To what exact situation in real life are you referring to?
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Philo89 — 12 years ago(February 25, 2014 01:57 AM)
I always figure it helps to flip it around and analogize it - imagine a federal prison near the Pacific Coast of Oregon. A Chinese submarine surfaces off the coast and sends in two special ops teams. They storm the prison, shoot guards, break out two spies, and get back out again in under 30 minutes. Gone without a single piece of evidence left behind, before any local law enforcement show up.
You're the President of the United States - this lands directly on your desk. Your intelligence officers tell you it was Chinese special operations that broke their people out, while the prison officials are reporting "a group of armed men stormed the prison and left several guards dead." (They don't even know two prisoners are missing yet)
Now you have two choices:- Tell the world what happened, and declare war on China. If you are going to blame this on China, it's absolutely an act of war, and you must respond appropriately. Of course China will deny it, and you don't really have any concrete evidence to show they did it.
- Cover it up. Use whatever means you have to "steer" the investigation towards a prison riot. All you've got is a bunch of dead and injured guards and possibly prisoners. Admittedly this cover-up gets tougher when two helicopters land in the prison, but China's got tighter control over the media, too.
In case #2, you then use the fact that you used discretion instead of unleashing hellfire and damnation in proportional response to exert political pressure on the other nation to get things you might want (prisoners of your own released, most likely)
And it will live on as a conspiracy theory, and nothing more.