It is possible to take this at face value with the realization that people other than the government might see it to their advantage to implicate us in a false flag attack of some sort.

During WW2, there were often rival resistance groups in the Nazi occupied areas who would occasionally false flag an attack in a rival controlled zone in order to draw the reprisals away from their own people but onto the rival resistance groups host population. That sort of thing was very common between Communist and Nationalist resistance groups in France and Poland.

Polish Nationalist resistance groups did that a lot during the war and built up such a large resentment among the Communist sympathizers that the Nationalist resistance fighters were being murdered by Communists well into the 1950s.

You don't hear about it much in the US, but it has always been a lingering issue in Israel, especially in the late 1940s to 1980s since a lot of the non-Communist European Jews had fled Eastern Europe to escape persecution from those who had gone Communist. A lot of cold war era conflict and spy vs spy stuff goes back to that period of infighting between western sponsored resistance groups and soviet sponsored resistance groups.

False flag attacks are one reason why in many cases, the enemy of your enemy is NOT your friend either.