threatened this status quo and suddenly it was almost impossible to control the flow of information.

As a result, The Black Flower was developed as a project which would search for anything indicating a leak and then swamp the web with spurious material on a similar theme. The truth would still be in plain sight, but rendered useless to anyone who lacked the specific knowledge to separate it from the white noise created by the intelligence agencies.

The theory of The Black Flower came into its own with 9/11. One conspiracy website, The Zero Commission, now defunct, went as far as to suggest that many of the conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks had been part of the Black Flower operation, using a wall of chatter to cover up inconsistencies in the official accounts.

To give a fictional account of how that would work, let’s imagine shortly after the attacks, stories emerge pointing to the possibility that the WTC had been rigged with explosives. There could be a rational explanation for this – perhaps after the first attack on the WTC (the truck bomb) the authorities concluded that the buildings should be rigged to allow controlled demolition rather than a devastating “topple” in the event of another attack. On the morning itself, someone is forced to come to the devastating conclusion that the buildings have to be brought down rather than risk them toppling and taking out a swathe of Manhattan. Naturally, that hugely difficult decision cannot be made public, but rumours start circulating quickly that there were a series of controlled explosions. It’s vital these stories are quashed, but the easiest way to do that is to surround them with white noise. Operation Black Flower swings into action, releasing stories on the net about the planes having no logos, about missiles, about the complete absence of a plane at the Pentagon, and soon enough the public has lost the original inconsistency in a sea of delusional fantasies.

Of course, it’s impossible to say how close The Black Flower comes to real operational policy, let alone whether there is a project going by that name. But what can be said categorically is that the web is already being used as an instrument of warfare (not least by Al Qaeda) and the western intelligence agencies will need to consider a Black Flower strategy at some point in the future, even if they aren’t using it now, because intelligence work is all about the control of information and the web weakens the levers of control.

And finally, it’s worth pointing out that some conspiracy theorists claim our inability to verify the existence of The Black Flower is in fact proof of the project’s greatest success so far – but then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

(coming next - school's out)