America

Tamil Satire - Global sentiment:

Bin Laden is paid to be an enemy ...
God Save us from American Peace and Liberty
... Home-made prison with colour TV"

And all sung and danced to a Tamil beat and choreography.



Hat-tip Aangirfan

The al Qaeda Khazi

al Qaeda

Following the demise of the Soviet Union, the Anglo-American/NATO Imperial Project (AANIP) was on a high through the early 1990's; but as the decade progressed, expectations of a much vaunted -  but elusive -  'peace dividend' put increasing pressure on a fundamental need to crank up its global military capabilities if well-laid plans were to be realised.

The communist threat was no more and as the decade progressed, the need for a new enemy became pressing; preferably a really evil scary omnipresent one that could keep the masses by turns frightened and outraged - and thus docile and demanding of protection. What better than an "enemy"  organised around a group already trained, armed, infiltrated and controlled by Western Intelligence?

And so it came to pass.

"al Qaeda" is Arabic for "the Base" - or "database" as, in its Western incarnation, it  morphed to refer to the database of foreign (mainly Wahhabi and Sunni Arab) fighters  prepared to harass the Russians in Afghanistan through the late 1980's and Chechnya in the 1990's. Then a few years later the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. All of those campaigns in unwitting service to - and furtherance of - that same AANIP. "al Qaeda" was thus the creation of the CIA and, thoroughly infiltrated manipulated and controlled, it remains so to this day.

How can we be sure of this? - well the clincher, in the vast array of evidence that says so, lies in the name:

Arabic, like English and most languages, has its collections of homonyms  and it appears that "Toilet" (loo, khazi, WC, gents, john etc.) is a particularly populous one - especially since it must cater for the Western fashion of sitting on a seat with a hole in it, rather than squatting.

And guess what?   "al-Qaeda" is one of them - and the seat-type Western one at that!

So question: Can you imagine a group of terrorists styling themselves "The Red Toilet Faction", "The Toilet Brigades", "The Irish Republican Toilet" ? - Hmmm; me neither.
It sticks out like the bulbous red backside of an Orangutan you might say - and sort of gives the game away.  Of course no one outside the gullible western-propagandised sheeple are taken in by it, but that matters little to TPTB in the West. Those who can clearly see that the Emperor has no cloths and who understand the grossness of his deceptions, have neither vote nor voice and thus, so long as there are regular "terrorist" attacks to keep the Western Sheeple outraged and fearful,  they can be safely ignored.
Popular perceptions of the  "grave risk to our way of life that terrorism (ie al-Qaeda) represents" must be carefully calibrated and, from the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, through the 1890's "Walsall Bomb Plot" and latter-day "Operation Gladio" outrages, our security services have mastered the art to near perfection.

I have taken to watching the BBC news occasionally again - strictly for its entertainment value you understand. It is a rare bulletin that does not include at least one of the range of standard-format rah rah pieces about our oh-so-necessary, just , and righteous wars; or the grave threat we face from the barbarian (or rather Muslim)  terrorist hordes ranged against us. I have taken to counting the number of "Branches" (Franchises might be a better term) of "The Toilet" (TT) we now need to fret about - TT in Iran; TT in Iraq; TT in Timbuktu - cave-space rental must be costing an arm-and-a-leg. I'm waiting patiently for TT on the moon.

The latest of course is TT in the Yemen. Apropos the latest shock-horror episode of the toner-cartridge-bombs saga, I was watching Frank Gardner explaining it all on the BBC a few days ago. It was bloody hilarious - really entertaining. "The Toilet" was invoked no less than 9 times in a 3 minute slot with such gems as: "The Toilet  in Yemen consists mainly of Toilet Operatives from Saudi Arabia" (and there was I thinking that it was Saudi that imported lowly immigrants to clean their khazis - you live and learn eh?).

So next time you are forced to endure Mr Gardner, or any other MI5/6 stooge waxing lyrical about "al Qaeda in Iraq", Afghanistan, Saudi, Yemen, Blackburn, Tunbridge Wells, etc etc. remember, everywhere has them! -  and every time you hear that dreaded scary "AL-QAEDA!!!" word, just substitute the translation. You'll begin to look forward to the news as a reliable source of hilarity.

PS native Arabic speakers are cordially invited to correct me - or elaborate.

(Also posted on WikiSpooks)

Espionage, Torture and those seven paragraphs

For a telling commentary on yesterdays Appeal Court decision in the Binyam Mohamed torture evidence case, have a look at Obsolete's Blog. The whole thing is worth reading but a couple of quotes:

Reading the seven paragraphs that have finally been released detailing the CIA's treatment of Binyam Mohamed after today's ruling by the Court of Appeal, it's initially difficult to know quite why the government was so determined that they should remain secret. They tell us absolutely nothing that we didn't already know: that the US was systematically mistreating almost anyone that came into their custody in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; that this was just the start of the torture regime which Binyam Mohamed found himself under; that the CIA, despite the claims of our security services, had been letting them know just what they were doing to individuals connected to this country; and that despite knowing full well that what the CIA was doing to Mohamed at this early stage would breach our obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights, as found during the 1970s when the "five techniques" were outlawed in Northern Ireland, they did absolutely nothing to intervene to stop his mistreatment

 And....

Indeed, the only reason why the Court of Appeal decided that seven paragraphs could today be published was that far more gruesome evidence of the torture which Mohamed underwent was released by a US court in a judgement in November of last year. Lord Neuberger quotes from it in his section of today's ruling (paragraph 126):

[Mr Mohamed's] trauma lasted for two long years. During that time, he was physically and psychologically tortured. His genitals were mutilated. He was deprived of sleep and food. He was summarily transported from one prison to another. Captors held him in stress positions for days at a time. He was forced to listen to piercingly loud music and the screams of other prisoners while locked in a pitch-black cell. All the while, he was forced to inculpate himself and others in various plots to imperil Americans.
...
At page 58, she said that "[t]he [US] Government does not challenge or deny the accuracy of [Mr Mohamed's] story of brutal treatment" and repeated that point at pages 62 and 64. On pages 61-2, she said that his "persistence in telling his story" and "very vigorous… and very public ... pursu[ance of] his claims in the British courts" indicated that his evidence was true and "demonstrates his willingness to test the truth of his version of events in both the courts of law and the court of public opinion". In the passage just quoted from page 70 of her Opinion, she referred to Mr Mohamed's "lengthy prior torture" as an established fact.

Compared to the seven paragraphs we have today, it doesn't really get much more damning.

It moved me to make the following comment:

This sort of stuff really is your forte Obsolete. That is one cracking analysis which I wouldn't presume to add to, other than with a rather apposite quotation from Joseph Persico's 'Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage' (hat tip to Cryptome)

Espionage involves peeking at the other fellow's hand, marking the cards, cooking the books, poisoning the well, breaking the rules, hitting below the belt, cheating, lying, deceiving, defaming, snooping, eavesdropping, prying, stealing, bribing, suborning, burglarizing, forging, misleading, conducting dirty tricks, dirty pool, skulduggery, blackmail, seduction, everything not sporting, not kosher, not cricket. In short, espionage stands virtue on its head and elevates vice instead.

- all to further our mission to do good in the world naturally - so that's OK then.

Some things never change eh? and despite all the pompous, ridiculous - not to say comical if it weren't so damned depressing - protestations of their apologists (well he would say that wouldn't he? - aka Mandy Rice Davies) the routine behaviour of our own SIS's are most certainly no exception.

Does ANYONE seriously believe that this will have ANY effect other than to make them and their political puppets - to whom offers may be made that simply cannot be refused - that much more careful, deceptive - and all the other attributes mentioned above - when going about their business of protecting us from their manufactured and calibrated milieu of TERROR?

After all, Robert Cecil is their archetype - and we STILL celebrate his brilliant 'just-in-time' capture and execution of those dastardly gunpowder plotters some 400 years later eh?

Indeed some thing never NEVER CHANGE and the Sheeple remain as credulous as ever.

Hat tip to 'Deep Politics Forum' for the picture 

Update: This post was prompted by 'Obsolete's' take on the '7 paragraphs'. His subsequent posts on the matter are well worth reading too:

Scum-watch: Whose side are you on? - This is one of his routine demolitions of our appalling tabloid press. The Sun in this case, though there is precious little to choose between them in the utter garbage stakes apart from contrived left-right biases. Of course, like the sheep-dog in the picture above, their real purpose is to herd the sheeple while dividing them over trivia.

The seven paragraphs fallout continues

UK terrorist threat level raised to 'Severe'

So, just what IS the purpose of these 'terrorist attack risk level warnings I ask - somewhat rhetorically?

Since anyone with a modicum of intelligence can calculate that the odds of being harmed by a 'terrorist attack' are in the same ballpark as winning the National Lottery Jackpot two weeks running, just how is our behaviour supposed to change with a 'raised warning level'?

Are we perhaps supposed to pay 10% more attention to bearded males carrying rucksacks - or maybe 22.5% more? - something like that? - I think we should be told.

Anyway in the interests of doing my bit to counter this latest threat level warning so-to-speak, here is a little piece that I'm told first made the rounds at about the time this 'calibrate the Sheeple fear level for purposes yet to become clear' charade of terrorist threat levels first started. It's posted by way of a tonic on the premise that, since you can do bugger all else about their ridiculous patronising crap, you might as well have a damn good laugh at them - and let them know it.

So, with due apologies for the smug Anglo-Saxon stereotypes, here goes:

It appears that the English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from 'Miffed' to 'Peeved'. Soon, though security levels may be raised yet again to 'Irritated' or even 'A Bit Cross'. Londoners have not been 'A Bit Cross' since 'the blitz' in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorised from 'Tiresome' to a 'Bit of a Nuisance.' The last time the British issued a 'Bit of a Nuisance' warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from 'Run' to 'Hide.' The only two higher levels in France are 'Surrender' and 'Collaborate.' The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France's white flag factory, effectively paralysing the country's military capability.

It's not only the English and French that are on a heightened level of alert: Italy has increased the alert level from ' Shout Loudly and Excitedly' to 'Elaborate Military Posturing.' Two more levels remain: 'Ineffective Combat Operations' and 'Change Sides.'

The Germans also increased their alert state from 'Disdainful Arrogance' to 'Dress in Uniform and Sing Marching Songs.' They also have two higher levels: 'Invade a Neighbour' and 'Lose.'

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed subs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

Adverts to help you out of that box - Not allowed in US

These advertisements are turning heads in various UK airports through December and January. Not allowed in the US of course. Can't have people being encouraged to think in the 'Land of the Free' now can we?

The full series including flash animations can be viewed here.

Should fear of an unknown menace detract from the presence of the world´s largest nuclear arsenal?

Is the ability to influence minds more potent than a deadly force?

If violence against civilians defines terrorism, then how do people in a war zone distinguish friendly forces?





Should a democratically elected government use violence to control a demonstration?

Victory in Afghanistan *!£x$*** ?

General Stanley McChrystal - Commander of US / 'International Security Assistance' Forces in Afghanistan and former commander of 'Special Forces' operations in Iraq - is a convert to 'winning hearts and minds' - or so he would have us believe.

Among one of multiple eye-popping items of double-speak, he had this to say to Stars and Stripes on New Years Day :

“What we are working on is that we’re really focusing on getting counterinsurgency, protecting the people, in the minds of the Afghan people. We are not viewed as occupiers now.”

In light of the relentless toll on the civilian population by the 'Point-Click-kill Brigade' - (or 'Remote Control Warriors' as the US military likes to call them) with their 'Reaper' and 'Predator' drones designed and named especially to 'win hearts and minds' it seems); not to mention Stanley's old buddies who, when there is a smigeon of doubt or they are simply too pumped up to think straight, are inclined to simply execute children in cold blood, Rick Rozoff's recourse to Fyodor Dostoevsky seems apposite:

"A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else."

The Cairo Declaration

The 'Gaza Freedom March' has been largely ignored by the Western MSM - No surprises there then.

The march organisers are doing their best to draw attention to the continuing barbaric behaviour of Zionist Israel towards Gaza and the Palestinian population in general.

About 1,400 marchers are currently in Cairo, having been prevented by the Egyptian Authorities from crossing into Gaza. It seems that the Egyptians, having proved themselves useless at fighting Zionist Israel, have decided it would be more profitable for them to do it's dirty work instead. With it's actions against the marchers and the construction of yet another wall (underground this time - see pic above) Egypt has become something of a Zionist poodle - a bit like the UK relationship with the US really. As a perceptive commentator said recently (can't recall where) "With its surrounding Arab countries as 'enemies', Israel has little need of friends" - ouch!

My guess is that all this seriously rankles with the average Egyptian. Their Western supported (not to say dictated to) government is sowing the wind. I wonder if it is ready for the whirlwind?

Anyway, the march has just issued 'The Cairo Declaration' as follows:

End Israeli Apartheid
Cairo Declaration
January 1, 2010

We, international delegates meeting in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March 2009 in collective response to an initiative from the South African delegation, state:

In view of:

• Israel`s ongoing collective punishment of Palestinians through the illegal occupation and siege of Gaza;
• the illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the continued construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements;
• the new Wall under construction by Egypt and the US which will tighten even further the siege of Gaza;
• the contempt for Palestinian democracy shown by Israel, the US, Canada, the EU and others after the Palestinian elections of 2006;
• the war crimes committed by Israel during the invasion of Gaza one year ago;
• the continuing discrimination and repression faced by Palestinians within Israel;
• and the continuing exile of millions of Palestinian refugees;
• all of which oppressive acts are based ultimately on the Zionist ideology which underpins Israel;
• in the knowledge that our own governments have given Israel direct economic, financial, military and diplomatic support and allowed it to behave with impunity;
• and mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (2007)
  

We reaffirm our commitment to:

• Palestinian Self-Determination
• Ending the Occupation
• Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine
• The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees

We therefore reaffirm our commitment to the United Palestinian call of July 2005 for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to compel Israel to comply with international law.

To that end, we call for and wish to help initiate a global mass, democratic anti-apartheid movement to work in full consultation with Palestinian civil society to implement the Palestinian call for BDS.

Mindful of the many strong similarities between apartheid Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa, we propose:

1. An international speaking tour in the first 6 months of 2010 by Palestinian and South African trade unionists and civil society activists, to be joined by trade unionists and activists committed to this programme within the countries toured, to take mass education on BDS directly to the trade union membership and wider public internationally;
2. Participation in the Israeli Apartheid Week in March 2010;
3. A systematic unified approach to the boycott of Israeli products, involving consumers, workers and their unions in the retail, warehousing, and transportation sectors;
4. Developing the Academic, Cultural and Sports boycott;
5. Campaigns to encourage divestment of trade union and other pension funds from companies directly implicated in the Occupation and/or the Israeli military industries;
6. Legal actions targeting the external recruitment of soldiers to serve in the Israeli military, and the prosecution of Israeli government war criminals; coordination of Citizen`s Arrest Bureaux to identify, campaign and seek to prosecute Israeli war criminals; support for the Goldstone Report and the implementation of its recommendations;
7. Campaigns against charitable status of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

We appeal to organisations and individuals committed to this declaration to sign it and work with us to make it a reality.

Please e-mail us at cairodec@gmail.com

Accompanying my signature and support:

You have my support 100%

I find the complicity of the Western World (and most especially the Arab World) surreal - unbelievable - almost like living a dream.

The sheer in-your-face Orwellian inversion of language in almost everything connected with the Israel/Palestine situation when it figures at all in the public utterances of the Western Political Establishment is quite simply breath-taking. How CAN any of them actually believe what they are saying? - I ask somewhat rhetorically. Answer? - THEY DON'T. The High Offices of State in the West require that those appointed or aspiring to them sacrifice any and all principles and considerations of common humanity to the absolute imperative of promoting the OFFICIAL NARRATIVE OF EVENTS (unless there is a 'humanitarian intervention' on the cards of course, in which case their hearts bleed).

That narrative in summary is of a misunderstood alliance of superior democratic, freedom-loving nations valiantly striving to do good in the world.

To describe it as 'Orwellian' does not do justice to its sheer bloody absurdity - and to maintain the Orwellian fiction, we are lied to systematically and kept in a constant state of fearful compliance by the phoney 'war on terror' - War on Terror? - WAR ON TERROR !! - I ask you - Just who the hell do people think have caused more GENUINE terror and death in civilian populations throughout the world than the US/ISRAELI/UK military this past decade?

And to cap it all, the man responsible for more terror, death, bombing and general mayhem than any other individual on the planet for the year in question, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize! - and what's more actually accepted it with a toe-curlingly embarrassing justification for perpetual 'just' war.


You really couldn't make this stuff up could you? In a rational world any attempt to do so - as a work of fiction say - would simple be laughed at as absurd. But WE are required to live and believe it!

In my dotage I have learned to be thoroughly ashamed of having to hold a 'British' passport. - and when I see puppets like the fresh-faced boy Milliband earnestly trying to patronise me - let alone that reptile Blair - I could be physically sick.

Sorry about the rant. It is cathartic - Not to mention TRUE.

The very best wishes to you and your efforts.

Operation Cast Lead one year on

For those interested in the reality, systematically hidden and obfuscated by the 'Official Narrative', of major events and the motives driving them,  'Lenin's Tomb' is well worth monitoring. It is run by Richard Seymour whose recent book 'The Liberal Defence of Murder' is an impressive forensic dissection of the pathologies that are manipulated by 'The System' to secure cheer-leading support from otherwise sensible, well meaning people for the West's multiple latter-day imperial wars on those who decline to see things our way.

Richard is something of an activist himself, apparently believing in the possibility of systemic change for the better through political action - and all power to him for that. I, on the other hand, am a crotchety old grand-dad who has finally come to accept that any such meaningful change is - and will continue to be - fought tooth and nail, with all the means at its disposal (which are mind-bogglingly vast) by our present deeply corrupt, self-serving system. The net effect being that meaningful change will only come about through events of a nature even more cataclysmic than say the French or Russian Revolutions were in their day. Which in turn is to say through massive hardship and the destruction of much of what we pompously imagine to be our oh-so-civilised, 'advanced', and superior way-of-life.

Reading the Runes I think I divine the stirrings of just such a cataclysm in the making. It manifests in the 'whistling past the graveyard' posturing of just about every Establishment Spokesman and his dog, in face of the relentless convergence of population growth, environmental degradation and peak oil/energy (in fact peak just-about-everything - especially debt). I'm less sure that the real powers behind the throne are 'whistling past the graveyard' though. Rather, they are quietly, deceptively but systematically preparing for the cataclysm they know to be immanent. For example: there are some pretty self-evident Police-States in the making; Nato/US/Israel now account for 75% of the world's military expenditure (it's called 'defence' dontcha know?); The US garrisons the entire planet with over 1,000 non-domestic military bases and a military command for every corner of the globe (not to mention space and their shiny new 'Cyber-warfare' command) - 'the enemy' is everywhere you see, and they just gotta seek him out. (They simply HAVE to have enemies and if they seem a bit thin on the ground, why then, they'll just coach, arm and manufacture a few, easy-peasy); The 'Military/Industrial-Wall Street Complex' calls all the shots whilst its budgets remain sacrosanct and the general population suffers a  relentlessly grinding decline in its wealth, job/financial security and everything that defines its 'non-negotiable way of life'. The Super-rich get super-richer; Joe Average struggles to stagnate at best; whilst prospects for the vast underclass of globalised humanity ever participating in what the West takes for granted have vanished like the mirage they always were. Meanwhile, the systematic persecution of 'Untermenschen' such as the Palestinians (a grimly appropriate term in this context)  hardly registers on the delicate but purblind consciences of Western Politicians  at all. IOW, if you covet a political career, then there are things; really important things; things vital to the very survival of humanity in fact - that simply cannot be discussed outside an absurd orthodoxy that is rigidly enforced. The Emperor is indeed naked.

AND --- WE - the sheeple are seriously enjoined to believe that all this is part-and-parcel of a 'War on Terror' with a benign, well-intentioned but misunderstood Western Alliance  selflessly seeking to do good in the world !!!!

Jesus H Christ! - talk about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy to a 5 year old ! - and STILL we lap it up. What the Hell is wrong with us?

Anyway, back to Lenin's Tomb and the subject of this post.

Operation Cast Lead was launched on 27 December 2008 on the spurious pretext of preventing Hamas rocket fire into southern Israel. It followed months of pledges by senior Israeli ministers to level parts of Gaza, and inflict a "Holocaust" on the territory. It followed Israel's most explicit violation of a ceasefire agreement on November 4th, when it launched a series of raids on Gaza. It followed the intensitification of a blockade that left 9 out of 10 Gazans living below the poverty line, with some families forced to live on grass to survive. Mary Robinson, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and fairly conventional supporter of a two-state settlement, described how the blockade was affecting Gaza: "their whole civilisation has been destroyed, I'm not exaggerating ... It's almost unbelievable that the world doesn't care while this is happening." There is a great deal more to be said about context but, suffice to say, the aggression was merely the latest phase in a war on the civilian population of Gaza, a sustained punishment beating it was enduring for resistance: specifically, for having maintained its elected government despite a successful Israeli-backed Fatah putsch in the West Bank in the summer of 2007, which one would infer had been planned since Hamas' electoral victory in early 2006. That this punishment is continuing - of which, more later - is reason in itself to revisit the last year's blitzkrieg.

The brutality of Operation Cast Lead shocked some of Israel's most devoted supporters, and divided the pro-Israel camp. Even as it was happening, some of the most shocking accounts of IDF conduct were emerging. These included sealing off a neighbourhood, bombing and shelling it, blocking medical and humanitarian entry, and knowingly leaving children to slowly die next to their already deceased relatives. They included the targeting of hospitals and ambulances, and the repeated targeting of schools. UN casualty statistics reflected a particularly onerous burden on the civilian population - 42% of those killed, they said, were women and children. Some news reports falsely suggested that this meant that 'only' 42% of those killed were civilians, which involved the racist supposition that Palestinian males over 16 no longer count as civilians with the full protection of humanitarian norms and laws. As it happens, the re-definition of the category of 'civilian' was integral to Israeli doctrine during the war, and it was essential to their military plans. The 'Dahiya Doctrine', the parameters of which informed Israeli operations in Gaza, involved precisely this shift, as General Gadi Eisenkot explained:

"What happened in the Dahiya quarter in Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired upon. We will apply disproportionate force upon it and cause great damage and destruction there," he said. "From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases."

“This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved”. [Emphasis added]

Such genocidal logic, congruent with the promises of a 'Holocaust', was consistently expressed in Israel's methods and targeting, not to mention the uplifting sentiments expressed by IDF soldiers while defacing Palestinian homes. Since the end of Operation Cast Lead, we have had numerous reports into Israel's conduct of the operation, though less attention has been paid to the supposed rationale behind the attacks. The Goldstone Report [pdf] has documented in forensic detail an astonishing level of premeditated and sadistic violence toward civilians. It documented deliberate attacks on hospitals, mosques, and perhaps most chillingly the assault on the al-Samouni area resulting in the calculated massacre of the al-Samouni family. Focusing on 36 specific incidents of such aggression, with detailed consideration of evidence in each case, it concluded that the war had either in whole or in part been against the "people of Gaza as a whole". This was quite remarkable for such a report, produced by a UN team led by a "Zionist" who "loves Israel". It also concluded that "the operations were in furtherance of an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas". As a consequence of such conclusions, the report demanded that Israel should pay reparations to the Palestinians affected by its actions, noting that its internal structures left few avenues open for Palestinians to sue for reparations themselves. It also encouraged the UN to refer the report to the ICC, and called on the ICC to act on legal appeals from the "Government of Palestine". Predictably, the report was subject to a barrage of ignorant rubbish, suggesting that it was the result of a mission biased against Israel (forgetting that its remit actually included studying alleged war crimes by armed Palestinian groups), and that its findings were based "largely on interviews with Hamas" (utter garbage). Numerous rebuttal websites have been set up, including a rather slick one by CAMERA, with the aim of blowing smoke over the findings. But all of this is so much acting out by an increasingly bellicose and shrill minority.

One point that the Goldstone report also emphasised was that the punishment of the Palestinian population was continuing in the form of a blockade, which it considered to be "collective punishment". On Sunday, a new report [pdf] by numerous NGOs including Amnesty, Christian Aid, CAFOD, Oxfam, Trocaire and Medical Aid for the Palestinians looks at the impact of the blockade. Its main conclusions are shared by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It finds that all attempts to regenerate Gazan society and economy since Operation Cast Lead have been frustrated by the ongoing blockade. Most of the $4bn of international donor money has not been spent, not for lack of determination, but because the conditions of the blockade make it impossible to carry out the necessary reconstruction:

"the civilian population and the United Nations and aid agencies that aim to help them are prohibited from importing materials like cement or glass for reconstruction in all but a handful of cases".

The inability to reconstruct damaged homes has left tens of thousands displaced, some living in tents.

"And this is to say nothing of the backlog of need from those homes severely damaged in previous military actions, those new houses left half-built due to lack of materials and existing properties condemned as unhygienic or unsafe to live in that cannot be replaced."

Not only are homes not being rebuilt, but power stations necessary to maintain production, keep hospitals and public services functioning, and maintain sanitary water, remain destroyed. Israel regularly refuses to allow generators into Gaza. And industries are going idle. 120,000 jobs in the private sector were lost because of the blockade. Even before Operation Cast Lead, "98% of industrial operations in Gaza were idle because of the blockade". Because of the destruction to power stations, sewage systems and water piping, 8,000 people lack any access to piped water at all, and the remainder of the population has to suffer sporadic supplies when the power cuts out as it regularly does: water shortages and power cuts are particularly liable to take place during winter. The shortage of clean water is causing a shocking rise in diarrhoea, which is behind 12% of young deaths.

The blockade has reduced the categories of goods entering Gaza from approximately 4,000 to about 35, and those items that are theoretically allowed in (some medicines, basic foods and humanitarian supplies) are subject to arbitrarily shifting restrictions. The blockade had also severely restricted agricultural production, and Operation Cast Lead destroyed 17% of cultivated land in Gaza. Israel's imposition of a depopulated 'buffer zone' "inside of the walls and fences surrounding Gaza" has resulted in between "a quarter and a third of Gaza's agricultural land" being subsumed into the 'buffer zone'. The combined effect of Cast Lead and the ongoing blockade has been to put 46% of Gazan agricultural land out of production.

While southern Israel "blossoms", Gaza is constantly regressing in its ability to reproduce itself as a society and economy. Earlier this year, a leaked UN report said that the ongoing blockade was resulting in a process of "de-development", with "increased aid dependency" among the population - already, 75% of Gazans depend on food aid to survive. The report by Amnesty et al concludes, with language that is becoming all too familiar, that the blockade amounts to "collective punishment". It is worse than collective punishment, and that tag will simply not do any more. Baruch Kimmerling has characterised Israel's war on the Palestinians as 'politicide': an attempt to wholly destroy the fabric of any potential Palestinian state. But, as Martin Shaw has written, the proliferation of -cides with respect to the crimes of war - femicide, democide, infanticide, etc - really adverts to the genocidal logic that they are all too often embedded in. The logic of Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians is dictated by its twin drives to maintain control of Gaza and the West Bank with the long term aim of incorporating both as official Israeli territories, and its determination to remain a 'Jewish state' with a substantial Jewish majority. Either the Israeli state must give up one of these goals (and no one is applying sufficient pressure to make it do so), or it must find a way of disposing of the Palestinian population. Ethnic cleansing is one such means. Imposing conditions such as are intended to make life and its reproduction almost impossible, and unbearable, is another. The war on the population of Gaza is an attempt to break Palestinian resistance by means of destroying, in part, the aforementioned population.

Lest we forget

The following brief article by William Bowles (Published at 'Global Research') sums up my own feelings in the run up to Remembrance Day here in the UK.

The horror of war is quite clearly something we NEED to be reminded of but in spite of it being particularly appropriate to include the dead of our armed forces in any such remembrance, the  hijacking of what is - in essence - a mourning process, to the glorification of the Anglo-American Imperial Project, quite simply makes me sick.

In large measure, those who 'made the ultimate sacrifice' did so as as cannon fodder for purposes which 95% of humanity justifiably see as hubristic imperial arrogance long past it's 'sell-by' date - and which therefore  HAS to be hidden from the general population - or rather turned into it's Orwellian opposite - by our Machiavellian Deep State power structures:

There is something ironic — if not downright obscene — about the fact that in the UK the Poppy is used as the symbol of remembrance for all those who have died in the UK’s countless imperial wars, a symbol that is being used to punt the latest ‘adventure’, Afghanistan, home of the opium poppy.

The use of the Poppy flower as a symbol of remembrance stems from the fact that the Poppy grew in abundance in the slaughterhouse called Flanders in WWI, due apparently to the fact that the artillery shells exposed the formerly deeply buried seeds to the sun.

‘Lest we forget’ apparently now reads ‘We forgot’ as ‘our boys’ slug it out for the Empire with an enemy they will never defeat, but then the sick thing about this particular imperial war is that it ain’t about winning.

In part it’s about waging a war for the minds of the British public, thus punting the Poppy, this time in the name of the ‘War on Terror’ is shoved down our throats every time we turn on the telly and every announcer, every newscaster sports the Poppy badge. And of course, it’s also about being there, yet another forward base for launching military strikes at more ‘enemies’, bases that are intended for military strikes principally against China and Russia. And frankly, it’s not even the UK’s war, it’s entirely made in the USA, that’s how far the British Empire has sunk, (ineffectual) hitman for the Empire.

“According to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.” [America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan By F. William Engdahl]

The propaganda techniques being used today that link the D-Day Landings (commemorating its 60th anniversary) to the current slaughter in Afghanistan is not new, it was developed during the latter half of the 19th century and used to great effect on the British, namely the ideology of racism used to unite the British people in the name of Empire.

Eric Hobsbawm’s excellent trilogy on the British Empire, ‘The Age of Capital’, ‘The Age of Empire’ and ‘Age of Revolution’ go into some detail as to how public pageants that for example sold the Royal Family (not at the top of most people’s list in the 19th century) as though it were ours, were used to whip up a patriotic fervour.

“It is impossible to deny that the idea of superiority to, and dominion over, a world of dark skins in remote places was genuinely popular, and thus benefited the politics of imperialism....At the end of the [19th] century ‘colonial pavilions’, hitherto virtually unknown, multiplied… No doubt this was planned publicity…[and] it succeeded because it touched a public nerve.
....
“In its great International Expositions bourgeois civilization had always gloried in the triple triumphs of science, technology and manufactures. In the era of empires it also gloried in its colonies.
....
“The sense of superiority which thus united western whites, rich, middle-class and poor, did so not only because all of them enjoyed the privileges of the ruler, especially when in the colonies. In Dakar or Mombasa the most modest clerk was a master, and accepted as a ‘gentleman’ by people who would not even have noticed his existence in Paris or London; the white worker was a commander of the blacks.” [ Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Age of Empire’, p.70-71]

And nothing apparently has changed in the intervening century. Led by the BBC and the corporate press a sophisticated propaganda campaign has been mounted, extolling the virtues of ‘our boys’ as they fight to bring democracy to those Afghani ingrates.

How deeply embedded this is in British society is demonstrated to us all the time through the endless references to dim and distant imperial wars, and of course with the emphasis on the not so-distant. e.g., the ‘good war’, that is to say WWII (it’s about the only ‘history’ kids get taught at school here these days). A war by the way, that had the UK and France signed the proposed Soviet-Anglo-French mutual protection treaty, could have been avoided.[1]

Of course the UK no longer has an empire, it’s little more than a hired gun and a pretty broke one at that.

For around thirty years British capitalism has been living off its North Sea oil and its pivotol role in the global financial circuit, essentially living off the interest earned on investments and loans, but producing nothing of real worth. And having gotten a ‘hands-off’ government in place which proceeded to do its master's bidding and make the economy a free-for-all, it now exhibits all the characteristics of the age it constantly harks back to, the age of Empire but without the military power to back it up.

Living the good life off its ill-gotten financial gains (all of it is now in the hands of various and sundry private equity funds and banks etc), British capitalism has been brought to its knees. Oh how those generals must be longing for the day when his (or her) imperial majesty’s armed forces did as they pleased, where they pleased, when they pleased and had the means to do it. Now they can’t even field what amounts to little more than an expeditionary force. (In the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878-80), Britain sent 40,000 troops. Oh, and they ‘won’ that one.)

The role that the ideology of racism plays in selling the illegal occupation of Afghanistan could not be clearer, exploiting feelings of fear and insecurity and of regaining a leading role in a world now long gone.

The outbursts by various military leaders concerning the alleged lack of support for ‘our boys over there’ is obviously a state-inspired tactic given that the majority of people here do not support the government’s military presence in Afghanistan (56%).

This is how the BBC reported the alleged row over troop numbers but oddly, under the heading of ‘Most ‘remain against Afghan war’’:

“Gen Sir David Richards, the new head of the Army, is believed to want an extra 1,000 troops, according to Michael Codner, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute.
....
“Mr Codner says Britain needs to maintain its influence with the US with a consistent and reliable contribution of military forces.

“There is a financial and human cost in this strategy which the nation must either pay, or accept that it has lost its presumed status and influence and can relax and be a normal European country that does not take hard power seriously,” he wrote in an article sent to the BBC. [‘Most ‘remain against Afghan war’, BBC News website, 7 October, 2009]

Note that unless the UK wants to lose “its presumed status and influence” it had better continue sacrificing British lives. No mention of course of the thousands of Afghan lives sacrificed in order to maintain our ‘presumed status and influence’.

‘Hard power’? A euphemism for murder. And it’s hardly surprising that such glib terms roll of the tongues of these ‘masters of the universe’, so used are they to calling the shots when it comes to attempting to justify their imperial wars. And how neatly it ties into the state propaganda of “making Britain safer”, the latest wheeze from Gordon Brown as to why we are slaughtering Afghanis.

And clearly even the propaganda onslaught ain’t doing the trick with opposition to the war up from 53% when we invaded the place in 2001 to 56% today. The BBC is somewhat bemused by these figures telling us that,

‘The increase in opposition to the war is slight, despite the rising number of British soldiers killed in the last 12 months.’

Does it not occur to the propagandists at the BBC that perhaps, just perhaps, endless, bloody war is just not acceptable to more than half the population?

Notes

[1.] See Yuriy RUBTSOV: ‘The Moscow talks in 1939: a missed chance’

See also: Obama: Manufacturing A Savior A Case Study In Social Engineering - Fabricating Myths, Mantras, Consent and Dissent, for Imperial Mobilization By Zahir Ebrahim

An Illustrated Prayer for the IDF

Mark Twain's 'War Prayer' was considered too controversial by his family and was therefore not published until after his death in 1910. The posthumous direction to publish included the following observation: "I have told the truth ... and only dead men can tell the truth in this world." It is a scathing indictment of war - especially the sanctimonious, patriotic variety - in the form of a short story and though over 100 years old it's ending, in the form of a prayer, might have been written especially for today's euphemistically named "Israeli Defence Force":

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle – be Thou near them! With them – in spirit – we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells.

Help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead.

Help us to drown the thunder of the guns with shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.

Help us to lay waste their humble homes with hurricanes of fire.

Help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst,

 sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it

– for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen."

All photographs are of the 22 day Israeli invasion of Gaza Decamber 2008 - January 2009.
Hat-Tip to "What Really Happened"

Drone Wars or - The Point, Click, Kill Brigade

"The West did not conquer the world through the superiority of its ideas, values or religion, but through its superiority in applying organized violence....". So said Samuel P Huntington, military/political philosopher and inspiration of Neocons, in his seminal work "The Clash of Civilisations". Whilst the subject of this post is somewhat somewhat narrower, Huntington's aphorism sprang to mind whilst pondering how different things would be in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, the Caucasus - indeed the whole world, were it not for the West's overwhelming superiority, both qualitative and quantitative, in military technology.

With the UK military death toll in Afghanistan now substantially higher than for Iraq we are subject to a constant steam of patriotic MSM coverage aimed at bolstering public support for our wars. From the ostentatious ra ra visits of national football and cricket team Reps to our boys (and girls) in Helmand, to the sombre long-focus shots of coffins descending from the rear of Hercules planes at RAF Lynam and the parades through nearby Wootton Bassett. We are regularly treated to earnest patronising lectures from General This and Colonel That on the valour of our service personal in their dual tasks of 'protecting our freedom' and 'helping the Afghans'. Last week there was a National service of commemoration for those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan - and all of this impossible to miss no matter your 'news' sources or degree of attention.

I have no issue with the valour of our service men and women. The loss of a single one is as tragic as is the loss of a son, daughter, husband or father to any family - including afghan and Iraqi families who God knows have suffered rather more than ourselves in these perpetual wars of ours. My issue is with our so-called leaders. In particular their bare-faced lies about the reasons for our involvement together with the sickeningly jingoistic/patriotic masquerade to which the grief of bereaved families is, as a matter of routine, harnessed by them.

However, be all that as it may (or rather IS), were our armed forces, valiant and professional though they undoubtedly are, to be deployed on equal terms with their alleged enemies - ie without monopolistic precision GPS guided air power and with arms limited to aging Kalshnikovs, RPG's and cannibalised mines from the Soviet era - it is unlikely their deployment would last long against similarly armed 'insurgents' who, for the most part, simply see themselves as defending their homeland against foreign invaders.

Which brings me to the 'Point, Click, Kill Brigade' or 'Remote Control Warriors' as the US military likes to characterise them -

The Drone Pilots.

The following is a brief paraphrased resume of articles and interviews published in various US media here, here and here.

Absent serious traffic, it takes a certain USAF Captain (we'll call him Adam) about 45 minutes to drive from his four-bedroom suburban home outside Las Vegas to his place of work at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. He is an instructor and 'Remote Control Warrior' piloting drones flying some 7,500 miles away on 'combat operations' in Afghanistan and that damned commute is likely the most harrowing part of his day.

His first kill in Adam's own words:

"A month after I began flying combat UAVs, me and the crew were watching a trigger house, which gives insurgents a vantage over a roadway to detonate an IED as a vehicle passes. We had spotted two people stringing wires from the house to the road the night before, but that wasn’t enough to go on. This night, however, the figures appeared to pull back a dark spot on the road and crouch, plugging in wires. Seeing that feed, the ground unit gave me clearance to fire, and I launched a missile. I saw it reach one of the men. It landed right at his feet, and - PAUSE - he was gone.”

On his 45 minute drive home Adam noted (with or without irony) the usual illuminated signs cautioning him to "... Drive carefully - this is the most dangerous time of your day". His wife gave him a hug and said she was proud he took his first shot. He’ll never forget the date. It was his daughter’s second birthday, and he had had some cake with her before heading off to work that morning.

The stuff of latter day military heroes eh?

Perhaps the most infamous example to date of the work of these 'Remote Control Warriors' is the attack on a wedding party in June 2009. The BBC and Reuters initially reported the death toll at about 45 with the all usual official obfuscations and equivocations dutifully repeated - they were 'suspected militants', 'suspected insurgents', 'we had solid evidence...' etc ad nauseam - Because of course, if the West suspects an Afghan of being 'A MILITANT', why then it's perfectly OK to incinerate him isn't it? The actual death toll was soon established at over 80, most of them women and children.

Where was the outrage? - Answer: there wasn't any, just the routine mendacity of 'military spokesmen' followed by sheepish embarrassed silence.

With more of the same now almost a daily occurrence it is no longer news at all unless the innocent civilian death toll is more than about 10, in which case it may warrant a paragraph or two on an inside page. And all the while our leaders seriously expect us to believe that we occupy the moral high ground.

The moral high ground. THE MORAL BLOODY HIGH GROUND?

The place we in the West ACTUALLY occupy is more akin to a moral sewer. With the attention span of the general population reduced to the blink of an eye on anything that does not portray us as poor misunderstood heroes or titillate our insatiable appetite for trivia about the lives of our air-head celebrities, or our propensity to self-righteous outrage at the alleged misdeeds of this that or the other villain du-jour.

Here's a video of a 'Kill' - and that from 7,500 miles away with USAF Captain Adam commentating. Don't worry. All is well. These are professionals and their prey ARE after all suspected militants - and in any event mere 'Ragheads' - so that's OK then.

Democratic State Vs Deep State

This essay originated as an unpublished conference paper. It was later incorporated as chapter 2 of the book Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty. Since first encountering it about 6 months ago I have wanted to refer people to it on a number of occasions but have been unable to find it anywhere on the internet other than in part on various forums. It is an authoritative and succinct resume of the REAL role of the Secret Intelligence Services and the policy setting veto powers they wield in most Western Democracies - but especially in the USA and UK. It is a MUST READ for anyone seeking to understand the 'smoke and mirrors' world of foreign affairs and domestic security policy. It clearly demonstrates the frivolous irrelevance of our 'for-public-consumption' party-political masquerade in setting and implementing the real 'Deep-State' agenda that, by definition, must be kept hidden from the general population. Privy-council level political appointment involves gradually initiation into it's sordid realities. Remain complicit and your career may blossom; threaten it and (pace the likes of Robin Cook) it were better you just agree to spend more time with your family lest some form of unpleasantness - or worse - befall you. For the rest of us it's a child-like patriotic narrative of derring-do in hostile and backward parts of the world, trying to help the poor benighted natives and generally seeking to do good in the world whilst being stoically mis-understood - a complete load of old garbage in other words.

Here it is in full:

APPROACHING THE DUAL STATE OF THE WEST
Ola Tunander

In a 1955 study of the United States State Department, Hans Morgenthau discussed the existence of a US ‘dual state’. According to Morgenthau, the US state includes both a ‘regular state hierarchy’ that acts according to the rule of law and a more or less hidden ‘security hierarchy’—which I will refer to here as the ‘security state’ (also known in some countries as the ‘deep state’) —that not only acts in parallel to the former but also monitors and exerts control over it. In Morgenthau’s view, this security aspect of the state—the ‘security state’—is able to ‘exert an effective veto over the decisions’ of the regular state governed by the rule of law. While the ‘democratic state’ offers legitimacy to security politics, the ‘security state’ intervenes where necessary, by limiting the range of democratic politics. While the ‘democratic state’ deals with political alternatives, the ‘security state’ enters the scene when ‘no alternative exists’, when particular activities are ‘securitised’ —in the event of an ‘emergency’. In fact, the security state is the very apparatus that defines when and whether a ‘state of emergency’ will emerge. This aspect of the state is what Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, referred to as the ‘sovereign’.

Logically speaking, one might argue that Morgenthau’s ‘dual state’ is derived from the same duality as that described in Ernst Fraenkel’s conception of the ‘dual state’, which Fraenkel described as typifying the Nazi regime of Hitler’s Germany. In the Nazi case, though, this duality was overt, combining the ‘regular’ legal state with a parallel ‘prerogative state’, an autocratic paramilitary emergency state or Machtstaat that operated outside or ‘above’ the legal system, with its philosophical foundation in the Schmittian ‘sovereign’. Fraenkel refers to Emil Lederer, who argues that this Machtstaat (‘power state’, as distinct from the Rechtstaat) has its historical origins in the European aristocratic elite, which still played an important role within European society after the triumph of democracy. This elite acted behind the scene in the 1920s, but considered it necessary to intervene in support of the Nazi Party in the 1930s to prevent a possible socialist takeover. However, this autocratic Machtstaat—the Nazi SS-state—was arbitrary, because of its individualised command. In his analysis, Morgenthau draws a parallel between Nazi Germany and the US dual state. Indeed, in his view, the autocratic ‘security state’ may be less visible and less arbitrary in democratic societies such as the US, but it is no less important. Morgenthau argues that the power of making decisions remains with the authorities charged by law with making them, while, as a matter of fact, by virtue of their power over life and death, the agents of the secret police… [and what I would call the security state: author] at the very least exert an effective veto over [these] decisions.

Below, I will demonstrate that the activity of the ‘security state’—or the ‘deep state’—concerns not just the vetoing of democratic decisions, but also the ‘fine tuning of democracy,’ for example through the ‘fostering’ of war or terrorism to create fear and increase public demands for protection. The ‘security state’ is able to calibrate or manipulate the policies of the ‘democratic state’ through the use of a totally different logic of politics—a kind of politics that in this book is referred to as ‘parapolitics’ and which operates outside the law to define the limits of the legal discourse. The argument presented here is not meant as a normative statement, but rather as an attempt to describe and analyse the Western state as it actually operates, both inside and outside the law.

This argumentation has already appeared in Italy both in the parliamentary report on terrorism and among scholars. Franco de Felice re-introduced the concept of dual state in Italy in his ‘Doppia lealta e doppio stato’ (1989). He argues that that the dual state is born from an incapacity of the regular state to reconcile domestic policies with foreign policies. But if the Italian dual state, logically speaking, originates from the attempt to bridge between domestic and foreign policy, it originates, historically speaking, from Italy’s post-war ‘historical compromise’ between the emerging democratic forces of the allies and the remaining forces of fascist Italy. At the very end of the Second World War, US intelligence (with later CIA Chief for Counter-Intelligence James Jesus Angleton and his Italian contact, Federico Umberto D’Amato, head of Italian secret service up to the 1980s) recruited large numbers of officials and soldiers from the fascist Republic of Salò and from its Special Forces, Decima MAS, for the new Italian state. This recruitment program included figures like Prince Junio Valerio Borhese, Pino Rauti and Licio Gelli, who are believed to have played a major role in the terrorism and ‘coup attempts’ in Cold War Italy (see below). In the 1960s to the 1980s, these more or less aristocratic fascists came to operate within an extra-legal shadow government or invisible government in liaison with US intelligence and in parallel to the regular democratic state.

Paolo Cucchiarelli and Aldo Giannulli have written in their Lo Stato Parallelo (1997) about the dual state or ‘parallel state’ as a state that operates both inside and outside the law; and Rosella Dossi has written about the dual state in Italy’s Invisible Government (2001). Similar to de Felice these Italian scholars refer back to Ernst Fraenkel, not to Hans Morgenthau. Morgenthau’s analysis is very useful, however, because it is able to combine the concept of democracy with an autocratic Machtstaat or ‘shadow government’, thus putting a finger on an aspect of the state that is often neglected in political science. Morgenthau was a traditional ‘realist’ who inherited important ideas from Carl Schmitt, and was able to flesh out Schmitt’s rather abstract analysis of the sovereign. My ambition in this chapter is to continue along that path, to give yet more substance to this line of thinking and, at the same time, make it accessible to a wider audience.

THE SOVEREIGN AS THE ‘DEEP STATE’

Let us approach the idea of the ‘sovereign’ as the security side of the state—what some would call the ‘deep state’—by looking at a few examples.

Recent trials and parliamentary inquires in Italy have established that bombing campaigns in the late 1960s and 1970s in that country—and probably elsewhere in Europe—were run not by various anarchist or other left-wing groups, as had been generally believed at the time, but were instead carried out by action squads known as Nuclei di Difesa della Stato (Nuclei for Defence of the State, or NDS) in accordance with a political strategy known as the ‘Strategy of Tension’. Already in 1964, Angleton’s close colleague, William Harvey, then CIA station chief in Rome, had recommended Colonel Renzo Rocca, Chief of Italian Military Intelligence Division R (Gladio: the Italian Stay-Behinds), to use his ‘action squads’ to ‘carry out bombings against Christian Democratic Party offices’ in order to implicate the Italian Communist Party (PCI). These ‘gladiators’ had been ‘recruited from Republic of Salò and from the Italian former naval Special Forces Decima MAS and other militant Fascist organizations.’ From 1966, US and Italian intelligence started to recruit action squads for a ‘parallel Gladio’, or NDS, from Pino Rauti’s fascist organisation Ordine Nuovo. Subsequently, while masquerading as left-wingers, anarchists and Maoists, Italian NDS squads from Ordine Nuovo, in collaboration with the fascist Avanguardia Nazionale and their successor organisations, carried out a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than hundred people, in direct collaboration with the CIA and ‘US factions’ of the Italian intelligence and security services.

Later, Carlo Digilio, who had worked with the CIA in Italy, would recount in court hearings how he had collaborated with activists from Ordine Nuovo and how the bombing campaign had been linked to a US plan to introduce a state of emergency in Italy in order to exclude the political left from government. The same view was presented by Italian Chief of Counter-Intelligence, General Gianadelio Maletti, who confirmed in court that US intelligence had provided Ordine Nuovo with explosives for the first major Italian bomb attack (Milan in 1969). Digilio also described how he passed on details of planned bomb attacks to his CIA contact, Captain David Carrett, who had also told him that the bombing campaign was part of a US plan to establish a state of emergency in order to control Italian domestic politics.

In 1974, however, after several years of bombings in Italy, a number of activists from Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale were forced to flee the country. This led to a pause in their bombing campaign, with no major operations being carried out until 1980, when a bomb at Bologna’s railway station left 85 dead and more than 200 wounded. However, also in early 1970s, as General Maletti and others have confirmed, Italian and US intelligence and secret service agents were able to assume vital positions at the highest levels of Italy’s Red Brigades. In 1974, the left-wing leadership of the Red Brigades had been arrested, facilitating the ‘takeover’ of the organisation by the US and Italian services. This resulted in the launch of a range of professional military operations, a period of ‘blind terror’ and a radical increase in the number of attacks being carried out within Italy.

It thus seems that the Italian ‘deep state’ switched to using the Red Brigades as its major extra-legal instrument following the flight of right-wing activists in 1974.

After the murder of Aldo Moro in 1978, his wife recounted how a senior US official had threatened to use ‘groups on the fringes’ of the official services to kill her husband ‘if he did not abandon his policy’ of a ‘historical compromise’ with the left. Notably, the ‘Red Brigade’ kidnapping of Moro in March 1978 took place on the very day on which his ‘compromise’ was to go to the vote in the Italian parliament. Later, it was discovered that an apartment and printing press used by the ‘Red Brigades’ at this time belonged to SISMI, Italy’s military intelligence.

It is now indisputable that the use of terrorism was an element of US policy with respect to Italy. US policy was not just to infiltrate and monitor extremist groups, but also ‘to instigate acts of violence’, to quote Italian Chief of Counter-Intelligence General Gianadelio Maletti. A similar strategy, Maletti believed, was also carried out in other European countries. Thus, although a bomb attack in 1972 was first blamed on the Red Brigades, it later transpired that the attack had been carried out by Ordine Nuovo’s Vinunzo Vinciguerra. While Vinciguerra described himself in court as genuinely fascist, he argued that Ordine Nuovo no longer was: it had been turned into a covert military arm of the ‘state’. Here, in using the term ‘state’, Vinciguerra is speaking of the ‘security state’—the ‘deep state’ or parallel state that is prepared to use extra-legal violence to force the general population to trade democratic freedoms for security and protection, establishing a political order that limits the range of democratic discourse and the rule of law.

Similarly, in Turkey, terrorists detonating bombs were exposed as agents of gendarmerie intelligence. Former Turkish Prime Minister and President Suleyman Demirel argued in 2005, ‘In our country there are two [states]: There is one deep state and one other state [the legal state].’ This ‘deep state’ allegedly detonates bombs under cover of being terrorists (Kurdish, left-wing or Islamic) to justify emergency measures. ‘The state that should be the real is the spare one, the one that should be spare is the real one’, Demirel added. In January 2007, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that there is a ‘deep state’, and ‘it should be minimized’. He added that this structure exists in all countries. ‘We can describe it as gangs inside a state organization, and this kind of structure does exist,’ he said. David Philips wrote for the Council of Foreign Relations: ‘The deep state – a shadowy network involving the military and intelligence apparatus as well as the state bureaucracy -- is the ultimate arbiter of power.’ As stated by Cucchiarelli and Giannulli, in Italy this ‘deep state’ or clandestine ‘parallel state’ makes an illegitimate use of power not to subvert, but rather to preserve, the current system of power. The terrorist acts were explicitly carried out in defence of the state by the so-called Nuclei di Difesa della Stato.

In the final analysis, it is the deep state that is the state structure that decides when and when not to use illegal measures to keep order. In Schmitt’s words, it is this ‘state’ that is the actual ‘sovereign’, the entity that is able to establish order and the rule of law through operations outside the law: ‘The sovereign is he who decides on the exception… For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.’

THE HISTORICAL ORIGIN OF EUROPEAN TERRORISM

In his Theory of the Partisan (1963), Schmitt describes the irregular fighter or anti-state insurgent as a ‘partisan’, and in the battle between the state and insurgents, he argues, the state will ‘fight like a partisan wherever there are partisans.’ Schmitt continues, ‘In the vicious circle of terror and counter-terror, the combat of the partisan is often simply a mirror-image of the partisan battle itself … you have to fight like a partisan wherever there are partisans.’ Schmitt refers to the example of French General Raoul Salan, head of the Organisation d’Armée Secrète (OAS) that from 1961 carried out a campaign of mass terror against the insurgency in Algeria. Salan introduced the ideas of ‘revolutionary war’ to fight the insurgency using its own methods. Already from late 1950s, French settlers and the French Secret Service set up an organisation, the Red Hand, for the assassination of nationalist Algerians trying to buy small arms abroad. The Red Hand poisoned their targets or let Algerians carry out the killings to indicate an internal Algerian feud, but from early 1960s the OAS also attacked French citizens, in order to lay the blame for such attacks on the Arab insurgency. In Italy from the mid-1960s, the ‘sovereign’ employed similar terror tactics against the Italian population, laying the blame on the left and the increasingly democratic PCI.

The general ideas for the bombing campaign in Italy, the Strategy of Tension and the concept of ‘revolutionary war’ were presented at a seminar in May 1965—financed by Colonel Rocca’s Gladio division of Italian military intelligence—at the Alberto Polio Institute for Military Studies in Rome. Among the participants at that seminar were top-ranking Italian military officers and politicians linked to NATO and the USA. A central figure was General Adriano Guilio Cesare Magi Braschi, Chief of Division for Unconventional Warfare of the Italian Milititary Intelligence. He had been close to the OAS and had, according to the court case in Milano 2001, played an important role for the initiation of the Nuclei di Difesa della Stato. Among the speakers presenting the concepts of the Strategy of Tension and ‘revolutionary war’ were two ‘journalists’: Pino Rauti, leader of Ordine Nuovo, and Guidi Giannettini, a fascist intelligence operative and liaison to the OAS. Both Rauti and Giannettini were writing a strategy booklet for the Chief of Staff General Giuseppe Aloja and both were central figures in Ordine Nuovo that subsequently carried out the bombing campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1965—66, the international fascist intelligence network Aginter Press was established to implement the Strategy of Tension, with support from the Portuguese security service PIDE and the CIA. This network included a unit specialising in the infiltration of anarchist and pro-Chinese groups, and its ‘correspondents’ would use such organisations as a cover for carrying out bombings and other violent attacks. Aginter Press also included a strategic centre for subversion and intoxication operations, along with an executive action organisation OACI that carried out assassinations (most likely the same ‘pool of assassins’ that William Harvey, CIA Station Chief in Italy, had recruited in Europe for the CIA’s ‘Executive Action Capability’). All of these divisions of Aginter Press were under the leadership of French OAS officer and former US liaison officer Captain Yves Guillou (alias Yves Guerin Serac), in collaboration with the American intelligence operative Jay Sablonsky (alias Jay Salby) and the French former SS officer Robert Leroy, who had served as an instructor during the war for the Nazi Special Forces commanded by Otto Skorzeny.
Their network brought together Nazi and fascist activists from intelligence services and security services all over Europe (West Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) and Latin America, South Africa and the US. Italian ‘correspondents’ for Aginter Press included the co-founder Stefano delle Chiaie (leader of Avanguardia Nazionale), Pino Rauti and Guidi Giannettini, who collaborated with French OAS leader Pierre Lagaillarde (also involved in the assassination attempt on the French President, Charles de Gaulle). Some of these, such as delle Chiaie and Rauti, were also linked to the US-dominated World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Magi Braschi was later Italian representative of WACL. An Aginter Press document from 1969 (found in Lisbon in 1974) paints a picture identical to that presented by Giannettini earlier in 1965, with proposals for ‘selective terrorism… eliminating certain carefully selected persons’ (including assassination of political leaders) and ‘indiscriminate terrorism’, including ‘randomly shooting down people with firearms’ and the use of bombs in public squares or buildings, in accordance with the Strategy of Tension bombing campaign. Judge Guido Salvini told the senators investigating the bombing campaign that instructors from Aginter Press ‘came to Rome between 1967 and 1968 and instructed the militant members of Avanguardia Nazionale in the use of explosives’. The intention with the bombings was to create a climate of chaos to dramatise political life in order to ‘securitize’ issues previously open to public debate, thus limiting the range of the democratic discourse. Another Aginter Press document (from 1968) states:

In our opinion the first action that we should undertake is the destruction of institutions of the state under the cover of Communist and Maoist actions … This will create a feeling of hostility towards those that threaten the peace … Maoist circles characterized by their own impatience and zeal, are [especially] suitable for infiltration.

The document also states that ‘we already have elements infiltrated into all these [Communist and Maoist] groups’. From late 1960s, fascist activists in Italy started to dress as left-wingers. They masqueraded as Maoists and anarchists while conducting ‘false flag’ terrorist operations, particularly a bombing campaign, in collaboration with US intelligence in order to manipulate public opinion and limit the range of the democratic discourse. In the early and mid-1980s, attacks similar to those that had taken place in Italy were also conducted in Belgium, including the random shooting of 28 people in supermarkets outside Brussels in 1983–85. A ‘left-wing’ terrorist group known as the Cellules Communistes Combattantes (CCC) was accused of having carried out these operations. Later, however, it transpired that the attacks had been conducted by fascist and Nazi groups, with US support. Like Aginter Press before it, the neo-Nazi organisation Westland New Post operating in Belgium contained both an intelligence division and a special operations division. It was run by Belgian agent Paul Latinus in collaboration with US intelligence and the WACL. Around the same time, US Army special forces began a programme of targeting Western/NATO installations in Belgium, while disguising themselves as terrorists. Indeed, the CCC may have simply been a cover for this form of ‘deep state’ extra-legal activity. Notably, the CCC was supported by prominent Belgian neo-fascist Jean-Francois Thiriart, who had founded a ‘Belgium OAS’, had close ties to the French OAS and had initiated the European-wide fascist organisation Jeune Europe, a forerunner of Aginter Press.

THE SOVEREIGN DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE

Drawing on these two examples of Italy and Belgium, we see that Western European states have seemingly been characterised by the existence of a regular ‘democratic state’, on the one hand, and a ‘security state’—what Vinciguerra simply calls the ‘state’, a US-linked security structure—on the other. This is what the Italian Parliamentary Commission on terrorism and massacres from 1995 meant by ‘il Doppio Stato’ or ‘the dual state’.

As mentioned, de Felice argues that this dual state is born from the incapacity of the regular democratic state to reconcile domestic politics with foreign policies, primarily its responsibility to the USA and NATO. As Vinciguerra argues, the extra-legal violence did not originate from the ‘terrorist groups’, ‘but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations within the Atlantic Alliance... 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.’ Within such a context, NATO is not just something in between an alliance of sovereign nation-states and a super-state in its own right, but also something of both—with the US ‘supranational political-military authority’ unifying the policies of the individual states. For example, in Italy in the 1960s and the 1970s, two chiefs of military intelligence (SIFAR and later SID)—General Giovanni de Lorenzo and General Vito Miceli—led military ‘coup attempts’ while they were liaison officers to the USA. Both of these men had been appointed on the recommendation of the US ambassador and both later became members of parliament for the Italian fascist party, MSI. When Licio Gelli—a former fascist intelligence officer, US liaison officer and head of the Italian quasi-masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2) —was interviewed about the Strategy of Tension, he suggested that ‘dictatorship and democracy always march side by side, because democracy is being undermined by dictatorship and dictatorship is being undermined by democracy,’ adding that we have not yet ‘reached an equilibrium.’ For Gelli, the activity of the Italian ‘security state’ during the Cold War was close to what the Turkish military elite would describe as the ‘deep state’ correcting the course of democracy—or the political ‘fine tuning’ of democracy.

In Italy, a number of ‘coup attempts’ took place (in 1964, 1970, 1973 and 1974), though all were called off at critical moments once the government had been reminded of the existence of the ‘state’—or rather the ‘security state’: the real ‘sovereign’. In these cases, various liaison officers, generals and fascist leaders exerted an effective veto on government policy by informing the prime minister that a coup had been set in progress, warning that he would have to suffer the consequences if he did not back down on his policy. In 1964, for example, a governmental shift to the left was interrupted by General de Lorenzo’s ‘coup’ in collaboration with Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the ‘Black Prince’ who had headed the Italian naval special forces Decima MAS during the Second World War. To achieve his aims, De Lorenzo set in motion the plan ‘Piano Solo’, which had originally been devised for counter-insurgency purposes (just as Colonel George Papadopulous, the Greek liaison officer to the USA, would similarly activate Greece’s ‘Prometheus’ plan three years later, launching a military coup in Greece to prevent NATO critic Georgios Papandreou from returning as Prime Minister.) In December 1970, another ‘coup’ was launched in Italy. Prince Borghese set in motion the counter-insurgency plan ‘Triangolo’. This time, Borghese’s people—led by Stefano delle Chiaie—had already taken over the Ministry of Interior when the coup was aborted. Borghese’s collaborator, Gaetano Lunetta, later insisted that ‘the truth is that it was a coup and that it succeeded.’ He said that the political result that those who organized the attack sought to attain was achieved: the deep-freezing of the [centre-left] policies of Aldo Moro, the removal of the PCI from the government arena, [and] the assurance of [Italy’s] total pro-Atlantic and pro-American loyalty.

After this followed the Rosa dei Venti ‘coup’ led by General Magi Braschi in 1973 and the so-called ‘White coup’ led by Count Edgardo Sogno in 1974. General Maletti described in court his conversation with Sogno. After Sogno had presented his case to the CIA Station Chief in Rome in July 1974, Maletti had asked Sogno if the Americans would support the coup. Sogno responded, ‘the United States would have supported any initiative tending to keep the communists out of government’. In the court case following the Rosa dei Venti ‘coup’, the coup plotters were accused of ‘having promoted, set up and organized a secret association made up of civilians and military personnel, with the purpose of provoking an armed insurrection and, as a consequence, an illegal alteration of the Constitution and of the form of government through the intervention of the armed forces.’ In October 1974, Chief of Italian Military Intelligence, General Vito Miceli was arrested accused of political conspiracy. However, in court, he argued that the secret organisation accused of overthrowing the government had been formed under a secret agreement with the US and within the framework of NATO. In the later court case in 2001, General Maletti said that Count Sogno had close ties with the CIA.

All the ‘coups’ were carried out in close collaboration with the Americans, and notably, two of the major actors in this game—Federico Umberto D’Amato, chief of the secret service UAR (the Interior Ministry Office of Special Affairs), and Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, leader of the National Front and former president of the fascist party MSI—had been close collaborators with the US postwar liaison to Italy, CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, Angleton maintained his contacts with Borghese and D’Amato up to the 1970s; and, as CIA Station Chief in Rome in the mid-1960s, William Harvey was Angleton’s close collaborator.

THE SOVEREIGN AND THE GROSSRAUM

The organisation that General Miceli had spoken about in 1974 was Gladio—the Italian ‘Stay-Behind’ army—that would not only ‘stay behind’ in case of a Soviet occupation, but that would also conduct clandestine domestic operations to counter domestic communist forces. The Stay-Behinds were coordinated in Brussels by the very secret Allied Clandestine Committee (also known as the Allied Coordination Committee, ACC) and by the equally secret Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC). In addition, there was a parallel structure. Former chief of the Italian Stay-Behinds, General Gerardo Serravalle (1971–1974), said that when he heard how Vinciguerra, in court, had presented the Stay-Behinds ‘with such a precision and in such detailed terms’ he concluded that Vinciguerra was an insider and that it must have been a parallel structure (later confirmed as the NDS) that he himself was not informed about. Serravalle stated that there was a part of the Stay-Behinds that he did not control and that he was forced by the Americans to carry out this domestic campaign to blame the Left in order to receive material support from the CIA.

Mr Stone [the CIA] stated, quite clearly, that the financial support of the CIA was wholly dependent on our willingness to put into action, to program and plan, these other—shall we call them internal measures [terrorist operations blaming the Communists: author]. I said this was not in the orders for the Stay-Behinds. Nor had it been foreseen by Gladio when the original discussion took place. But this was CIA policy Serravalle said.

In addition to these US-led formal structures, there existed an informal ‘US network’. The US created and maintained special intelligence ties and clandestine ties with individuals not only in Italy and Belgium but all over Europe. These local ‘US elites’ were more tuned to US interests and were often able to influence local state policies, and even to veto or manipulate policies and individuals in conflict with US interests. Such elites formed part of what we have called the ‘security state’—the ‘sovereign’—which included informal groups and their network of extra-legal executives.

One such ‘entirely informal group’ was the Cercle Pinay, which brought together Atlanticist ultra-right-wing political leaders, industrialists and intelligence chiefs. It was named after former French Prime Minister Antonio Pinay but was, in practical terms, run by its secretary, the French fascist intelligence operative Jean Violet. Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti has named other participants: US State Secretary Henry Kissinger, US Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller (host), David Rockefeller from Chase Manhattan Bank, German CSU leader Franz Josef Strauss, Andreotti himself and Pinay’s ‘good friend’, the Italian industrialist Carlo Pesenti. According to David Rockefeller, it was Carlo Pesenti who took him aside and invited him to join the ‘Cercle’. Rockefeller referred to the Cercle as the ‘Pesenti Group’. Pesenti was, according to Christi, the main financial backer of the Aginter Press ‘correspondent’ Stefano delle Chiaie and his Avanguardia Nazionale. Jean Violet had also direct links to Aginter Press. This suggests that the Cercle Pinay acted as some kind of parapolitical ‘board’ to the extra-legal executives of Aginter Press.

Thus, the Schmittian ‘sovereign’ cannot be identified with NATO as a formal organisation, but is rather the parallel hierarchy of informal Western structures with their military/intelligence centre in the US and in some European capitals. And it was this informal security structure, or ‘security state’, that intervened if necessary to guarantee US or ‘Western’ interests. Indeed, the central actors of this Western security network appear as the real ‘sovereign’, in the Schmittian sense, that decides on the exception in the Euro-Atlantic area, or what Schmitt would call Grossraum.
This idea of a Grossraum led by a central power, or Reich, was first introduced by Schmitt in the late 1930s, and further developed in his 1950 work Nomos of the Earth. Distinct from Karl Haushofer’s Lebensraum, Schmitt’s vision of a German Grossraum covered a bloc of independent states under German leadership and protection. Its realisation would have created an economic sphere of interest for Germany, just as the British colonies had come to represent a similar sphere for England. Schmitt based his idea on the US Monroe Doctrine, which denied European and other powers the right to interfere in North and South American affairs. Schmitt sought to apply this approach to Central Europe, a bloc of independent states under German leadership and protection, orchestrated around German political ideas. However, after Germany’s defeat in the Second World War and the Red Army’s advances in the East, it was the US that emerged as Europe’s protecting power.

Western leaders established a Euro-Atlantic ‘bloc of states’, a Grossraum that we call ‘NATO’, orchestrated around Western political ideas and protected by its Reich, the USA. Cold War NATO was a ‘bloc of states’ intended to exclude Soviet intervention. It was led by its central power and unified by its hegemonic political ideas: democracy, market liberalism, national pluralism, the rule of law and collective defence. However, the glue that held Cold War NATO together was not just ideas. Equally important were the informal super-national structures—or rather a hierarchy of such structures under the sovereign’s hegemony. Under this view, NATO—or the Western security community—may have been a more unified entity than even Schmitt’s concept of Grossraum.

THE DUAL STATE AND THE DUAL SECURITY STRUCTURE

To guarantee the stability and defence of the NATO area, or Grossraum, the US developed a ‘dual security structure’ that included both defensive forces and offensive units that would regularly challenge the defensive force structures. In 2000, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger (1981–87) confirmed that during the Cold War the US had specifically tasked units to play the role of enemy forces. These would secretly attack Western defences worldwide in order to ‘regularly’ and ‘frequently’ test their capabilities and increase their state of readiness, so that counter-forces to potential Soviet capabilities could be developed prior to their emergence. Referring to covert US/UK submarine operations in Swedish waters in the 1980s, Weinberger stated that

it was necessary to test frequently the capabilities of all countries, not only in the Baltic [Sea]—which is very strategic of course—but in the Mediterranean and Asiatic waters and all the rest…. And it was not just done in the sea. It was done on air defences and land defences as well [see Belgium above: author]... and all this was done on a regular basis and on an agreed upon basis.

In collaboration with local security elites, the US ‘security state’ used special forces that tested and reinforced the defensive capabilities of US allies and friends worldwide. In the case of the submarine intrusions into Swedish waters in the 1980s, a couple of admirals trusted by the US were informed about the operations in advance, but the mass media, local military forces and even the host country government were led to believe that the operations were carried out by the ‘enemy’, the Soviet Union. In the 1970s (up to 1980), only 5 to 10 per cent of the Swedish population believed in a direct Soviet threat. In 1983, however, after a series of submarines turned up within densely populated Swedish archipelagos, 42 per cent of the population viewed the Soviet Union as a direct threat; and the percentage of people viewing the Soviet Union as unfriendly went from 27 per cent to 83 per cent over the same period. Thus, in collaboration with trusted individuals within Sweden, US forces seem to have been able to change the mindset of the population and the government almost overnight. Members of the Swedish ‘security state’, or ‘deep state’, acted in collaboration with their US counterparts to deceive the Swedish government and public. These PSYOPs—psychological or ‘perception management’ operations—were run outside the law.

In that sense, there is a correspondence between the dual state and the ‘dual security structure’ (offensive/defensive forces) of the Western powers. In Italy, for example, the same US officers (David Carrett and others) who ran US operations to ‘test the readiness’ of Italian coastal defences (Delfino Attivo and Delfino Sveglio) simultaneously organised the terrorist campaign aimed at raising the awareness of and ‘changing the mindset’ of the Italian population as a whole.
In a similar development, US Rear-Admiral James Lyons, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations, in 1984 set up a ‘terrorist unit’—known as the Red Cell—recruited from his own naval special forces (SEAL Team Six), to attack naval bases worldwide. This unit set off bombs, wounded US personnel and took hundreds of hostages as part of its operations. According to Lyons, it was necessary for US forces to get ‘physical’ experience of the terrorist threat in order to ‘change the mindset’ and ‘raise the awareness’ of the troops to prevent a possibly even more devastating attack.

Once again, the US was developing a security system that included both sides of the coin. With the end of the Cold War and the decline of the Soviet threat, however, many Europeans believe this ‘dual structure’—with its specifically tasked terrorist units—may have evolved into an instrument for establishing not only internal Western stability but also US global hegemony. In such a world, war is no longer waged between the large armies of major powers, but by ‘special units’ to create ‘a special mental atmosphere… to keep the structure of the society intact,’ to quote George Orwell’s 1984.

CONCLUSIONS

The above examples show that the ‘sovereign’—the ‘security state’ or what some would call the ‘deep state’—is able not to just limit the range of the democratic discourse but also to manipulate or ‘fine tune’ such discourse.

• First, the secret armies of the ‘sovereign’ (the Stay-Behinds and the ‘parallel Stay-Behinds’ or NDS) were recruited from the defeated fascist forces of Southern Europe in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. In Northern Europe, hundreds of Nazi SS officers were recruited for a similar purpose. Fascist leader Prince Junio Valerio Borghese was rescued and recruited by the later CIA liaison to Italy, James Jesus Angleton, at the very end of the war, and Angleton’s man, Federico Umberto D’Amato, was given the task of recruiting forces from the fascist Republic of Saló to the Ministry of Interior, the army and the secret armies in order to combat the Italian communists. The brutal ‘black’ terrorist, Stefano delle Chiaie, collaborated with both Borghese and D’Amato. These secret fascist and Nazi armies were recruited and developed as part of a ‘historical compromise’ between the winning Anglo-Saxon democrats and the losing autocrats of the Axis powers. But, more importantly, the ‘sovereign’, as it developed after the Second World War, turned these secret armies into a sophisticated military arm for PSYOPs to limit the range of democratic discourse and to ‘fine tune’, calibrate and manipulate that discourse.

• Second, by letting fascist forces carry out the preliminary stages of military coups, the ‘sovereign’ was able to force governments to resign or accept a change of policy on a number of occasions. Once a change of policy had been accepted, as during all the Italian ‘coup attempts’ in the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘sovereign’ then aborted the military coup and the use of extra-legal measures was no longer considered necessary. The Borghese–delle Chiaie ‘coup’ of December 1970, for example, was allegedly aborted after interventions by General Vito Miceli—or, according to Remo Orlandini, a close collaborator with Borghese, by US President Richard Nixon himself. In each case, the Italian government was presented with a fait accompli, giving the ‘sovereign’ a de facto veto over policy. The elected government, the ‘democratic state’, was forced either to yield to the ‘sovereign’, the ‘security state’, or to confront it by mobilising popular support and legitimacy—something the ‘security state’ is only able to do through the introduction of its ‘game’ of fear and protection. In the final analysis, with the exception of Aldo Moro, Italian prime ministers always chose to back down.

• Third, the ‘sovereign’ may decide to carry through a military coup in order to take over government responsibility, as in Greece in 1967. To a certain extent, the same CIA network (including the CIA station chief and the leader of the Italian Ordine Nuovo) was involved both in Italy and in the 1967 coup in Greece. In the Greek case, the ‘sovereign’ was able to veto the anti-NATO policy of Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou. However, it later proved to be more difficult to return to democratic politics, and over time US officials grew less happy with the Greek generals. For the ‘sovereign’, fascist or military rule was never a goal in itself. The ‘coup’ was rather an instrument to re-establish order in accordance with the Machiavellian formula of fear and protection: first, let a ‘cruel and efficient governor’ eliminate all opposition; then, publicly eliminate the same governor to regain legitimacy. In comparison with Greece, the return to regular politics was always more smooth in the Turkey, where the army had widespread legitimacy and military coups have been more or less institutionalised. However, in most of Europe, the overt coup d’état appears to have been too clumsy an instrument for controlling domestic politics.

• Fourth, the ‘sovereign’ may raise the ‘security temperature’ through the use of ‘indiscriminate terrorism’—dramatising politics, as happened during the bombing campaign in Italy. Fear of bomb attacks has enormous psychological impact, compelling people to turn to the state for protection and to blame the perceived enemy. In the event of such attacks, mass media will often respond hysterically, blaming whomever the authorities say is responsible. Such an instrument is thus ideal for calibrating government policy, in other words as a means to ‘fine tune’ democratic politics and to ‘securitise’ what used to be open to public debate, bringing the democratic political sphere more into line with the political vision of the ‘security state’. Through the use of a brutal bombing campaign, it is possible to create events that the mass media will interpret as an ‘enemy attack’, that will enable the ‘sovereign’ to externalise conflicts to provide internal stability. The Strategy of Tension, as it was developed in Italy, was used to discredit critics and to ‘correct’ the political line of the democratic state. Most important was the exercise of control over domestic Italian politics in a way that could not be achieved through the use of legal means.

• Fifth, if necessary, the ‘sovereign’ may turn to ‘selective terrorism’ to take out a political leader, either as a way of vetoing the policies of that leader or to blame anti-US forces for such ‘terrorist’ actions. In the case of Aldo Moro’s murder in 1978, both of these goals were achieved. Moro’s wife accused the Americans of responsibility for her husband’s death, claiming that they had previously threatened to kill him, and Moro himself was given a private funeral. Moro’s murder enabled the ‘sovereign’ to veto his ‘historical compromise’, and at the same time to blame left-wingers—the so-called Red Brigades—for the operation. Both General Maletti and secret service chief D’Amato have confirmed that the Red Brigades had been penetrated at the top. Indeed, Maletti has even confirmed that the top echelon of the Red Brigades was run by Western intelligence. Until 1974, the ‘sovereign’ could rely on the assassination squads of Aginter Press, but when it began using the Red Brigades it needed special forces support. The killing of Aldo Moro was a special forces operation, involving the use of ammunition from special forces supplies.

• Sixth, the ‘sovereign’ may use specifically tasked units (army or navy special forces) to attack its own forces or allied or friendly forces throughout the Western world in order to increase readiness and raise public awareness of a common threat. Such dramatic operations are conducted as realistic exercises (‘train as you fight’), but in the mass media they are presented as enemy attacks or intrusions, which thus shape and influence the mindset of the general public and local military forces and even the policies of the host country government. Such attacks create fear and demands for protection; they externalise conflicts to provide internal stability; and they may force governments to back away from particular policies. The ‘enemy attacks’, as they are reported in the mass media, are turned into PSYOPs that alter world opinion and influence decisions in international forums such as the UN. Such a strategy gives the ‘sovereign’ an ideal instrument for calibrating the ruling mass media discourse as well as government policy in various countries.

• Seventh, the ‘sovereign’ spans the entire Western world. By this is meant that the dual state divide between the ‘democratic state’ and the ‘security state’ seemingly corresponds to a divide between democratic nation-states and a protective central power—or, to use Carl Schmitt’s terminology, between the states of the Western Grossraum and the US Reich. In every state, US intelligence has recruited loyal officers and civil servants that have acted as direct liaisons to US authorities—such as General de Lorenzo and General Miceli in Italy. Licio Gelli set up P2 as a parallel ‘security state’ or shadow government, and in practice it was a high-level US–Italian network ‘authorised’ by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig. A similar picture is emerging in other European states. These local ‘US elites’ played the game of fear and protection to set the agenda, to influence local governments and even to veto policies or individuals in conflict with US interests. This presence of the Reich in various host countries gives the hegemonic power, in this case the US, an even more dominating role than Schmitt had anticipated. The central actors of the Western informal security network appear as the real ‘sovereign’, in a Schmittian sense, that decides on the exception in the NATO area or Grossraum.

• Eighth, in the world of democracies, the ‘sovereign’—the ‘deep state’—has always to implement its game of fear and protection covertly and its very existence is always denied in public. Thus, the problem with liberalism in political science and legal theory is not its ambition to defend the public sphere, political freedoms and human rights, but rather its claim that these freedoms and rights define the Western political system. Liberal political science has been turned into an ideology of the ‘sovereign’, because undisputable evidence for the ‘sovereign’—what Vinciguerra simply calls the ‘state’—is brushed away as pure fantasy or ‘conspiracy’. Schmitt has been described as an apologist for the autocratic emergency state in Germany, but when we look closer he rather emerges as a scholar unveiling the dual state—the hidden autocratic security force parallel to the democratic state. Some might argue that this dual state is defensible, others not, but we should be aware that the liberal denial of its very existence is based on an illusion.