The Pentagon's Secret Wars: You Don't Have the Right to Know
This is a reprint from last year, just to emphasize that the U.S. is being run by oligarch and not by a representative democracy.
Do the American people have the right to know the nations with which the United States is at war? The Defense Department says no. When asked by senators to identify the groups being fought, the Pentagon said it’s a secret. The Pentagon did hand over a list of forces associated with al-Qaeda, but members of Congress who received the list were forbidden from sharing it with the public. ProPublica — an investigative news organization — contacted the office of Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and requested a copy of the enemies roster. Levin’s representatives refused.
Why such secrecy? Defense Department spokesmen say it’s a national security exigency. “Because elements that might be considered ‘associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory, said, as reported by ProPublica. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.” Jack Goldsmith of Harvard University Law School disagrees. Goldsmith told ProPublica, “If the organizations are ‘inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” He believes there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name." The New American recently reported that President Barack Obama is rapidly expanding the borders of the undeclared wars he’s waging in the name of the United States. Presumably, based on the president’s own prior statements, all the people being targeted by the vast Predator and Reaper drone fleets deployed worldwide are members of “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces.” It’s the identity of these “associated forces” that is behind the belligerence boom. Unless, of course, the “guilt by association” standard is for show and the current and former administrations will drop bombs wherever they want and then retroactively assign the requisite affiliation to the victims. In a study entitled “How Many Wars Is the U.S. Fighting Today?” Harvard professor Linda Bilmes and Michael Intriligator of UCLA estimate that the United States government is fighting at least five “unannounced and undeclared” wars around the world. The paper reports that these unconstitutional combat operations represent a “tradition of many previous covert US military incursions,” such as those carried out in past decades in Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and others. With the advancement in drone technology, the government is able to be “involved in more conflicts worldwide.” And the evidence is that the Obama administration is taking full advantage of those capabilities. The paper reported: Today US military operations are involved in scores of countries across all the five continents. The US military is the world’s largest landlord, with significant military facilities in nations around the world, and with a significant presence in Bahrain, Djibouti, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Kyrgyzstan, in addition to long-established bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the UK. That list, of course, does not include the less well defined “military presence” in Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Add to that the following summary of the combat operations published by Global Research: Many smaller US military operations in Africa and the Middle East are increasingly utilizing drones. Former US Africa Command (AFRICOM) commander General Carter Ham stated in February that his forces required a 15-fold increase in surveillance and reconnaissance capacities for the continent. US Air Force drones have already been flying sorties across North Africa, and the US already operates drone bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia and the Seychelles. As part of “Operation Nomad Shadow,” a secret US military surveillance program, the US military is currently launching drones from the Incirlik air base in Turkey to provide surveillance for the Turkish military in its campaign against the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The drones fly into northern Iraq to gather data, which is then transmitted to a “fusion cell” in Ankara for analysis. If presented with this information, would President Obama claim that he has approved military activity in all these areas because there are active cells of al-Qaeda or its associates? Or, alternatively, is the “War on Terror” simply an attractive curtain behind which the wizards in Washington carry out their imperialistic agenda, an agenda that has nothing to do with fighting terror, protecting national security, or promoting democracy and everything to do with expanding the reach of the cadre of covert monied interests that see every new war as a new revenue stream and the citizens of countries involved in the conflict as potential debtors. |
Not One Terrorist in a Hundred…a Thousand…is Real”…. Amendment II to the U.S. Constitution A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. A major obstacle to the completion of the American Union is the fact that we have the right to private ownership of firearms. No dictator has ever taken control of his country without first confiscating the citizens guns. The Elite know this, so they have created the organization called "The Department of Homeland Security", which was formed with the expressed purpose of defending this nation against terrorist attacks from the outside. In reality, this is the beginning of a "police state", which will be used to "handle" the militias that will protest the confiscation of firearms owned by Americans. Every time that a firearm is used in an incident, the mainstream news media, and several members of Congress, such as Senator Dianne Feinstein (BB & TC), demand that we have much more restrictive control of weapons. Will we find out twenty years from now that the "DC-Area Sniper" was actually a member of one of the CIA's black-operations organizations, or was under CIA mind control as he shot his victims? There is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was under CIA mind control when he (allegedly) bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City.
Gladio Killers – They Still Walk Among Us (EDITOR’S NOTE: Wikipedia’s report on Operation Gladio is reproduced below. This is a threatened document, an important part of our history. Help preserve it.)
Lee Wanta next to Alexander Hamilton at the U.S. Treasury Reagan Era To Be Declassifiedby Gordon Duff, Senior Editor
Something unusual has happened. An era is going to be uncovered, a time of BCCI, Iran Contra, the fall of the Soviet Union, one of corruption and triumph. What we know is this, the files are being opened and interviews never before authorized are scheduled. More curious, perhaps the most curious of all, the FBI is notifying former intelligence agents and officials that the project has the official ‘green light.’ The fist interviews and, perhaps the first book, will outline relations between President Reagan and Emil Lee Wanta, letting a few into the dream world of White House insiders. I have had my perceptions of Reagan shattered more than once. The official cover story, the myth sold by the Bush clan, that Reagan came into office, was almost immediately gunned down and for the next 8 years, George H. W. Bush was “defacto” president while Reagan remained a “doddering fool.” I spent an evening going over notes with Lee. His memory of the period is volumes, much of which isn’t going to be of interest to many. While White House intelligence coordinator, Wanta worked in a grey environment of jockeying for influence, internal strife and one thing he makes clear:
One of Reagan's Best Lines Of the issues which have current standing, Libya will be high on the list, for awhile at least. Tony Blair is doing the rounds in Tripoli today for JP Morgan, the Rothschild partner that worked so closely with Gaddafi on his plans to put together a series of Banks based on the African Union. The deals offered, if things go as expected, will be intended to impact the new Libya as they did the old, bleeding the majority of oil cash into private accounts and leaving a pittance for the people. This was Gaddafi’s policy and it may well be the policy of the new government as well, if writers like Franklin Lamb are right. During talks with Wanta I was able to verify some issues involving Gaddafi. Gaddafi was placed in office in 1969 by the CIA as personal protege of Director Richard Helms. Helms admired Gaddafi greatly and valued the relationship between the US and Libya as one of the most critical and strategic for America during that vital period. The cover stories, that rogue CIA agents were training IRA terrorists in Libya got a laugh out of Wanta. ————–
Filling out the history of the Reagan era, in particular, the project to “crash the ruble,” the financial trading scheme run by Wanta through the Department of Treasury that netted trillions in assets that Reagan intended to be spent paying off the national debt, as Wanta relates. In actuality, it was much more than that, with Treasury getting control of $23 trillion dollars leaving $4.3 trillion to Wanta’s companies. This would all sound imaginary if it weren’t for the court filings backing it all up and the arrests, Wanta in particular, and murders surrounding the disposition of these funds, which represent the combined assets of the American people. The money exists, has existed, enough to erase our national debt. The concept of Wanta’s own funds, seized by the Federal Reserve, $4.3 trillion dollars less $1.7 trillion in taxes owed, immediately put into the “General Fund” is frightening to some. This kind of money is unimaginable power, particularly in the hands of someone jailed for failing to be adequately dishonest. Wanta, a devout Catholic, lay clergy, is a simple working class kid from Milwaukee, one who has shunned the trappings of wealth though he, at one time, controlled the greatest fortune in the history of our beleaguered planet. Leo E. Wanta - Signed by Ronald Reagan Sometimes we review accounts and where they have gone, some in billions, the names of powerful political families known to all are tied to the looting of these accounts, some names predictable, some surprising. Most embarrassing are bank security photographs of high ranking government officials, cabinet officers, looting bank accounts held in trust for the American people. All of the money involved, taxpayer funds, all belonging to the American people, more than enough to fund a high speed rail system for America or housing for a century of homeless veterans. Ah, but back to Libya and the “teaser” Wanta left me: “I had some familiarity with Gaddafi during the late 70s and early 80s. I had, by 1982, been able to confirm that our “hostility” toward Gaddafi was a CIA deception plan tied to his usefulness in assisting operations around the world, much as with Osama bin Laden.”
Then again, Ambassador Mark Siljander, a Reagan favorite, friend of Baker and Edwin Meese indicted by the Bush administration under circumstances, were allowed to mention them as incredulous. Steve Rosen - Weissman - AIPAC The indictment of Steve Rosen, former head of the Rand Corporation, member of the Bush/Rice National Security Council arrested for spying for Israel. News reports fail to mention Rosen’s position as top Bush advisor on the Middle East but, instead, mention his later employment with AIPAC, the Israeli lobby. Rosen sued AIPAC for firing him, they claimed they couldn’t have an “accused spy’ working for them.
Rosen’s case was dropped and investigations against other Bush advisors, in fact ALL Bush advisors were dropped after a 3 year FBI “sting” operation that included wiretapping the White House. “Play by play” of the tapes included, among other things, passing on nuclear secrets, done by people currently, not only ‘free as birds’ but chirping to the news every day. Moreover, dozens of hours of FBI transcripts cover sexual liaisons of what is typically termed an “unnatural” nature, described in punishing detail and tedious repetition.
But we still aren’t getting to that “teaser” on Libya. How do I say this? MK Ultra - Survivors Conference According to Trowbridge Ford, Reagan was told by his vice president, George H.W. Bush that John Hinckley, the man who tried to murder him 69 days into office, the most obvious CIA “MKUlta” case we know of, was working for Gaddafi. Ford has put some top level intelligence on Veterans Today but this just didn’t jell. Hinckley’s family was directly tied to Bush. They were family friends. I saw nothing that could have tied Gaddafi to this. Ford went on further stating that Gaddafi planned and executed the Berlin club bombings at the behest of the Soviet Union and, in return, suffered a devastating air attack at the hands of the United States, the 1986 bombing of Tripoli. I am now told that all the groups Gaddafi was said to control, the IRA or a group pretending to be “IRA,” the Red Brigades and others had been working for NATO all along as part of the Gladio program, the whole thing was a NATO “cover and deception” program, an integral part of the Cold War. Thus, the “retaliation” against Gaddafi was nothing more than theatre as were other incidents of pretended confrontation with the long term CIA asset, as previously stated, a strong parallel to Osama bin Laden. The CIA’s version of events is different, more than a bit. Operation Gladio - Taxpayer Funded Terror The “disco bombings” were not Gaddafi but rather “P2/Gladio” operations, part of a series of bombings that began in 1969 and went on into the 1990s. The reason for the attack on Libya is classified, not “up for grabs,” not yet anyway. I will keep working on that but, rather than simply invent something, best tell you that I just don’t know. What I do know is this: The 1986 bombing of Tripoli that supposedly killed “Gaddafi’s daughter,” a subject of much conjecture, was planned between the Reagan administration and Gaddafi. Gaddafi agreed to the bombing to provide him with “needed cover and credibility.” The operation began with the landing of Special Forces personnel in Tripoli. They secured the Gaddafi family and arranged for “selected targets.” Those included the communications antenna arrays near the Gaddafi compound, army barracks and an air field. All targets were “painted” by American Special Forces personnel on the ground working with Libyan permission. One American plane was lost due to mechanical failure. The results? Gaddafi in Italy - Gladio Operations Framed Communists Gaddafi claimed a great victory over the United States. He fired two SCUD missiles at Italy and America continued to blame Gaddafi for terrorism that had nothing to do with him, he continued to be the “front man” for false flag terrorism much as Osama bin Laden was blamed for attacks in Africa and on 9/11 though we were able to confirm that he was on the CIA payroll at the time. Was Gaddafi ever under total NATO control? Was he ever a full ally of Israel, a nation he worked closely with on WMD programs? Why was Libya given so much latitude in keeping its WMD programs alive if all this weren’t true? Some of the key elements, proof if you choose to accept it, came out recently when former Bush special envoy, David Welch, met with Gaddafi representatives in Cairo, at the Four Seasons Hotel, on August 11, 2011.
They May Want Him but Will They Get Him ? The real discussions, taking into account that Gaddafi was “dead meat” politically, involved the disposition of his billions spread across the banks of Europe, the United States and his defense holdings, partnered with the Bush family. We still know little about Gaddafi. Was he really working for an independent Africa, free of western financial machinations or acting as a ‘front man’ for Rothschild interests in Africa? That is never going to be known. We do know the banks he proposed would never have worked, the currency he wanted to put in place, a ‘pan-African’ replacement for the dollar and euro were not supportable with Libya’s tiny gold reserves. We also know his partners in the African Union to be among the most corrupt politicians in Africa. Was his attempt still, taking on what could never be done, still an honest effort? Will we ever understand Gaddafi, who to this day may well be alive and, under some circumstances, still have a role to play? Will Gaddafi ever admit his position during the Cold War, was he a CIA asset of simply “playing the grand game” of East v. West? The original article was written several years ago. Since that time, Gladio units have reappeared in Norway with the Anders Breivik/Norwegian Police slaying of 77 and have become active across Europe under the guise of the anti-Islamic and ultra-nationalist banners. America used Libya, during part of the Cold War, as a base for Gladio operations. American special operations forces stationed there to be activated if Europe fell to a Soviet onslaught were said to be IRA terrorists undergoing training by Libyans. If one stops and thinks, the idea of a Libyan training the IRA in bomb making had to seem more than a bit ironic.
How many Americans have heard of Operation Gladio? Many ask, how could simple Arabs or even Israel, put together an organization capable of 9/11? If, as 78% of Australians indicate in a recent Herald Sun poll, America planned 9/11 herself, how did a democracy lose its way? How did America’s intelligence and defense groups become terrorists? When did it happen and why? The answer isn’t simple, it started decades ago, when the world was at the edge of obliteration and two systems, or what we then believed were systems, fought for the hearts and minds of the world. Today, all that sounds childish. A mature look at the Cold War looks more like two rats fighting over a corpse. Then, however, some saw it as “light and dark,” clear as that. Many believed the Soviet Union would drive its tanks through Europe like a knife through hot butter. To fight this “eventuality,” NATO built a terrorist organization of massive proportions. The remaining cells of Operation Gladio, one of the greatest disasters of military ignorance in history, are busy today. We call some of them “Al Qaeda.”
______________________ WHERE THE DAMAGE HAS LEFT US, LESS FREE, MAYBE NOT FREE, NOT INDEPENDENT AT ALL This week, in light of failing relations with Israel over unresolved “Bush era” issues, 9/11, Israel’s role in manipulating America into two illegal wars and the despicable propaganda campaign they have run against the United States in her own press, something unheard of happened. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met with GOP leaders, extracting a promise that they would agree to work with Israel against the interests of the United States.
They are either the worst friend imaginable or something else. Many are coming to realize that America has been occupied by Israel. When Netanyahu met with his Republicans it was because President Obama, much like Karzai in Afghanistan, is simply getting sick of them as Karzai is sick of the American occupation of Afghanistan. There is a reason that dual citizens control Homeland Security, the FBI, the State Department and Department of Defense. Oh, you didn’t know that most of the key officials of those organizations are Israeli citizens? The news didn’t tell you? Well, in an occupied country, the “occupier” controls the news. ______________________ THOSE WHO CLAIM TO SAVE US TURN OUT TO BE THE THREAT ITSELF Michael Chertoff These organizations are controlled so that any resistance will be crushed immediately. I am not one to talk about FEMA camps and black helicopters but Jesse Ventura seems to be right. Our most recent proof is the Yemen bomb scam. No bombs were found. There is no Al Qaeda in Yemen, in fact there is no Al Qaeda, no matter how much you hear the word, which means, of course, “toilet.” Former Homeland Security director, Chertoff, (Israeli) is raking in millions selling scanners which, other than being another humiliation, may well be dangerous. When is the last time you heard of a bomb being found by TSA (Transportation Security Administration) officers? The last time a bomb came into the US, the “terrorist” was personally seated on the plane by an airport security official working for an Israeli company. He was walked around inspections. Why search anyone at all under circumstances like that? The same company manages most of America’s airports too. Have we lost our minds here?
__________________________ BRITAIN AND THE MURDER OF DAVID KELLY Today, if you read the Daily Mail, the Thames Valley Constabulary, after several years, has decided to open a murder inquiry on the “suicide” of Dr. David Kelly, the expert who told Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. For years, “backchannel” chatter has been that Kelly’s murder was ordered at the highest levels of government, not just Britain but America as well. More importantly, Kelly was personally involved in the Israeli/South African nuclear program and its dismantlement.
Dr. David Kelly Kelly’s murder is one of the thousands of war crimes tied to the phony war on terror. Every tape released, featuring long dead Osama bin Laden is a war crime as are the very suspicious bombings in Pakistan, the very suspicious Mumbai attack and the 7/7 “incident” in Britain that the “organs of state security” are working so hard to cover up to this day. In fact, there is a long history of bombings, Madrid, further back, Berlin or those in Italy during the 80s. All are easily tied to intelligence agencies and, frankly, have been by newspapers, politicians. Here at home, it was more than CIA agent Valerie Plame who was attacked. A good friend and former UN Ambassador, a Middle East briefer for President’s Reagan and Bush/Bush, did the same thing as Kelly. He went to President Bush and revealed that the intelligence that was being presented was false. He wasn’t killed. Instead he was arrested, charged with dozens of fanciful counts of working for terrorist organizations.
_______________________ GLADIO, THE LIVING PROOF THERE IS NO AL QAEDA, NO WAR ON TERROR “We have met the enemy, and they are us.” In order to fight communism, NATO organized through its intelligence agencies, ‘stay behind’ terrorist capabilities in case Western Europe would fall to the communists. Hundreds of millions were spent to set up, in every country of Europe, terrorist organizations, bomb making factories in basements, underground organizations, terror cells. This was done under what was called Operation Gladio. These terror organizations were used, from time to time, to simulate threats. They kidnapped officials, blew up trains and cafe’s, they became a real terrorist threat. The newspapers don’t like reporting this but it is not only true but extremely well documented. As Wikipedia has now come under threat, the extensive section of GLADIO will be reproduced in this article. It should be saved. Nearly everything we claim the PLO and other organizations were responsible for, including and especially Al Qaeda, has been the work of the GLADIO “stay behind” networks which were never totally broken up after the Cold War. GLADIO is Al Qaeda. Everything that is claimed to be Osama bin Laden and the imaginary Taliban training camps, people who have trouble keeping camels alive, was financed by NATO as part of the Cold War and left to take on a life of itself, morphing into a terrorist capability that no one wants to give up, no matter what kind of threat it is capable of.
Editing: Jim W. Dean ———————————————— Operation GladioFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Emblem of “Gladio”, Italian branch of the NATO “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations. The motto means “In silence I preserve freedom”. Gladio (Italian for Gladius, the sword is a type of Roman short sword) is a code name denoting the clandestine NATO “stay-behind” operation in Italy after World War II, intended to continue anti-communist actions in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion of Western Europe. Although Gladio specifically refers to the Italian branch of the NATO stay-behind organisations, “Operation Gladio” is used as an informal name for all stay-behind organisations, sometimes called “Super NATO”.[1] Operating in many NATO and even some neutral countries,[2] Gladio was part of a series of national operations first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official withdrawal from NATO’s Military Committee in 1966 — which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements. The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during the Cold War era, and its relationship to right-wing terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.[3] Contents Origins The origin of Gladio can be traced to the so-called “secret anti-Communist NATO protocols”, which were allegedly protocols committing the secret services of NATO member states to work to prevent Communist parties from coming to power in Western Europe. According to the Italian researcher Mario Coglitore, the protocols required member states to guarantee alignment with the Western block “by any means”. According to a US journalist Arthur Rowse, a secret clause exists in the North Atlantic Treaty requiring candidate countries, before joining NATO, to establish clandestine citizen cadres standing ready to eliminate communist cells during any national emergency. These clandestine cadres were to be controlled by the county’s respective security services.[4] General stay-behind structure Emblem of NATO’s “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations. After World War II, the UK and the US decided to create “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations, with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion through sabotage and guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines. Arms caches were hidden, escape routes prepared, and loyal members recruited: i.e., mainly hardline anticommunists, including many ex-Nazis or former fascists, whether in Italy or in other European countries. In Germany, for example, Gladio had as a central focus the Gehlen Org — also involved in ODESSA “ratlines” — named after Reinhard Gehlen who would become West Germany’s first head of intelligence, while the predominantly Italian P2 masonic lodge was composed of many members of the neofascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), including Licio Gelli. Its clandestine “cells” were to stay behind (hence the name) in enemy controlled territory and to act as resistance movements, conducting sabotage, guerrilla warfare and assassinations. However, Italian Gladio was more far reaching. “A briefing minute of June 1, 1959, reveals Gladio was built around ‘internal subversion’. It was to play ‘a determining role… not only on the general policy level of warfare, but also in the politics of emergency’. In the 1970s, with communist electoral support growing and other leftists looking menacing, the establishment turned to the ‘Strategy of Tension’ … with Gladio eager to be involved.”[5] CIA director Allen Dulles was one of the key people in instituting Operation Gladio, and most of Gladio’s operations were financed by the CIA.[citation needed] The anti-communist networks, which were present in all of Europe, including in neutral countries like Sweden and Switzerland, were partly funded by the CIA.[6] Some went as far as claiming that Democrazia Cristiana leader Aldo Moro had been the “founder of (Italian) Gladio”.[7] However, whether these allegations are correct or not, his murder in 1978 put an end to the “historic compromise” (sharing of power) attempt between the PCI and the Christian Democrats (DC), thus accomplishing one of the alleged objectives of the strategy of tension. Operating in all of NATO and even in some neutral countries such as Spain before its 1982 admission to NATO, Gladio was first coordinated by the Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the “Clandestine Planning Committee” (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by the SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official retreat from NATO — which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements. Ganser alleges that:[4] Next to the CPC, a second secret army command center, labeled Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC), was set up in 1957 on the orders of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR). This military structure provided for significant US leverage over the secret stay-behind networks in Western Europe as the SACEUR, throughout NATO’s history, has traditionally been a US General who reports to the Pentagon in Washington and is based in NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium. The ACC’s duties included elaborating on the directives of the network, developing its clandestine capability, and organizing bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE. According to former CIA director William Colby, it was ‘a major program’. Coordinated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), {the secret armies} were run by the European military secret services in close cooperation with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British foreign secret service Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also MI6). Trained together with US Green Berets and British Special Air Service (SAS), these clandestine NATO soldiers, armed with underground arms-caches, prepared against a potential Soviet invasion and occupation of Western Europe, as well as the coming to power of communist parties. The clandestine international network covered the European NATO membership, including Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, as well as the neutral European countries of Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland. The existence of these clandestine NATO armies remained a closely guarded secret throughout the Cold War until 1990, when the first branch of the international network was discovered in Italy. It was code-named Gladio, the Latin word for a short double-edged sword [gladius]. While the press said that the NATO secret armies were ‘the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II’, the Italian government, amidst sharp public criticism, promised to close down the secret army. Italy insisted identical clandestine armies had also existed in all other countries of Western Europe. This allegation proved correct and subsequent research found that in Belgium, the secret NATO army was code-named SDRA8, in Denmark Absalon, in Germany TD BJD, in Greece LOK, in Luxemburg Stay-Behind, in the Netherlands I&O, in Norway ROC, in Portugal Aginter, in Switzerland P26, in Turkey Ozel Harp Dairesi, In Sweden AGAG (Aktions Gruppen Arla Gryning, and in Austria OWSGV. However, the code names of the secret armies in France, Finland and Spain remain unknown. Upon learning of the discovery, the parliament of the European Union (EU) drafted a resolution sharply criticizing the fact (…) Yet only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried out parliamentary investigations, while the administration of President George H. W. Bush refused to comment, being in the midst of preparations for war against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf, and fearing potential damages to the military alliance. If Gladio was effectively “the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II”,[8] it must be underlined, however, that on several occasions, arms caches were discovered and stay-behind paramilitary organizations officially dissolved – only to be created again. But it was not until the 1990s that the full international scope of the program was disclosed to public knowledge. Giulio Andreotti, the main character of Italy’s post-World War II political life, was described by Aldo Moro to his captors as “too close to NATO”, Moro thus advising them to be wary. Indeed, before Andreotti’s 1990 acknowledgement of Gladio’s existence, he had “unequivocally” denied it in 1974, and then in 1978 to judges investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. And even in 1990, “Testimonies collected by the two men [judges Felice Casson and Carlo Mastelloni investigating the 1972 Peteano fascist car bomb] and by the Commission on Terrorism on Rome, and inquiries by the Guardian, indicate that Gladio was involved in activities which do not square with Andreotti’s account. Links between Gladio, Italian secret services bosses and the notorious P2 masonic lodge are manifold (…) In the year that Andreotti denied Gladio’s existence, the P2 treasurer, General Siro Rosetti, gave a generous account of ‘a secret security structure made up of civilians, parallel to the armed forces’ There are also overlaps between senior Gladio personnel and the committee of military men, Rosa dei Venti (Wind Rose), which tried to stage a coup in 1970.”[5] European Parliament resolution concerning Gladio Wikisource has original text related to this article:European Parliament resolution on Gladio On November 22, 1990, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Gladio, requesting full investigations – which have yet to be done – and total dismantlement of these paramilitary structures. In 2005,the first academic examination of Gladio was published by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser, as of 2010, is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, is a documented study of how Gladio oeprated. British journalist Philip Willan, who by 2010 writes for the UK Guardian and UK Observer, is the author of the book Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, describing how US intelligence services relationship with a masonic lodge used to prop up Christian Democrat governments , undermining the growing political influence of the Italian Communist Party. The 1990 European resolution condemned “the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence” as well as “armed operations organization in several Member States of the Community”, which “escaped all democratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO.” Denouncing the “danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so,” especially before the fact that “in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime,” the Parliament demanded a “a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organizations or any splinter groups, their use for illegal interference in the internal political affairs of the countries concerned, the problem of terrorism in Europe and the possible collusion of the secret services of Member States or third countries.” Furthermore, the resolution protested “vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network,” asking “the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks” and to “draw up a complete list of organizations active in this field, and at the same time to monitor their links with the respective state intelligence services and their links, if any, with terrorist action groups and/or other illegal practices.” Finally, the Parliament called “on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the ‘Gladio’ organization and any similar bodies,” and instructed “its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Secretary-General of NATO, the governments of the Member States and the United States Government.” Allegations The first academic examination of Gladio was published in 2005 by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser is currently a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Gladio has been accused of trying to influence policies through the means of “false flag” operations: a 2000 Italian Parliamentary Commission report from the Olive Tree left-wing coalition concluded that the strategy of tension used by Gladio had been supported by the United States to “stop the PCI (Italian Communist Party), and to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching executive power in the country”. Propaganda Due (also known as P2), a quasi-freemasonic organization, whose existence was discovered in 1981, was said closely linked to Gladio. P2 was outlawed and disbanded in 1981, in the wake of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which was linked to the Mafia and to the Vatican Bank. Its Grand Master, Licio Gelli, was involved in most of Italy’s scandals in the last three decades of the 20th century: Banco Ambrosiano’s crash; Tangentopoli, which gave rise to the Mani pulite (“Clean hands”) anticorruption operation in the 1990s; the kidnapping and the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 – the head of the secret services at the time, accused of negligence, was a piduista (P2 member). Licio Gelli has often said he was a friend of Argentine President Juan Perón. In any case, some important figures of his circle were discovered to be piduista, such as José López Rega, founder of the infamous anticommunist organization Triple A and provisional president Raúl Alberto Lastiri. Some members of later Jorge Videla’s dictatorship were part of the P2 too, such as Admiral Emilio Massera and General Guillermo Suárez Mason. The Vatican Bank was also accused of funneling covert US funds for the Solidarnosc trade union movement in Poland and the Contras in Nicaragua.[9] Furthermore, Gladio has been linked to other events, such as Operation Condor[10] and the 1969 killing of anticolonialist/independentist Mozambican leader Eduardo Mondlane by Aginter Press, the Portuguese “stay-behind” secret army, headed by Yves Guérin-Sérac – the allegation on Mondlane’s death is disputed, with several sources stating that FRELIMO guerrilla leader Eduardo Mondlane was killed in a struggle for power within FRELIMO. In 1995, Attorney General Giovanni Salvi accused the Italian secret services of having manipulated proofs of the Chilean secret police’s (DINA) involvement in the 1975 terrorist attack on former Chilean Vice-President Bernardo Leighton in Rome. A similar mode of operation can also be recognized in various Cold War events, for example between the June 20, 1973 Ezeiza massacre in Buenos Aires (Argentina), the 1976 Montejurra massacre in Spain and the 1977 Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul (Turkey). After Giulio Andreotti’s revelations and the disestablishment of Gladio, the last meeting of the “Allied Clandestine Committee” (ACC), was held according to the Italian Prime minister on October 23 and 24, 1990. Despite this, various events have raised concerns about “stay-behind” armies still being in place. In 1996, the Belgian newspaper Le Soir revealed the existence of a racist plan operated by the military intelligence agencies. In 1999, Switzerland was suspected of again creating a clandestine paramilitary structure, allegedly to replace the former P26 and P27 (the Swiss branches of Gladio). Furthermore, in 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), accused of being “another Gladio”. Gladio’s strategy of tension and internal subversion operations Further information: Strategy of tension NATO’s “stay-behind” organizations were never called upon to resist a Soviet invasion, but their structures continued to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Internal subversion and “false flag” operations were explicitly considered by the CIA and stay-behind paramilitaries. According to a November 13, 1990 Reuters cable,[11] “André Moyen – a former member of the Belgian military security service and of the [stay-behind] network – said Gladio was not just anti-Communist but was for fighting subversion in general. He added that his predecessor had given Gladio 142 million francs ($4.6 millions) to buy new radio equipment.”[12] Ganser alleges that on various occasions, stay-behind movements became linked to right-wing terrorism, crime and attempted coups d’état:[4] “Prudent Precaution or Source of Terror?” the international press pointedly asked when the secret stay-behind armies of NATO were discovered across Western Europe in late 1990. After more than ten years of research, the answer is now clear: both. The overview aboves shows that based on the experiences of World War II, all countries of Western Europe, with the support of NATO, the CIA, and MI6, had set up stay-behind armies as precaution against a potential Soviet invasion. While the safety networks and the integrity of the majority of the secret soldiers should not be criticized in hindsight after the collapse of the Soviet Union, very disturbing questions do arise with respect to reported links to terrorism. There exist large differences among the European countries, and each case must be analyzed individually in further detail. As of now, the evidence suggests the secret armies in the seven countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, focused exclusively on their stay-behind function and were not linked to terrorism. However, links to terrorism have been either confirmed or claimed in the nine countries, Italy, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Sweden, demanding further investigation. According to Daniele Ganser, only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried on parliamentary investigations, while the prosecution of various “black terrorists” (terrorismo nero, neofascist terrorism) in Italy was difficult. A 1990 article from The Guardian featured the following quote from judge Libero Mancuso:[13] On the eve of the 1980 Bologna bombing anniversary, Liberato [sic] Mancuso, the Bologna judge who had led the investigation and secured the initial convictions [of the Bologna bombers] broke six months of silence: “It is now understood among those engaged in the matter of democratic rights that we are isolated, and the objects of a campaign of aggression. This is what has happened to the commission into the P2, and to the magistrates. The personal risks to us are small in comparison to this offensive of denigration, which attempts to discredit the quest for truth. In Italy there has functioned for some years now a sort of conditioning, a control of our national sovereignty by the P2 – which was literally the master of the secret services, the army and our most delicate organs of state.” Examples of such alleged terrorist acts include the strategy of tension in Italy, or the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich.[citation needed] A Gladio official said that “depending on the cases, we would block or encourage far-left or far-right terrorism”.[14][15] Gladio operations in NATO countriesFirst discovered in Italy Main article: Gladio in Italy The Italian NATO stay-behind organization, dubbed “Gladio”, was set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani‘s (DC) supervision.[16] However, Gladio’s existence came to public knowledge when Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti revealed it to the Chamber of Deputies on October 24, 1990, although far-right terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra had already revealed its existence during his 1984 trial. According to media analyst Edward S. Herman, “both the President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, had been involved in the Gladio organization and coverup…”[17][verification needed] Giulio Andreotti’s October 24, 1990 revelations Prime minister Giulio Andreotti (member of the Christian Democracy, DC) publicly recognized the existence of Gladio on October 24, 1990. Andreotti spoke of a “structure of information, response and safeguard”, with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave to the Commissione Stragi, the parliamentary commission led by senator Giovanni Pellegrino in charge of investigations on bombings committed during the Years Of Lead in Italy, a list of 622 civilians who according to him were part of Gladio. Andreotti also assured that 127 weapons’ cache had been dismantled, and pretended that Gladio had not been involved in any of the bombings committed from the 1960s to the 1980s (further evidence implicated neofascists linked to Gladio, in particular concerning the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1972 Peteano attack by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the 1980 Bologna massacre in which SISMI officers were condemned for investigation diversion, along with Licio Gelli, head of Propaganda Due masonic lodge, etc.). Andreotti declared that the Italian military services (predecessors of the SISMI) had joined in 1964 the Allied Clandestine Committee created in 1957 by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and which was in charge of directing Gladio’s operations.[18] However, Gladio was actually set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani‘s supervision.[16] Beside, the list of Gladio members given by Andreotti was incomplete. It didn’t include, for example, Antonio Arconte, who described an organization very different from the one brushed by Giulio Andreotti: an organization closely tied to the SID secret service and the Atlantist strategy.[19][20] According to Andreotti, the stay-behind organisations set up in all of Europe did not come “under broad NATO supervision until 1959.”[21] 2000 Parliamentary report: a “strategy of tension” In 2000, a Parliament Commission report from the “Gruppo Democratici di Sinistra l’Ulivo” concluded that the strategy of tension had been supported by the United States to “stop the PCI, and to a certain degree also the PSI, from reaching executive power in the country“. A 2000 Senate report, stated that “Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.” According to The Guardian, “The report [claimed] that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place. It also [alleged] that Pino Rauti [current leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party], a journalist and founder of the far-right Ordine Nuovo (new order) subversive organisation, received regular funding from a press officer at the US embassy in Rome. ‘So even before the ‘stabilising’ plans that Atlantic circles had prepared for Italy became operational through the bombings, one of the leading members of the subversive right was literally in the pay of the American embassy in Rome,’ the report says.”[22] General Maletti’s testimony concerning alleged CIA involvement General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, alleged in March 2001 during the eight trial for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombings that the CIA had foreknowledge of the event.[23] According to the Guardian, he said:[24] …his men had discovered that a rightwing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany. Those explosives may have been obtained with the help of members of the US intelligence community, an indication that the Americans had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring of extremist groups to instigating acts of violence… General Maletti told the Italian court that “the CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism,” and continued on by declaring: “I believe this is what happened in other countries as well.” Gianadelio Maletti also said to the court: “Don’t forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives.“[citation needed] General Maletti himself in the first Piazza Fontana trial received a four year sentence for providing a false passport to one of the accused bombers, this sentence was overturned in 1985.[25] Maletti received, while in exile, a 15-years sentence in 2000 for his role in trying to cover up a 1973 bomb attack in Milan against the Interior minister, Mariano Rumor (DC – 4 killed and 45 injured), but was acquitted on appeals.[26] According to the court, General Maletti knew in advance of the plan of the attacker, Gianfranco Bertoli, allegedly an anarchist but in reality a right-wing activist and a “long-standing SID informant” according to The Guardian, but had deliberately failed to inform the interior minister of it.[24] Responding to charges made by Maletti in La Repubblica one year earlier, the CIA called the allegation that it was involved in the attacks in Italy “ludicrous.”[27] A quick chronology of Italy’s “strategy of tension”
In 1964, Gladio was involved in a silent coup d’état when General Giovanni de Lorenzo in the so-called Piano Solo (“Operation Alone”) forced the Italian Socialists Ministers to leave the government.[28] According to Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the politic and military authorities to declare a state of emergency“[29]
In 1970, the failed coup attempt Golpe Borghese gathered, around fascist Junio Valerio Borghese, international terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and P2 grand master Licio Gelli.[citation needed]
According to The Guardian, “General Geraldo Serravalle, a former head of “Office R”, told the terrorism commission that at a crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper echelons “had the idea of attacking the communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil war.” Later, he put it more bluntly: “They were saying this: “Why wait for the invaders when we can make a preemptive attack now on the communists who would support the invader? The idea is now emerging of a Gladio web made up of semi-autonomous cadres which – although answerable to their secret service masters and ultimately to the NATO-CIA command – could initiate what they regarded as anti-communist operations by themselves, needing only sanction and funds from the existing ‘official’ Gladio column (…) General Nino Lugarese, head of SISMI from 1981-84 testified on the existence of a ‘Super Gladio’ of 800 men responsible for ‘internal intervention’ against domestic political targets.”[5]
Magistrate Felice Casson discovered that “the explosives used in the attack came from one of 139 secret weapons depots of a secret army organized under the code name Operation Gladio”.[17] Neofascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed in 1984 to judge Felice Casson of having carried out the Peteano terrorist attack, in which three policemen died, and for which the Red Brigades (BR) had been blamed before. Vinciguerra explained during his trial how he had been helped by Italian secret services to escape the police and to fly away to Francoist Spain. However, he was abandoned by NATO as soon as he started talking about Gladio, declaring for example during his 1984 trial: “with the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the states itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army… A super-organization which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces…” He then said to The Guardian, in 1990: “I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organised matrix… Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo (the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”[4][5]
General Geraldo Serravalle, head of Gladio from 1971 to 1974, told a television programme that he now thought the explosion aboard the plane Argo 16 on 23 November 1973 was probably the work of gladiatori who were refusing to hand over their clandestine arms. Until then it was widely believed the sabotage was carried out by Mossad, the Israeli foreign service, in retaliation for the pro-Libyan Italian government’s decision to expel, rather than try, five Arabs who had tried to blow up an Israeli airliner. The Arabs had been spirited out of the country on board the Argo 16.[30]
In 1974, a massacre committed by Ordine Nuovo, during an anti-fascist demonstration in Brescia, kills eight and injures 102. The same year, a bomb in the Rome to Munich train “Italicus Express” kills 12 and injures 48. Also in 1974, Vito Miceli, P2 member, chief of the SIOS (Servizio Informazioni), Army Intelligence’s Service from 1969 and SID‘s head from 1970 to 1974, got arrested on charges of “conspiration against the state” concerning investigations about Rosa dei venti, a state-infiltrated group involved in terrorist acts. During his trial, he revealed the existence of the NATO stay-behind secret army.[citation needed]
In 1977, the secret services were thus reorganized in a democratic attempt. With law#801 of 24/10/1977, SID was divided into SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), SISDE (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Democratica) and CESIS (Comitato Esecutivo per i Servizi di Informazione e Sicurezza). The CESIS was given a coordination role, led by the President of Council.[citation needed]
Prime minister Aldo Moro was murdered in May 1978 by the Second Red Brigades (BR), headed by Mario Moretti, in obscure circumstances. The head of the Italian secret services, accused of negligence, was a P2 member. The so-called “historic compromise” between the Christian-Democracy and the PCI was abandoned:[31] The Italian Government led by Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga (a member of the extreme right faction of Italy’s Christian Democrat party, a pro-NATO atlantist was also suspected of involvement in the killing of Aldo Moro).[citation needed] “As the conspiracy theorists would have it, Mr. Moro was allowed to be killed either with the acquiescence of people high in Italy’s political establishment, or at their instigation, because of the historic compromise he had made with the Communist Party“[citation needed] “During his captivity, Aldo Moro wrote several letters to various political figures, including Giulio Andreotti. In October 1990, “a cache of previously unknown letters written by the former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, just prior to his execution by Red Brigade terrorists in 1978… was discovered in a Milan apartment which had once been used as a Red Brigade hideout. One of those letters made reference to the involvement of both NATO and the CIA in an Italian-based secret service, ‘parallel’ army.”[32] “This safe house had been thoroughly searched at the time by Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the head of counter-terrorism. How is it that the papers had not been revealed before?” asked The Independent[31] Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was murdered in 1982 (see below). In May 1978, investigative journalist Mino Pecorelli thought that Aldo Moro’s kidnapping had been organised by a “lucid superpower” and was inspired by the “logic of Yalta“. He painted the figure of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa as “general Amen,” explaining that it was him that, during Aldo Moro’s kidnap, had informed Interior Minister Francesco Cossiga of the localization of the cave where Moro was detained. In 1978, Pecorelli wrote that Dalla Chiesa was in danger and would be assassinated (Dalla Chiesa was murdered four years later). After Aldo Moro’s assassination, Mino Pecorelli published some confidential documents, mainly Moro’s letters to his family. In a cryptic article published in May 1978, wrote The Guardian in May 2003, Pecorelli drew a connection between Gladio, NATO’s stay-behind anti-communist organisation (which existence was publicly acknowledged by Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in October 1990) and Moro’s death. During his interrogation, Aldo Moro had referred to “NATO’s anti-guerrilla activities.”[33] Mino Pecorelli, who was on Licio Gelli‘s list of P2 members discovered in 1980, was assassinated on March 20, 1979. The ammunitions used, a very rare type, where the same as discovered in the Banda della Magliana ‘s weapons stock hidden in the Health Minister’s basement. Pecorelli’s assassination has been thought to be directly related to Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who was condemned to 20 years of prison for it in 2002 before having the sentence cancelled by the Supreme Court of Cassation in 2003.[citation needed]
“The makings of the bomb… came from an arsenal used by Gladio… according to a parliamentary commission on terrorism… The suggested link with the Bologna massacre is potentially the most serious of all the accusations levelled against Gladio, and comes just two days after the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, cleared Gladio’s name in a speech to parliament, saying that the secret army did not drift from its formal Nato military brief.”[34] In November 1995, Neo-Fascists terrorists Valerio Fioravanti and Francesca Mambro, members of the Nuclei Armati Revoluzionari (NAR), were convicted to life imprisonment as executors of the 1980 Bologna massacre. The NAR neofascist group worked in cooperation with the Banda della Magliana, a Mafia-linked gang which took over Rome’s underground in the 1970s and was involved in various political events of the strategy of tension, including the Aldo Moro case, the 1979 assassination of Mino Pecorelli, a journalist who published articles alleging links between Prime minister Giulio Andreotti and the mafia, as well as the assassination of “God’s Banker” Roberto Calvi in 1982. The investigations concerning the Bologna bombing proved Gladio’s direct influence: Licio Gelli, P2′s headmaster, received a sentence for investigation diversion, as well as Francesco Pazienza and SISMI officers Pietro Musumeci and Giuseppe Belmonte. Avanguardia Nazionale founder Stefano Delle Chiaie, who was involved in the Golpe Borghese in 1970, was also accused of involvement in the Bologna massacre[15][35]
General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa’s 1982 murder, in Palermo, by Pino Greco, one of the Mafia Godfather Salvatore Riina‘s (aka Toto Riina) favorite hitmen, is allegedly part of the strategy of tension. Alberto Dalla Chiesa had arrested Red Brigades founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini in September, 1974, and was later charged of investigation concerning Aldo Moro. He had also found Aldo Moro’s letters concerning Gladio.
After the discovery by judge Felice Casson of documents on Gladio in the archives of the Italian military secret service in Rome, Giulio Andreotti, head of Italian government, revealed to the Chamber of deputies the existence of “Operazione Gladio” on October 24, 1990, insisting that Italy has not been the only country with secret “stay-behind” armies. He made clear that “each chief of government had been informed of the existence of Gladio”. Former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi said that he had not been informed until he was confronted with a document on Gladio signed by himself while he was Prime Minister. Former Prime Minister Giovanni Spadolini (Republican Party), at the time President of the Senate, and former Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, at the time secretary of the ruling Christian Democratic Party claimed they remembered nothing. Spadolini stressed that there was a difference between what he knew as former Defence Secretary and what he knew as former Prime Minister. Only former Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga (DC) confirmed Andreotti’s revelations, explaining that he was even “proud and happy” for his part in setting up Gladio as junior Defence Minister of the Christian Democratic Party. This lit up a political storm, requests were made for Cossiga’s (Italian President since 1985) resignation or impeachment for high treason. He refused to testify to the investigating Senate committee. Cossiga narrowly escaped his impeachment by stepping down on April 1992, three months before his term expired.[36]
David Carrett, officer of the U.S. Navy, was indicted by magistrate Guido Salvini on charge of political and military espionage and his participation to the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, among other events. Judge Guido Salvini also opened up a case against Sergio Minetto, Italian official for the US-NATO intelligence network, and pentito Carlo Digilio. La Repubblica underlined that Carlo Rocchi, CIA’s man at Milan, was surprised in 1995 searching for information concerning Operation Gladio, thus demonstrating that all was not over.[29] 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, which started Italy’s anni di piombo, and the 1974 “Italicus Expressen“ train bombing were also attributed to Gladio operatives. In 1975, Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Pinochet during Franco‘s funeral in Madrid, and would participate afterward in operation Condor, preparing for example the attempted murder of Bernardo Leighton, a Chilean Christian Democrat, or participating in the 1980 ‘Cocaine Coup’ of Luis García Meza Tejada in Bolivia. In 1989, he was arrested in Caracas, Venezuela and extradited to Italy to stand trial for his role in the Piazza Fontana bombing. Despite his reputation, Delle Chiaie was acquitted by the Assize Court in Catanzaro in 1989, along with fellow accused Massimiliano Fachini (as yet no convictions have been made for the attack). According to Avanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.”[29] The DSSA, another Gladio? In July 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), a “parallel police” created by Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca, two leaders of the National Union of the Police Forces (UNPF), a trade-union present in all the state security forces. Both said they were former members of Gladio. According to the DSSA website — closed after these revelations — Fabrizio Quattrocchi, murdered in Iraq after being taken hostage, was there “for the DSSA”. According to the Italian investigators, the DSSA was trying to obtain international and national recognition by intelligence agencies, in order to obtain finances for its parallel activities. Furthermore, Il Messaggero, quoted by The Independent, declared that, according to judicial sources, wiretaps suggested DSSA members had been planning to kidnap Cesare Battisti, a former communist activist. “We were seeing the genesis of something similar to the death squads in Argentina” (the AAA groups) the magistrate is reported to have said.[37][38][39][40][41] Belgium Main article: Belgian stay-behind network After the 1966 retreat of France from NATO, the SHAPE headquarters were displaced to Mons in Belgium. In 1990, following France’s denial of any “stay-behind” French army, Giulio Andreotti publicly said the last Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) meeting, at which the French branch of Gladio was present, had been on October 23 and 24, 1990, under the presidency of Belgian General Van Calster, director of the Belgian military secret service SGR. In November, Guy Coëme, the Minister of the Defense, acknowledged the existence of a Belgium “stay-behind” army, lifting concerns about a similar implication in terrorist acts as in Italy. The same year, the European Parliament sharply condemned NATO and the United States in a resolution for having manipulated European politics with the stay-behind armies.[28] New legislation governing intelligence agencies’ missions and methods was passed in 1998, following two government inquiries and the creation of a permanent parliamentary committee in 1991, which was to bring them under the authority of Belgium’s federal agencies. The Commission was created following events in the 1980s, which included the Brabant massacres and the activities of far right group Westland New Post.[42] France In 1947, Interior Minister Edouard Depreux revealed the existence of a secret stay-behind army in France codenamed “Plan Bleu”. The next year, the “Western Union Clandestine Committee” (WUCC) was created to coordinate secret unorthodox warfare. In 1949, the WUCC was integrated into NATO, whose headquarters were established in France, under the name “Clandestine Planning Committee” (CPC). In 1958, NATO founded the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) to coordinate secret warfare.[citation needed] The network was supported with elements from SDECE, and had military support from the 11th Choc regiment. The former director of DGSE, admiral Pierre Lacoste, alleged in a 1992 interview with The Nation, that certain elements from the network were involved with terrorist activities against de Gaulle and his Algerian policy. A section of the 11th Choc regiment split over the 1962 Evian peace accords, and became part of the Organisation armée secrète (OAS), but it is unclear if this also involved members of the French stay-behind network.[43][44] La Rose des Vents and Arc-en-ciel (“Rainbow”) network were part of Gladio. François de Grossouvre was Gladio’s leader for the region around Lyon in France until his alleged suicide on April 7, 1994. Grossouvre would have asked Constantin Melnik, leader of the French secret services during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), to return to activity. He was living in comfortable exile in the US, where he maintained links with the Rand Corporation. Constantin Melnik is alleged to have been involved in the creation in 1952 of the Ordre Souverain du Temple Solaire, an ancestor of the Order of the Solar Temple, created by former A.M.O.R.C. members, in which the SDECE (French former military intelligence agency) was interested.[45] [edit] Denmark The Danish stay-behind army was code-named Absalon, after a Danish archbishop, and led by E.J. Harder. It was hidden in the military secret service Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE). In 1978, William Colby, former director of the CIA, released his memoirs in which he described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavia:[46] “The situation in each Scandinavian country was different. Norway and Denmark were NATO allies, Sweden held to the neutrality that had taken her through two world wars, and Finland were required to defer in its foreign policy to the Soviet power directly on its borders. Thus, in one set of these countries the governments themselves would build their own stay-behind nets, counting on activating them from exile to carry on the struggle. These nets had to be co-ordinated with NATO’s plans, their radios had to be hooked to a future exile location, and the specialised equipment had to be secured from CIA and secretly cached in snowy hideouts for later use. In other set of countries, CIA would have to do the job alone or with, at best, “unofficial” local help, since the politics of those governments barred them from collaborating with NATO, and any exposure would arouse immediate protest from the local Communist press, Soviet diplomats and loyal Scandinavians who hoped that neutrality or nonalignment would allow them to slip through a World War III unharmed.” On November 25, 1990, Danish daily newspaper Berlingske Tidende, quoted by Daniele Ganser (2005), confirmed William Colby’s revelations, by a source named “Q”: “Colby’s story is absolutely correct. Absalon was created in the early 1950s. Colby was a member of the world spanning laymen Catholic organisation Opus Dei, which, using a modern term, could be called right-wing. Opus Dei played a central role in the setting up of Gladio in the whole of Europe and also in Denmark… The leader of Gladio was Harder who was probably not a Catholic. But there are not many Catholics in Denmark and the basic elements making up the Danish Gladio were former [WW II] resistance people – former prisoners of Vestre Fængsel, Frøslevlejren, Neuengamme and also of the Danish Brigade.” Germany Reinhard Gehlen, Nazi intelligence agent on the East front during the war, turned towards the US after the war, and set up the “Gehlen Organisation,” which used many former Nazi party members for intelligence purposes during the Cold War. But alongside the Gehlen organisation, which became the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service), West Germany‘s intelligence agency created in 1956, US intelligence also set up a German stay-behind network parallel (and juxtaposed) to the Gehlen Org (which also had a role in the organisation of the ODESSA network, used to exfiltrate Nazi war criminals). CIA documents released in June 2006 under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, more than fifteen years after Prime minister Giulio Andreotti’s revelations concerning Gladio, show that the CIA organized “stay-behind” networks of German agents between 1949 and 1955.[47] One of these networks supported by the CIA was the Technische Dienst (TD, Technical Service) section within the Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ, Union of German Youth). The anti-communist BDJ was founded in 1950 by ex-Nazis Erhard Peters and Paul Lüth. The existence of TD came to light, after a speech in the Hesse Landtag by PM Georg August Zinn.[48] During the investigations into BDJ, which started in September 1952, a couple of arms caches were found, including one in the Odenwald region, Hesse.[49] The claim by August Zinn that the BDJ supposedly was in the possession of a list of Social Democracts and Communists to be liquidated in case of a Soviet invasion, including leading figures of the opposition Social Democratic Party[50]) was denied by German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.[49] The BDJ was outlawed in January 1953.[51][52] Documents shown to the Italian parliamentary terrorism committee revealed that in the 1970s British and French officials involved in the network visited a training base in Germany built with US money.[50] In 1976, the secret service BND secretary Heidrun Hofer was arrested after having revealed the secrets of the German stay-behind army to her husband, who was a spy of the KGB.[28] The 1980 Oktoberfest bomb blast Revelations of a witness in the investigation of the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich lead to the conclusion that the explosives might have come from the German Neo-Nazi Heinz Lembke.[citation needed] In 1981, German police by chance found an arms cache in the Lüneburg Heath, which led to the arrest of Lembke and the discovery of other arms caches in Lower Saxony. A few days later Lembke hanged himself in his prison cell. Lembke had been questioned in Oktoberfest investigation, but the public prosecutors found no evidence that he supplied the explosives for the bombing.[53] Lembke’s arms caches were supposed to be connected to Gladio by a number of researchers and journalists.[4] CIA’s documents released in June 2006 One network included Staff Sergent Heinrich Hoffman and Lieutenant Colonel Hans Rues, and another one, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, a former Wehrmacht officer, described by his own North American handlers as an “unreconstructed Nazi.”[54] In an April 1953 CIA memo released in June 2006, the CIA headquarters wrote: “The present furore in Western Germany over the resurgence of the Nazi or neo-Nazi groups is a fair example — in miniature — of what we would be faced with.” Therefore some of these networks were dismantled. These documents stated that the ex-Nazis were a complete failure in intelligence terms. According to Timothy Naftali, a US historian from the University of Virginia who reviewed the CIA documents then released, “The files show time and again that these people were more trouble than they were worth. The unreconstructed Nazis were always out for themselves, and they were using the West’s lack of information about the Soviet Union to exploit it.”[54] The US NARA Archives themselves stated in a 2002 communique, concerning Reinhard Gehlen’s recruiting of former Nazis, that “Besides the troubling moral issues involved, these recruitments opened the West German government, and by extension the United States, to penetration by the Soviet intelligence services.”[55] Hans Globke, who had worked for Adolf Eichmann in the Jewish Affairs department and helped draft the 1935 Nuremberg laws, became Chancellor Konrad Adenauer‘s national security advisor in the 1960s, and “was the main liaison with the CIA and NATO” according to The Guardian.[54] A March 1958 memo from the German BND agency to the CIA wrote that Adolf Eichmann is “reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias CLEMENS since 1952.” However, the CIA did not pass the information on to the Israeli MOSSAD, as it feared revelations concerning its use of former Nazis for intelligence purposes — Eichmann, who was in charge of the Jewish Affairs department, was abducted by the MOSSAD two years later. Among these information that might have been revealed by Eichmann were the ones concerning Hans Globke, CIA’s liaison in West Germany. At the request of Bonn, the CIA persuaded Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann’s memoirs, which it had bought from his family.[47] Norbert Juretzko’s 2004 revelations In 2004 the German spymaster Norbert Juretzko published a book about his work at the BND. He went into details about recruiting partisans for the German stay-behind network. He was sacked from BND following a secret trial against him, because the BND could not find out the real name of his Russian source “Rübezahl” whom he had recruited. A man with the name he put on file was arrested by the KGB following treason in the BND, but was obviously innocent, his name having been chosen at random from the public phone book by Juretzko. According to Juretzko, the BND built up its branch of Gladio, but discovered after the fall of the German Democratic Republic that it was 100% known to the Stasi early on. When the network was dismantled, further odd details emerged. One fellow “spymaster” had kept the radio equipment in his cellar at home with his wife doing the engineering test call every 4 months, on the grounds that the equipment was too “valuable” to remain in civilian hands. Juretzko found out because this spymaster had dismantled his section of the network so quickly, there had been no time for measures such as recovering all caches of supplies.[citation needed] Civilians recruited as stay-behind partisans were equipped with a clandestine shortwave radio with a fixed frequency. It had a keyboard with digital encryption, making use of traditional Morse code obsolete. They had a cache of further equipment for signalling helicopters or submarines to drop special agents who were to stay in the partisan’s homes while mounting sabotage operations against the communists. Greece The aim of British Prime minister Winston Churchill was to prevent the communist-led EAM resistance movement from taking power after the end of World War II. After the suppression of a pro-EAM uprising in April 1944 among the Greek forces in Egypt, a new and firmly reliable unit was formed, the Third Greek Mountain Brigade, which excluded “almost all men with views ranging from moderately conservative to left wing.”[56] After liberation in October 1944, EAM controlled most of the country. When it organized a demonstration in Athens on December 3, 1944 , members of rightist and pro-royalist paramilitary organizations, covered by “British troops and police with machine guns… posited on the rooftops”, suddenly shot on the crowd, killing 25 protesters (including a six-year-old boy) and wounding 148.[57] This marked the outbreak of the Dekemvriana, which would lead to the Greek Civil War. When Greece joined NATO in 1952, the country’s special forces, the LOK (Lochoi Oreinōn Katadromōn, i.e. “Mountain Raiding Companies“) were integrated into the European stay-behind network. The CIA and LOK reconfirmed on March 25, 1955 their mutual co-operation in a secret document signed by US General Trascott for the CIA, and Konstantinos Dovas, chief of staff of the Greek military. In addition to preparing for a Soviet invasion, the CIA instructed LOK to prevent a leftist coup. Former CIA agent Philip Agee, who was sharply criticized in the US for having revealed sensitive information, insisted that “paramilitary groups, directed by CIA officers, operated in the sixties throughout Europe [and he stressed that] perhaps no activity of the CIA could be as clearly linked to the possibility of internal subversion.”[58] The LOK was involved in the Greek military coup d’État on April 21, 1967,[59][not in citation given] which took place one month before the scheduled national elections for which opinion polls predicted an overwhelming victory of the centrist Center Union of George and Andreas Papandreou. Under the command of paratrooper Lieutenant Colonel Costas Aslanides, the LOK took control of the Greek Defence Ministry while Brigadier General Stylianos Pattakos gained control over communication centers, the parliament, the royal palace, and according to detailed lists, arrested over 10,000 people. Phillips Talbot, the US ambassador in Athens, disapproved of the military coup which established the “Regime of the Colonels” (1967–1974), complaining that it represented “a rape of democracy” – to which Jack Maury, the CIA chief of station in Athens, answered: “How can you rape a whore?”.[28][not in citation given] Arrested and then exiled in Canada and Sweden, Andreas Papandreou later returned to Greece, where he won the 1981 election for Prime minister, forming the first socialist government of Greece’s post-war history. According to his own testimony, he discovered the existence of the secret NATO army, then codenamed “Red Sheepskin”, as acting prime minister in 1984 and had given orders to dissolve it.[citation needed] Following Giulio Andreotti’s revelations in 1990, the Greek defence minister confirmed that a branch of the network, known as Operation Sheepskin, operated in his country until 1988.[60] The socialist opposition called for a parliamentary investigation into the secret army and its alleged link to terrorism and the 1967 coup d’état. Public order minister Yannis Vassiliadis declared that there was no need to investigate such “fantasies” as “Sheepskin was one of 50 NATO plans which foresaw that when a country was occupied by an enemy there should be an organised resistance. It foresaw arms caches and officers who would form the nucleus of a guerilla war. In other words, it was a nationally justifiable act.”[citation needed] In December 2005, journalist Kleanthis Grivas published an article in To Proto Thema, a Greek Sunday newspaper, in which he accused “Sheepskin” for the assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Athens in 1975, as well as the assassination of British military attaché Stephen Saunders in 2000. This was denied by the US State Department, who responded that “the Greek terrorist organization ‘17 November‘ was responsible for both assassinations”, and that Grivas’s central piece of evidence had been the Westmoreland Field Manual which the State department, as well as an independent Congressional inquiry have alleged to be a Soviet forgery.[61] The document in question, however, makes no specific mention of Greece, November 17, nor Welch. The State Department also highlighted the fact that, in the case of Richard Welch, “Grivas bizarrely accuses the CIA of playing a role in the assassination of one of its own senior officials” while “Sheepskin” couldn’t have assassinate Stephen Saunders for the simple reason, according to the US government, that “the Greek government stated it dismantled the “stay behind” network in 1988.”[61] Cyprus The 1960 constitution only had provision for a very small professional army of a few hundred men from both Cypriot communities. Following the 1963-64 clashes that led to the collapse of the power sharing between greek and turkish cypriots, the National Guard was created as a conscription greek cypriot army. The officers for the National Guard where almost exclusively Greek nationals, officers of the greek army. LOK units were created in Cyprus modelled on the Greek LOK units, though Cyprus never joined NATO and was at the time a member of the Non-Aligned Movement. Reporter Makarios Drousiotis[62] has written about Greek officer Dimitris Papapostolou, commander of LOK in Cyprus at the time, conspiring with ex-interior minister Polykarpos Yorkatzis to kill elected president Makarios by attacking his helicopter, and after the failure of that attempt, being involved in the assassination of Yorkatzis. The 15 July 1974 coup d’etat against Makarios was executed by National Guard units, with the attack on the presidential palace perpetrated by 32 Moira Katadromon LOK unit with the help of a tanks reconnaisance unit. The Netherlands A large arms cache was discovered in 1983 near the village Velp. In 1990 the government by means of then-prime-minister Ruud Lubbers was forced to confirm that the arms were related to planning for unorthodox warfare. He insisted that the Dutch organisation was, contrary to the operations in other European countries, totally independent from NATO command, and during wartime occupation would be commanded by the Dutch government in exile. The operating bureaus of the organisation would also move to safety in England or the USA at the first sign of trouble. In his television show of 22 April 2007 Dutch crime journalist Peter R. De Vries revealed that weapons had been illegally supplied to Gladio well after the network was supposed to have been disbanded.[28] A Dutch investigative television program revealed on September 9, 2007, that an arms cache that belonged to Gladio was ransacked in the 1980s. The cache was located in a forest near Scheveningen. Some of stolen weapons later turned up, including hand grenades and machine guns, when police officials arrested criminals Sam Klepper and John Mieremet in 1991. The Dutch military intelligence agency, MIVD, feared at that time that the disclosure of the Gladio history of these weapons was politically explosive. Norway In 1957, the director of the secret service NIS, Vilhelm Evang, protested strongly against the pro-active intelligence activities at AFNORTH, as described by the chairman of CPC: “[NIS] was extremely worried about activities carried out by officers at Kolsås. This concerned SB, Psywar and Counter Intelligence.” These activities supposedly included the blacklisting of Norwegians. SHAPE denied these allegations. Eventually, the matter was resolved in 1958, after Norway was assured about how stay-behind networks were to be operated. In 1978, the police discovered an arms cache and radio equipment at a mountain cabin and arrested Hans Otto Meyer, a businessman accused of being involved in selling illegal alcohol. Meyer claimed that the weapons were supplied by Norwegian intelligence. Rolf Hansen, defense minister at that time, stated the network was not in any way answerable to NATO and had no CIA connection. Portugal Further information: Aginter Press In 1966, the CIA set up Aginter Press which, under the direction of Captain Yves Guérin-Sérac (who had taken part in the founding of the OAS), ran a secret stay-behind army and trained its members in covert action techniques amounting to terrorism, including bombings, silent assassinations, subversion techniques, clandestine communication and infiltration and colonial warfare. Aginter Press was suspected of having assassinated General Humberto Delgado (1906–1965), founder of the Portuguese National Liberation Front against Salazar‘s dictatorship (prominent historians and several sources also claim Delgado’s assassination was performed by PIDE operational Rosa Casaco), as well as anti-colonialist leader Amilcar Cabral (1924–1973), founder of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) and Eduardo Mondlane leader of the liberation movement FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), in 1969 (prominent historians and several sources also claim Cabral’s assassination was performed by indivuduals within Cabral’s guerrilla movemment, the PAIGC, and Mondlane’s death was work of his enemies inside FRELIMO – according to these versions, both assassinations were the result of struggles for power within the independentist movements). Turkey Main article: Counter-Guerrilla Further information: Deep state, Ergenekon network, and Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele As one of the nations that prompted the Truman Doctrine, Turkey is one of the first countries to participate in Operation Gladio and, some say, the only country where it has not been purged. According to Italian magistrate Felice Casson, the Turkish stay-behind forces are two-pronged: the military “Counter-Guerrilla”, and the civilian “Ergenekon”. An offshoot of the latter organization is currently the subject of a major investigation. Casson says Turkey is home to the most powerful branch of Operation Gladio.[70] The counter-guerrilla’s existence in Turkey was revealed in 1973 by then prime minister Bülent Ecevit,[71] and he immediately became a target for several assassination plots. During the ongoing trials since summer of 2008 it has been revealed that the group named Ergenekon is actually consisted of Armed Forces officers and various civilians working to influence the governments of Turkey, either by subversion or direct coup d’etat.[citation needed] The United Kingdom In Great Britain, Prime Minister Winston Churchill created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1940 to assist resistance movements and carry out subversive operations in enemy-held territory across occupied Europe. Guardian reporter David Pallister wrote in December 1990 that a guerrilla network with arms caches had been put in place following the fall of France. It included Brigadier “Mad Mike” Calvert, and was drawn from a special-forces ski battalion of the Scots Guards which was originally intended to fight in Nazi-occupied Finland.[21] Known as Auxiliary Units, they were headed by Major Colin Gubbins, an expert in guerrilla warfare who would later lead the SOE. The Auxiliary Units were attached to GHQ Home Forces, and concealed within the Home Guard. The units were created in preparation of a possible invasion of the British Isles by the Third Reich. These units were allegedly stood down only in 1944. Several of their members subsequently joined the Special Air Service and saw action in France in late 1944. The units’ existence did not generally become known by the public until the 1990s though a book on the subject was published in 1968.[72] In fiction, Owen Sheers’ Resistance (2008), set in Wales, takes as one of its central characters a member of the Auxiliary Units called to resist a successful German invasion. After the end of World War II, the stay-behind armies were created with the experience and involvement of former SOE officers.[28] Following Giulio Andreotti’s October 1990 revelations, General Sir John Hackett (1910–1997), former commander-in-chief of the British Army on the Rhine, declared on November 16, 1990 that a contingency plan involving “stay behind and resistance in depth” was drawn up after the war. The same week, Sir Anthony Farrar-Hockley (1924–2006), former commander-in-chief of NATO’s Forces in Northern Europe from 1979 to 1982, declared to The Guardian that a secret arms network was established in Britain after the war.[50] General John Hackett had written in 1978 a novel, The Third World War: August 1985, which was a fictionalized scenario of a Soviet Army invasion of West Germany in 1985. The novel was followed in 1982 by The Third World War: The Untold Story, which elaborated on the original. Farrar-Hockley had aroused controversy in 1983 when he became involved in trying to organise a campaign for a new Home Guard against eventual Soviet invasion.[73] Gladio membership included mostly ex-servicemen but also followers of Oswald Mosley‘s pre-war fascist movement.[citation needed] Among the 200,000+ Polish ex-servicemen in the UK after the end of World War II, unable to return home for fear of communist repression, were conspiratorial groups maintaining combat readiness ready to fight for a free Poland should the Warsaw Pact attack western Europe. The ‘Pogon‘ organisation, linked to the Polish Government-in-Exile held regular paramilitary exercises until the 1970s; many of its members were associated with the Polish scouting movement in the UK which had a strong paramilitary flavour. Links with ‘Stay-behind’ networks are strongly suspected. General Serravalle’s revelations General Gerardo Serravalle, who commanded the Italian Gladio from 1971 to 1974, related that “in the 1970s the members of the CPC [Coordination and Planning Committee] were the officers responsible for the secret structures of Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands and Italy. These representatives of the secret structures met every year in one of the capitals… At the stay-behind meetings representatives of the CIA were always present. They had no voting rights and were from the CIA headquarters of the capital in which the meeting took place… members of the US Forces Europe Command were present, also without voting rights. “.[74] Next to the CPC a second secret command post was created in 1957, the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC). According to the Belgian Parliamentary Committee on Gladio, the ACC was “responsible for coordinating the ‘Stay-behind’ networks in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, United Kingdom and the United States”. During peacetime, the activities of the ACC “included elaborating the directives for the network, developing its clandestine capability and organising bases in Britain and the United States. In wartime, it was to plan stay-behind operations in conjunction with SHAPE; organisers were to activate clandestine bases and organise operations from there”.[75] General Serravale declared to the Commissione Stragi headed by senator Giovanni Pellegrino that the Italian Gladio members trained at a military base in Britain.[50] Documents shown to the committee also revealed that British and French officials members of Gladio had visited in the 1970s a training base in Germany built with US money.[50] The Guardian’s November 1990 revelations concerning plans under Margaret Thatcher The Guardian reported on November 5, 1990, that there had been a “secret attempt to revive elements of a parallel post-war plan relating to overseas operations” in the “early days of Mrs Thatcher‘s Conservative leadership”. According to the British newspaper, “a group of former intelligence officers, inspired by the wartime Special Operations Executive, attempted to set up a secret unit as a kind of armed MI6 cell. Those behind the scheme included Airey Neave, Mrs Thatcher’s close adviser who was killed in a terrorist attack in 1979, and George Kennedy Young, a former deputy chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.” The newspaper stated that Thatcher had been “initially enthusiastic but dropped the idea after the scandal surrounding the attack by the French secret service on the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in New Zealand in 1985.”[59] The Swiss branch, P-26, as well as Italian Gladio, had trained in the UK in the early 1970s.[59][76] Parallel stay-behind operations in non-NATO countriesAustria In Austria, the first secret stay-behind army was exposed in 1947. It had been set up by far-right Soucek and Rössner, who both insisted during their trial that “they were carrying out the secret operation with the full knowledge and support of the US and British occupying powers.” Sentenced to death, they were then pardoned under mysterious circumstances by President Körner (1951–1957). Franz Olah set up a new secret army codenamed Österreichischer Wander-Sport-und Geselligkeitsverein (OWSGV, literally “Austrian hiking, sports and society club”), with the cooperation of MI6 and the CIA. He later explained that “we bought cars under this name. We installed communication centres in several regions of Austria”, confirming that “special units were trained in the use of weapons and plastic explosives”. He precised that “there must have been a couple of thousand people working for us… Only very, very highly positioned politicians and some members of the union knew about it”. In 1965, the police forces discovered a stay-behind arms cache in an old mine close to Windisch-Bleiberg and forced the British authorities to hand over a list with the location of 33 other caches in Austria.[28] In 1990, when secret “stay-behind” armies were discovered all around Europe, the Austrian government said that no secret army had existed in the country. However, six years later, the Boston Globe revealed the existence of a secret CIA arms caches in Austria. Austrian President Thomas Klestil and Chancellor Franz Vranitzky insisted that they had known nothing of the existence of the secret army and demanded that the US launch a full-scale investigation into the violation of Austria’s neutrality, which was denied by President Bill Clinton. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns – appointed in August 2001 by President George Bush as the US Permanent Representative to the Atlantic treaty organization, where, as ambassador to NATO, he headed the combined State-Defense Department United States Mission to NATO and coordinated the NATO response to the September 11, 2001 attacks – insisted: “The aim was noble, the aim was correct, to try to help Austria if it was under occupation. What went wrong is that successive Washington administrations simply decided not to talk to the Austrian government about it.”[4] Finland In 1944, the Swedes worked with Finnish Intelligence to set up a stay-behind network of agents within Finland to keep track of post-war activities in that country. While this network was allegedly never put in place, Finnish codes, SIGINT equipment and documents were brought to Sweden and apparently exploited until the 1980s[77] In 1945, Interior Minister Yrjö Leino exposed a secret stay-behind army which was closed down (so called Weapons Cache Case). This operation was organized by Finnish general staff officers (without foreign help) in 1944 to hide weapons in order to sustain a large-scale guerilla warfare in the event the Soviet Union tried to occupy Finland in the aftermath of the Continuation War. See also Operation Stella Polaris. In 1991, the Swedish media claimed that a secret stay-behind army had existed in neutral Finland with an exile base in Stockholm. Finnish Defence Minister Elisabeth Rehn called the revelations “a fairy tale”, adding cautiously “or at least an incredible story, of which I know nothing.”.[28] However, in his memoirs, former CIA director William Colby described the setting-up of stay-behind armies in Scandinavian countries, including Finland, with or without the assistance of local governments, to prepare for a Soviet invasion.[46] Spain Main article: Montejurra Incidents Several events prior to Spain’s 1982 membership in NATO have also been tied to Gladio: In May 1976, a year after Franco‘s death, two left-wing Carlist members were shot down by far-right terrorists, among whom Gladio operative Stefano Delle Chiaie and members of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), demonstrating connections between Gladio and the South American “Dirty War“. This incident became known as the Montejurra massacre.[78] According to a report by the Italian CESIS (Executive Committee for Intelligence and Security Services), Carlo Cicuttini (who took part in the 1972 Peteano bombing in Italy alongside Vincenzo Vinciguerra), participated in the 1977 Massacre of Atocha in Madrid, killing five people (including several lawyers), members of the Workers’ Commissions trade-unions closely linked with the Spanish Communist Party. Cicuttini was naturalized Spanish and exiled in Spain since 1972 (date of the Peteano bombing)[79] Following Andreotti’s 1990 revelations, Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first democratically elected Prime minister after Franco’s death, denied ever having heard of Gladio.[80] President of the Spanish government in 1981-82, during the transition to democracy, Calvo Sotelo stated that Spain had not been informed of Gladio when it entered NATO. Asked about Gladio’s relations to Franquist Spain, he said that such a network was not necessary under Franco, since “the regime itself was Gladio.”[81] According to General Fausto Fortunato, head of Italian SISMI from 1971 to 1974, France and the US had backed Spain’s entrance to Gladio, but Italy would have opposed its veto to it. Following Andreotti’s revelations, however, Narcís Serra, Spanish Minister of Defense, opened up an investigation concerning Spain’s links to Gladio.[82][83] Furthermore, Canarias 7 newspaper revealed, quoting former Gladio agent Alberto Volo, who had a role in the revelations of the existence of the network in 1990, that a Gladio meeting had been organized in August 1991 in the Gran Canaria island.[84] Alberto Vollo also declared that as a Gladio operative, he had received trainings in Maspalomas, in the Gran Canaria island between the 1960s and the 1970s.[85] El País daily also revealed that the Gladio organization was suspected of having used former NASA installations in Maspalomas, in the Gran Canaria island, in the 1970s.[86] André Moyen, former Belgian secret agent, also declared that Gladio had operated in Spain.[87] He said that Gladio had bases in Madrid, Barcelona, San Sebastián and the Canarias islands. Sweden In 1951, CIA agent William Colby, based at the CIA station in Stockholm, supported the training of stay-behind armies in neutral Sweden and Finland and in the NATO members Norway and Denmark. In 1953, the police arrested right winger Otto Hallberg and discovered the preparations for the Swedish stay-behind army. Hallberg was set free and charges against him were dropped.[28] Switzerland Main article: Projekt-26 In Switzerland, a secret army named P26 was discovered, by coincidence months before Giulio Andreotti’s October 1990 revelations. After the “secret files scandal” (Fichenaffäre), Swiss parliamentaries started investigating the Defense Department in the summer of 1990. According to Felix Würsten of the ETH Zurich, “P26 was not directly involved in the network of NATO’s secret armies but it had close contact to MI6.”[88] Daniele Ganser (ETH Zurich) wrote in the Intelligence and National Security review that “following the discovery of the stay-behind armies across Western Europe in late 1990, Swiss and international security researchers found themselves confronted with two clear-cut questions: Did Switzerland also operate a secret stay-behind army? And if yes, was it part of NATO’s stay-behind network? The answer to the first question is clearly yes… The answer to the second question remains disputed…”[89] Swiss Major Hans von Dach published in 1958 Der totale Widerstand, Kleinkriegsanleitung für jedermann (“Total Resistance,” Bienne, 1958) concerning guerrilla warfare, a book of 180 pages about passive and active resistance to a foreign invasion, including detailed instructions on sabotage, clandestinity, methods to dissimulate weapons, struggle against police moles, etc.[90] In 1990, Colonel Herbert Alboth, a former commander of the Swiss secret stay-behind army P26 declared in a confidential letter to the Defence Department that he was willing to reveal “the whole truth”. He was later found in his house, stabbed with his own military bayonet. The detailed parliamentary report on the Swiss secret army was presented to the public on November 17, 1990.[28] According to The Guardian, “P26 was backed by P27, a private foreign intelligence agency funded partly by the government, and by a special unit of Swiss army intelligence which had built up files on nearly 8,000 “suspect persons” including “leftists”, “bill stickers”, “Jehovah’s witnesses“, people with “abnormal tendencies” and anti-nuclear demonstrators. On November 14, the Swiss government hurriedly dissolved P26 — the head of which, it emerged, had been paid £100,000 a year.”[59] In 1991, a report by Swiss magistrate Pierre Cornu was released by the Swiss defence ministry. It said that P26 was without “political or legal legitimacy”, and described the group’s collaboration with British secret services as “intense”. “Unknown to the Swiss government, British officials signed agreements with the organisation, called P26, to provide training in combat, communications, and sabotage. The latest agreement was signed in 1987… P26 cadres participated regularly in training exercises in Britain… British advisers — possibly from the SAS — visited secret training establishments in Switzerland.” P26 was led by Efrem Cattelan, known to British intelligence.[76] In a 2005 conference presenting Daniele Ganser’s research on Gladio, Hans Senn, General Chief of Staff of the Swiss Army between 1977 and 1980, explained how he was informed of the existence of a secret organisation in the middle of his term of office. According to him, it already became clear in 1980 in the wake of the Schilling/Bachmann affair that there was also a secret group in Switzerland. But former MP, Helmut Hubacher, President of the Social Democratic Party from 1975 to 1990, declared that although it had been known that “special services” existed within the army, as a politician he never at any time could have known that the secret army P26 was behind this. Hubacher pointed out that the President of the parliamentary investigation into P26 (PUK-EMD), the right-wing politician from Appenzell and member of the Council of States for that Canton, Carlo Schmid, had suffered “like a dog” during the commission’s investigations. Carlo Schmid declared to the press: “I was shocked that something like that is at all possible,” and said to the press he was glad to leave the “conspirational atmosphere” which had weighted upon him like a “black shadow” during the investigations.[91] Hubacher found it especially disturbing that, apart from its official mandate of organizing resistance in case of a Soviet invasion, P26 had also a mandate to become active should the left succeed in achieving a parliamentary majority.[88] FOIA requests and US State Department’s 2006 communiquéThree Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been filed to the CIA, which has rejected them with the Glomar response: “The CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of records responsive to your request.” One request was filed by the National Security Archive in 1991; another by the Italian Senate commission headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino in 1995 concerning Gladio and Aldo Moro‘s murder; the last one in 1996, by Oliver Rathkolb, of Vienna university, for the Austrian government, concerning the secret stay-behind armies after a discovery of an arms-cache.[28] Furthermore, the US State Department published a communiqué in January 2006 which, while confirming the existence of stay-behind armies, in general, and the presence of the “Gladio” stay-behind unit in Italy, in particular, with the purpose of aiding resistance in the event of Soviet aggression directed Westward, from the Warsaw Pact, dismissed claims of any United States ordered, supported, or authorized skullduggery by stay-behind units. In fact, it claims that, on the contrary, the accusations of US-sponsored “false flag” operations are rehashed former Soviet disinformation based on documents that the Soviets themselves forged; specifically the researchers are alleged to have been influenced by the Westmoreland Field Manual, whose forged nature was confirmed by former KGB operatives, following the end of the Cold War. However since then counter sources from within gladio and the CIA have admitted its authenticity. The alleged Soviet-authored forgery, disseminated in the 1970s, explicitly formulated the need for a “strategy of tension” involving violent attacks blamed on radical left-wing groups in order to convince allied governments of the need for counter-action. It also rejected a Communist Greek journalist’s allegations made in December 2005 (See above).[61] Politicians on Gladio Whilst the existence of a “stay-behind” organization such as Gladio was disputed, prior to its confirmation by Giulio Andreotti[citation needed], with some skeptics describing it as a conspiracy theory, several high ranking politicians in NATO countries have made statements appearing to confirm the existence of something like what is described:
As noted above, the US has now acknowledged the existence of Operation Gladio.[citation needed]
| We know about the 300 or more FEMA camps distributed around the country. We know that Congress has authorized 30,000 drones to conduct surveillance on the American people. We know that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had requisitioned 1.5 billion rounds of .40 calibre hollow-point ammunition, which is not even permissible for use in warfare under the Geneva Conventions. Since DHS does not conduct operations abroad, it must be acquiring that massive stock of ammo for use on us right here in the United States. That much is alarming enough all by itself. What we didn’t know is that DHS is some kind of monstrous joke, that it has been squandering billions of taxpayers’ dollars, and that it has turned up no evidence of any domestic terrorist threat! NONE! That is not my opinion but the conclusion of the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Report about Fusion Centers (3 October 2012). The situation is absurd. DHS has no financial oversight and cannot even identify how much it has spent, where there is more than $1 billion difference in its own estimates. So what precisely are we getting for our money? These “fusion centers” have been created to integrate research on terrorist activities at the federal, state, and local level. So what have they produced? The answers appears to be, NOTHING! Read and then reread the crucial finding of this extensive study: “Despite reviewing 13 months’ worth of reporting originating from fusion centers from April 1, 2009 to April 30, 2010, the Subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot”! And there is more. ”At DHS headquarters, Reports Officers who reviewed the draft HIRs from fusion centers before they were to be published found many of the reports useless. The officers shared those sentiments in written comments they made recommending that particular HIR draft reports be cancelled. At times they expressed amazement at the poor quality of reporting . . . . Of the 574 unclassified draft reports field officers filed, the Subcommittee investigation counted 188 marked by DHS reviewers as cancelled, nearly a third . . . . Of the 86 unclassified reports published, the Subcommittee found only 94 which related in some way to potential terrorist activity, or the activities or a known or suspected terrorist . . . . some were based on information from publicly available web sites or dated public reports”. Virtually none of them contained any information of value. The problem, of course, is that DHS has been consuming vast resources from the national treasury while accomplishing nothing of value with regard to its anti-terrorism function. Instead, it is acquiring vast stocks of ammunition that is not even permissible for use in combat under the Geneva Conventions. DHS appears to be preparing to go to war with the American people. I am reminded of that old cartoon: that we have met the enemy and it is us! The fear induced in the public by these machinations has reached historic proportions. Perhaps the best summation of where we are has come from John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, who has captured the situation we are in. Everyone needs to reflect on the United States having become obsessed with national security, even to the extent of gutting our Bill of Rights and turning the country into a “surveillance society”. It is long past time that serious consideration be given to dismantling DHS and returning the organization of our government to its far saner past. The Politics of Fear in America: A Nation at War with Itself
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after authorising the bombing of neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War. I wonder what Lehrer would say about President Barack Obama, who ordered two Cruise missile attacks on targets in Yemen a week before Christmas, allegedly killing 49 civilians, including 17 women and 23 children. The missiles missed their target, local Al Qaeda leader Qasm al-Rimi.
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barack Obama, right, ordered two Cruise missile attacks on Yemen which allegedly killed 49 civilians. Entertainer Tom Lehrer, left, gave up writing songs after Henry Kissinger was also awarded the prize But now there's speculation that the attack prompted Al Qaeda to send the 23-year-old suicide bomber they trained, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, on the Detroit-bound jet. An official Tehran news website noted: 'U.S. Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Barack Obama has signed the order for a recent military strike on Yemen in which scores of civilians, including children, have been killed.' Do you find yourself beginning to doubt our own propaganda, which says that while we innocently go about our business in the world, international terrorists are bent on destroying our way of life for no other reason than to gain dominion over our Christian culture?So it's necessary to bring the 'war on terror' to them, even when this so often means killing innocent people? An American commentator writing on Slate, the internet news organization, asks: 'When it comes to undermining Al Qaeda, both in Yemen and generally, isn't it painfully obvious that the images of dead Muslim women and children which we constantly create - and which we have again just created in Yemen - will fuel that movement better than anything else we can do?' He continues: 'Whatever else is true, and even if one believes it's justified to lob Cruise missiles into more countries where we claim suspected Al Qaeda sites are located, one thing seems clear: all of the causes widely recognised as having led to 9/11 - excessive American interference in the Muslim world, our alliance with their most oppressive leaders, and our own military attacks on Muslims - seem stronger than ever. 'As we take more actions of this sort, we will create more terrorists, which will, in turn, cause us to take more actions of this sort in a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle. 'The U.S.military, and the intelligence community and its partners in the private contractor world, will certainly remain busy, empowered and well-funded in the extreme.' Excerpts from the Preface of America's "War on Terrorism", Second edition, Global Research, 2005. That same evening at 9.30 pm, a "War Cabinet" was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. And at 11.00 pm, at the end of that historic meeting at the White House, the "War on Terrorism" was officially launched. The decision was announced to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks. The following morning on September 12th, the news headlines indelibly pointed to "state sponsorship" of the 9/11 attacks. In chorus, the US media was calling for a military intervention against Afghanistan. Barely four weeks later, on the 7th of October, Afghanistan was bombed and invaded by US troops. Americans were led to believe that the decison to go to war had been taken on the spur of the moment, on the evening of September 11, in response to the attacks and their tragic consequences. Little did the public realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks. The decision to launch a war and send troops to Afghanistan had been taken well in advance of 9/11. The "terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event" as it was later described by CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks, served to galvanize public opinion in support of a war agenda which was already in its final planning stage. The tragic events of 9/11 provided the required justification to wage a war on "humanitarian grounds", with the full support of World public opinion and the endorsement of the "international community". Several prominent "progressive" intellectuals made a case for "retaliation against terrorism", on moral and ethical grounds. The "just cause" military doctrine (jus ad bellum) was accepted and upheld at face value as a legitimate response to 9/11, without examining the fact that Washington had not only supported the "Islamic terror network", it was also instrumental in the installation of the Taliban government in 1996. In the wake of 9/11, the antiwar movement was completely isolated. The trade unions and civil society organizations had swallowed the media lies and government propaganda. They had accepted a war of retribution against Afghanistan, an impoverished country of 30 million people. I started writing on the evening of September 11, late into the night, going through piles of research notes, which I had previously collected on the history of Al Qaeda. My first text entitled "Who is Osama bin Laden?" was completed and first published on September the 12th. (See full text of 9/12 article below). From the very outset, I questioned the official story, which described nineteen Al Qaeda sponsored hijackers involved in a highly sophisticated and organized operation. My first objective was to reveal the true nature of this illusive "enemy of America", who was "threatening the Homeland". The myth of the "outside enemy" and the threat of "Islamic terrorists" was the cornerstone of the Bush adminstration’s military doctrine, used as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the repeal of civil liberties and constitutional government in America. Without an "outside enemy", there could be no "war on terrorism". The entire national security agenda would collapse "like a deck of cards". The war criminals in high office would have no leg to stand on. It was consequently crucial for the development of a coherent antiwar and civil rights movement, to reveal the nature of Al Qaeda and its evolving relationship to successive US adminstrations. Amply documented but rarely mentioned by the mainstream media, Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war. This was a known fact, corroborated by numerous sources including official documents of the US Congress. The intelligence community had time and again acknowledged that they had indeed supported Osama bin Laden, but that in the wake of the Cold War: "he turned against us".
Who Is Osama Bin Laden? by Michel Chossudovsky www.globalresearch.ca A few hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration concluded without supporting evidence, that "Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organisation were prime suspects". CIA Director George Tenet stated that bin Laden has the capacity to plan ``multiple attacks with little or no warning.'' Secretary of State Colin Powell called the attacks "an act of war" and President Bush confirmed in an evening televised address to the Nation that he would "make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them". Former CIA Director James Woolsey pointed his finger at "state sponsorship," implying the complicity of one or more foreign governments. In the words of former National Security Adviser, Lawrence Eagleburger, "I think we will show when we get attacked like this, we are terrible in our strength and in our retribution." Meanwhile, parroting official statements, the Western media mantra has approved the launching of "punitive actions" directed against civilian targets in the Middle East. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: "When we reasonably determine our attackers' bases and camps, we must pulverize them -- minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage" -- and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror's national hosts". The following text outlines the history of Osama Bin Laden and the links of the Islamic "Jihad" to the formulation of US foreign policy during the Cold War and its aftermath. Prime suspect in the New York and Washington terrorists attacks, branded by the FBI as an "international terrorist" for his role in the African US embassy bombings, Saudi born Osama bin Laden was recruited during the Soviet-Afghan war "ironically under the auspices of the CIA, to fight Soviet invaders". 1 In 1979 "the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA" was launched in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in support of the pro-Communist government of Babrak Kamal.2: With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI [Inter Services Intelligence], who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad.3 The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade: In March 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 166,...[which] authorize[d] stepped-up covert military aid to the mujahideen, and it made clear that the secret Afghan war had a new goal: to defeat Soviet troops in Afghanistan through covert action and encourage a Soviet withdrawal. The new covert U.S. assistance began with a dramatic increase in arms supplies -- a steady rise to 65,000 tons annually by 1987, ... as well as a "ceaseless stream" of CIA and Pentagon specialists who traveled to the secret headquarters of Pakistan's ISI on the main road near Rawalpindi, Pakistan. There the CIA specialists met with Pakistani intelligence officers to help plan operations for the Afghan rebels.4 The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) using Pakistan's military Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) played a key role in training the Mujahideen. In turn, the CIA sponsored guerrilla training was integrated with the teachings of Islam:
Pakistan's Intelligence ApparatusPakistan's ISI was used as a "go-between". The CIA covert support to the "jihad" operated indirectly through the Pakistani ISI, --i.e. the CIA did not channel its support directly to the Mujahideen. In other words, for these covert operations to be "successful", Washington was careful not to reveal the ultimate objective of the "jihad", which consisted in destroying the Soviet Union. In the words of CIA's Milton Beardman "We didn't train Arabs". Yet according to Abdel Monam Saidali, of the Al-aram Center for Strategic Studies in Cairo, bin Laden and the "Afghan Arabs" had been imparted "with very sophisticated types of training that was allowed to them by the CIA" 6 CIA's Beardman confirmed, in this regard, that Osama bin Laden was not aware of the role he was playing on behalf of Washington. In the words of bin Laden (quoted by Beardman): "neither I, nor my brothers saw evidence of American help". 7 Motivated by nationalism and religious fervor, the Islamic warriors were unaware that they were fighting the Soviet Army on behalf of Uncle Sam. While there were contacts at the upper levels of the intelligence hierarchy, Islamic rebel leaders in theatre had no contacts with Washington or the CIA. With CIA backing and the funneling of massive amounts of US military aid, the Pakistani ISI had developed into a "parallel structure wielding enormous power over all aspects of government". 8 The ISI had a staff composed of military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats, undercover agents and informers, estimated at 150,000. 9 Meanwhile, CIA operations had also reinforced the Pakistani military regime led by General Zia Ul Haq:
The Golden Crescent Drug TriangleThe history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation":12
In the Wake of the Cold WarIn the wake of the Cold War, the Central Asian region is not only strategic for its extensive oil reserves, it also produces three quarters of the World's opium representing multibillion dollar revenues to business syndicates, financial institutions, intelligence agencies and organized crime. The annual proceeds of the Golden Crescent drug trade (between 100 and 200 billion dollars) represents approximately one third of the Worldwide annual turnover of narcotics, estimated by the United Nations to be of the order of $500 billion.14 With the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a new surge in opium production has unfolded. (According to UN estimates, the production of opium in Afghanistan in 1998-99 -- coinciding with the build up of armed insurgencies in the former Soviet republics-- reached a record high of 4600 metric tons.15 Powerful business syndicates in the former Soviet Union allied with organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The ISI's extensive intelligence military-network was not dismantled in the wake of the Cold War. The CIA continued to support the Islamic "jihad" out of Pakistan. New undercover initiatives were set in motion in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Balkans. Pakistan's military and intelligence apparatus essentially "served as a catalyst for the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of six new Muslim republics in Central Asia." 16. Meanwhile, Islamic missionaries of the Wahhabi sect from Saudi Arabia had established themselves in the Muslim republics as well as within the Russian federation encroaching upon the institutions of the secular State. Despite its anti-American ideology, Islamic fundamentalism was largely serving Washington's strategic interests in the former Soviet Union. Following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the civil war in Afghanistan continued unabated. The Taliban were being supported by the Pakistani Deobandis and their political party the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). In 1993, JUI entered the government coalition of Prime Minister Benazzir Bhutto. Ties between JUI, the Army and ISI were established. In 1995, with the downfall of the Hezb-I-Islami Hektmatyar government in Kabul, the Taliban not only instated a hardline Islamic government, they also "handed control of training camps in Afghanistan over to JUI factions..." 17 And the JUI with the support of the Saudi Wahhabi movements played a key role in recruiting volunteers to fight in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. Jane Defense Weekly confirms in this regard that "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate[d] in Pakistan under the ISI" 18 In fact, it would appear that following the Soviet withdrawal both sides in the Afghan civil war continued to receive covert support through Pakistan's ISI. 19 In other words, backed by Pakistan's military intelligence (ISI) which in turn was controlled by the CIA, the Taliban Islamic State was largely serving American geopolitical interests. The Golden Crescent drug trade was also being used to finance and equip the Bosnian Muslim Army (starting in the early 1990s) and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In last few months there is evidence that Mujahideen mercenaries are fighting in the ranks of KLA-NLA terrorists in their assaults into Macedonia. No doubt, this explains why Washington has closed its eyes on the reign of terror imposed by the Taliban including the blatant derogation of women's rights, the closing down of schools for girls, the dismissal of women employees from government offices and the enforcement of "the Sharia laws of punishment".20 The War in ChechnyaWith regard to Chechnya, the main rebel leaders Shamil Basayev and Al Khattab were trained and indoctrinated in CIA sponsored camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congress's Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the war in Chechnya had been planned during a secret summit of HizbAllah International held in 1996 in Mogadishu, Somalia. 21 The summit, was attended by Osama bin Laden and high-ranking Iranian and Pakistani intelligence officers. In this regard, the involvement of Pakistan's ISI in Chechnya "goes far beyond supplying the Chechens with weapons and expertise: the ISI and its radical Islamic proxies are actually calling the shots in this war". 22 Russia's main pipeline route transits through Chechnya and Dagestan. Despite Washington's perfunctory condemnation of Islamic terrorism, the indirect beneficiaries of the Chechen war are the Anglo-American oil conglomerates which are vying for control over oil resources and pipeline corridors out of the Caspian Sea basin. The two main Chechen rebel armies (respectively led by Commander Shamil Basayev and Emir Khattab) estimated at 35,000 strong were supported by Pakistan's ISI, which also played a key role in organizing and training the Chechen rebel army:
Following his training and indoctrination stint, Basayev was assigned to lead the assault against Russian federal troops in the first Chechen war in 1995. His organization had also developed extensive links to criminal syndicates in Moscow as well as ties to Albanian organized crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, according to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) "Chechen warlords started buying up real estate in Kosovo... through several real estate firms registered as a cover in Yugoslavia" 24 Basayev's organisation has also been involved in a number of rackets including narcotics, illegal tapping and sabotage of Russia's oil pipelines, kidnapping, prostitution, trade in counterfeit dollars and the smuggling of nuclear materials (See Mafia linked to Albania's collapsed pyramids, 25 Alongside the extensive laundering of drug money, the proceeds of various illicit activities have been funneled towards the recruitment of mercenaries and the purchase of weapons. During his training in Afghanistan, Shamil Basayev linked up with Saudi born veteran Mujahideen Commander "Al Khattab" who had fought as a volunteer in Afghanistan. Barely a few months after Basayev's return to Grozny, Khattab was invited (early 1995) to set up an army base in Chechnya for the training of Mujahideen fighters. According to the BBC, Khattab's posting to Chechnya had been "arranged through the Saudi-Arabian based [International] Islamic Relief Organisation, a militant religious organisation, funded by mosques and rich individuals which channeled funds into Chechnya".26 Concluding RemarksSince the Cold War era, Washington has consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at same time placing him on the FBI's "most wanted list" as the World's foremost terrorist. While the Mujahideen are busy fighting America's war in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, the FBI --operating as a US based Police Force- is waging a domestic war against terrorism, operating in some respects independently of the CIA which has --since the Soviet-Afghan war-- supported international terrorism through its covert operations. In a cruel irony, while the Islamic jihad --featured by the Bush Adminstration as "a threat to America"-- is blamed for the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, these same Islamic organisations constitute a key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the truth must prevail to prevent the Bush Adminstration together with its NATO partners from embarking upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.
Endnotes
It should be noted, that the hospital is directly under the jurisdiction of the Pakistani Armed Forces, which has close links to the Pentagon. U.S. military advisers based in Rawalpindi. work closely with the Pakistani Armed Forces. Again, no attempt was made to arrest America's best known fugitive, but then maybe bin Laden was serving another "better purpose". Rumsfeld claimed at the time that he had no knowledge regarding Osama's health. (CBS News, 28 January 2002) The CBS report is a crucial piece of information in our understanding of 9/11. It refutes the administration's claim that the whereabouts of bin Laden are unknown. It points to a Pakistan connection, it suggests a cover-up at the highest levels of the Bush administration. Dan Rather and Barry Petersen fail to draw the implications of their January 2002 report. They suggest that the US had been deliberately misled by Pakistani intelligence officials. They fail to ask the question:
If they are to stand by their report, the conclusion is obvious. The administration is lying. Osama bin Laden's whereabouts were known. If the CBS report is accurate and Osama had indeed been admitted to the Pakistani military hospital on September 10, courtesy of America's ally, he was either still in hospital in Rawalpindi on the 11th of September, when the attacks occurred or had been released from the hospital within the last hours before the attacks. In other words, Osama's whereabouts were known to US officials on the morning of September 12, when Secretary of State Colin Powell initiated negotiations with Pakistan, with a view to arresting and extraditing bin Laden. These negotiations, led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, head of Pakistan's military intelligence, on behalf of the government of President Pervez Musharraf, took place on the 12th and 13th of September in Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's office. He could have been arrested at short notice on September 10th, 2001. But then we would not have been privileged to five years of Osama related media stories. The Bush administration desperately needs the fiction of an "outside enemy of America". Known and documented Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda is a construct of the US intelligence apparatus. His essential function is to give a face to the "war on terrorism". The image must be vivid. The national security doctrine rests on the fiction of Islamic terrorists, led by Osama who are portrayed as a "threat to the civilized World". In the words of President Bush, "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? We are on the offensive. We will not rest. We will not retreat. And we will not withdraw from the fight until this threat to civilization has been removed." (quoted by CNN, September 5, 2006) The "hot pursuit" of Osama in the rugged mountainous areas of Pakistan must continue, because without Osama, referred to ad nauseam in news reports and official statements, the fragile legitimacy of the Bush administration collapses like a deck of cards. Chossudovsky calls it a complete fabrication "based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden (from a cave in Afghanistan and hospital bed in Pakistan) outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus." He calls it, instead, what, in fact, it is - a pretext for permanent "New World Order" wars of conquest serving the interests of Wall Street and the financial community, the US military-industrial complex, Big Oil, and all other corporate interests profiting hugely from a massive scheme harming the public interest, in the name of protecting it, and potentially all humanity unless it's stopped in time. On the morning of 9/11, the Bush administration didn't miss a beat telling the world Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon meaning Osama bin Laden was the main culprit - case closed without even the benefit of a forensic and intelligence analysis piecing together all potential helpful information. There was no need to because, as Chossudovsky explained, "That same (9/11) evening at 9:30 pm, a 'War Cabinet' was formed integrated by a select number of top intelligence and military advisors. At 11:00PM, at the end of that historic (White House) meeting, the 'War on Terrorism' was officially launched," and the rest is history. Chossudovsky continued "The decision was announced (straightaway) to wage war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in retribution for the 9/11 attacks" with news headlines the next day asserting, with certainty, "state sponsorship" responsibility for the attacks connected to them. The dominant media, in lockstep, called for military retaliation against Afghanistan even though no evidence proved the Taliban government responsible, because, in fact, it was not and we knew it. Four weeks later on October 7, a long-planned war of illegal aggression began, Afghanistan was bombed and then invaded by US forces working in partnership with their new allies - the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or so-called Northern Alliance "warlords." Their earlier repressive rule was so extreme, it gave rise to the Taliban in the first place and has now made them resurgent. Chossudovsky further explained that the public doesn't "realize that a large scale theater war is never planned and executed in a matter of weeks." This one, like all others, was months in the making needing only what former CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks called a "terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event" to arouse enough public anger for the Bush administration to launch it after declaring their "war on terrorism." Chossudovsky, through thorough and exhausting research, exposed it as a fraud. He's been on top of the story ever since uncovering the "myth of an 'outside enemy' and the threat of 'Islamic terrorists' (that became) the cornerstone (and core justification) of the Bush administration's military doctrine." It allowed Washington to wage permanent aggressive wars beginning with Afghanistan and Iraq, to ignore international law, and to "repeal civil liberties and constitutional government" through repression laws like the Patriot and Military Commissions Acts. A key objective throughout has, and continues to be, Washington's quest to control the world's energy supplies, primarily oil, starting in the Middle East where two-thirds of known reserves are located. Toward that end, the Bush administration created a fictitious "outside enemy" threat without which no "war on terrorism" could exist, and no foreign wars could be waged. Chossudovsky exposed the linchpin of the whole scheme. He uncovered evidence that Al Queda "was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war" era, and that in the 1990s Washington "consciously supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placing him on the FBI's 'most wanted list' as the World's foremost terrorist." He explained that the CIA (since the 1980s and earlier) actively supports international terrorism covertly, and that on September 10, 2001 "Enemy Number One" bin Laden was in a Rawalpindi, Pakistan military hospital confirmed on CBS News by Dan Rather. He easily could have been arrested but wasn't because we had a "better purpose" in mind for "America's best known fugitive (to) give a (public) face to the 'war on terrorism' " that meant keeping bin Laden free to play the role. If he didn't exist, we'd have had to invent him, but that could have been arranged as well. The Bush administration's national security doctrine needs enemies, the way all empires on the march do. Today "Enemy Number One" rests on the fiction of bin Laden-led Islamic terrorists threatening the survival of western civilization. In fact, however, Washington uses Islamic organizations like Islamic Jihad as a "key instrument of US military-intelligence operations in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union" while, at the same time, blaming them for the 9/11 attacks calling them "a threat to America." "America's War on Terrorism" - In-Depth The book is in four parts, each discussed enough below to convey the essence and flavor of the heavily documented power-packed amount of information in the volume's 365 pages - a healthy serving for each day of the year. Part I - September 11 September 11, 2001 is a day that will live in infamy, but not for how official accounts portray it. It wasn't the first September 11 of note and may not be the last. Chileans remember theirs in 1973 when General Augusto Pinochet, aided by CIA, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, ousted and murdered democratically elected President Salvador Allende by military coup d'etat. It ended the most vibrant democracy in the Americas ushering in a 16 year fascist reign of terror Chileans are still healing from 18 years later. Now it's our turn with Bush administration officials using the myth of an "outside enemy" to hide the real threat we face from within from real enemies in our own government. They're waging war on the world, destroying our civil liberties, and shredding our social state paying for it. It began long before 9/11, but that day plans became policy, then hardened, expanded and now threatening all humanity. Chossudovsky spells in out stating straightaway "The world is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history (having) embarked upon a military adventure" threatening everyone unless exposed and stopped. He begins with vital heavily documented background information about 9/11 already covered above. It explained we needed cover for our "war on terrorism." Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda provided it as "Enemy Number One" and his network, hiding the fact he and thousands of Mujahideen fighters were recruited for the largest ever CIA operation in the 1980s. They were organized, financed and sent to "destabili(ze) the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan, but (more importantly) destroy...the Soviet Union." CIA's Milton Beardman once explained "If Osama bin Laden did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." In fact, we did, using Pakistan's Military Intelligence ISI as intermediary, so bin Laden and Mujahideen fighters weren't aware who their real paymaster was or why they were recruited. ISI played a crucial role for Washington in the 1980s. Then, from the end of the Cold War to the present, it's been "the launch pad for CIA covert operations in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Balkans" turning Bosnia into a "militant Islamic base" and later Kosovo with help from NATO and Washington. This isn't speculation. It's fact. The ISI-Osama-Al Queda-Taliban nexus is a matter of public record, but the "American people have been consciously and deliberately deceived (about it) by their government." They have no knowledge the Taliban gained power in 1996 the same covert way - helped by US military aid funneled through Pakistan's ISI. Jane's Defense Weekly confirmed "half of Taliban manpower and equipment originate(d) in Pakistan under the ISI." Just like today, our hidden agenda was "oil" with Taliban officials "whisked off to Houston" to meet with US oil company giant, Unocal, "regarding the construction of the strategic trans-Afghan pipeline." Afghanistan is strategically located "at the hub of five nuclear powers: Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Kazakhstan." It also borders Russia, China and Iran. It's why Washington wants a permanent military presence in the country run by a puppet client government masquerading as a democratically elected one, and why we're at war so that status won't ever change. Chossudovsky explains behind the scenes, "military planners in the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA call the shots on foreign policy." They're in league with NATO, the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization (all US-dominated organizations). The real powers controlling everything are "the global banks and financial institutions, the military-industrial complex, the oil and energy giants, the biotech and pharmaceutical conglomerates," other corporate giants and the dominant media, or de facto ministry of state information and propaganda, disseminating deception while suppressing the truth. The result is catastrophic. The rule of law has been suspended, the Republic hangs by a thread, and "the foundations of an authoritarian state apparatus have emerged" that, in an emergency, could become as harsh as in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia at its worst under Stalin. It's no understatement. Its early disturbing signs are already present and recognized. The entire scheme is based on the myth of an "Islamic Jihad" being a "threat to America" when, in fact, the CIA and the US intelligence community have close ties to the "Islamic Militant Network." The CIA even admits bin Laden was an "intelligent asset" (as distinct from an "agent") during the Cold War, but that information's long gone down "the memory hole" and forgotten. He was used by four presidents beginning with Ronald Reagan, then GHW Bush, Bill Clinton, and now GW Bush writ large today as "Enemy Number One" in the phony "war on terrorism." Part II - War and Globalization Washington's "hidden agenda" involves waging preventive wars to "extend...the global market system (and) open...up new 'economic frontiers' for US corporate capital....in close liaison with Britain." US-British ties in areas of banking, oil and defense industries drive our joint military operations in the Middle East, Central Asia and most anywhere else from this marriage wreaking hell on earth wherever it marauds. "America's New War" post-9/11 was "in the 'pipeline' for at least three years prior to....September 11." Beginning with the Clinton administration's illegal war of aggression against Yugoslavia, NATO was enlarged to include Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Inclusion of former Soviet satellites took aim directly at Yugoslavia as the West's next target with Russia designated a future one. With that in mind, GUUAM was formed in 1999 comprised of four post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) - Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. It's a Western financed regional military alliance, under US-controlled NATO, "strategically at the hub of the Caspian oil and gas wealth with Moldova and Ukraine offering (pipeline) export routes to the West." A key immediate aim of this alliance is to fracture CIS, exclude Russia from Caspian resources Washington wants to control, and politically isolate Moscow combined in one strategic blow. "Militarization of the Eurasian Corridor" was the plan to do it with Congress adopting the Silk Road Strategy Act (SRS) in March, 1999. It was a framework to develop "America's business empire along an extensive geographical corridor" as well as undermine and destabilize Russia, China and Iran. It was also planned as a first step toward incorporating all former Soviet republics into "America's business empire" and sphere of influence, further isolating Russia and China. The area involved is vast, extending from the Black Sea to the Chinese border in a strategically vital part of the world rich in energy resources a new "Great Game" is being waged for. As already explained, Afghanistan lies "at the strategic crossroads of the Eurasian oil pipeline and transport routes." Under US control, it's part of making SRS work that requires the "militarization of the Eurasian corridor (for) control over extensive oil and gas reserves (and for protecting) pipeline routes (planned by) Anglo-American oil companies" like BP-Amoco and others. SRS also aims to prevent "former Soviet republics from developing economic, political and defense ties with China, Iran, Turkey and Iraq (and to) cut the Russians off altogether from the Caspian oil and gas fields." What's planned is a number of pipeline routes (transiting west, south and east) from the Caspian through countries controlled by the Western military alliance. The whole scheme aims to benefit the US-Anglo alliance, cut off Russia, China and Iran, and "weaken competing European oil interests in the Transcaucasus and Central Asia." When George Bush took office, negotiations with the Taliban were resumed on behalf of Unocal, after the Clinton administration first tried and then broke them off in 1999. The talks failed a few months before 9/11 leading to the Afghan war a scant four weeks later on October 7. It ended after five weeks on November 12 when the Taliban fled Kabul allowing US-recruited and financed Northern Alliance forces to enter the city the next day. Life in Afghanistan's been surreal ever since. In parts of Kabul, an opulent elite emerged grown rich from rampant corruption and drugs trafficking discussed further below. This opulent Potemkin facade hides the harsh, dangerous, desperate conditions for the vast majority of 26 million Afghans made worse by a US-led war and occupation allowing Northern Alliance warlords back in power. It reinstated their repressive rule that helped bring Taliban to power in the first place over two-thirds of the country including the capital, Kabul. Today it's de jeva vu all over again with Afghans fed up with occupation and Northern Alliance brutality. That's allowed Taliban forces to capitalize on the turmoil and reemerge reclaiming most Southern parts of the country. It's why war rages on with no resolution in site and likely will be as unwinnable as the lost cause in Iraq already acknowledged in US high circles. The Taliban was ousted in 2001 for various reasons. Among them was its near-eradication of opium production now flourishing again under Northern Alliance-occupation forces rule. Drugs trafficking is big business writ large with Chossudovsky explaining it's "the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade" annually grossing up to $500 billion according to a UN estimate. That's more than double the revenue generated by legal prescription drugs Big Pharma reported in 2005. A well-hidden Afghan war objective was reinstating opium production that was achieved writ large post-2001. UN anti-drug chief, Antonio Maria Costa, said it was at a record 6100 tons in 2006 (enough for 610 tons of heroin) or 92% of total world supply and 30% more than the amount consumed globally. Chossudovsky explained narcotics are a major source of wealth, not just for organized crime, but also for the "US intelligence apparatus" representing powerful "spheres of finance and banking." Intelligence agencies and legal business syndicates are allied with criminal enterprises blurring the lines between them, at times indistinguishable. Included are Western international and other banks and their offshore affiliates in tax havens. Multi-billions from illicit drugs trafficking pour into them making this revenue source a huge profit center. None of this is secret, but it remains unreported below the radar. So is how the money is laundered and recycled into legal enterprises in real estate, manufacturing, other businesses as well as used for transactions in stocks, bonds, and other speculative investments. It's also well documented that CIA trafficked in drugs (directly or indirectly) throughout its 60 year existence and especially since the 1980s when it used cocaine revenues funding the Contra wars in Nicaragua. Today, CIA is partnered with Afghan "warlords" and criminal syndicates in the huge business of heroin trafficking. Along with its other illicit drug dealings, it guarantees the intelligence agency billions in revenue supplementing its annual budget Mary Margaret Graham, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection, disclosed at $44 billion in 2005. This year it's likely higher with rogue operations ongoing almost anywhere and CIA able to get whatever it wants just for the asking. This is how a rogue agency operates Chalmers Johnson calls a global Mafia-style hit squad in his new book, "Nemesis." It's a "personal, secret, unaccountable army of the president" with mischievous covert illegal operations its main function. They include overthrowing democratically elected governments, assassinating foreign heads of state and key officials, recruiting and training secret paramilitary armies, propping up friendly dictators, and snatching targeted individuals for "extraordinary rendition" to secret torture-prison hellholes from which they may never emerge. Under George Bush, CIA is more active than ever with double the number of covert operatives. Johnson explains "CIA's bag of dirty tricks....is a defining characteristic of the imperial presidency. It is a source of unchecked power" gravely threatening the nation and shortening the life of the Republic and democratic rule he believes won't survive unless the agency is disbanded. Along with CIA and Homeland Security, Chossudovsky highlights "America's War Machine" and the major buildup in it begun after 1999. The aim: "to achieve (an unchallengeable) position of global military hegemony....through the largest military buildup since the Vietnam war" with large annual increases planned in future years and no end to this in sight. For FY 2006, the Pentagon's reported budget was $499.4 billion (excluding multi-billions off-the-book for Iraq and Afghanistan). For fiscal 2007, it increased to over $583 billion. Astonishingly, Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, Robert Higgs, says high numbers mask the total annual amount spent on defense in all forms, at home and abroad, that's almost double the budgeted amounts. For FY 2006, his total is $934.9 billion broken down as follows in billions: -- Department of Defense: $499.4. -- Department of Energy: $16.6 -- Department of State: $25.3 -- Department of Veterans Affairs: $69.8 -- Department of Homeland Security: $69.1 -- Department of Justice (one-third of FBI): $1.9 -- Department of the Treasury (for Military Retirement Fund: $38.5. -- NASA: $7.6 -- Net interest attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays: $206.7. Using published budgeted numbers alone, the US now spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined. In 2005, China spent around $30 billion, today it's surely higher but even if $50 billion it's around 8.6% of our FY 2007 defense budget and about 5% of it with all other expenditures Higgs includes. Hyping China's threat to the US, however, Department of Defense (DOD) claimed Beijing spent $65 billion in 2005, $90 billion in 2006 and $120 budgeted for 2007. Note, Higgs US defense spending numbers exclude secret budgets for CIA, NSA, and other off-the-books intelligence operations. It also excludes smaller budgets for the Selective Service System, the National Defense Stockpile Center, and the Treasury's program blocking financial flows to "terrorists." Nonetheless, in total, the numbers are huge, growing, and already out-of-control with Higgs estimating FY 2007 numbers an astonishing $1.028 trillion. What is it buying us and at what cost? Chossudovsky explains it's for plenty including refurbishing our nuclear arsenal with the latest technology targeting Russia and China. There's also a new generation of "tactical nuclear weapons" or so-called "mini-nukes" including "bunker buster" earth penetrating bombs targeting underground facilities. They're designed to explode deep below ground destroying their targets while containing toxic radioactive fallout. It's already known the latter objective fails based on observed tests so far. The information, however, is suppressed and won't deter the Pentagon from using these weapons even knowing they spread harmful radiation. Billions are also being spent developing advanced weapons systems including the hugely expensive F22 Raptor fighter plane, Joint Fighter (JF) program and controversial Strategic Defense Initiative "National Missile Defense Shield" intended for offense, not defense. It's now caused a public row with Russia over its planned deployment in Eastern European states close enough to raise justifiable alarm in the Kremlin. Then there's the ultimate imperial project in space under the doctrine of "Full Spectrum Dominance" assuring land, sea, air and space supremacy. It's outlined in the 1998 US Space Command document titled "Vision for 2020" with the cost to achieve this likely to run into trillions of dollars. Even worse is the danger post-9/11 since the Bush administration scrapped the notion of "nuclear deterrence." A secret report leaked to the Los Angeles Times state three conditions under which nuclear weapons may be used henceforth: -- "against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack; -- in retaliation for attack with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons; or -- in the event of surprising military developments" meaning anything the administration or Pentagon cook up as justification. The administration cites "rogue states" as potential targets, but clearly new policy has Russia, China and Iran in mind and maybe North Korea. China and Russia aren't ignoring the threat adding to the arms race along with other countries, like Iran, fearful of a US attack. In 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a new "National Security Doctrine" marking "a critical shift in East-West relations." It's further intensified today with Interfax recently reporting Putin saying Washington is turning Europe into a "powder keg" referring to it's missile shield deployment plans. Putin also used harsh rhetoric ahead of the June G-8 summit accusing the Bush administration of imperialism and starting a new arms race. At a lengthy well-attended news conference, he had plenty to say that was suppressed in the West because of his candor. He voiced the concern of many in the Kremlim that Washington is targeting Russia by surrounding it with military bases, installing missiles on its borders, and allying with CIS states to isolate the country in preparation for regime change. He emphasized Russia didn't start confrontation and isn't threatening to attack anyone. However, the nation is preparing for the worst and in late May test-fired a sophisticated new intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple warheads and new cruise missiles Russian generals claim will assure the country's security for the next 40 years. With Washington intent on destabilizing their country, Russia isn't ignoring the threat and will act responsibly to defend itself. That includes targeting US and European sites with "ballistic missiles, cruise missiles or some completely new systems" according to Putin. Earlier, Russia also confirmed it wouldn't exclude "a first-strike use" of nuclear warheads "if attacked even by purely conventional means," having only one country in mind as a potential aggressor - the US. Former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, also aimed sharp comments against Washington and Britain for its support in an early June BBC interview. He said Russia is trying to be constructive, but America is squeezing them out of global diplomacy (and is responsible) for the current state of relations between his country and the West. He also said the Iraq War undermined Tony Blair's credibility and accused America of "empire-building." He added Blair has "himself in the embrace of a military monster (and lost) his credibility in the world and in Europe." Chossudovsky further deconstructs Washington's agenda post-9/11 saying "the world is at an important crossroads in its history." The US "campaign against terrorism" is a "war of conquest" for empire, threatening future humanity with devastating consequences. "America's New War" isn't confined to the Middle East and Central Asia. It's aimed everywhere by militarizing "vast regions of the world, leading to the consolidation of what is best described as the "American Empire." The "war on terrorism" is cover to "re-colonize not only China (and) the former Soviet bloc, but also Iran, Iraq and the Indian (subcontinent)." Chossudovsky stresses "war and globalization" are bedfellows umbilically linked. They benefit Wall Street and the banking community, Big Anglo-American Oil, US-UK defense contractors and other corporate giants backing this process to extend "the frontiers of the global market system" giving them total control everywhere. The dominant media claim "free trade" and "free market" reforms will bring the benefits of western civilization to everyone. Unmentioned is how it's being done - through imperial wars of conquest as the method of choice, bringing with them massive death and destruction, extreme exploitation, devastating poverty, totalitarian control, and, in Iraq, the end of the "Cradle of Civilization" dating back thousands of years. Washington's rampaging military juggernaut turned a modern prosperous nation into a surreal lawless armed wasteland with few essential services like electricity, clean water, medical care, fuel and most everything else needed for sustenance and survival including safe streets, homes, schools and all public places. It also contaminated vast areas of Iraq with deadly depleted uranium and other hazardous chemicals and pollutants making the country the most toxic environment on earth and unsafe to live in. So much for the benefits of Western civilization and "free market" reforms. They champion deregulation and privatizing everything to steal a country's wealth for corporate predators, taking it from the people it belongs to. They get nothing back but misery and persecution if they complain. This is democracy American-style that's all illusion and no reality, and it's coming soon to a neighborhood near you unless resisted and stopped. Chossudovsky also deconstructs the language as Orwell would do. He justifiably calls the "war on terrorism" a cruel hoax. "Realities," he says, "have been turned upside down." -- "Acts of war are heralded as 'humanitarian interventions' (to restore) democracy. -- Military occupation and (killing civilians are called) 'peacekeeping operations.' -- The derogation of civilities (through totalitarian 'anti-terror' legislation) is called providing 'domestic security' and upholding civil liberties. -- ....expenditures on health and education (and most other essential social services) are curtailed to finance the military-industrial complex and police state." -- Mass human poverty is created worldwide through conquest, colonization and countries "transformed into open territories" for savage exploitation. -- "US protectorates are installed with the blessing of the 'international community.' -- 'Interim (or illusory democratically elected) governments are formed" run by designated political puppets selling out their nations' sovereignty to the lord and master of the universe for a sliver of the spoils. Sum it up - this is what "New World Order" rule looks like those now under it can explain better than any writer. It's tyranny masquerading as humanitarian intervention, liberation and democracy. Here's how Orwell once described it: "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." Today, it's sustained by the illusion of a phony "war on terrorism" publicly supported through fear of nonexistent enemies, ignoring instead a real one that does - our own government destroying our freedoms in the name of protecting them. Chossudovsky stresses what's vitally needed now to fight back in our own self-defense - "an unprecedented degree of solidarity (to build) meaningful mass movements" for real change (restoring) the balance of power within society...." He explains "militarization....enforces the capitalist market system....Military bases must be shut down; the war machine....must be dismantled....The 'structures of ownership' must be transformed disempowering banks, financial institutions and transnational corporations (plus instituting) a radical overhaul of the state apparatus." A key priority is "stall(ing) the privatization of collective assets, infrastructure, public utilities (including water and power), state institutions (like hospitals, schools and law enforcement including prisons), communal lands" and all else in the commons. Further, an illegitimate tyrannical system must end by removing and prosecuting criminal politicians and bureaucrats. The corrupted judiciary must be replaced by one upholding domestic and international law. Our system of checks and balances must be restored, and the Constitution again respected and obeyed, not discarded to the rule of law by what the chief executive says it is, meaning none at all. The "New World Order" must end, consigned to the dustbin of history, lest we end up there or wish we did rather than endure endless misery and abuse. Part III - The Disinformation Campaign It's an age-old trick that always works. It's why it's used so often even after being exposed as phony time and again but quickly forgotten in what Gore Vidal calls "the United States of amnesia." It's creating a climate of fear through fictional enemies made to seem real by the pursuasive power of the dominant media. Wars and propaganda are partnered at a time truth is the first casualty. Chossudovsky explains "the main objective of war propaganda (to convince the public war is justified) is to fabricate an enemy (by) drown(ing) out truth." The war is waged "from the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA" and other parts of the government using the dominant media to instill fear through disinformation and lies justifying anything in self-defense. Logic and reality are manipulated and twisted to create a phony enemy made to look real. An illusion is created that homeland security is threatened and under attack justifying wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are pure acts of illegal aggression for conquest and colonization. Preventive wars are justified even though common sense and any knowledge of international law says they never are for any reason. Chossudovsky explains how propaganda campaigns follow "a consistent pattern." They need "to instill credibility and legitimacy" based on claimed "reliable" information sources. The dominant media then transmit them through endless repetitions of warnings of the following kinds of information: -- References to "reliable sources (and a) growing body of evidence" from government, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. -- Claimed evidence linking terrorist groups to bin Laden, Al Queda or sympathetic to them. -- Threats of imminent terrorist attacks "sooner or later." -- Vulnerability of "soft targets" likely causing civilian casualties. -- Possible terror attacks in "allied countries" like Britain, France or Germany where public opinion opposes the US "war on terrorism." -- "Confirm the need...preventive actions" are justified against "terrorist organizations and/or foreign governments which harbor" them. -- Claim "terrorist groups" likely have WMDs and are linked to "rogue states" like Iran or Syria. -- Cite warnings with frightening color-coded alerts based on uncovered information (later proved phony) of impending "attacks on US soil (and/or) in Western cities." -- Cite law enforcement efforts "to apprehend alleged terrorists." -- Feature headlined news stories of suspects arrested, nearly always Muslims/Arabs, that usually turn out to be fabricated hoaxes using innocent victims to hype fear. -- Stressing Homeland Security repressive legislation (like Patriot Acts I and II and the Military Commissions Act) is justified as well as "ethnic profiling" and mass sweeps and arrests. All this is done to convince the public harsh "emergency measures" and preventive wars are in the public interest even though that turns reality on its head endangering everyone. It works, however, by giving the enemy a face with Osama bin Laden in the lead role. He's still got it, but so did Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi up to the time of his reported death in June, 2006. Al-Zarqawi was called "the new terrorist mastermind" even overshadowing "Enemy Number One" bin Laden. Unmentioned in the media was that Al-Zarqawi, like bin Laden, was recruited by CIA, through Pakistan's ISI, to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and that US intelligence maintained links to the "Islamic militant network" ever since. While Al-Zarqawi was reigning top threat, he was linked to Ansar Al-Islam, an "obscure Islamist group, based in Northern Iraq." He was also called Al Qaeda's "chief biochemical engineer" and was blamed for "the suspicious white powder found in a letter sent to (former) Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist," also containing deadly ricin poison. In January, 2003, a ricin terror alert was issued signaling Al-Zarqawi responsible, later proved phony by British police. As already stressed, the US needs a face on terror to justify illegal wars purportedly against it. While he was alive, Al-Zarqawi provided it along with bin Laden before and since. If neither of these men existed, others would be invented for their leading roles as "Enemy Number One" with still more designees in supporting roles. Without them, there's no justification for the "war on terrorism," and without media disinformation they'd be no way to get the public to go along. Part IV - The New World Order This "new world" flaunts the law, wages illegal wars on the world against nonexistent threats, and condemns its own people to state repression in the name of protecting national security it's endangering by its actions everywhere. One of its most outrageous acts is condoning and practicing torture as official state policy. Chossudovsky explains what's now widely known and accepted - that orders to torture Iraqi, Afghan and Guantanamo prisoners came from the highest government levels. Thus, prison guards and military and CIA interrogators followed "precise guidelines" from command directives. A secret FBI email, dated May 22, 2004, confirmed George Bush "personally signed off on certain interrogation techniques in an executive order (authorizing) sleep deprivation, stress positions, use of military dogs, sensory deprivation" using hoods, and who knows what else so far not made public. What is known is that CIA and the Pentagon have considerable knowledge how damaging these acts are to human beings forced to endure them for extended periods. The current Army field manual states this about sensory deprivation alone: (It) "may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior (and) significant psychological distress." Now try imagining how worse it is on victims undergoing physical abuse and intimidation daily combined with the damaging effects of sensory deprivation, never knowing when or if it will end. George Bush, his Justice Department, Donald Rumsfeld, Robert Gates and others at the highest levels of the Pentagon and CIA ordered these tortures. It's not because they work, but because they effectively destroy human beings, control those who survive it, and intimidate everyone thinking they may be next. It doesn't matter to officials in charge that most of their victims are innocent of any crime. Unreported is who these prisoners are being tortured. Seton Hall University Law School professors, including Mark Denebeaux, analyzed unclassified government data obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Their report was based on evidentiary summaries from 2004 military hearings on whether 517 Guantanamo "detainees" were "enemy combatants." They learned the majority of Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo weren't accused of hostile acts, but more shockingly, that 95% were seized by Afghan bounty hunters and sold to US forces for $5000 per claimed Taliban and $25,000 for supposed Al Queda members. In addition, at least 20 detainees were children, some as young as 13. Chossudovsky calls such actions: "reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition" in brazenness "when there was no need to conceal acts of torture." According to administration twisted logic and indifference to international law and norms, "torture is public policy with a humanitarian mandate (because) democracy and freedom are....upheld by 'going after terrorists.' " The 400 year ruling feudal order Inquisition aimed to "maintain and sustain those in authority," and that end justified any means doing it. Today, the Pentagon, Homeland Security and CIA are similar to yesteryear's "great Inquisitor" dispensing justice through a network of religious courts for political and social control. It's mandate was: destroy the heretics, and those charged were guilty by accusation given only a choice to repent and be strangled to death or stay silent and be burned alive. It's hard calling those times "the good old days," but it's no better today, just more sophisticated. Through years of experimenting, we've become expert inflicing maximum pain making victims endure it the longest time possible before expiring or going insane. Chossudovsky cites this as one example on our "road towards a police state" we're well advanced toward already, or maybe now there. We have outrageous laws in place, Nazis and Stalin would have been proud of, but now can do what Orwell imagined 58 years ago in his 1984 "Big Brother" society controlling everyone. Technology allows near-unlimited surveillance and abusive spying to watch, categorize, tag, and label us through information from our most personal records and behavior. Only the recesses of our hearts, minds and souls remain unpenetrated - so far. Nothing will change at this "critical juncture in our history" unless we "break the Inquisition." Doing it means "breaking the consensus (and) disabl(ing) its propaganda" campaign of fear and intimidation. That entails "unseat(ing) the Inquisitors" and prosecuting those in high office guilty of crimes of war and against humanity. Without this, they'll be no justice or an end to "New World Order" tyranny safe in the hands of a carefully chosen new "Grand Inquisitor" elected in 2008 picking up where the old one leaves off. He (or she) will follow ruling order policy assuring Congress and the courts are as much in lockstep as today with "the military-intelligence establishment calling the shots on US foreign policy." Benefitting hugely at our expense will be predatory corporate giants licking their chops for more gains ahead from continuing "militarization of (our) civilian institutions" fast disappearing under military/police state control. Chossudovsky raises the issue of administration foreknowledge of 9/11. He notes the Pentagon conducted a test simulation of a passenger plane crashing into the Pentagon in October, 2000. Ironically, the CIA held a similar (quickly hushed up for a year) test at its Chantilly, Virginia Reconnaissance Office on the morning of 9/11. Both tests refute administration lies they could not predict events they were preparing for. In addition, Washington had numerous "intelligence warnings" and that senior administration officials lied under oath to the 9/11 Commission they had no foreknowledge or forewarning. They had plenty. "Carefully documented research" also reveals: -- The US Air Force got stand-down orders on 9/11 not to intervene. -- A cover-up of World Trade Center (WTC) and Pentagon investigations occurred. -- WTC rubble was hastily removed and disposed of before it could be examined. -- Plane debris at the Pentagon was unaccounted for. -- Huge financial gains were made through insider trading in the days prior to 9/11. -- WTC Building 7 either mysteriously collapsed or was "pulled" the afternoon of 9/11. -- Critics accuse the White House of "criminal negligence" for disregarding crucial intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attack. These critics contend "they knew (in advance) but failed to act" preventively. Chussodovsky rebukes this line of reasoning saying revealing Bush administration lies regarding foreknowledge contributes to reinforcing the 9/11 cover-up. Foreknowledge then "becomes part of the disinformation campaign (serving) to present Al Queda as a threat (to American security), when, in fact, Al Queda is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus" and is still being used by it. Pinning responsibility on Islamic terrorists justifies the "war on terrorism" and against Iraq and Afghanistan. It also provides cover for repressive police state legislation shredding our civil liberties and dismantling our social state to pay for militarizing it. While debate centers around "incompetence" or "an intelligence failure," Al Queda and "Enemy Number One" are blamed," and the beat goes on allowing the administration to get away with (mass) murder literally. Explained above, this is Washington's strategy. Without Al Queda to blame and a gullible public believing it, the Bush house of cards collapses, there's "no war on terrorism" nor all it spawned at home and abroad. The 9/11 (whitewash) Commission was part of the scheme. It revealed Bush administration officials lied under oath, then did nothing about it. "Yet nobody had begged the key question," Chossudovsky asserts: "What is the significance of these 'warnings' emanating from the intelligence apparatus, knowing that the CIA is the creator of Al Queda and that Al Queda is an 'intelligence asset' (as distinct from an agent)." Were Bush administration officials deliberately lying to the 9/11 Commission to cover up a bigger lie no one's been held accountable for? Chossudovsky debunks another 9/11 lie asking "On the Morning of 9/11: What Happened on the Planes?" Events in their cabins were based on supposedly "corroborating evidence" from cell and air phone conversations to family members or others. Only one cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was recovered - from UAL 93. The 9/11 Commission gave the impression cell phone communications to and from the planes were of good quality. It was never mentioned prevailing technology made it near impossible to place a wireless cell call from an aircraft travelling at high speed above 8000 feet. Installed air phones, in contrast, provide clear communications. The Commission's timeline suggests the planes were at higher altitudes so claimed cell phone conversations reported were dubious at best and likely contrived, exaggerated or plain lies. Reports of these calls on the day of the attack were crucial "to sustain the illusion" America was under attack. It was "part of the disinformation campaign....dispel(ling) the historical role played by US intelligence in supporting the development of the (Al Queda) terror network." Heightening the level of fear and conditioning the public for what may lie ahead, we're now warned about a "Second 9/11." Former CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks did it in an interview in December, 2003 saying "another mass, casualty-producing event" would result in the Constitution being suspended and martial law declared - in other words, the end of the Republic officially replaced by tyranny. Chossudovsky stresses Franks' comment wasn't opinion. It was "consistent with the dominant viewpoint....in the Pentagon....and Homeland Security....in case of a national emergency." Further, the "war on terrorism" is the cornerstone of Bush's National Security doctrine providing "justification for repealing the Rule of Law" in the event of a significant external threat or event. Should this happen, it will amount to the "Criminalization of the State, the repeal of democracy," and the end of America as we know it - officially. From all available evidence, it appears this is planned using a fabricated terrorist threat and second 9/11 to pull it off with public consent believing it's for our own security, henceforth compromised and lost. Chossudovsky discusses the major Pentagon 2005 document outlining what's planned ahead for global military dominance along with police state control at home. It's called "The National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (NDS). It extends the "contours of Washington's global military agenda (envisaging possible) military intervention against countries (not constituting) a threat to the US homeland." This goes beyond preventive war to a more "proactive" strategy against declared enemies to "preserve peace (and) defend America." This is insanity, yet four major threats are considered: -- "Traditional challenges" from recognized military powers. -- "Irregular threats" from forces using "unconventional" means. -- "The catastrophic challenge" from WMDs. -- "Disruptive challenges" from "potential adversaries" using new technologies against us. NDS listed 25 countries "deemed unstable and, thus, candidates for (military) intervention." Those named remain secret, but some have been identified including Venezuela, Nepal, Haiti, Algeria, Peru, Bolivia, Sudan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire. It's hard imagining Iran, Syria and Lebanon aren't targets as well with others qualified for membership by failing to place our sovereignty above their own. Helping them "stabilize" is used as the pretext for any planned military intervention. That means any nation opting out of our "free market" model can expect the Marines to show up to return them to the fold. It's called democracy American-style. At home, as already explained, creating fear is the method of choice keeping the public on board supporting the phony "war on terrorism." That's what color-coded terror alerts are all about. They're seen daily on TV, and raised to "high risk" Code Orange at strategic moments when elevated fear levels are needed to get legislation passed, divert attention from administration embarrassments, diffuse anti-war protests, or simply re-stoke public angst about terror threats so people don't forget them. Never mind, as Chossudovsky documents, these threats, headlining for days at times, are nearly always based on "fabricated intelligence." So in the run-up to the March, 2003 Iraq war, a disinformation campaign was waged about WMDs and linking Saddam with Al Queda and 9/11. It was to build public support for the war and weaken anti-war protests against it that were unprecendented in size worldwide before it began. Once the truth on both counts came out, it was too late, and it was on to the next scare scam. Chossudovsky cites the Air France Christmas, 2003 stand down orders based on phony evidence Al Queda and Taliban operatives were on Flight 68. It was a lie, but it kept Los Angeles International Airport on "maximum deployment" throughout the holiday period and FBI officials working around the clock - for nothing because of "fake intelligence" to heighten fear. The nation was on "high risk" Code Orange alert, six heavy-traffic Air France flights paid the price, and so did the public getting scammed. Whenever a strategic moment arises or Washington thinks public fear is ebbing, get ready for more headlined news of terror plots and arrests made or suspects being hunted down. It happened in early June with hyped stories of a plot to blow up JFK Airport's jet fuel tanks and supply lines some reports claimed would be "more devastating than 9/11." This nonsense keeps being used because people believe it. This time, four men were charged even though no crime was committed, the suspects had no apparent means to carry out the supposed plot, and the only so-called "evidence" comes from conversations recorded between "the source" (identified as an unnamed drug trafficker) and defendants. We're told the informant agreed to infiltrate the "terror cell" in return for leniency on his pending sentence, guaranteeing he'd say anything to get himself off. This plot gets thicker, but the point is once again hyped accounts have again been used to stoke public fear. And once again, Muslims are vicimized as "terrorists." Sadly, even though likely innocent, these men may end up convicted and imprisoned just like other high-profile targets Sami Al-Arian and Rafil Dhafir. They're both innocent men now serving hard time victimized by Washington's "war on terrorism." Chossudovsky explains we live in a "Big Brother, Homeland Security State." A July, 2004 Homeland Security Council (HSC) report refers to a "Universal Adversary" (UA) defined as four categories of "conspirators:" -- "foreign (Islamic) terrorists;" -- "domestic (anti-war, civil and human rights) groups;" -- "state-sponsored adversaries" ("Rogue States, unstable or failed states"); and -- "disgruntled employees" (labor and union activists). Chossudovsky explains the notion of a "Universal Adversary" is being used to prepare the public for a "real life emergency situation" under which no political or social dissent will be tolerated. If it happens, it will trigger a Code Red Alert signaling the highest threat level of severe or imminent terrorist attack preparing the public for imposition of martial law and suspension of the Constitution. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, anti-terrorist "drills" were held in major cities to build "a broad consensus among 'top officials,' within federal, State and municipal bodies, as well as within the business community and civil society organizations that the outside enemy exists and that 'the threat is real.' " Chossudovsky calls it "a world of fiction (that) becomes fact." In the event of an emergency, the military will be involved that was forbidden under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, never enforced, and now repealed since October 17, 2006. That was when George Bush signed the Military Commissions (torture authorization) Act and National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2007 containing a provision annulling the 1807 Insurrection Act. Now the president can (legally) deploy federal or National Guard troops on the nation's streets for whatever he calls public disorder, including peaceful anti-war protests. These laws, along with Patriot Acts I and II (violating our most personal privacy rights) have set the table for martial law imposition whenever the chief executive orders it. Chossudovsky explains media disinformation is preparing the public "for the unthinkable" likely to be police state rule under the facade of a "functioning democracy." Its parameters have already been defined: -- "the Big Brother surveillance apparatus, through....consolidated data banks on citizens; -- the militarization of justice and law enforcement; -- the disinformation and propaganda network; -- the covert support to terrorist organizations; -- political assassinations, torture manuals, and (homeland) concentration camps (being built); and -- extensive war crimes and the blatant violation of international law." Conclusions Chossudovsky wrote an important book in 2002 titled "War and Globalization." This volume, "America's War on Terrorism," updated it with voluminous, heavily documented new information on the state of America today under both parties and the threat that poses for the Republic, hanging by a thread. Though published in 2005, it's as fresh now as when it first appeared, and his conclusion is essentially the same as what Chalmers Johnson wrote in his 2006 book, "Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic." Johnson explained our well-entrenched militarism and single-minded pursuit of empire saying we have a choice. We can keep on this path and lose our democracy, but history is clear: we can't have both. Chossudovsky and Johnson both agree - the signs are ominous, and conclusive evidence post-9/11 proves it, amply spelled out in "America's War on Terrorism." That doesn't mean we're doomed or change can't come. It can, but never from the top down. The lessons of history are clear. Mass-action grassroots efforts can achieve what governments won't do willingly. Scare tactics to bring us in line won't work if we don't let them. But it will take millions mobilized to resist to do it. Is saving the Republic incentive enough to try? We better hope so.
See Ten Years War in Afghanistan http://peopleus.blogspot.com/2011/05/ten-years-in-afghanistan.html The Patsies In the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Americans everywhere recited the collective mantra, “Things will never be the same”. Actually things had changed very little. Fifteen of the nineteen alleged hijackers were born in Saudi Arabia, where the House of Saud dictatorship has financed Muslim Brotherhood modern-day Assassins and CIA covert operations since its inception for the benefit of the Eight Families banking cartel and their Four Horsemen – whose ARAMCO oilfields are protectedvia US military occupation of the Kingdom. The Assassins this time were members of al Qaeda, thecadre of former Afghan mujahadeen fighters that the CIA trained, then used to carry out proxy wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Indian Kashmir, East Turkistan Province in China, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, Algeria and Uzbekistan. The CIA brought al Qaeda spiritual leader and Anwar Sadat assassin Sheik Abdul Rahman to the US to recruit Islamic fundamentalists willing to fight in these CIA wars. [1]
Al Qaeda was headed by Osama bin Laden, who built the CIA’s mujahadeen training camps in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was House of Saud point man in recruiting Arab fighters for CIA shenanigans in Central Asia and the Balkans. Bin Laden’s brother Salem was a business partner and good friend of James Bath. His father Mohammed provided seed money for Bath’s good friend George W. Bush’s Arbusto Energy. The bin Laden family fortune was managed by Carlyle Group principal George Bush Sr. According to a PBS spokeswomen, within three days of 911 both Vice-President Dick Cheney and Queen Elizabeth II called PBS to request copies of two video documentaries the station had done – one on bin Laden and the other on Islam. Since US intelligence knew all it needed to know of their foot soldier bin Laden, Cheney and Her Majesty were more concerned with what the US public had already been told of the Saudi paymaster so they could factor this into their forthcoming public relations blitz. Bin Laden’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri heads Egyptian Islamic Jihad – a Muslim Brotherhood front whose assassins had help from the CIA in escaping justice in Egypt so they could go to Albania to fight with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Al-Zawahiri’s sidekick Ali Mohammed came to the US in 1984. He trained terrorists in Brooklyn and Jersey City on weekends and instructed US Special Forces at Fort Bragg. [2] He was later involved in the US Embassy bombings in Africa. According to the FBI, five of the nineteen alleged 911 hijackers were trained by the US military – three at Pensacola Naval Air Station and two at other facilities. [3] Alleged 911 ring leader Mohammed Atta received the $100,000 he needed to plan and carry out the terror attacks from Standard Chartered accounts in gold bullion haven Dubai – where US Naval vessels often berth. Standard Chartered was founded by the Illuminated Cecil Rhodes. The bank is one of five London “gold-fixers” and prints Hong Kong’s currency. These accounts were controlled by 911 paymaster and UAE citizen Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi. According to British MP Michael Meacher in an article for The Guardian, M16 recruited up to 200 British Muslims to fight in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Meacher says a Dehli-based foundation describes Omar Saeed Sheikh – the man who beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 – as a British agent. Meacher says it was Sheikh who – at the behest of Pakistani ISI General Mahmood Ahmed – had al-Hawsawi wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta before 911, a fact confirmed by Dennis Lomel, director of the FBI’s financial crimes unit. [4] An October 11, 2001 article in The Times of India also corroborates this. At a June 25, 2002 conference in Calgary, University of Ottawa Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky and former Los Angeles police officer Michael Ruppert further corroborated this information based on ABC News reports. They added that ISI Chief Ahmad was in Washington on September 4, 2001 meeting with CIA Director George Tenet, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and the heads of two Congressional intelligence committees. [5] The New York Times reported on February 17, 2002 that the two congressmen Ahmed met with were Joint Senate Intelligence Committee Co-Chairs, Florida Senators Bob Graham and Porter Goss. Goss is a former CIA operative and was appointed Bush Jr. CIA Director in 2004. When President Clinton and Defense Secretary Cohen had earlier pressed UAE officials to crack down on theal Qaeda money shuffle, a senior UAE sheik told them it was difficult to discern between criminal money and that going to fight CIA proxy wars in Bosnia and Chechnya. [6] Ruppert cited a BBC report by Gregg Palast that details how the Bush Administration ordered curtailment of an FBI investigation of the bin Laden family. Minneapolis FBI whistle-blower Colleen Rowley and Robert Wright – who worked for the bureau in Chicago – described the same unnamed superior who “obstructed”, “deliberately thwarted” and “intimidated” their attempts to track down US-based al Qaeda operatives. Wright was investigating an al Qaeda money laundering ring based in Chicago that may have been plugged into the Nugan Hand/Bank of Cicero/CIA/P-2 black network based in Chicago – often disguising its dirty transactions via the freewheeling Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Chossudovsky stated his belief that 911 served the US in its quest to control both Central Asian oil supplies and the Afghan opium trade. He told the Calgary crowd, “Osama bin Laden is and remains to this day a CIA asset. Even now his al Qaeda operatives are working with the Kosovo Liberation Army who are US allies and with the US-backed forces in Macedonia. Members of al Qaeda have been protected as they moved into Kashmir where they are now fomenting conflict between India and Pakistan.”[7] Many of the alleged hijackers were in the country on legitimate US visas. Most were issued at the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to Mike Springmann, Chief of the Visa Section at Jeddah during the late 1980’s, CIA officials ran roughshod over the visa operation, often overruling Springmann’s decisions not to issue visas to people he considered dangerous. Often CIA officials would stamp the questionable applicants’ visas themselves in clear violation of US law. [8] Bush blocked Secret Service investigations into US-based al-Qaeda terrorist “sleeper” cells while he continued to negotiate secretly with Afghan Taliban officials. The last meeting, headed by Bush NSA and former Unocal official Zalmay Khalilzad, was in August 2001, just five weeks before the terror attacks. [9] The Unocal-led consortium offered the Taliban, through current Afghan President Hamid Kharzai, $100 million to run its natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean. The Bush team offered additional aid to the Taliban, whom they’d already given over $132 million in 2001, and told them, “You either accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”[10] Considering the history of CIA/Four Horsemen/Eight Families treachery in the Middle East and the toll these schemes have taken on the Arab world, one could easily interpret 911 as an Arab response to US imperialism. The trouble is that explanation defies the facts. Mohammed Atta’s father, a prominent Cairo physician, said his son was afraid of flying and insists that he was not a trained pilot. Atta believes his son was kidnapped and made a patsy by the Israeli Mossad. He believes Israelis used his son and the other 18 Arabs’ identities as cover to carry out the 911 plot because this would turn Americans against the Arab world, enhance the Israeli bargaining position vis-à-vis the Palestinians and draw the US further into the Middle Eastern cauldron. Atta’s father stated, “This was done by Mossad using American pilots.” Lending credence to the doctor’s charges is the assertion that the official passenger flight logs for all four American and United flights that became fuel-air bombs on 911 listed no Arab passengers. [11] TheDallas Morning News reported that in July 2001 a federal task force pulled the plug on over 500 Arab websites in the US when they raided InfoCom Corporation in Texas. Did the Feds want to silence cyber-chat concerning the actual whereabouts of the “hijackers”? Reports emerged from the Arab world that many of them had been sighted after 911. According to Daniel Hopsicker who wrote, Welcome to Terrorland..., Mohamed Atta began working for the US government in Hamburg in 1992. He was later enrolled in an elite officer training course at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL. Hopsicker says Atta had pilot licenses from six countries and wonders why, except to establish a paper trail, he would even have needed to attend flight school. [12] Atta spoke Hebrew, snorted coke and lived with a stripper. He met with various German and Swiss nationals just prior to 911 and was part of an email discussion on the Middle East that included numerous employees of US defense contractors. Atta and up to seven other 911 hijackers had received flight training at US military facilities. Most interestingly, Atta was part of an elite international exchange program run by the American/German Congress-Bundestag Program – an organization with close ties to both David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. The group funded Atta trips to Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus; where he played the role of Islamic fundamentalist. [13] Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) wrote in his 2005 book that two weeks after 911 he presented a chart to the Bush Administration showing that Atta and other hijackers were being monitored as part of the Pentagon’s Able Danger program. In September 2006 the Pentagon Inspector General put out a statement denying Atta’s existence on this chart. An infuriated Weldon stated, “I am appalled that the DOD IG would expect the American people to actually consider this a full and thorough investigation”. [14] The Florida flight school where the 911 hijackers trained was Huffman Aviation – co-owned by Bill Clinton chum Wally Hilliard and Rudy Dekkers, who met with Atta less than one month prior to 911. One Huffman employee told Hopsicker, “Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection…They were let into the country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal.” Huffman’s hangar at Venice Airport is used to maintain the planes of Caribe Air, a known CIA-front airline which had twenty of its planes seized by federal authorities at Mena, AR after they were found to have curried billions of dollars worth of contra cocaine. Hopsicker says Caribe could also be tied to Enron, since many of that now-defunct company’s Caribbean tax shelters had the word “Caribe” in their name. 15] The Beneficiaries While much of the Arab world’s mainstream media echoed Atta’s father’s viewpoint, all US media – corporate and progressive alike – dismissed these claims as “outrageous conspiracy theories”. Yet no one could deny that Israel gained a great deal from the 911 attacks. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – wanted in Belgium for war crimes – began targeting Palestinian leaders for assassination as soon as Bush took office, causing US public support for Israel to wane. Sharon used 911 to turn the tide, labeling all Palestinians, “bin Laden terrorists”, and occupying yet more Palestinian territory. Bush sent General Anthony Zinni to Tel Aviv as Middle East envoy to lend legitimacy to Sharon’s aggression, while refusing to deal with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. The Samuel Huntington CFR Clash of Civilizations crowd had their pretext for a global war against Arabs and Muslims. US defense giants reaped the 911 harvest. In October 2001 Lockheed Martin led a consortium of corporations awarded the largest single defense contract ever – a $200 billion deal to build an F-35 joint strike fighter. The Lockheed-led group included Northrup Grumman and several British companies including British Aerospace and Rolls Royce. [16] Amidst the post-911 flag-waving frenzy, the all-American bidder McDonnell Douglas would have seemed a more discretionary choice. Defense stocks surged. Raytheon stock was up 36% in the month following 911 while the rest of the stock market crashed. The hawks and their generals pushed for huge Pentagon budget increases, some advocating a $500 billion defense budget by 2005. In January 2002, President Bush approved a defense budget of $317 billion. Three weeks later he increased it to $379 billion, while setting a marker for a $471 billion defense budget by 2007. The money will line the pockets of the Eight Families banking cartel which owns the defense companies, pockets already deepened by Bush tax cut and the subsequent increase in US debt – which the international bankers make a healthy living financing. Their point man Bush – cousin to the House of Windsor – saw his dismal approval ratings skyrocket to over 80% as a fear-driven US public rallied around the Four Horsemen President. The Rockefeller-controlled airlines, near bankruptcy before 911, glad-handed their way to a $15 billion taxpayer bailout. The insurance industry, railroads and travel industry soon got in line at the government trough; their phony far-right anti-government venom temporarily muted. The CIA was a major 911 beneficiary, marching out an array of “old hands” like Richard Armitage, General Barry McCafferty and United Brands grant recipient Major Andy Messing to extol the virtues of dealing with unsavory underworld characters when gathering intelligence. The Clinton Administration had clamped down on this common CIA practice after revelations of CIA involvement in the Guatemalan death squad murders of American citizens. CIA torture chambers were once again open for business. Global civil liberties were a major casualty of 911. Within a week of the attacks Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft announced plans to unleash the CIA and FBI, expanding and combining their already sweeping powers. With no public debate and near unanimous Congressional approval – despite the fact that not one Congress member read it – Bush gleefully signed the ironically-titled USA Patriot Act into law, suspending big chunks of the US Constitution and bringing the nation a step closer to outright martial law. Similar legislation was passed in numerous other countries. Section 802 of the Patriot Act designated a federal crime broadly defined as “domestic terrorism”, which cast a broad net over political dissidents and seemed especially targeted at the growing ranks of WTO/IMF protestors who have taken a frontal assault on the Eight Families. Section 411 posed an ideological litmus test for foreigners wishing to come to the US in a direct affront to the First Amendment. Section 215 obliterated the Fourth Amendment, allowing the FBI to obtain a court order to seize a person’s “tangible things”, including books, documents and computer disks; without suspecting that person of wrongdoing and without informing that person of the seizure until well after the fact. Section 218 gave the FBI a green light to spy on domestic “enemies” and threatened to return the US to the dark days of J. Edgar Hoover. [17] Later Ashcroft marched out his new TIPS program, which encouraged mailmen, utility workers and neighbors to spy on their fellow citizens. In November 2002 the Bush Administration pushed through the new Homeland Security Act, whose name conjures memories of Hitler’s Office of Fatherland Security, which he established within one month of the stagedReichstag fire and later became the SS. [18] One provision of the act created an Information Awareness Office, which would compile a computer database on every American. The office emerged from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – a JASON Society affiliate - that earlier spawned both the Internet and stealth technology. Heading the office was Admiral John Poindexter, the five-count convicted felon of Iran/Contra fame. The Center for Public Integrity revealed an even more draconian version of the Patriot Act being drafted at Georgetown University. Dubbed the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, the draft called for secret arrests – never before allowed in US history – and carte blanchedeportation of legal immigrants. Another provision allowed chemical companies to quit disclosing toxic emissions to the communities in which they operated. As of February 2003 there had been over 300 rollbacks of the Freedom of Information Act. [19] In 2004 Patriot Act II passed. Provisions included a National ID. In 2003 the General Accounting Office dropped its lawsuit against Vice President Cheney, which would have forced him to reveal which energy executives he met with secretly to craft the Bush Energy policy. The right of US citizens to acquire information by which they could hold their government accountable was seriously eroded by the events of 911 and the culture of secrecy that emerged in its aftermath. But it was the Eight Families banking cartel that had the most to gain from dialing 911. The day of the terror attacks there was an unusually heavy volume of financial transactions being handled at the WTC. The bulk of investment bankers killed in the WTC worked for competitors of the Big Six old money investment banks. Cantor Fitzgerald was particularly hard hit. Merrill Lynch had its own building nearby, as did Deutsche Bank. Lehman Brothers moved from the WTC to a newly built headquarters just prior 911. Only seven weeks before 911 a group of wealthy oligarch investors terminated their lease on the WTC. Investor Larry Silverstein bought a 99-year lease on the property in July 2001, while the old money slid out from under it. Silverstein filed a $7.2 billion insurance claim after the tragedy. The Eight Families insurance companies involved offered only $3.6 billion. The President’s brother, Marvin Bush, was on the board of directors at Securacom – now Stratesec – from 1993-2000. The company provided security for the WTC, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines. It had the security contract at Los Alamos Laboratories, when there had been a number of security breaches at that facility. The firm is backed by a Kuwaiti-American investment firm known as KuwAm. Current clients include the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force and Department of Justice. They carry a Blanket Purchase Agreement with the GSA – meaning that no other company can compete for these security contracts. According to David Icke’s bombshell book Children of the Matrix, Securacom is a subsidiary of Crown Agency- a British Crown entity which Icke says also owns the Agha Khan Foundation. Khan is based in Pakistan and is spiritual torch-bearer for Islamism, from which groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban take their cues. This important fact points to Buckingham Palace involvement in the prosecution of 911. Marvin Bush also sat on the board at HCC Insurance Holdings until November 2002. That company carried some of the insurance on the WTC. Brother Jeb – Governor of Florida – declared a state of emergency in his state one week prior to 911. He personally escorted the alleged hijackers' flight school documents to Washington, DC shortly after the attacks. [20] New York Mayor Rudolf Guliani was portrayed as the hero of 911. Yet on November 2, 2001 Guliani ordered New York firefighters to thin their ranks at ground zero. The day before, 200 tons of gold buried in vaults beneath the WTC belonging to Silver Triangle gold kingpin/drug money laundry Bank of Nova Scotia was recovered. Gold prices soon began their meteoric rise. The Bank of Nova Scotia has extensive ties to both Israel and the House of Windsor. No one in the fawning corporate media bothered to ask Guliani where that gold went. Nor did they ask him why. According to Internet reports, he had ordered 6,000 gallons of fuel stored beneath WTC #7 to supply his personal bomb shelter. [21] The explosion of this fuel may have caused WTC #7 – which was clearly not hit by an airplane – to collapse, destroying sensitive Enron-related CIA and FBI documents stored there. The CIA ran an undercover station on the 47th floor of #7. The 23rd and 24th floors of the WTC North Tower housed FBI covert operations and boatloads of agency documents. Louie Cacchioli, a firefighter with Engine 47 in Harlem said he was in an elevator to the spook-occupied 24th floor of the North Tower, when he heard explosions. His crew – the first in that building – believes bombs were set off inside the towers. In a statement to the Albuquerque Journal shortly after the disaster, Van Romero, Vice-President for Research at the world-renowned New Mexico Institute for Mining and Technology, agreed. Romero, one of the world’s foremost demolitions experts, stated, “My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.”[22] Numerous experts agreed that jet fuel alone burns too fast to have melted the massive steel structure of the WTC on its own. The orderly nature of the collapse of both towers also begged inquiry. The contractor awarded the $7 billion job of cleaning up the WTC rubble was eerily named Controlled Demolition – the same outfit that quickly disposed of the evidence of the Alfred T. Murrah Federal Building after the Oklahoma City bombing. WTC scrap metal was expeditiously shipped to China. Brigham Young physics Professor Steven Jones, who studied the WTC rubble, says he found traces of thermite explosives all over the stuff. In September 2006, Brigham Young placed Jones on paid leave for his efforts at seeking the truth. Was Time’s 2001 Man of the Year Rudy Guliani part of a covert operation to consolidate Crown/Eight Families control over Persian Gulf and Central Asian oil? In February 2002 Guliani was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Iraq War Timeline, Part 1: 1973-1993Before and After the First Gulf WarMarch 20, 1973: Iraq launches a limited military offensive on Kuwait along the two nations’ 99-mile border in an attempt to control the Persian Gulf islands of Warba and Bubiyan. The islands are strategically located around the Iraqi oil port of Umm Qasr. Kuwaiti radio says an Iraqi military unit occupied a Kuwaiti police station at Sameta, two miles inside the Kuwaiti border, with Iraqi shelling of a border post near Umm Qasar. Saddam Hussein is vice president of Iraq at the time. April 4, 1973: Iraq pulls back its forces from Kuwaiti territory. June 30, 1973: An attempted assassination of Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and Vice President Saddam Hussein fails. July 16, 1979: Iraqi President al-Bakr resigns. Saddam Hussein assumes absolute power and executes scores of potential rivals. July 25, 1990: Saddam Hussein summons April Glaspie, the American ambassador to Baghdad, to a meeting “to hold comprehensive political discussions,” Hussein told her, and to send “a message to President Bush.” During the meeting, Glaspie says, according to atranscript in The New York Times: “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait. I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via [Egyptian] President [Hosni] Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us? […] “Frankly, we can only see that you have deployed massive troops in the south. Normally that would not be any of our business. But when this happens in the context of what you said on your national day, then when we read the details in the two letters of the Foreign Minister, then when we see the Iraqi point of view that the measures taken by the U.A.E. and Kuwait is, in the final analysis, parallel to military aggression against Iraq, then it would be reasonable for me to be concerned. And for this reason, I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship—not in the spirit of confrontation—regarding your intentions.” Glaspie’s comments have been variously interpreted as raising concerns or giving Saddam Hussein a tacit green light to deal with Kuwait as he will. August 2, 1990: Saddam Hussein launches invasion of Kuwait. Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait is virtually complete within 48 hours of the invasion. August 7, 1990: After a secret trip by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where Cheney secures agreements to base American military forces on Saudi soil and let U.S. Navy ships pass through the Suez Canal, President George H.W. Bush orders U.S. troops deployed in Saudi Arabia and begins building a multi-national coalition to defend the Saudi regime. The deployment is dubbed Operation Desert Shield. January 17, 1991: Operation Desert Shield becomes Operation Desert Storm as President Bush orders an air assault on Kuwait and Iraq, beginning at 3 a.m. Iraqi time. The air war lasts 38 days. Iraq launches seven Scud missiles at Israel and other Scuds at Daharan, Saudi Arabia, headquarters of the American forces. February 23, 1991: Iraq ignites some 700 oil wells in Kuwait. February 24, 1991: After 38 days of air assaults, Allied forces launch ground offensive. Kuwait is cleared of Iraqi forces within 100 hours. February 28, 1991: At 8:01 a.m. Iraqi time, allies declare a cease-fire. President Bush, on advice from Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, refuses to pursue Iraqi forces beyond a certain point in Southern Iraq, or to unseat Saddam Hussein. Bush encourages Kurds in the north of Iraq and Shiites in the south to rebel and unseat Hussein. Rebellions follow. March 25, 1991: Bush administration officials concedethat Hussein is close to crushing the Shiite rebellion in the south of Iraq. March 28, 1991: Hussein’s offensive against Kurds in the north of the country gains. The New York Timesreports that “the official Iraqi press said Government forces had captured the city, Kirkuk, the most important site in Kurdish hands. Kurdish rebels would not confirm that Kirkuk had fallen, but the Baghdad television showed what it said was footage of an Iraqi official touring the city.” April 9, 1992: A military court in Jordan sentences Ahmad Chalabi, in absentia, to 22 years in prison for embezzling money from a Jordanian bank he had managed. In 2002 and 2003, Chalabi would emerge as the Bush administration’s choice—and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney’s choice—to be the Iraqi president following the downfall of Saddam Hussein. August 1992: President Bush declares a “no-fly” zone for Iraqi aircraft in southern Iraq, adding to a similar no-fly zone declared over the Kurdish north of Iraq in 1991. The policy is aimed at protecting Kurds and Shiits in the two regions from being attacked from the air by Saddam’s forces. But it applies only to fixed-wing aircraft. Saddam continues to attack rebellious Shiites in the South with helicopter gunships. By then, at any rate, Hussein had crushed the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions Bush had encouraged, but not defended. August 14, 1992: Speaking at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney says Bush was right not to invade Iraq and seek the ouster of Saddam Hussein: “The question in my mind,” Cheney says, “is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.” April 14, 1993: Ex-President George Bush travels to Kuwait. Kuwaiti authorities say they’ve foiled an attempt to assassinate Bush, and blame the attempt on Iraqi agents. June 3, 1993: The Project for the New American Century, a group of neo-conservative politicians and journalists, releases its founding statement, claiming that “American foreign and defense policy is adrift.” April 15, 1994: In an interview at the American Enterprise Institute, Dick Cheney repeats that invading Baghdad would have been unwise, and would have led to a “quagmire.” January 26, 1998: The Project for the New American Century writes a letter to President Bill Clinton that states that his Iraq policy is failing: “The only acceptable strategy,” the letter’s signatories say, “is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.” Signatories include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad. January 20, 2001: President George W. Bush is inaugurated president. January 30, 2001: Ten days after Bush’s inauguration, the president meets with the principals of his National Security Council for the first time. “So, Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What’s on the agenda?,” the president asked Condoleeezza Rice, his national security adviser. “How Iraq is destabilizing the region, Mr. President,” she replied. According to the account reported by then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who was in the meeting, to author Ron Suskind in “The Price of Loyalty,” CIA Director George Tenet pulled out the poster-size surveillance photograph of a factory in Iraq. The photograph looked grainy, hard to decipher, but Tenet said the factory might be “a plant that produces either chemical or biological materials for weapons manufacture.” Secretary of State Colin Powell declared the sanctions against Iraq ineffective. The president ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to explore military options. The meeting was adjourned after an hour. “Ten days in,” Suskind wrote, “and it was about Iraq.” September 12, 2001: Speaking to Richard Clarke, his chief counter-terrorism adviser, and others in the White House Situation Room, President Bush, referring to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the day before, says: “Look, I know you have a lot to do and all… but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.” Clarke, taken aback, tells the president that “al-Qaeda did this.” According to Clarke, who reports the exchange in “Against All Enemies” (Free Press, 2004), Bush replies: “I know, I know, but… see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred… Look into Iraq, Saddam.” January 29, 2002: In his State of the Union message, President Bush declares Iraq part of the “axis of evil,” which includes Iran and North Korea. February 2002: The Defense Intelligence Agency issuesan assessment discrediting links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Late February 2002: Joseph Wilson, a career foreign service officer and ambassador, travels to Niger on behalf of the CIA to investigate a claim that Saddam had acquired yellowcake uranium from Niger in the late 1990s. Wilson finds no evidence supporting the claim. The CIA transmits the results of the trip to Vice President Dick Cheney’s office. The yellowcake-uranium document is later shown to be a forgery. September 16, 2002: Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, White House Economic Adviser Lawrence Lindsay estimates the cost of war on Iraq at between $100 million to $200 million. Lindsay is ousted three months later. In December, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, tells The New York Times that “the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion.” Congressional Democrats estimate the cost at $93 billion, not including post-war peacekeeping and reconstruction. October 10-11, 2002: The U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 10, and the U.S. Senate on Oct. 11, pass the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, better known as the Iraq War Resolution. January 28, 2003: In his State of the Union message, Bush says that the “British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” He presses the case for war on Iraq. February 6, 2003: Secretary of State Colin Powell,speaking to the United Nations Security Council, shows satellite photographs, projected on two big screens, of what he said were chemical and biological facilities, and claims Hussein is making nuclear weapons and developing missiles deliver them. “Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world,” Powell says. March 7, 2003: Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, tells the Security Council that his searches have found “no evidence” of production facilities of biological agents in Iraq. The same day, the International Atomic Agency’s Mohamed el Baradei, tells the council that “After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq.” He reasserts the find that the Niger uranium documents were a forgery. March 8, 2003: In a national radio address, Bush says: “He possesses weapons of terror. He provides funding and training and safe haven to terrorists who would willingly deliver weapons of mass destruction against America and other peace-loving countries. The attacks of September the 11, 2001 showed what the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We will not wait to see what terrorists or terror states could do with weapons of mass destruction.” March 8, 2003: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awards KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton (the oil giant once headed by Dick Cheney), a no-bid monopoly contract to restore and operate Iraq’s oil infrastructure. The $2.4 billion contract has a total potential value of $7 billion, according to a House Committee on Government Reform report. March 17, 2003: As the United Nations Security Council refuses to pass a resolution, sought by Bush, authorizing war on Iraq, Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair end their attempt to convince the United Nations to do so. That evening, Bush gives Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war. March 19, 2003: The U.S.-led war on Iraq begins. Top US Government Insider: Bin Laden Died In 2001, 9/11 A False Flag (confirmed!)Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations Steve R. Pieczeniksays he is prepared to tell a federal grand jury the name of a top general who told him directly 9/11 was a false flag attack “Bin Laden had already been “dead for months,” and that the government was waiting for the most politically expedient time to roll out his corpse. Pieczenik would be in a position to know, having personally met Bin Laden and worked with him during the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the early 80′s” Top US government insider Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, a man who held numerous different influential positions under three different Presidents and still works with the Defense Department, shockingly told The Alex Jones Show yesterday that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001 and that he was prepared to testify in front of a grand jury how a top general told him directly that 9/11 was a false flag inside job. Pieczenik cannot be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist”. He served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under three different administrations, Nixon, Ford and Carter, while also working under Reagan and Bush senior, and still works as a consultant for the Department of Defense. A former US Navy Captain, Pieczenik achieved two prestigious Harry C. Solomon Awards at the Harvard Medical School as he simultaneously completed a PhD at MIT. Recruited by Lawrence Eagleburger as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Management, Pieczenik went on to develop, “the basic tenets for psychological warfare, counter terrorism, strategy and tactics for transcultural negotiations for the US State Department, military and intelligence communities and other agencies of the US Government,” while also developing foundational strategies for hostage rescue that were later employed around the world. Pieczenik also served as a senior policy planner under Secretaries Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, George Schultz and James Baker and worked on George W. Bush’s election campaign against Al Gore. His record underscores the fact that he is one of the most deeply connected men in intelligence circles over the past three decades plus. The character of Jack Ryan, who appears in many Tom Clancy novels and was also played by Harrison Ford in the popular 1992 movie Patriot Games, is also based on Steve Pieczenik. Back in April 2002, over nine years ago, Pieczenik told the Alex Jones Show that Bin Laden had already been “dead for months,” and that the government was waiting for the most politically expedient time to roll out his corpse. Pieczenik would be in a position to know, having personally met Bin Laden and worked with him during the proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan back in the early 80′s. Pieczenik said that Osama Bin Laden died in 2001, “Not because special forces had killed him, but because as a physician I had known that the CIA physicians had treated him and it was on the intelligence roster that he had marfan syndrome,” adding that the US government knew Bin Laden was dead before they invaded Afghanistan. Marfan syndrome is a degenerative genetic disease for which there is no permanent cure. The illness severely shortens the life span of the sufferer. “He died of marfan syndrome, Bush junior knew about it, the intelligence community knew about it,” said Pieczenik, noting how CIA physicians had visited Bin Laden in July 2001 at the American Hospital in Dubai. “He was already very sick from marfan syndrome and he was already dying, so nobody had to kill him,” added Pieczenik, stating that Bin Laden died shortly after 9/11 in his Tora Bora cave complex. “Did the intelligence community or the CIA doctor up this situation, the answer is yes, categorically yes,” said Pieczenik, referring to Sunday’s claim that Bin Laden was killed at his compound in Pakistan, adding, “This whole scenario where you see a bunch of people sitting there looking at a screen and they look as if they’re intense, that’s nonsense,” referring to the images released by the White House which claim to show Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton watching the operation to kill Bin Laden live on a television screen. “It’s a total make-up, make believe, we’re in an American theater of the absurd….why are we doing this again….nine years ago this man was already dead….why does the government repeatedly have to lie to the American people,” asked Pieczenik. “Osama Bin Laden was totally dead, so there’s no way they could have attacked or confronted or killed Osama Bin laden,” said Pieczenik, joking that the only way it could have happened was if special forces had attacked a mortuary. Pieczenik said that the decision to launch the hoax now was made because Obama had reached a low with plummeting approval ratings and the fact that the birther issue was blowing up in his face. “He had to prove that he was more than American….he had to be aggressive,” said Pieczenik, adding that the farce was also a way of isolating Pakistan as a retaliation for intense opposition to the Predator drone program, which has killed hundreds of Pakistanis. “This is orchestrated, I mean when you have people sitting around and watching a sitcom, basically the operations center of the White House, and you have a president coming out almost zombie-like telling you they just killed Osama Bin Laden who was already dead nine years ago,” said Pieczenik, calling the episode, “the greatest falsehood I’ve ever heard, I mean it was absurd.” Dismissing the government’s account of the assassination of Bin Laden as a “sick joke” on the American people, Pieczenik said, “They are so desperate to make Obama viable, to negate the fact that he may not have been born here, any questions about his background, any irregularities about his background, to make him look assertive….to re-elect this president so the American public can be duped once again.” Pieczenik’s assertion that Bin Laden died almost ten years ago is echoed by numerous intelligence professionals as well as heads of state across the world. Bin Laden, “Was used in the same way that 9/11 was used to mobilize the emotions and feelings of the American people in order to go to a war that had to be justified through a narrative that Bush junior created and Cheney created about the world of terrorism,” stated Pieczenik. During his interview with the Alex Jones Show yesterday, Pieczenik also asserted he was directly told by a prominent general that 9/11 was a stand down and a false flag operation, and that he is prepared to go to a grand jury to reveal the general’s name. “They ran the attacks,” said Pieczenik, naming Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Condoleezza Rice amongst others as having been directly involved. “It was called a stand down, a false flag operation in order to mobilize the American public under false pretenses….it was told to me even by the general on the staff of Wolfowitz – I will go in front of a federal committee and swear on perjury who the name was of the individual so that we can break it open,” said Pieczenik, adding that he was “furious” and “knew it had happened”. “I taught stand down and false flag operations at the national war college, I’ve taught it with all my operatives so I knew exactly what was done to the American public,” he added. Pieczenik re-iterated that he was perfectly willing to reveal the name of the general who told him 9/11 was an inside job in a federal court, “so that we can unravel this thing legally, not with the stupid 9/11 Commission that was absurd.” Pieczenik explained that he was not a liberal, a conservative or a tea party member, merely an American who is deeply concerned about the direction in which his country is heading. The pro Gaddafi media has been on steroids shoveling out all their NATO monster stories…slaughtering civilians intentionally, destroying civilian infrastructure, etc. And when it comes to the rebel command we have heard of them being Al Qaeda led, CIA, SAS, …almost like they had a roulette wheel somewhere with all their favorite villains on in. We now have incontrovertible proof that Israelis, working in Tripoli, actively managed Gaddafi’s intelligence services. When the inner sanctum was cranked open and BBC video teams entered, the documentation of this strange partnership was exposed for the world to see. Apologies for the audio being low on this. Just turn up your speakers. Thanks
Are You Also Looking at Rupert Murdoch News Corp Type Instructions Here? VT has uncovered that Israel has been working so closely with the Gaddafi regime that they were running his Homeland Security Headquarters…the countrywide communications intercepts and the torture chambers downstairs. The companies identified, French and Israel partnerships which include EADS and IAI (Israeli Aircraft Industries,) manufacturer or the EAGLE systems, drones used for surveillance, signals intelligence gathering, target acquisition and attack, are identified as contractors.
All Documents in English - No French Involved Here The French firm Amesys is responsible for sensor arrays and signal’s interception equipment. However, as there is no documentation in French seen onsite, no French operators would have been in Tripoli. The French are notoriously “testy” about reading, speaking or writing in English and will generally only do so under threat of torture. Over the past few days we have been shifting gears with our readers the Libyan story. It is now shifting over from bits and pieces reporting to one where we will have a solid evidence trail.
I was working on a Gaddafi White Collar Mercenaries piece yesterday when this BBC film crew tour took us through the open doors of his Homeland Security Operation center. Yes folks, Santa has come early this year. I had my fingers crossed and prayed that I would not be seeing burned out rooms. How Many Lives and Fates Were Sealed in This Room? There were rows and rows of hard copy archive shelving holding what was treasure trove of intercept records. Obviously phosphorus grenades must have been in short supply, or these folks took off at the last minute. But then it got better. As the tour continued there was shot after shot of signs, admin instructions and documents…all in English !!! Let that sink in a minute. Here were are in Tripoli, in Gaddafi’s security brain center, something which had obviously been in operation a long, long time…and the language de jour???….English. BBC gave us a few examples of finds.
Human Intel Was Done in Arabic For Outside Personnel Followup What we have here is a foreign mercenary run security operation, partially due to Gaddafi’s need to keep an eye his defecting civilian and military people, and to keep his midnight raid people busy. The torture center was on the floor below the operations center. The NTC claims 40,000 detainees are still missing. Were their fates sealed in this room? An Eagle Amus document popped into view…the French partners of the Israeli intercept equipment. With the office run in English, with Arabic translators of course, we really have a shot list of helper culprits…Canada, Britain, the American CIA, or the French…all NATO countries.
Israeli Low Level Drone Can Capture Communications During the Libyan war mass media gave virtually no background coverage to Gaddafi’s long time dealings with the Israelis. We have reported here that the Gaddafi sons, particularly Saif, were shuffling back and forth to Israel, with one trip lasting a week. The early African mercenary story with the Israeli contractor was in the Israeli print news. And Gordon Duff recent article reporting Said Gaddafi’s funding of the Africa Islamic Council’s anti-Hezbollah efforts in Lebanon.
Saif Gaddafi - the Israeli Connection Why was Saif doing that? The benefit to the Israelis is obvious. But what was Saif getting in return for the effort? Was he there to borrow money maybe, or to tap into the Israeli’s talent reservior for electronic intercept hardware, software, and experienced personnel, especially the language skills necessary. Are there other suspects, the Serbians, Turks, Belorussians, Poles, Georgians ??? What could they really bring to the table in this capacity. Nothing really. So there are really only two choices…one of the main NATO countries, or Israel. We have placed our bet. Welcome to the real world folks. It’s a nasty place. More will be coming on the Gaddafi white collar mercs….the civilian technicians and military officers. There is a long history here. |
Sunday, May 29, 2011
America's "War on Terrorism"
Experts believe the America's "War on Terrorism", attack took place in 1992 in Yemen. American troops bound for Somalia were staying at two hotels in the port city of Aden. Bombs were detonated and killed two people but none were US Troops who had already moved on from the hotel. In 2000, came what most people know as the first attack – the bombing of the USS Cole in the harbor of the same port city of Aden, Yemen. The World Trade Center was the site of the first attack on American soil where terrorist detonated a truck bomb under the building.
Below is a partial photo timeline of attacks around the world (excluding Iraq because there are just too many) beginning at the World Trade Center in 1993 and up to the 2010 intercepted mail bombs, packaged in printers, bound for Jewish Centers in Chicago and originating in Yemen.
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: Brian Rolchford stands outside the World Trade Center after walking down from the 105th floor. Smoke swept through the 110-story building after an explosion caused the ceiling of a train station to collapse on February 26, 1993. The explosion set off a fire below the twin towers. (TIM CLARY/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: A police photographer adjusts a light at the edge of the crater in an underground parking garage at the World Trade Center on February 28, 1993. The explosion killed 6 people and injured over 1,000. (MARK D.PHILLIPS/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: New York City police and firefighters inspect the bomb crater inside the World Trade Center on February 27, 1993, one day after the fatal attack by an Islamic faction. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in the bombing. (AP Photo/Richard Drew) #
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: An injured man is aided by rescue workers after an explosion rocked the World Trade Center in New York, Feb. 26, 1993. (AP Photo/Joe Tabacca) #
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: Two New York City police officers help an injured women away from the scene of the World Trade Center explosion on Feb. 26, 1993. (AP Photo/Joe Tabacca, File) #
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: A clock, which reflects the time of the blast at the World Trade Center, sits in the wreckage of a vehicle at an impound lot in Brooklyn, March 9, 1993. (AP Photo/Kevin Larkin)#
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: Nidal A. Ayyad, 25, a chemical engineer arrested in connection with the World Trade Center bombing, is led away by U.S. Marshalls at Federal Court after being denied bail on March 12, 1993. (TIMOTHY CLARY/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1993 WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMBING: Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, 49, shown in file picture dated August 6, 1989 sits and prays inside an iron cage at the opening of court session in Cairo. Rahman, spiritual leader of Egypt's main armed group the Moslem fundamentalist Jamaa Islamiyya, was jailed for life in January 1996 for his role in a terrorist plot against the United States and an assassination bid against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He has also been implicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. (MIKE NELSON/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1993 BOMBAY BOMBINGS: A police officer stands beside a charred automobile outside the Air India building March 13, 1993, one day after a series of bombs exploded in this western port city, India's financial and commercial center. More than 250 people were killed, and more than 1,250 were injured by the bombs. Among the targets were the Bombay Stock Exchange, luxury hotels, a bus, a movie theater and shopping centers. (DOUGLAS E. CURRAN/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1993 BOMBAY BOMBINGS: People cover their faces from the stench of decaying bodies March 14, 1993 while attempting to identify relatives at a morgue attached to the King Edward Memorial Hospital. More than 250 people were killed after a series of powerful bomb blasts rocked the city two days earlier. (DOUGLAS E. CURRAN/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1993 BOMBAY BOMBINGS: A double-decker bus passes the crater of a March 12th bomb blast, one of a series of bombs that rocked this western port city in India. More than 300 people were killed in the blasts, which a senior police official has blamed on Bombay's criminal underworld. (DOUGLAS E. CURRAN/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: People help rescue one of the people injured when a bomb exploded near the US embassy and a bank in Nairobi August 7, 1998, killing at least 60 people, including eight Americans, and leaving more than 1000 injured. US ambassador Prudence Bushnell was slightly hurt in the blast, which which reduced a six-story building to rubble. Another bomb exploded in Dar-el-Salaam, Tanzania, killing six people. (AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: People and firemen work to remove the bodies of people who died when a bomb exploded near the US embassy and a bank in Nairobi August 7, killing at least 60 people, including eight Americans, and leaving more than 1,000 injured. US ambassador Prudence Bushnell was slightly hurt in the blast, which which reduced a six-story building to rubble. Another bomb exploded in Dar-el-Salaam, Tanzania, killing six people. (AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Rescuers and officials stand at the site in front of US embassy August 12 in Nairobi after a ceremony for those killed in the August 7 bomb attack at the embassy. (THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Kenyan rescuers carry a dead body to Nairobi hospital, August 11, five days after the deadly bomb attack here that killed 211 people. Bulldozers continue to clear a huge pile of rubble in search of more bodies and survivors. (THOMAS COEX/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Rescuers work to help survivors amid the devastation brought by a bomb explosion in Al-Qaeda's first major international attack near the US embassy and a bank in Nairobi on August 7, 1998 that killed at least 60 people, including eight Americans, and left more than 1,000 injured. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Cars burn in the parking lot outside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, Friday, August 7, 1998, after a huge explosion ripped apart a building and heavily damaged the embassy. (AP Photo/Sayyid Azim) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: People walk past the bomb damaged Co-Operative Bank House following an explosion in Nairobi, Friday, August 7, 1998. An undetermined number of people inside and outside the bank were reported killed, and hundreds were injured after a bomb exploded outside the U.S. embassy. U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, was cut on the lip and helped from the nearby Cooperative Bank House, where she had just given a news conference, embassy spokesman Bill Barr said. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi)#
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Rescue workers carry Susan Francisca Murianki, a U.S. Embassy office worker, over the rubble of a collapsed building next to the embassy, Friday, August 7, 1998 in Nairobi, Kenya. Terrorist bombs exploded minutes apart outside the U.S. embassies in the Kenyan and Tanzanian capitals Friday. Americans were among the dead, and the U.S. ambassador to Kenya was injured, the State Department said. More than 40 people were killed and 1,000 wounded in Nairobi alone. (AP PHOTO/KHALIL SENOSI) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Rescue workers remove a dead body from the collapsed building next to the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi Saturday, Aug. 8, 1998. Terrorist bombs exploded minutes apart outside the U.S. embassies in both Kenya and Tanzania, killing at least 107 people, injuring over 2,200 and turning buildings into mountains of shattered concrete. (AP Photo/Khalil Senosi) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Teams from Israel, the U.S. and France work with Kenyan rescuers during the evening Tuesday, Aug. 11, 1998 to recover bodies trapped under the building adjacent to the U.S. embassy, left, which collapsed in the explosion. Twin terrorist bombings in Kenya and Tanzania claimed at least 217 lives and injured nearly 5,000, and the death toll was rising. (AP Photo/Sayyid Azim) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: One day after the bomb blast exploded on the compound of the U.S. Embassy to Tanzania, a nurse watches over patients in a ward set aside for those wounded in the bombing at the Muhimbili Medical Center in the capital Dar es Salaam Saturday, Aug. 8, 1998. Almost simultaneously, bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Friday killing over 130 and injuring over 2,200. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: One day after the bomb blast, a U.S. ballistics investigator looks for clues as he examines the burned-out wreakage of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania in a residential neighborhood of the capital Dar es Salaam Saturday, Aug. 8, 1998. Almost simultaneously, bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania Friday killing over 130 and injuring over 2,200. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: One day after a bomb blast exploded on the compound of the U.S. Embassy to Tanzania, a Tanzanian Army soldier helps keep watch over the burned-out building wreakage, in the capital Dar es Salaam Saturday, Aug. 8, 1998. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: U.S. Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, center, is helped by unidentified men, as she is evacuated from the area of the U.S. Embassy following an explosion in downtown Nairobi, Friday, Aug. 7, 1998. Terrorist bombs exploded minutes apart outside the U.S. embassies in both Kenya and Tanzania, turning buildings into mountains of shattered concrete. Bushnell, was cut on the lip and helped from Cooperative Bank House, near the embassy, where she had just given a news conference, embassy spokesman Bill Barr said. (AP Photo/Sayyid Azim) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: One day after the bomb blast, the burned-out wreakage of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania is seen in a residential neighborhood of the capital Dar es Salaam Saturday, Aug. 8, 1998. Almost simultaneously, bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania killing over 130 and injuring over 2,200. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Shirley Wambui, 5, weeps during the burial of her aunt Alice Ndutu Gachiri in the Nairobi Langata cemetery Saturday August 15, 1998. Gachiri died on Friday Aug. 7 in the building next to the US embassy destroyed by a car bomb. The blast killed 247 and injured more than 5,500 people. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: In this Aug. 15, 1998 photo, a United States Marine talks with an FBI investigator in front of the damaged U.S. Embassy in the capital Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: Orie Rogo-Manduli weeps during a memorial service for victims on the site of the U.S. embassy bombing Friday, Aug. 14, 1998. With rescue operations wrapped up, and the death toll at 257, the focus was on cleanup work and the all-out push to learn who perpetrated the nearly simultaneous bombings in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. (AP Photo/Jean-Marc Bouju) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: On the day of the burial of Bakari Nyumbu, a guard at the U.S. Embassy killed in last Friday's bombing, female family members say Muslim prayers for him in front of Nyumbu's house in the Tandale suburb of the capital Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Monday, Aug. 10, 1998. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: The coffin containing the body of Bakari Nyumbu, who was killed in last Friday's U.S. Embassy bombing while he was on duty as an embassy guard, is passed into a grave beneath a blanket inscibed with Koranic writing, during a traditional Muslim burial ceremony, in the Tandale suburb of the capital Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Monday, Aug. 10, 1998. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: An unidentified member of the Jean Dalizu family, clutching a photo of Jean Dalizu, wipes her eye August 13 prior to the start of a memorial ceremony for 10 US victims of the terrorist bombings at the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Dalizu was one of 12 US citizens killed in the bombing attacks on the US Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (STEPHEN JAFFE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 1998 US EMBASSY BOMBINGS: US President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton hold their hands over their hearts August 13 at Andrews Air Force Base during a memorial service for victims of the August 7th terrorist bombing at the US Embassy in Nairobi. (JOE MARQUETTE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: The U.S. Navy released this view of damage sustained on the port side of the Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer USS Cole after a suspected terrorist bomb exploded during a refueling operation in the port of Aden, Yemen, Thursday, Oct.12, 2000. (AP Photo/U.S. Navy) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: Family members of the USS Cole crewmen that were killed console each other during a memorial service October 18, 2000 in Norfolk, VA. President Clinton attended the service that honored the wounded and dead from the U.S. Navy destroyer that was bombed while on a refueling stop in the Yemeni port of Aden. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Newsmakers) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: A U.S. Air Force Honor Guard carries the coffin of a victim of the terrorist attack to a waiting hearse from a C-17 Air Force aircraft, at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany Friday, Oct. 13, 2000. 17 U.S. Navy sailors from the USS Cole were killed in Aden, Yemen, on Thursday, Oct.12, 2000, in a terrorist attack. Five of the victims arrived at the base. (AP Photo/Thomas Kienzle) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: Experts examine the hole on the side of the USS Cole in Aden on Friday October 13, 2000. A powerful explosion ripped a hole in a U.S Navy destroyer in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing at least six sailors and injuring some 30 others in what U.S. officials described as a possible terrorist attack. Eleven sailors was still missing. (AP Photo/Dimitri Messinis) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: An unidentified U.S. Navy sailor, who was injured at the terrorist attack on USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, on Thursday Oct.12, 2000, is lifted on an ambulance car after he arrived on a U.S. Air Force aircraft on the U.S. airbase in Ramstein, Germany, Saturday, Oct.14, 2000. In total, 11 injured U.S. soldiers arrive with this plane for medical treatment in the nearby U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl. (AP Photo/Thomas Kienzle) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: An unidentified sailor, second from left, injured in the attack on the USS Cole, is greeted by a family member on the tarmac at the Norfolk Naval Station in Norfolk, Va. on Sunday, Oct. 15, 2000. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: An injured sailor from aboard the USS Cole cries during a memorial service at Norfolk Naval Station in Norfolk, Va., Wednesday Oct. 18, 2000. President Clinton attended the service for the dead and injured from the ship. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) #
THE 2000 USS COLE BOMBING: Unidentified family members of victims of the deadly explosion to the USS Cole attend a memorial service 18 October, 2000 at Norfolk Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia. At right is First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. The apparent terrorist attack in Yemen left 17 American sailors presumed dead and 39 injured. US President Bill Clinton, Defense Secretary William Cohen, Joint Chiefs Chairman Hugh Shelton and Attorney General Janet Reno were in attendance. (MARIO TAMA/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: A woman reacts in terror as she looks up to see the World Trade Center go up in flames September 11, 2001 in New York City after two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in a terrorist attack. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Smoke spews from a tower of the World Trade Center September 11, 2001 after two hijacked airplanes hit the twin towers in an alleged terrorist attack on New York City. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Firefighters watch as smoke rises from the site of the World Trade Center collapse September 11, 2001 in New York City after two hijacked airplanes crashed into the twin towers in a terrorist attack. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: People walk away from the area where the World Trade Center buildings collapsed September 11, 2001 after two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in a terrorist attack. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Smoke pours from the World Trade Center after it was hit by two hijacjked passenger planes September 11, 2001 in New York City in a terrorist attack. (Photo by Robert Giroux/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: A police officer patrols in the street after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers September 11, 2001 in New York City after two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in a terrorist attack. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: An injured civilian is treated as a tower of the World Trade Center collapses September 11, 2001 after two airplanes slammed into the twin towers in a terrorist attack. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Smoke comes out from the west wing of the Pentagon building September 11, 2001 in Arlington, Va., after a plane crashed into the building and set off a huge explosion. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Policemen and firemen run away from the huge dust cloud caused as the World Trade Center's Tower One collapses after terrorists crashed two hijacked planes into the twin towers, September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Photo by Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Rescue workers and Pentagon personnel attend to the wounded outside the Pentagon after a hijacked plane crashed into the building September 11, 2001 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Greg Whitesell/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: New York City firefighters hug each other during rescue operations at the World Trade Center after two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers September 11, 2001 in New York. (Photo by Ron Agam/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: A fiery blasts rocks the south tower of the World Trade Center as the hijacked United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashes into the building September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: New York City firefighters take a rest at the World Trade Center after two hijacked planes crashed into the Twin Towers September 11, 2001 in New York. (Photo by Ron Agam/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Smoke rises from the site of the World Trade Center terrorist attack September 15, 2001 in New York City. (Pool photo courtesy of NYC Office Of Emergency Management/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Two people hug in front of the Wall of Prayers for victims of the World Trade Center disaster September 14, 2001 at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. The World Trade Center towers collapsed September 11th after two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into it. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: The World Trade Center burns after two airliners crashed into the buildings in New York City, Tuesday September 11, 2001. Photo by Gabe Palacio/ImageDirect #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: This 11 September 2001 photo shows a man standing amid rubble, calling out asking if anyone needs help, following the collapse of the first World Trade Center tower in New York after two hijacked planes crashed into the buildings. (DOUG KANTER/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Offiials examine the crater on September 11, 2001 at the crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The plane from Newark, New Jersey, and bound for San Francisco, California, is believed to have been hijacked and crashed in the field killing all 45 people on board. (DAVID MAXWELL/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Rescue workers conducting search and rescue attempts on September 14, 2001, descend deep into the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York. (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Rescuers are dwarfed by the size of the rubble and debris of where the World Trade Center once stood, one day after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001. (RUTH FREMSON/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: A man coated with ash and debris from the collapse of the World Trade Center south tower coughs near City Hall in lower Manhattan Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Smoke billows from one of the towers of the World Trade Center and flames and debris explode from the second tower, Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. In one of the most horrifying attacks ever against the United States, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center in a deadly series of blows that brought down the twin 110-story towers. (AP Photo/Chao Soi Cheong) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Firefighters carry an injured fireman from the World Trade Center area in New York after the buildings collapsed when two planes crashed into the structure on Sept. 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Matt Moyer) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: In this September 13, 2001 photograph, a woman poses with a picture of a missing loved one who was last seen at the World Trade Center when it was attacked on September 11, 2001. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: People flee the scene near New York's World Trade Center after terrorists crashed two planes into the towers on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. In a horrific sequence of destruction, terrorists hijacked two airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center in a coordinated series of attacks that brought down the twin 110-story towers. (AP Photo/Diane Bondareff) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: A woman and man hold candles on Sept. 14, 2001 in memoriam of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks.(AP Photo/Shawn Baldwin) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: Mary Ortele, left, of Brooklyn, N.Y., holds a picture of herself with her missing husband, Peter, as she is hugged by her mother, Kathy Adlun, at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001. Ortele's husband went missing in the September 11th terrorist attack against the World Trade Center. (AP Photo/Matt Moyer) #
THE 2001 SEPTEMBER 11th ATTACKS: This is an undated photo taken by Joel Meyerowitz, a photographer who was granted unparalleled access to Ground Zero. Meyerowitz was able to photograph over 8,500 images from the site. (Ap Photo/Joel Meyerowitz) #
THE 2002 BALI BOMBINGS: Buildings and cars are on fire after a bomb blast at the tourist site of Kuta, Bali on October 13, 2002. At least 53 people including 10 foreigners, were killed when a bomb exploded in a popular nightclub on the Indonesian resort island of Bali. (DARMA/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2002 BALI BOMBINGS: Inggrid (C) one of the bomb blast victims, reports her missing husband, Douglass Warner (a British citizen), to the Identification Center at Sanglah hospital on October 14, 2002, in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia. Foreigners fled Bali after a bomb blast rocked the city center of Kuta, Bali of October 12, 2002 at 11:15 pm local time. The blast occurred in front of the busy disco in a popular tourist area, leaving 188 dead and 132 injured. (Photo by Edy Purnomo/Getty Images) #
THE 2002 BALI BOMBINGS: A foreign tourist (R) looks at the destroyed building of the Padi club the day after a bomb blast in Denpasar, on the Indonesian island of Bali, October 13, 2002. The huge car bomb ripped through two bars late on October 12th packed with foreign tourists. (CHOO YOUN-KONG/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2002 BALI BOMBINGS: Foreign tourists carry their luggage pass the site of a bomb blast at Kuta Beach on the Indonesian island of Bali. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye) #
THE 2002 BALI BOMBINGS: Women light candles on a beach in memory of friends who died in a bomb explosion at a popular Kuta, Bali night club on October 14, 2002. Nearly 200 people were killed and hundreds injured when what is believed to be a car bomb exploded in the early hours of Sunday. (AP Photo/Ed Wray) #
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: Turkish police inspect wreckage hours after the explosion of a bomb in a truck outside the Neve Shalom synagogue November 15, 2003 in Istanbul, Turkey. Explosives went off in front of two of the city's synagogues in the morning of traditional Sabbath prayers, killing at least 16 people, including 6 Jews, and injuring hundreds others. Turkish and Israeli intelligence and police are investigating the attacks. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images) #
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: Ali Coskun, father of a victim Murat Coskun, 20, cries where two car bombs exploded in front of the Neve Shalom synagogue 15 November 2003. At least 15 people were killed and scores injured as explosive-rigged vehicles blew up outside synagogues in a historic part of Istanbul that has been home to Jews for 500 years. (CEM TURKEL/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: Turkish police investigate the rubbles of the Neva Shalom synagogue 15 November 2003 in Istanbul, Turkey. Powerful blasts rocked two Jewish quarters of old Istanbul 15 November, killing at least 20 people and partly destroying the city's biggest synagogue as worshippers were at their Sabbath prayers. Both blasts went off outside synagogues. Officials said they were probably caused by explosive-laden vehicles activated by remote control or timer. (CEM TURKEL/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: Turkish policeman stands in front of a devastated street in Istanbul after powerful blasts rocked two Jewish quarters of the old city 15 November 2003. (CEM TURKEL/AFP/Getty Images)#
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: A Turkish policeman investigates the rubbles of a car in front of the Neva Shalom synagogue 15 November 2003 in Istanbul, Turkey. (CEM TURKEL/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: Police forensic officers examine and collect evidence in front of the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul, Turkey. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici) #
On the night of the 27th of February, the 10,192-ton ferry sailed out of Manila for Cagayan de Oro Cityvia Bacolod City and Iloilo City with 899 recorded passengers and crew aboard. A television set containing an 8-pound (3.6 kilograms) TNT bomb had been placed on board in the lower, more crowded decks.
An hour after its 11 p.m. sailing, just off either El Fraile or Corregidor Island[3] an explosion tore through the vessel, starting a fire that engulfed the ship and caused the confirmed deaths of 63 people while another 53 were recorded as missing and presumed dead.[3] As the fire spread across the vessel most of the survivors jumped into the sea or boarded rescue boats and, by the 29th of February, officials had accounted for 565 of the 744 recorded passengers and all but two of the 155 crew members.
In the days following the blast, the recovery of the dead and missing, calculated at around 180 on February 29, would be slow. Officials stated the missing may have been trapped inside the blazing ferry, have drowned in Manila Bay and that others may had been picked up by fishing boats. The recovery of bodies would take several months, with only four bodies recovered by Coast Guard divers from the half-submerged ferry in the first week alone, despite it having been towed to shallower waters near Mariveles town, west of Manila. At least another 12 bodies, some displaying blast injuries, were recovered by divers in the days up until the 7th.[2] Eventually, 63 bodies would be recovered while another 53 would remain missing, presumed dead. Despite claims from various terrorist groups, the blast was initially thought to have been an accident, caused by a gas explosion, and sabotage was ruled out initially.
However, stated Philippine media reports, at the marine board of inquiry hearing in late March, 2004, a safety supervisor with the ship’s owner,WG&A, testified that about 150 survivors told him an explosion took place in the tourist section around the general area of bunk 51. The Captain of the ferry, Ceferino Manzo, testified in the same hearing that the entire tourist section was engulfed in “thick black smoke [that] smelled like gunpowder.”[6] After divers righted the ferry, five months after it sank, they found evidence of a bomb blast. A man named Redondo Cain Dellosa, aRajah Sulaiman Movement member, confessed to planting a bomb, triggered by a timing device, on board for the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla group. He held a ticket on the ferry for bunk 51B, where the bomb was placed, and disembarked before the ship’s departure.
President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo announced on October 11, 2004, that investigators had concluded that the explosion had been caused by a bomb. She said six suspects had been arrested in connection with the bombing and that the masterminds,Khadaffy Janjalani and Abu Sulaiman, were still at large. It was believed that Abu Sayyaf bombed Superferry 14 because the company that owned it,WG&A, did not comply with a letter demanding USD 1 million in protection money
THE 2004 SUPERFERRY BOMBING IN THE PHILIPPINES: The Philippine Coast Guard and other vessels fight a fire aboard "Superferry 14" Friday, Feb. 27, 2004, 70 kilometers (45 miles) southwest of Manila. Coast guard Rear Adm. Danilo Abinoja said at least 665 people had been rescued and one body recovered. Another eight people were injured. (AP Photo) #
THE 2004 SUPERFERRY BOMBING IN THE PHILIPPINES: A silhouette of the rescue boat and the Superferry as Philippines Coast Guard search operation continues, 01 March 2004, for more than 140 passenger still missing. Philippine President Gloria Arroyo 01 March rejected Muslim guerrilla group's claim that it bombed the passenger ferry which caught fire last week. (JAY DIRECTO/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2004 SUPERFERRY BOMBING IN THE PHILIPPINES: A ferry survivor carries her two children on their arrival at the Manila port, 27 February 2004 after they were rescued from the burning Superferry 14. One person died while 200 people are unaccounted for when fire broke out after an explosion in the engine room around 1:00 am. (JAY DIRECTO/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2004 SUPERFERRY BOMBING IN THE PHILIPPINES: The half-submerged Superferry 14 is shown March 4, 2004 in Mariveles, Philippines. Divers recovered 6 bodies in the afternoon from the ferry that caught fire in a possible terrorist attack. (Photo by David Greedy/Getty Images) #
Most Tragic Acts of Terrorism in History – 2004 Super Ferry 14 Bombing: Philippines
The Philippines had also suffered numerous terrorist attacks one of the most notable and most tragic attacks occurred on February 27, 2004 and was known as the SuperFerry 14 bombings.
THE 2004 SUPERFERRY BOMBING IN THE PHILIPPINES: Philippines Coast Guard members prepare to search the half-submerged Superferry 14 for missing persons March 4, 2004 in Mariveles, Philippines. Divers recovered 6 bodies in the afternoon from the ferry that caught fire in a possible terrorist attack. (Photo by David Greedy/Getty Images) #
Lavilla is one of the top ideologues in the Rajah Solaiman Movement, a group of former Christians who converted to Islam and claim affiliation with the al Qaeda-linked regional terrorist groups Jemaah Islamiyah and Abu Sayyaf, Blancaflor said.
Blancaflor said authorities suspect Lavilla helped plot the bombing of a superferry near Manila on February 27, 2004, in which at least 116 people died. They believe Lavilla also helped plan the bombing of a bus behind the Intercontinental Hotel in Manila on February 14, 2005, an attack that killed at least four people and came to be known as the Valentine's Day Bombing.
The bus bombing was part of a trio of attacks that happened that day. The two other blasts, both fatal, happened in the southern cities of General Santos and Davao.
Blancaflor said he suspects Lavilla was also involved in the planning of several bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Manila, all of which were thwarted by Philippine police.
In describing Lavilla's arrest in Bahrain, Blancaflor said only that police there arrested him as they were enforcing U.N. Security Council resolution 1276, which imposed air travel and financial sanctions on the Taliban.
Jemaah Islamiyah aims to create a Muslim "superstate" across much of Southeast Asia. Authorities blame the group for the Bali, Indonesia nightclub bombings of 2002, which killed more than 200 mostly Western tourists.
The group is also suspected of subsequent attacks on the Australian Embassy and J.W. Marriott hotel, both in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
The Abu Sayyaf group is one of several Islamic militant groups fighting the government in and around the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS: Rescue workers cover up bodies by a bomb damaged passenger train following a number of explosions on trains in Madrid, Spain, March 11, 2004, just three days before Spain's general elections, killing more than 170 rush-hour commuters and wounding more than 500 in Spain's worst terrorist attack ever. (AP Photo/Paul White) #
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS: Victims comfort each other after a train exploded at the Atocha train station in Madrid 11 March 2004. At least 198 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in bomb attacks on four commuter trains. (RICARDO CASES/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS: Forensic experts inspect the train which exploded the day before 12 March 2004 at the Atocha train station. At least 198 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in bomb attacks on four commuter trains, 11 March 2004. (JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS:: A woman cries as she leaves El Pozo train station in memory of the victims of the near-simultaneous explosions on four trains, 12 March 2004 in Madrid. At least 198 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in bomb attacks on four commuter trains, 11 March 2004. (PEDRO ARMESTRE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS:: Rescue workers remove a victim from a train at Atocha train station after explosions killed 191 people and injured some 1,800 in Madrid Thursday, March 11, 2004. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong) #
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS: Part of a crowd of tens of thousands march during a peace protest in Barcelona, Spain, Friday March 12, 2004 to protest against the bomb attacks on trains in Madrid that killed nearly 200 people and injured more than 1,400. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue) #
THE 2004 MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS: A man holds his mouth near the scene of the commuter train March 11, 2004 after it was devastated by a bomb blast during the morning rush hour in Madrid, Spain. According to Madrid officials at least 182 people were killed in the series of three blasts. (Photo by Bruno Vincent/Getty Images) #
THE 2003 ISTANBUL BOMBINGS: A candle and flowers are diplayed on the rails at the Atocha train station in memory of the victims one day after the near-simultaneous explosions on four trains, 12 March 2004 in Madrid. At least 198 people were killed and more than 1,400 wounded in bomb attacks on four commuter trains, 11 March 2004. (JOHANNES SIMON/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 LONDON BOMBINGS: Emergency services arrive at Edgware Road following an explosion which has ripped through London's underground tube network on July 7, 2005 in London, England. Blasts have been reported on the underground network and buses across the capital. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)#
THE 2005 LONDON BOMBINGS: A police officer assists a woman at Edgware Road following an explosion which has ripped through London's underground tube network on July 7, 2005 in London, England. Blasts have been reported on the underground network and buses across the capital. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)#
THE 2005 LONDON BOMBINGS: Emergency services are seen outside the main line station at Kings Cross following an explosion which has ripped through London's tube network on July 7, 2005 in London, England. (Photo by Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 LONDON BOMBINGS: Paul Dadge, right, helps injured tube passenger Davinia Turrell away from Edgware Road tube station in London following an explosion. (AP Photo/Jane Mingay) #
THE 2005 LONDON BOMBINGS: In this image provided by commuter Alexander Chadwick, taken on his mobile phone camera, passengers are evacuated from an underground train in a tunnel near Kings Cross station in London, on July 7, 2005. At least 33 people were killed in three explosions in London's subway system. (AP Photo/Alexander Chadwick, File) #
THE 2005 LONDON BOMBINGS: A forensic officer walks next to the wreckage of a double decker bus with its top blown off and damaged cars scattered on the road at Tavistock Square in central London. (AP Photo/Sang Tan) #
THE 2005 SHARM EL-SHEIKH BOMBINGS: Destruction in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh after a bomb attack early 23 July 2005. At least 65 people were killed, including eight foreigners, in a string of bomb attacks that rocked the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh early Saturday, medics and officials said. (KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 SHARM EL-SHEIKH BOMBINGS: Destruction after a bomb attack in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, early 23 July 2005. At least 65 people were killed, including eight foreigners, in a string of bomb attacks that rocked the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh early Saturday, medics and officials said. (KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 SHARM EL-SHEIKH BOMBINGS: Egyptian wounded men are seen in a ward in the Sharm El-Sheikh International Hospital following three explosions that rocked the Red Sea resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh early 23 July 2005. Suicide car bombers unleashed a trail of carnage in Egypt's tourist-packed Red Sea resort killing at least 83 people, including nine foreigners. The attacks on the popular Sinai water sports centre at the peak of the tourist season were the deadliest targeting foreigners in Egypt, topping the 62 people, most of them holidaymakers, killed in Luxor eight years ago, and drew swift condemnation from across the globe. (CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 SHARM EL-SHEIKH BOMBINGS: A picture shows a destroyed vehicle and a crater left after a car bomb attack in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh early 23 July 2005. An Al-Qaeda-linked group claimed the bombings in Egypt's tourist-packed Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that killed at least 75 people, including foreign tourists. (KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 SHARM EL-SHEIKH BOMBINGS: Destruction at a hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh after a bomb attack early 23 July 2005. An Al-Qaeda-linked group claimed the bombings in Egypt's tourist-packed Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh that killed at least 75 people, including foreign tourists. (KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 SHARM EL-SHEIKH BOMBINGS: Egyptians police are seen through the remains of a burnt-out car at the scene of a car bombing that wrecked a shopping mall July 23, 2005 at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. An group claiming links to Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility the triple bombings in the tourist-packed vacation town that killed at least 83 people, including foreign tourists. (Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: Jordanian policeman stand guard outside the Radisson hotel in Amman after three explosions rocked three hotels in Jordan's capital late Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005. Suicide bombers simultaneously attacked three hotels frequented by foreigners in Jordan's capital, killing at least 53 people and injuring more than 300, Jordan's deputy prime minister said. One police official said they appeared to be al-Qaida attacks. (AP Photo/ Muhammad Al-Kisswani) #
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: An injured man is moved to an ambulance in front of the Hyatt hotel November 9, 2005 in Amman, Jordan. Explosions rocked three hotels, Hyatt, Radisson Sas and Days Inn, in the Jordanian capital killing at least 31 people and injuring about 200 others. (Photo by Salah Malkawi/Getty Images)#
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: Blood stains are seen on the street outside the Days Inn hotel in Amman following an explosion there 09 November 2005. At least 53 people were killed in the blasts that rocked three hotels in the Jordanian capital in the evening, Deputy Prime Marwan Moasher said on state television. Two of the blasts appear to have been caused by bombers with suicide belts and a third by a suicide car bomb, Jordan's deputy prime minister told CNN. (KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: People gather outside the emergency ward of a hospital in Amman following explosions that hit three hotels in the Jordanian capital 09 November 2005. At least 53 people were killed in the blasts that rocked three hotels in Amman in the evening, Deputy Prime Marwan Moasher said on state television. Two of the blasts appear to have been caused by bombers with suicide belts and a third by a suicide car bomb, Jordan's deputy prime minister told CNN. (KHALIL MAZRAAWI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: The main entrance of Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman after an explosion believed to have killed at least five people and wounded 20 others, Wednesday Nov 9 2005. Explosions rocked three hotels in the Jordanian capital late Wednesday, killing at least 18 people, injuring more than 120. (AP Photo/Nader Daoud) #
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: Jordanian policeman walk amid rubble at the Radisson Hotel in Amman 10 November 2005 a day after a deadly attack. Jordan said it had arrested several suspects over hotel bombings that killed 56 people in the worst attacks in the kingdom's history, claimed by homegrown extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's militants. (RAMZI HAIDAR/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2005 AMMAN HOTEL BOMBINGS: Jordanian civilians and police help an injured man in front of the Grand Hyatt hotel hotel in Amman, Jordan after three explosions struck three hotels in Jordan's capital late Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2005. Killing at least 18 people, and injuring more than 120. The explosions struck the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels. (AP Photo/Nader Daoud) #
THE 2006 MUMBAI TRAIN BOMBINGS: Railway officials and workers clear the debrise of the first class compartment of a local train which was ripped open by a bomb blast at Khar Mumbai, late 11 July 2006. Seven explosions ripped through commuter trains and stations during evening rush hour in India's financial capital Mumbai, killing at least 163 people in an attack the prime minister blamed on terrorists. (SEBASTIAN D'SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2006 MUMBAI TRAIN BOMBINGS: A couple weeps after identifying the dead body of their relative in a mortuary at the Bhabha hospital in Mumbai, 12 July 2006. The death toll from a wave of co-ordinated blasts on commuter trains in India's financial capital Mumbai, 11 July has risen to 183 with 624 people injured, according to latest police figures. (PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2006 MUMBAI TRAIN BOMBINGS: A railway compartment of one of the train bomb blasts stands on the tracks at Khar Mumbai, late 11 July 2006. Seven explosions ripped through commuter trains and stations during evening rush hour in India's financial capital Mumbai, killing at least 163 people in an attack the prime minister blamed on terrorists. (SEBASTIAN D'SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2006 MUMBAI TRAIN BOMBINGS: Indian forensic experts collect samples from a damaged coach at the site of a bomb blast, at Kandivli in Mumbai, 12 July 2006. The death toll from a wave of coordinated blasts on commuter trains in India's financial capital Mumbai has risen to 174 with 485 people injured, police said. Relatives of the dead, injured and missing from Mumbai's devastating train bombings tearfully trawled the city's hospitals 12 July, searching for people who failed to return from work. (PRAKASH SINGH/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2006 MUMBAI TRAIN BOMBINGS: A relative of a train blast victim breaks down at a hospital in Mumbai, 12 July 2006. The death toll from a wave of co-ordinated blasts on commuter trains in India's financial capital Mumbai has risen to 183 with 624 people injured, according to latest police figures. (INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2006 MUMBAI TRAIN BOMBINGS: Indian Muslim men shout slogans during a protest held to condemn attacks on commuters trains a day earlier in Mumbai, in Bangalore 12 July 2006. Indian police said the bombs which ripped through trains in the financial hub Mumbai, killing more than 180 people and wounding hundreds more, bore the hallmark of Islamic militants. (DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2007 ALGIERS BOMBING: Algerian firemen extinguish a burning vehichle after a suicide car bomb attack near the Government Palace in the center of Algiers 11 April 2007. Several explosions hit the Algerian capital targeting the Government Palace and Police stations, resulting in around 17 dead and a hundred injuried. (FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2007 ALGIERS BOMBING: Algerian rescuers evacuate a seriously injuried man following a huge blast outside the Government Palace in the center of Algiers City 11 April 2007. At least 17 people were killed and scores injured in a series of car bombs that rocked the Algerian capital, including one that targeted the government headquarters. Though no claim of responsibility was made, the attacks came as Algeria, a former French colony, and neighbouring Morocco battle mounting Islamic extremism. (FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2007 ALGIERS BOMBING: Algerian staff official employees and rescuers inspect damages of the buildings of Prime minister's offices following a suicide car exploded near the Governmental Palace in the center of Algiers City 11 April 2007. At least 23 people were killed and scores injured in a series of car bombs that rocked the Algerian capital, including one that targeted the government headquarters. (FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2007 ALGIERS BOMBING: Police look for evidence in a car which exploded next to a police station in Algiers, Wednesday, April 11, 2007. Bombs ripped through the Algerian prime minister's office and a police station, coordinated terror attacks that Algerian authorities said killed at least 23 people and wounded 160 others. (AP Photo/Ouahab Hebbat) #
THE 2008 KANDAHAR BOMBING: Afghan policemen and bystanders inspect the site of a bomb blast in Kandahar on February 17, 2008. A bomb that tore through a dog fighting match in Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar has killed 80 people and wounded many more, provincial governor Assadullah Khalid said. "Sixty dead bodies have been taken to a civilian hospital and 20 others are taken to other hospitals," Khalid told a press conference. (HAMID ZALMY/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2008 KANDAHAR BOMBING: Afghan policeman, right, stands near the damaged police vehicles near the site of a suicide attack on the western edge of Kandahar, south of Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, Feb. 17. 2008. A suicide bombing at an outdoor dog fighting competition killed 80 people and wounded dozens more Sunday, a governor said. It appeared to be the deadliest attack in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan) #
THE 2008 DANISH EMBASSY BOMBING: United Nations Development Program (UNDP) adjacent to the Denmark embassy following a suicide attack in Islamabad on June 2, 2008. A suicide car bombing outside the Danish embassy in the Pakistani capital Islamabad killed at least eight people and wounded nearly 30 others, state television and officials said. (AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2008 DANISH EMBASSY BOMBING: Pakistani volunteers carry a body in front of the Denmark embassy following a suicide attack in Islamabad on June 2, 2008. A suicide car bombing outside the Danish embassy in the Pakistani capital Islamabad killed at least eight people and wounded nearly 30 others, state television and officials said. (AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2008 DANISH EMBASSY BOMBING: A Danish Embassy staff member sits in shock outside the Danish Embassy following an explosion on Monday June 2, 2008 in Islamabad, Pakistan. A suspected car bomb exploded outside the embassy at midday, killing at least 8 people and wounding more than a dozen, according to reports. It is not yet known who bears responsibility for the blast, though militant Islamic groups have threatened Danish embassies around the world with retribution for the publications of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, first printed in September 2005. (Photo Warrick Page/Getty Images) #
THE 2008 DANISH EMBASSY BOMBING: A Pakistani security official stands amid the rubble of the adjacent building and cars after a bomb explosion outside the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan on Monday, June 2, 2008. Three people were killed and seven hurt after the huge explosion badly damaged the embassy. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed) #
THE 2008 DANISH EMBASSY BOMBING: A Pakistani bomb disposal personnel examines a crater caused by a suicide attack in front of the Denmark embassy in Islamabad on June 2, 2008. A suicide car bombing outside the Danish embassy in the Pakistani capital Islamabad killed at least eight people and wounded nearly 30 others, state television and officials said. The blast left a huge crater outside the embassy, damaging the building and a nearby development agency. Several cars were destroyed by the force of the explosion and some were on fire, an AFP reporter said. (AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2009 PLOT TO BOMB NORTHWEST FLIGHT 253: This picture provided by J.P. Karas shows Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on the runway after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport from Amsterdam on Friday, Dec. 25, 2009. A passenger aboard the plane set off firecrackers Friday, causing a commotion and some minor injuries, a Delta official said. (AP Photo/J.P. Karas) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Pakistani commandos take up position at one of two mosques stormed by gunmen in Lahore on May 28, 2010. Gunmen stormed two minority sect mosques, taking worshippers hostage and sparking gun battles with police that have left 17 people dead, officials said. Gunfire and blasts rang out as the attackers, at least one of whom wore a suicide vest, stormed a mosque in the upscale neighbourhood Model Town and another in the busy Garhi Shahu area as people gathered for Friday prayers. (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Pakistani commandos make way for a colleague carrying an injured, bloodied worshiper at one of two mosques stormed by gunmen in Lahore on May 28, 2010. Gunmen stormed two minority sect mosques, taking worshippers hostage and sparking gun battles with police that have left 17 people dead, officials said. Gunfire and blasts rang out as the attackers, at least one of whom wore a suicide vest, stormed a mosque in the upscale neighbourhood Model Town and another in the busy Garhi Shahu area as people gathered for Friday prayers. (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Pakistani Ahmadi community members gather at their mosque after a suicide attack earlier on May 28, 2010 in Lahore. Gunmen wearing suicide vests stormed two Pakistani mosques firing guns, throwing grenades and taking hostages bringing carnage to Friday prayers and killing around 80 people. (FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Pakistani police take cover outside one of two mosques stormed by gunmen in Lahore on May 28, 2010. At least 56 people were killed when gunmen wearing suicide vests and carrying grenades attacked two mosques in the Pakistani city of Lahore on May 28, said police and an administration official. (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: A man mourns at the scene of an attack and siege at a mosque in the area of Garhi Shahu on May 28, 2010 in Lahore, Pakistan. Gunmen attacked two mosques in the Pakistani city of Lahore. The gunmen took hostages from among people gathered for Friday prayers in at least one building. Over 30 people were killed in the attack, responsibility of which has been claimed by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). (Photo by Nadeem Ijaz/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Pakistani media take cover outside one of two mosques stormed by gunmen in Lahore on May 28, 2010. (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Pakistani relatives mourn outside one of two mosques stormed by gunmen in Lahore on May 28, 2010. In one of the deadliest attacks in Pakistan's second city, which has been increasingly hit by Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked violence, squads of militants stormed into prayer halls, firing off guns and grenades, and taking hostages. (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTACKS ON MOSQUES IN LAHORE: Ahmadi Pakistanis mourn the death of a relative in a religious attack as burials take place at an Ahmadi graveyard in Rabwa on May 29, 2010, a spiritual center for the Ahmadi community in Pakistan about 160 kilometre west of Lahore. Victims of deadly May 28 attacks on two Pakistani mosques were buried separately after community members cancelled a mass funeral for more than 80 people, fearing further attacks. (FAROOQ NAEEM/AFP/Getty Images) #
THE 2010 ATTEMPTED BOMBINGS OF JEWISH CENTERS: A selection of UK national front pages on October 30, 2010 feature headlines and images of the alleged attempted bomb plot that grounded a number of cargo planes and sparked security alerts in the UK and US. Police in Dubai have confirmed that a US-bound parcel intercepted in Dubai contained explosives and bore al-Qaeda hallmarks. Yesterday security officials in the UK and Dubai intercepted two cargo planes bound for the US from Yemen. (LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images) #
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