Just count the promises he has broken. They could fill a small telephone directory.
4,268
How many betrayals can a man pack in a single resume?
Making the distinction between GMO and non-GMO was certainly an indication that Obama, unlike the FDA and USDA, saw there was an important line to draw in the sand. Beyond that, Obama was promising a new era of transparency in government. He was adamant in promising that, if elected, his administration wouldn’t do business in “the old way.” He would be “responsive to people’s needs.”
Then came the reality.
After the election, and during Obama’s term as president, people who had been working to label GMO food and warn the public of its huge dangers were shocked to the core. They saw Obama had been pulling a bait and switch. The new president filled key posts with Monsanto people, in federal agencies that wield tremendous force in food issues, the USDA and the FDA:
At the USDA, as the director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Roger Beachy, former director of the Monsanto Danforth Center. As deputy commissioner of the FDA, the new food-safety-issues czar, the infamous Michael Taylor, former vice-president for public policy for Monsanto. Taylor had been instrumental in getting approval for Monsanto’s genetically engineered bovine growth hormone.
As commissioner of the USDA, Iowa governor, Tom Vilsack. Vilsack had set up a national group, the Governors’ Biotechnology Partnership, and had been given a Governor of the Year Award by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, whose members include Monsanto.
As the new Agriculture Trade Representative, who would push GMOs for export, Islam Siddiqui, a former Monsanto lobbyist.
As the new counsel for the USDA, Ramona Romero, who had been corporate counsel for another biotech giant, DuPont.
As the new head of the USAID, Rajiv Shah, who had preciously worked in key positions for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of GMO agriculture research.
We should also remember that Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, once worked for the Rose law firm. That firm was counsel to Monsanto.
Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the US Supreme Court. Kagan, as federal solicitor general, had previously argued for Monsanto in the Monsanto v. Geertson seed case before the Supreme Court.
The deck was stacked. Obama hadn’t simply made honest mistakes. Obama hadn’t just failed to exercise proper oversight in selecting appointees. He wasn’t just experiencing a failure of short-term memory. He was staking out territory on behalf of Monsanto and other GMO corporate giants. And now let us look at what key Obama appointees have wrought for their true bosses. Let’s see what GMO crops have walked through the open door of the Obama presidency.
Monsanto GMO alfalfa.
Monsanto GMO sugar beets.
Monsanto GMO Bt soybean.
Coming soon: Monsanto’s GMO sweet corn.
Syngenta GMO corn for ethanol.
Syngenta GMO stacked corn.
Pioneer GMO soybean.
Syngenta GMO Bt cotton.
Bayer GMO cotton.
ATryn, an anti-clotting agent from the milk of transgenic goats.
A GMO papaya strain.
And perhaps, soon, genetically engineered salmon and apples. This is an extraordinary parade. It, in fact, makes Barack Obama the most GMO-dedicated politician in America. You don’t attain that position through errors or oversights. Obama was, all along, a stealth operative on behalf of Monsanto, biotech, GMOs, and corporate control of the future of agriculture.
From this perspective, Michelle Obama’s campaign for home gardens and clean nutritious foodsuddenly looks like a diversion, a cover story floated to obscure what her husband has actually been doing. Nor does it seem coincidental that two of the Obama’s biggest supporters, Bill Gates and George Soros, purchased 900,000 and 500,000 shares of Monsanto, respectively, in 2010. Because this is an election season, people will say, “But what about Romney? Is he any better?” I see no indication that he is. The point, however, is that we are talking about a sitting president here, a president who presented himself, and was believed by many to be, an extraordinary departure from politics as usual.
Not only was that a wrong assessment, Obama was lying all along. He was, and he still is, Monsanto’s man in Washington. To those people who fight for GMO labeling, and against the decimation of the food supply and the destruction of human health, but still believe Obama is a beacon in bleak times: Wake up.
About the author: The author of an explosive new collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. www.nomorefakenews.com
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Fanfare for the Workingman’s Man
•••
A tribute to Joe Bageant we could not miss
Joe at the keys: We still miss you, old man.
By Mark [Filed originally March 29th, 2011]
Joe Bageant passed away a couple of days ago at age 64. Most likely you are saying “Joe who?” For those of us who haunt his site or have read his books, life without more of Joe’s writing is a huge blow. Just one reading of his seminal work, Deer Hunting with Jesus where he explores the hassled life of the working class of Winchester, Virginia convinced me that he was in the top dozen best authors I have ever read. If you read Deer Hunting with Jesus, you will find that the book will haunt you. Never again, if you come from a family of some privilege (and Joe would include middle class people like me as privileged), will you be able to tune out the working class around you.•
Before reading the book, I was more likely to tune out the guy who empties the trash in my office, the roofer, the clerk on the express lane at the superstore, or the guy haunting a booth at the gas station. Perhaps I turned away in part because I worked that life for a while and was glad to forget it. I spent my teenage and young adult years in suboptimal employment. The jobs I had back then paid enough to get by, if you lived with Mom and Dad, or failing that didn’t mind depending on public transportation and living in a room in a house with multiple roommates. None of these jobs paid enough to allow you to thrive. My workingman experience was designed to be brief. I wanted better things: a house in a nice neighborhood, a car, an office and enough money to indulge regularly in my passion for the arts.
It was unthinkable that I would be a workingman for life, but plenty of people live this sort of life who are constantly living on the edge. Joe chronicled them because he was one of them, and he knew intimately the world of the redneck. Something very weird though happened to Joe. He became part of a social experiment called The Great Society, served in the Navy during Vietnam, and was the first in his family to go to college thanks to government largesse. In college, Joe had a great awakening. In college he became exposed to a larger world and yet somehow he also remained a redneck to the core. He scraped together a living writing for military journals. Thirty years after he left Winchester, Virginia, Joe decided to move back. In his book, he chronicled the sad decline of the working class there. His writing is so good, so personal that you cannot help but step inside the souls of the working poor white people of Winchester. He wrote with such vividness, such empathy and so poignantly that the book was hard to put down even while it was at once both heartwarming and heart wrenching.
Joe knew what’s what better than just about any person I have ever read. His vision of society was largely nihilistic but fundamentally clear-eyed. After reading his essays it was impossible not to agree with him. Even if you could not agree with him, it was impossible not to be blown away by his prose. His discerning gaze saw everything and pierced through all pretenses. Joe was so totally grounded in real life. In style, his writing was much like Hunter S. Thompson, except Joe carried with him a keen sense of empathy and pathos. Joe didn’t like lots of people including, arguably, people like me cocooned in the safety of the middle class. He seemed beyond hate, but certainly not above disdain and loathing. Those of us in the middle class, but particularly the politicians, lawyers, and stockbrokers of the world he saw either explicitly or implicitly as pimps, who turned the backbreaking work of the working class into unearned wealth in the form of 401-Ks, sports cars and McMansions. He knew that the working class were largely unseen and when seen at all, judged with some disdain and contempt by their “betters”.
I enjoy writing, but I will never be as good a writer on a good day as Joe was on a bad day. Never will I be able to write sentences that grab you like two hands with a vice grip on your throat like these:
Below it all are the spreading pox-like blotches of economic and ecological ruins of dead North American towns and city cores, such as downtown Gary Indiana, Camden, Newark, Detroit — all those places we secretly accept as being hellish because, well, that’s just what happens when blacks take over, isn’t it? Has anyone seen downtown Detroit lately? Of course not. No one goes there any more. Miles of cracked pavement, weeds and abandoned buildings that look like de Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. Hell, for all practical purposes it is uninhabited, though a scattering of drug addicts, alcoholics and homeless insane people wander in the shadows of vacant rotting skyscrapers where water drips and vines crawl through the lobbies, including the Ford Motor Company’s stainless steel former headquarters. (See the works of Chilean-born photographer Camilo José Vergara.) It is the first glimpse of a very near future, right here and now for all to see.
Once you got a taste for Joe’s writing, it grabbed you and you just wanted more. So you haunted his website and you joined Feedblitz so you were quickly notified when he made a new post because you knew it would be good. Only, Joe had to go all mortal on us. Apparently, Joe smoked, some things legal, some allegedly not, and perhaps because he was a child of the 1960s he ingested things that would land him in jail today. Perhaps that is why he spent so much time in Mexico. His lungs were bad, probably a product of smoking, and his habits probably contributed to his premature encounter with the grave. Doubtless, Joe met his maker pragmatically. He might have even been glad to punch his exit ticket. Joe saw, as do I, that mankind is entering a sad, resource-competitive phase likely to bring out the worst in us instead of the best. If he had been able to do so, I am sure he would have had an amazing essay or two about the overreach by Republicans in states like Wisconsin as just more evidence of a nasty class war already well underway.
Sometimes in tons of rock you will find a diamond. Joe was one of those diamonds. He was a glorious accident whose writing touched me (and thousands of others lucky enough to discover him) to the core. If you haven’t read Joe, check out his website as it may not be around forever. And yes, you absolutely must read Deer Hunting with Jesus. Your humanity will stretch in the process and your eyes will open wider than they ever have before. You may find yourself like me, sadly wiser on the ways of the world and appreciative of the workingmen and women all around us who make civilization possible.
Originally: March 29th, 2011 at 08:25pm Posted by Mark | Sociology, The Arts |
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BOYCOTTING THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: “Lesser-evil-ism” and the ‘Ratchet Effect’
“Lesser-evil-ism” and the ‘Ratchet Effect’
Today’s onslaught of desperate rationalizations from paranoid faux progressives who find themselves reduced to NAME CALLING rants when their non-arguments fall flat seems perfect timing for this post.
II. The ratchet effect
The ratchet is a simple, ubiquitous, ancient bit of machinery. There’s one in your bicycle wheel (it allows you to coast without pedaling), there’s one in your watch (if you’re the old-fashioned type and have a mechanical watch) and there’s one in the jib sheet winches of your boat (if you’re a yachtsman; but then in that case you probably aren’t reading this book). What the ratchet does is permit rotation in one direction but not in the other. Here’s a diagram:
The American political system, since at least 1968, has been operating like a ratchet, and both parties — Republicans and Democrats — play crucial, mutually reinforcing roles in its operation.
The electoral ratchet permits movement only in the rightward direction. The Republican role is fairly clear; the Republicans apply the torque that rotates the thing rightward.
The Democrats’ role is a little less obvious. The Democrats are the pawl. They don’t resist the rightward movement — they let it happen — but whenever the rightward force slackens momentarily, for whatever reason, the Democrats click into place and keep the machine from rotating back to the left.
Here’s how it works. In every election year, the Democrats come and tell us that the country has moved to the right, and so the Democratic Party has to move right too in the name of realism and electability. Gotta keep these right-wing madmen out of the White House, no matter what it takes.
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PR Watch report: “Won’t Back Down” Film Pushes ALEC Parent Trigger Proposal
As usual, we ask: Do actors ever think before lending their talents to such deceitful trash? Does Maggie Gyllenhaal understand what forces she’s serving?
By Mary Bottari and Sara Jerving, PR Watch, whom we thank
40 major U.S. companies, including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Kraft, and General Motors, have severed ties with ALEC.
Similarly, the Heartland Institute recently suffered an exodus of corporate sponsors after it launched a billboard comparing those who believe in the science behind global warming to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.
Hollywood Fiction vs. the Facts on Parent Trigger
always present. Charter schools are privately managed, taxpayer-funded public schools which are granted greater autonomy from regulations applicable to other public schools, ostensibly in exchange for greater accountability for results, but they have been criticized for uneven and mediocre track records.
door-to-door convincing parents to sign a petition to trigger a transformation.
paid individuals to collect signatures to hand the school over to a charter school operator, but the courts threw out the petitions.
In Adelanto, parents first signed petitions, then had second thoughts. The school board rejected the petition after parents withdrew their support, resulting in a lawsuit. The courts ruled that parents could not rescind their signatures. The parents had advocated for turning the school into a charter school, a plan which was rejected by the school board. Instead, an advisory panel was created and headed by the superintendent. The legal battles are continuing.
ALEC Spreads Parent Trigger Nationwide
The first Parent Trigger law was enacted in 2010 in California and, with an assist from Heartland and ALEC, the idea is rapidly spreading.
The California law was based on a proposal from Ben Austin, a policy consultant for a small non-profit education organization called Green Dot Public Schools, which manages charter schools for the city of Los Angeles. Austin subsequently formed Parent Revolution, which promotes these laws across the country. But this is not your local PTA. Parent Revolution is backed by big money, including receiving funding from the conservative Walton Family Foundation (think Wal-Mart), which has spent over a billion to promote school privatization.
Charles Koch
While ALEC has a governing board of state legislators it also has a governing board of corporations, packed with tobacco firms, giant pharmaceutical firms, and energy companies like Exxon Mobil. The ultra-conservative, billionaire Koch Brothers, have had a representative on the board for years and Koch-controlled money has funded ALEC to the tune of at least $1 million, according to estimates calculated by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
chaired by the for-profit education firm Connections Academy, which specializes in K-12 online education. Others on the task force include tech companies, testing companies and higher-education diploma mills like Bridgepoint Education and Corinthian Education, both of which are under investigation by state Attorneys General for aggressive recruiting policies that leave too many students in debt with no degree.
bring the bill to ALEC which helped it spread to two dozen other states in short order.
more than 30 yearsof effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding network of school vouchers, an idea first advocated by economist Milton Friedman in the 1950s. ALEC bills also allow schools to loosen standards for teachers and administrators, exclude students with physical disabilities and special educational needs, eschew collective bargaining, and experiment with other pet causes like merit pay, single-sex education, school uniforms, and political and religious indoctrination of students.
But does it work? The support for Parent Trigger, according to University of Illinois Professor Christopher Lubienski, is based more on ideology than empirical data. Lubienski is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Organization.
study conducted at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution presents evidence that students in only 17 percent of charter school show greater improvement in math and reading than students in similar traditional public schools, whereas 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than the student would have realized had they remained in public schools. However, the conversion to charter schools has proven profitable to many U.S. firms such as ALEC member National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter school management organization operating in eight states, and K-12, Inc., which promotes “virtual” charter schools as well as “virtual” voucher schools. K-12, Inc. is under investigation in Florida for improperly certifying teachers and asking them to cover it up.
according to Diane Ravitch, an education historian and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration.
Philip Anschutz, Right-Wing Billionaire, Owns Production Company
Philip Anschutz
participates in the Koch brothers’ secretive political strategy summits and funds David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity group, which backed Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker‘s union busting proposal and is working to defeat Barack Obama and other Democratic candidates across the country.
Anschutz bankrolls ALEC and ALEC member groups. In 2010, The Anschutz Foundation, gave ALEC $10,000 and his Union Pacific firm was an ALEC sponsorthe following year. The Foundation funded three ALEC members who sat on the ALEC Education Task Force which approved the Parent Trigger Proposal: The Independence Institute, Center for Education Reform, and Pacific Research Institute.
Waiting for ‘Superman’.” This film was criticized by Diane Ravitch as propaganda and as “a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the ‘free market’ and privatization.”
Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film
Rupert Murdoch
describes as a “500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” News Corp’s senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.
Michelle Rhee, Former D.C. Chancellor of Schools, Pushes Parent Trigger
Michelle Rhee
USA Today investigation that suggested that test score gains during her term may have been the result of cheating on the part of school officials. The report found extremely high erasure rates that were statistically anomalous.
Parent Trigger. Derrell Bradford, a state director for StudentsFirst, spoke on “Enacting a Comprehensive K-12 Education Reform Agenda” at the 2011 ALEC annual meeting.
The movie ends when the hard work of turning around a struggling school begins. The Hoover Institution study discussed above shows that only 17 percent of charter schools do a better job educating students.
With no data backing the benefits of the Parent Trigger proposal, many doubt that throwing a school system into chaos is the best way to improve troubled schools. Chaos does however give the privatizers and the profiteers starring roles in the ongoing debate over the future of the American educational system.
The Center for Media and Democracy is a non-profit investigative reporting group whose work aids public awareness about the people, companies, and groups attempting to shape the media and our democracy. CMD launched its award winning ALEC Exposed project in July 2011. Our websites are ALECExposed.org, PR Watch.org, SourceWatch.org, BanksterUSA.org, and FoodRightsNetwork.org.
Let’s keep this award-winning site going!
Yes, audiences applaud us. But do you?If yes, then buy us a beer. The wingnuts are falling over each other to make donations…to their causes. We, on the other hand, take our left media—the only media that speak for us— for granted. Don’t join that parade, and give today. Every dollar counts.
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//
Gladio: How We Terrorized Ourselves (Archival)
Gladio: How We Terrorized Ourselves (Archival) “Not One Terrorist in a Hundred…a Thousand…is Real”
Gladio Killers – They Still Walk Among Us
Veterans Today September 12, 2012
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Wikipedia’s report on Operation Gladio is reproduced below. This is a threatened document, an important part of our history. Help preserve it.)
The original article was written several years ago. Since that time, Gladio units have reappeared in Norway with the Anders Breivik/Norwegian Police slaying of 77 and have become active across Europe under the guise of the anti-Islamic and ultra-nationalist banners. America used Libya, during part of the Cold War, as a base for Gladio operations. American special operations forces stationed there to be activated if Europe fell to a Soviet onslaught were said to be IRA terrorists undergoing training by Libyans. If one stops and thinks, the idea of a Libyan training the IRA in bomb making had to seem more than a bit ironic. How many Americans have heard of Operation Gladio? Many ask, how could simple Arabs or even Israel, put together an organization capable of 9/11? If, as 78% of Australians indicate in a recent Herald Sun poll, America planned 9/11 herself, how did a democracy lose its way? How did America’s intelligence and defense groups become terrorists? When did it happen and why? The answer isn’t simple, it started decades ago, when the world was at the edge of obliteration and two systems, or what we then believed were systems, fought for the hearts and minds of the world.
____________
Operation Gladio [BBC Timewatch, 1992] State-Sponsored Terrorism in Europe
Today, all that sounds childish. A mature look at the Cold War looks more like two rats fighting over a corpse. Then, however, some saw it as “light and dark,” clear as that. Many believed the Soviet Union would drive its tanks through Europe like a knife through hot butter.
To fight this “eventuality,” NATO built a terrorist organization of massive proportions. The remaining cells of Operation Gladio, one of the greatest disasters of military ignorance in history, are busy today. We call some of them “Al Qaeda.”
Operation Gladio is the heart of world terrorism, alive and well, and built by NATO, built by the United States and used against America and the world.Gladio, created to save us from communism, quickly became a terrorist organization itself, murdering political leaders, rigging elections, terror attacks to blame on one group or another. The “medicine” became the disease. It is now killing us.
______________________
WHERE THE DAMAGE HAS LEFT US, LESS FREE, MAYBE NOT FREE, NOT INDEPENDENT AT ALL
This week, in light of failing relations with Israel over unresolved “Bush era” issues, 9/11, Israel’s role in manipulating America into two illegal wars and the despicable propaganda campaign they have run against the United States in her own press, something unheard of happened. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met with GOP leaders, extracting a promise that they would agree to work with Israel against the interests of the United States.
Yes, we said “against.” America has no treaties with Israel, no Israeli troops support us but Israel has been caught, time after time, spying on the US, bribing public officials and military leaders and worse, working to keep America under attack.
They are either the worst friend imaginable or something else. Many are coming to realize that America has been occupied by Israel. When Netanyahu met with his Republicans it was because President Obama, much like Karzai in Afghanistan, is simply getting sick of them as Karzai is sick of the American occupation of Afghanistan. There is a reason that dual citizens control Homeland Security, the FBI, the State Department and Department of Defense. Oh, you didn’t know that most of the key officials of those organizations are Israeli citizens? The news didn’t tell you? Well, in an occupied country, the “occupier” controls the news.
______________________
Michael Chertoff
THOSE WHO CLAIM TO SAVE US TURN OUT TO BE THE THREAT ITSELF
These organizations are controlled so that any resistance will be crushed immediately. I am not one to talk about FEMA camps and black helicopters but Jesse Ventura seems to be right. Our most recent proof is the Yemen bomb scam. No bombs were found. There is no Al Qaeda in Yemen, in fact there is no Al Qaeda, no matter how much you hear the word, which means, of course, “toilet.” Former Homeland Security director, Chertoff, (Israeli) is raking in millions selling scanners which, other than being another humiliation, may well be dangerous. When is the last time you heard of a bomb being found by TSA (Transportation Security Administration) officers? The last time a bomb came into the US, the “terrorist” was personally seated on the plane by an airport security official working for an Israeli company. He was walked around inspections. Why search anyone at all under circumstances like that? The same company manages most of America’s airports too. Have we lost our minds here?
We know who the real terrorists are, they are the people we hire to run our security. Didn’t read that in the papers? Problem living in an occupied country?
__________________________
BRITAIN AND THE MURDER OF DAVID KELLY
Today, if you read the Daily Mail, the Thames Valley Constabulary, after several years, has decided to open a murder inquiry on the “suicide” of Dr. David Kelly, the expert who told Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. For years, “backchannel” chatter has been that Kelly’s murder was ordered at the highest levels of government, not just Britain but America as well. More importantly, Kelly was personally involved in the Israeli/South African nuclear program and its dismantlement.
He was also the signatory for the 3 nuclear weapons that disappeared and he knew Saddam didn’t have them. The real reason for the attack on Iraq in 2003 was nuclear weapons the “45 minute” nukes, the “ambulance” nukes, that we claimed Saddam had. Kelly knew better, he arranged for their shipment to Oman and knew British politicians were paid millions to “look the other way” when these bombs disappeared.
Dr. David Kelly
Kelly’s murder is one of the thousands of war crimes tied to the phony war on terror. Every tape released, featuring long dead Osama bin Laden is a war crime as are the very suspicious bombings in Pakistan, the very suspicious Mumbai attack and the 7/7 “incident” in Britain that the “organs of state security” are working so hard to cover up to this day. In fact, there is a long history of bombings, Madrid, further back, Berlin or those in Italy during the 80s. All are easily tied to intelligence agencies and, frankly, have been by newspapers, politicians. Here at home, it was more than CIA agent Valerie Plame who was attacked. A good friend and former UN Ambassador, a Middle East briefer for President’s Reagan and Bush/Bush, did the same thing as Kelly. He went to President Bush and revealed that the intelligence that was being presented was false. He wasn’t killed. Instead he was arrested, charged with dozens of fanciful counts of working for terrorist organizations.
This was a warning. If they would go after one of President Reagan’s closest advisors and friends, a strong pro-Zionist and neo-con, anyone could be “gotten rid of.” Anyone who thinks people weren’t “gotten rid of” isn’t paying attention.
_______________________
GLADIO, THE LIVING PROOF THERE IS NO AL QAEDA, NO WAR ON TERROR
“We have met the enemy, and they are us.”
In order to fight communism, NATO organized through its intelligence agencies, ‘stay behind’ terrorist capabilities in case Western Europe would fall to the communists. Hundreds of millions were spent to set up, in every country of Europe, terrorist organizations, bomb making factories in basements, underground organizations, terror cells. This was done under what was called Operation Gladio. These terror organizations were used, from time to time, to simulate threats. They kidnapped officials, blew up trains and cafe’s, they became a real terrorist threat. The newspapers don’t like reporting this but it is not only true but extremely well documented. As Wikipedia has now come under threat, the extensive section of GLADIO will be reproduced in this article. It should be saved.Nearly everything we claim the PLO and other organizations were responsible for, including and especially Al Qaeda, has been the work of the GLADIO “stay behind” networks which were never totally broken up after the Cold War. GLADIO is Al Qaeda. Everything that is claimed to be Osama bin Laden and the imaginary Taliban training camps, people who have trouble keeping camels alive, was financed by NATO as part of the Cold War and left to take on a life of itself, morphing into a terrorist capability that no one wants to give up, no matter what kind of threat it is capable of.
The long shadow of GLADIO now fuels an industry that has started two wars, controls the world’s opium supplies and has allowed the United States to occupy the Middle East as a “protectorate.” At the same time, however, the United States itself, though its love affair with treason, terrorism and spying, has, itself, become the real victim of the invisible networks it spent so many millions to build.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran. A 100% disabled vet. He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. Duff is Senior Editor at one of the most widely read Veterans Online publications Veterans Today
Editing: Jim W. Dean
___________________________
Operation Gladio
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Use this original page for the more complete presentation of these materials. What follows is an effort to preserve the thrust of these documents and implications thereof.)
Emblem of “Gladio”, Italian branch of the NATO “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations. The motto means “In silence I preserve freedom”.
Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), founded in 1948. After the creation of NATO in 1949, the CCWU was integrated into the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1951 and overseen by SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe), transferred to Belgium after France’s official withdrawal from NATO’s Military Committee in 1966 — which was not followed by the dissolution of the French stay-behind paramilitary movements. The role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in sponsoring Gladio and the extent of its activities during theCold War era, and its relationship to right-wingterrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the Years of Lead and other similar clandestine operations is the subject of ongoing debate and investigation. Italy, Switzerland and Belgium have had parliamentary inquiries into the matter.[3]
Origins The origin of Gladio can be traced to the so-called “secret anti-Communist NATO protocols”, which were allegedly protocols committing the secret services of NATO member states to work to prevent Communist parties from coming to power in Western Europe. According to the Italian researcher Mario Coglitore, the protocols required member states to guarantee alignment with the Western block“by any means”. According to a US journalist Arthur Rowse, a secret clause exists in the North Atlantic Treaty requiring candidate countries, before joining NATO, to establish clandestine citizen cadres standing ready to eliminate communist cells during any national emergency. These clandestine cadres were to be controlled by the county’s respective security services.[4]
General stay-behind structure Emblem of NATO’s “stay-behind” paramilitary organizations.
European Union (EU) drafted a resolution sharply criticizing the fact (…) Yet only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried out parliamentary investigations, while the administration of President George H. W. Bush refused to comment, being in the midst of preparations for war against Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf, and fearing potential damages to the military alliance. If Gladio was effectively “the best-kept, and most damaging, political-military secret since World War II”,[8] it must be underlined, however, that on several occasions, arms caches were discovered and stay-behind paramilitary organizations officially dissolved – only to be created again. But it was not until the 1990s that the full international scope of the program was disclosed to public knowledge. Giulio Andreotti, the main character of Italy’s post-World War II political life, was described by Aldo Moro to his captors as “too close to NATO”, Moro thus advising them to be wary. Indeed, before Andreotti’s 1990 acknowledgement of Gladio’s existence, he had “unequivocally” denied it in 1974, and then in 1978 to judges investigating the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing. And even in 1990, “Testimonies collected by the two men [judges Felice Casson and Carlo Mastelloni investigating the 1972 Peteano fascist car bomb] and by the Commission on Terrorism on Rome, and inquiries by the Guardian, indicate that Gladio was involved in activities which do not square with Andreotti’s account. Links between Gladio, Italian secret services bosses and the notorious P2 masonic lodge are manifold (…) In the year that Andreotti denied Gladio’s existence, the P2 treasurer, General Siro Rosetti, gave a generous account of ‘a secret security structure made up of civilians, parallel to the armed forces’ There are also overlaps between senior Gladio personnel and the committee of military men, Rosa dei Venti (Wind Rose), which tried to stage a coup in 1970.”[5]European Parliament resolution concerning Gladio
Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser, as of 2010, is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology inZurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, is a documented study of how Gladio oeprated. British journalist Philip Willan, who by 2010 writes for the UK Guardian and UK Observer, is the author of the book Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, describing how US intelligence services relationship with a masonic lodge used to prop up Christian Democrat governments , undermining the growing political influence of the Italian Communist Party. The 1990 European resolution condemned “the existence for 40 years of a clandestine parallel intelligence” as well as “armed operations organization in several Member States of the Community”, which “escaped alldemocratic controls and has been run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO.” Denouncing the “danger that such clandestine network may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States or may still do so,” especially before the fact that “in certain Member States military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime,” the Parliament demanded a “a full investigation into the nature, structure, aims and all other aspects of these clandestine organizations or any splinter groups, their use for illegal interference in the internal political affairs of the countries concerned, the problem of terrorism in Europe and the possible collusion of the secret services of Member States or third countries.” Furthermore, the resolution protested “vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network,” asking “the Member States to dismantle all clandestine military and paramilitary networks” and to “draw up a complete list of organizations active in this field, and at the same time to monitor their links with the respective state intelligence services and their links, if any, with terrorist action groups and/or other illegal practices.” Finally, the Parliament called “on its competent committee to consider holding a hearing in order to clarify the role and impact of the ‘Gladio’ organization and any similar bodies,” and instructed “its President to forward this resolution to the Commission, the Council, the Secretary-General of NATO, the governments of the Member States and the United States Government.” Allegations
Daniele Ganser. Mr. Ganser is currently a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. His book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, Gladio has been accused of trying to influence policies through the means of “false flag” operations: a 2000 Italian Parliamentary Commission report from the Olive Tree left-wing coalition concluded that the strategy of tension used by Gladio had been supported by the United States to “stop the PCI (Italian Communist Party), and to a certain degree also the PSI (Italian Socialist Party), from reaching executive power in the country”. Propaganda Due (also known as P2), a quasi-freemasonic organization, whose existence was discovered in 1981, was said closely linked to Gladio. P2 was outlawed and disbanded in 1981, in the wake of the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, which was linked to the Mafia and to the Vatican Bank. Its Grand Master, Licio Gelli, was involved in most of Italy’s scandals in the last three decades of the 20th century: Banco Ambrosiano’s crash; Tangentopoli, which gave rise to the Mani pulite(“Clean hands”) anticorruption operation in the 1990s; the kidnapping and the murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 – the head of the secret services at the time, accused of negligence, was a piduista (P2 member). Licio Gelli has often said he was a friend of Argentine President Juan Perón. In any case, some important figures of his circle were discovered to be piduista, such as José López Rega, founder of the infamous anticommunist organization Triple A and provisional president Raúl Alberto Lastiri. Some members of later Jorge Videla’s dictatorship were part of the P2 too, such as Admiral Emilio Massera and General Guillermo Suárez Mason. The Vatican Bank was also accused of funneling covert US funds for the Solidarnosc trade union movement in Poland and the Contras in Nicaragua.[9] Furthermore, Gladio has been linked to other events, such as Operation Condor[10] and the 1969 killing of anticolonialist/independentist Mozambican leader Eduardo Mondlane by Aginter Press, the Portuguese “stay-behind” secret army, headed by Yves Guérin-Sérac – the allegation on Mondlane’s death is disputed, with several sources stating that FRELIMO guerrilla leader Eduardo Mondlane was killed in a struggle for power within FRELIMO. In 1995, Attorney General Giovanni Salvi accused the Italian secret services of having manipulated proofs of the Chilean secret police’s (DINA) involvement in the 1975 terrorist attack on former Chilean Vice-President Bernardo Leighton in Rome. A similar mode of operation can also be recognized in various Cold War events, for example between the June 20, 1973 Ezeiza massacre in Buenos Aires (Argentina), the 1976 Montejurra massacre in Spain and the 1977 Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul (Turkey). After Giulio Andreotti’s revelations and the disestablishment of Gladio, the last meeting of the “Allied Clandestine Committee” (ACC), was held according to the Italian Prime minister on October 23 and 24, 1990. Despite this, various events have raised concerns about “stay-behind” armies still being in place. In 1996, the Belgian newspaper Le Soir revealed the existence of a racist plan operated by the military intelligence agencies. In 1999, Switzerland was suspected of again creating a clandestine paramilitary structure, allegedly to replace the former P26 and P27 (the Swiss branches of Gladio). Furthermore, in 2005, the Italian press revealed the existence of the Department of Anti-terrorism Strategic Studies (DSSA), accused of being “another Gladio”. Gladio’s strategy of tension and internal subversion operationsFurther information: Strategy of tension NATO’s “stay-behind” organizations were never called upon to resist a Soviet invasion, but their structures continued to exist after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Internal subversion and “false flag” operations were explicitly considered by the CIA and stay-behind paramilitaries. According to a November 13, 1990 Reuterscable,[11] “André Moyen – a former member of the Belgian military security service and of the [stay-behind] network – said Gladio was not just anti-Communist but was for fighting subversion in general. He added that his predecessor had given Gladio 142 million francs ($4.6 millions) to buy new radio equipment.”[12] Ganser alleges that on various occasions, stay-behind movements became linked to right-wing terrorism, crime and attempted coups d’état:[4] “Prudent Precaution or Source of Terror?” the international press pointedly asked when the secret stay-behind armies of NATO were discovered across Western Europe in late 1990. After more than ten years of research, the answer is now clear: both. The overview aboves shows that based on the experiences of World War II, all countries of Western Europe, with the support of NATO, the CIA, and MI6, had set up stay-behind armies as precaution against a potential Soviet invasion. While the safety networks and the integrity of the majority of the secret soldiers should not be criticized in hindsight after the collapse of the Soviet Union, very disturbing questions do arise with respect to reported links to terrorism. There exist large differences among the European countries, and each case must be analyzed individually in further detail. As of now, the evidence suggests the secret armies in the seven countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands, focused exclusively on their stay-behind function and were not linked to terrorism. However, links to terrorism have been either confirmed or claimed in the nine countries, Italy, Ireland, Turkey, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Sweden, demanding further investigation. According to Daniele Ganser, only Italy, Belgium and Switzerland carried on parliamentary investigations, while the prosecution of various “black terrorists” (terrorismo nero, neofascist terrorism) in Italy was difficult. A 1990 article from The Guardian featured the following quote from judge Libero Mancuso:[13] On the eve of the 1980 Bologna bombing anniversary, Liberato [sic] Mancuso, the Bologna judge who had led the investigation and secured the initial convictions [of the Bologna bombers] broke six months of silence: “It is now understood among those engaged in the matter of democratic rights that we are isolated, and the objects of a campaign of aggression. This is what has happened to the commission into the P2, and to the magistrates. The personal risks to us are small in comparison to this offensive of denigration, which attempts to discredit the quest for truth. In Italy there has functioned for some years now a sort of conditioning, a control of our national sovereignty by the P2 – which was literally the master of the secret services, the army and our most delicate organs of state.” Examples of such alleged terrorist acts include the strategy of tension in Italy, or the Oktoberfest bomb blast of 1980 in Munich.[citation needed] A Gladio official said that “depending on the cases, we would block or encourage far-left or far-right terrorism”.[14][15]
Gladio operations in NATO countries
First discovered in ItalyMain article: Gladio in Italy The Italian NATO stay-behind organization, dubbed “Gladio”, was set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani‘s (DC) supervision.[16] However, Gladio’s existence came to public knowledge when Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti revealed it to the Chamber of Deputies on October 24, 1990, although far-right terroristVincenzo Vinciguerra had already revealed its existence during his 1984 trial. According to media analystEdward S. Herman, “both the President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, had been involved in the Gladio organization and coverup…”[17][verification needed]Giulio Andreotti’s October 24, 1990 revelations Prime minister Giulio Andreotti (member of the Christian Democracy, DC) publicly recognized the existence of Gladio on October 24, 1990. Andreotti spoke of a “structure of information, response and safeguard”, with arms caches and reserve officers. He gave to the Commissione Stragi, the parliamentary commission led by senatorGiovanni Pellegrino in charge of investigations on bombings committed during the Years Of Lead in Italy, a list of 622 civilians who according to him were part of Gladio. Andreotti also assured that 127 weapons’ cache had been dismantled, and pretended that Gladio had not been involved in any of the bombings committed from the 1960s to the 1980s (further evidence implicated neofascists linked to Gladio, in particular concerning the 1969Piazza Fontana bombing, the 1972 Peteano attack by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, the 1980 Bologna massacre in which SISMI officers were condemned for investigation diversion, along with Licio Gelli, head of Propaganda Due masonic lodge, etc.). Andreotti declared that the Italian military services (predecessors of the SISMI) had joined in 1964 the Allied Clandestine Committee created in 1957 by the US, France, Belgium and Greece, and which was in charge of directing Gladio’s operations.[18] However, Gladio was actually set up under Minister of Defense (from 1953 to 1958) Paolo Taviani‘s supervision.[16] Beside, the list of Gladio members given by Andreotti was incomplete. It didn’t include, for example, Antonio Arconte, who described an organization very different from the one brushed by Giulio Andreotti: an organization closely tied to the SID secret service and the Atlantist strategy.[19][20] According to Andreotti, the stay-behind organisations set up in all of Europe did not come “under broad NATO supervision until 1959.”[21]2000 Parliamentary report: a “strategy of tension” In 2000, a Parliament Commission report from the “Gruppo Democratici di Sinistra l’Ulivo” concluded that thestrategy of tension had been supported by the United States to “stop the PCI, and to a certain degree also thePSI, from reaching executive power in the country“. A 2000 Senate report, stated that “Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.” According to The Guardian, “The report [claimed] that US intelligence agents were informed in advance about several rightwing terrorist bombings, including the December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan and the Piazza della Loggia bombing in Brescia five years later, but did nothing to alert the Italian authorities or to prevent the attacks from taking place. It also [alleged] that Pino Rauti [current leader of the MSI Fiamma-Tricolore party], a journalist and founder of the far-right Ordine Nuovo (new order) subversive organisation, received regular funding from a press officer at the US embassy in Rome. ‘So even before the ‘stabilising’ plans that Atlantic circles had prepared for Italy became operational through the bombings, one of the leading members of the subversive right was literally in the pay of the American embassy in Rome,’ the report says.”[22]General Maletti’s testimony concerning alleged CIA involvement General Gianadelio Maletti, commander of the counter-intelligence section of the Italian military intelligence service from 1971 to 1975, alleged in March 2001 during the eight trial for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombings that the CIA had foreknowledge of the event.[23] According to the Guardian, he said:[24] …his men had discovered that a rightwing terrorist cell in the Venice region had been supplied with military explosives from Germany. Those explosives may have been obtained with the help of members of the US intelligence community, an indication that the Americans had gone beyond the infiltration and monitoring of extremist groups to instigating acts of violence… General Maletti told the Italian court that “the CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism,” and continued on by declaring: “I believe this is what happened in other countries as well.” Gianadelio Maletti also said to the court: “Don’t forget that Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather unorthodox initiatives.“[citation needed] General Maletti himself in the first Piazza Fontana trial received a four year sentence for providing a false passport to one of the accused bombers, this sentence was overturned in 1985.[25] Maletti received, while in exile, a 15-years sentence in 2000 for his role in trying to cover up a 1973 bomb attack in Milan against the Interior minister, Mariano Rumor (DC – 4 killed and 45 injured), but was acquitted on appeals.[26] According to the court, General Maletti knew in advance of the plan of the attacker, Gianfranco Bertoli, allegedly an anarchist but in reality a right-wing activist and a “long-standing SID informant” according to The Guardian, but had deliberately failed to inform the interior minister of it.[24] Responding to charges made by Maletti in La Repubblica one year earlier, the CIA called the allegation that it was involved in the attacks in Italy “ludicrous.”[27]A quick chronology of Italy’s “strategy of tension”
According toAvanguardia Nazionale member Vincenzo Vinciguerra: “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the politic and military authorities to declare a state of emergency“[29]
According to The Guardian, “General Geraldo Serravalle, a former head of “Office R”, told the terrorism commission that at a crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper echelons “had the idea of attacking the communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil war.” Later, he put it more bluntly: “They were saying this: “Why wait for the invaders when we can make a preemptive attack now on the communists who would support the invader? The idea is now emerging of a Gladio web made up of semi-autonomous cadres which – although answerable to their secret service masters and ultimately to the NATO-CIA command – could initiate what they regarded as anti-communist operations by themselves, needing only sanction and funds from the existing ‘official’ Gladio column (…) General Nino Lugarese, head of SISMI from 1981-84 testified on the existence of a ‘Super Gladio’ of 800 men responsible for ‘internal intervention’ against domestic political targets.”[5]
May 31, 1972 Peteano massacre
Magistrate Felice Casson discovered that “the explosives used in the attack came from one of 139 secret weapons depots of a secret army organized under the code name Operation Gladio”.[17] Neofascist Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed in 1984 to judge Felice Casson of having carried out the Peteano terrorist attack, in which three policemen died, and for which the Red Brigades (BR) had been blamed before. Vinciguerra explained during his trial how he had been helped by Italian secret services to escape the police and to fly away to Francoist Spain. However, he was abandoned by NATO as soon as he started talking about Gladio, declaring for example during his 1984 trial: “with the massacre of Peteano and with all those that have followed, the knowledge should now be clear that there existed a real live structure, occult and hidden, with the capacity of giving a strategic direction to the outrages. [This structure] lies within the states itself. There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity, that is, to organise a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army… A super-organization which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on NATO’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces…” He then said to The Guardian, in 1990: “I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organised matrix… Avanguardia Nazionale, likeOrdine Nuovo(the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”[4][5]
François Vitrani, “L’Italie, un Etat de ‘souveraineté limitée’ ?”, in Le Monde diplomatique, December 1990. (French)
Angelo Paratico “Gli assassini del karma” Robin editore, Roma, 2003
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