1898 February 15 - False Flag 3: The explosion and sinking of the battleship U.S.S. Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor is used to initiate the Spanish-American War thanks in large part to the propaganda issued by the Hearst media. "We could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was ... there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them." - William McKinley - (1843-1901) 25th US President - Source: 1899, on the Filipinos, following the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1898. During the invasion and occupation, U.S. forces killed an estimated 200,000 Filipino civilians. Address to the Methodist Episcopal Church; cited in Olcott, The Life of William McKinley (1916), v. 2, p. 110; estimate of civilian casualties from U.S. Library of Congress, "The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War," 1998.