Cracks in the dam

What I'm saying is Karl Rove can go down, and nothing will change. Because as rich as the story is, the Plame story remains political, and politics - as demonstrated by recent election cycles - doesn't really matter all that much anymore.

There are bigger fish than Rove, and if they are to fry, attention should be paid to another unfolding story.

Just as parapolitics trumps politics, global power networks eclipse American domestic power structures. Rove's domain is certainly significant, but it remains one circle within many. And potentially more damaging to the Power Elite than the Plame leak, though perhaps not as satisfying to us as Rove's expected perp walk, is the disclosure of a secret, "parallel" counter-terrorism network embedded in Italy's security infrastructure. (Which, by the way, now provides a compelling motive for Nicola Calipari's single bullet to the head.)

If this sounds familiar, you've been paying attention. It's Gladio, it's P2; it's the fascist-Masonic false flag terror: the assassins of Pope John Paul I and the true Balogna train bombers. It's the gang to which Michael Ledeen served as an "advisor" in the late 1970s.

Nearly a year ago, in Yellow Cake and Black Shirts, I wrote about the connection of Ledeen's Italian network to the Niger fraud, so perhaps, actually, we're really talking about different facets of the same story, and what's unravelling in Italy now is the deep politics to Rove's politics.

Rove can go down and it will only make us feel better, and only for a little while. But if such a network goes down, it threatens to take with it the whole, rotten system.

  Rigorous Intuition article

This is the part of the story that Josh Marshall has been questioning: why doesn't the FBI investigate the Niger fogeries? (Marshall posts on the Plame affair.)

One of the obvious places to start [...] an investigation would be with Elisabetta Burba, the Italian journalist who got copies of the documents and later turned them over to the American Embassy in Rome.

[...]

My colleagues and I have known the guy’s name [who sold Burba the faked documents] since late spring. And at least three European intelligence agencies knew who he was well before we found out. In fact, twice this summer we brought him to New York for interviews. Both time he travelled under his own name, Rocco Martino.

[...]

I told my friend that I doubted they were looking for him. And if they were, the last thing they'd want would be for it to be reported in the press that they'd questioned Rocco or taken him into custody. He was a hot potato. Everything we'd learned reporting on Niger uranium case told us that this was a story the US government did not want to get to the bottom of.

Needless to say, nothing happened.

Now, perhaps if the case weren’t that high a priority or if there were some jurisdictional issues, it might be understandable if the FBI made no effort to contact him in Rome. But if they were on top of this case or interested in getting to the bottom of it, you’d think they’d try to speak with him if he arrived in New York right after his name was plastered across a bunch of European newspapers --- including one, the Financial Times, which you can pick up at any decent newsstand in the United States. (The Italians were keeping a close eye on him. And through leaks to the press in Italy, they let it be known that Rocco had again gone to the US.)

But he came, spent several drama-filled or tragicomic days, and then left. And no one from the FBI or any other American law enforcement or intelligence agency made any attempt to contact him in any way. Nor have they done so since.

  Marshall post dated 9/19/04

We were able determine that the documents had been put into Martino's hands by a then-serving member of SISMI -- Italian military intelligence. And this SISMI colonel had done so using a women working in the Niger embassy in Rome, an Italian national, as a cut-out.

This was, as you might imagine, more than enough to make us want to know a lot more. But we were never able to develop any conclusive proof about who or what was behind the SISMI colonel or what the backstory was within SISMI.

Suspicions, we had plenty. But in terms of hard facts, we hit a wall just inside SISMI.

Just who forged the documents? And, more significantly, who put the whole process in motion? And why had SISMI or elements within it involved themselves?

  Marshall post dated 7/2/05

AlterNet story about Iran-Contra participant Michael Ledeen, dated May, 2003:

Most Americans have never heard of Michael Ledeen, but if the United States ends up in an extended shooting war throughout the Middle East, it will be largely due to his inspiration.

[...]

He basically believes that violence in the service of the spread of democracy is America's manifest destiny.

[...]

Now Michael Ledeen is calling for regime change beyond Iraq. In an address entitled "Time to Focus on Iran -- The Mother of Modern Terrorism," for the policy forum of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) on April 30, he declared, "the time for diplomacy is at an end; it is time for a free Iran, free Syria and free Lebanon."

With a group of other conservatives, Ledeen recently set up the Center for Democracy in Iran (CDI), an action group focusing on producing regime change in Iran.

[...]

"We wage total war because we fight in the name of an idea, and ideas either triumph or fail ... totally." In his reckoning, force is the only reliable strategy to enforce our ideology on our enemies. In the same summary he claims, drawing inspiration from Machiavelli: "We can lead by the force of high moral example ... [but] fear is much more reliable, and lasts longer. Once we show that we are capable of dealing out terrible punishment to our enemies, our power will be far greater."

Read more...The American Conservative has a June 2003 article about Ledeen titled: Flirting with Fascism - Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right, in which it quotes Ledeen's book:

Ledeen has gained notoriety in recent months for the following paragraph in his latest book, The War Against the Terror Masters. In what reads like a prophetic approval of the policy of chaos now being visited on Iraq, Ledeen wrote,

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace. Seeing America undo traditional societies, they fear us, for they do not wish to be undone. They cannot feel secure so long as we are there, for our very existence—our existence, not our politics—threatens their legitimacy. They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.

Ledeen’s conviction that the Right is as revolutionary as the Left derives from his youthful interest in Italian fascism. In 1975, Ledeen published an interview, in book form, with the Italian historian Renzo de Felice, a man he greatly admires. It caused a great controversy in Italy. Ledeen later made clear that he relished the ire of the left-wing establishment precisely because “De Felice was challenging the conventional wisdom of Italian Marxist historiography, which had always insisted that fascism was a reactionary movement.” What de Felice showed, by contrast, was that Italian fascism was both right-wing and revolutionary.

[...]

Ledeen was especially interested in the role played by youth in Italian fascism. It was here that he detected the movement’s most exciting revolutionary potential. The young Ledeen wrote that those who exalted the position of youth in the fascist revolution—like those who argued in favor of his beloved “universal fascism”—were committed to exporting Italian fascism to the whole world.

[...]

No doubt Ledeen thinks that the new Rome in Washington has the same universalist mission.

[...]

As Ledeen shows, the Italian fascists expressed their desire “to tear down the old order” (his words from 2002) in terms that are curiously anticipatory of a famous statement in 2003 by the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. In 1932, Asvero Gravelli also divided Europe into “old” and “new” when he wrote, in Towards the Fascist International, “Either old Europe or young Europe. Fascism is the gravedigger of old Europe. Now the forces of the Fascist International are rising.” It all sounds rather prophetic.

Okay, back to the present:

Italy has ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents. And uncovered a "parallel counter-intelligence network".

July 1, 2005

Negroponte. Ledeen. Boykin. North. Kerek. If these figures make you uneasy, they should. An Italian investigation has uncovered an underground, parallel police network with possible links to the CIA which may be involved in the slaying of Niccola Calipari and Il Diario reporter Enzo Baldoni, the extraordiary rendition of Abu Omar and Nigergate.

The investigation is ongoing. On the surface, it looks like a scam. But somehow, it has the same perfume of the deliberate quasi-legality we saw in Iran-Contra.

  Daily Kos article

Calipari was the SISMI chief in the Giuliana Sgrena rescue operation killed by American soldiers at a roadblock in Iraq. Baldoni was the reporter taken hostage and killed in Iraq.

Wayne Madsen is on the story:

A MAJOR SPY SCANDAL IS BREAKING IN ITALY -- PARALLEL, UNOFFICIAL NEO-FASCIST ITALIAN INTELLIGENCE GROUP HAS TIES TO NEO CON INTELLIGENCE APPARATUS IN BUSH ADMINISTRATION INVOLVED IN KIDNAPING MILAN IMAM. GENOA POLICE BUST PRIVATE INTELLIGENCE CELLS AROUND ITALY. POSSIBLE LINKS BETWEEN BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND TERRORIST GROUPS FIGURE IN PROBE.

[...]

[T]wo neo-Fascist leaders -- Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca -- who reportedly have close ties to both the P-2 (Propaganda Due) Masonic lodge and a secret Cold War network known as Gladio, were arrested. Some 25 members of the regular state police, the Carabinieri, the Frontier police, and the Prison police were placed under official investigation.

[...]

The investigation may soon extend to members of the Italian intelligence service SISMI. In 2004, Saya and Sindoca established the Department of Strategic Anti-Terrorism Studies (DSSA), which reportedly had links to both the Bush administration and Ariel Sharon's Likud government in Israel.

[...]

The parallel intelligence network is reportedly the outgrowth of a Gladio network consisting of six divisions that operated in Italy, North Africa, and the Middle East during the Cold War. The P-2 Lodge, headed by fascist leader Licio Gelli, reportedly maintained close links to former Secretary of State Alexander Haig and his one-time foreign affairs adviser Michael Ledeen. [...] A number of SISMI agents and assets have been tied to the group, including [...] Rocco Martino, who said he was the source of the faked Niger yellowcake uranium documents that were laundered through Rome and used as proof by the Bush White House that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Niger.

   article

I have some links to information about Operation Gladio (NATO's secret army) on my webpage here (for some reason I'm not getting the link to work properly, so you may have to scroll about half-way down the page to a blue box). Here are some excerpts:

'You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force ... the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security."

This was the essence of Operation Gladio, a decades-long covert campaign of terrorism and deceit directed by the intelligence services of the West -- against their own populations.

   article

"As early as 1947, the United States was constructing a clandestine network in Northern Italy to act in the event of a communist insurrection or electoral victory." (Wolfgang Achtner, Sunday Independent, 11/11/90)

"Though the Stay Behind operation was officially started only in 1952, "the whole exercise had been in existence for a long time, in fact ever since it was born in the head of Allen Dulles," said the ex-Nato source who has access to files in several West European nations.

   article

In Italy, on 3 August 1990, then-prime minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed the existence of a secret army code-named “Gladio” - the Latin word for “sword” - within the state. His testimony before the Senate subcommittee investigating terrorism in Italy sent shockwaves through the Italian parliament and the public, as speculation arose that the secret army had possibly manipulated Italian politics through acts of terrorism.

   article

Are you beginning to see how deep the rabbit hole goes? The crap that's happening now is not something new - it's just being brought to the surface, perhaps due to the bungling of the idiots now in the WH, and perhaps simply because it's time.

Back to Madsen's article:

Some experts on Gladio and the "stay behind networks" have cited the similarity of the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings and a Gladio/P-2-connected train bombing in Bologna in August 1974 and the 1978 assassination of Prime Minister Aldo Moro (after he announced he would bring Communists into the government) and the recent assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri after his negotiations with the pro-Syria and pro-Iran Hezbollah.

Remember the Hariri incident?

Of course, the biggest Gladio operation that we may be faced with in this country is the attack on the World Trade Towers. September 11.