Reply #84: Tell me where I'm supposed to put the stuff about Italian fascists [View All]

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_08_01.php#003235
Essentially, Berlusconi's spies deliberately fed the CIA false information to exaggerate Saddam's nuclear capability and ambitions.

Who wants to bet that this was a personal favor to either aWol or Cheny from Berlusconi.

<snip>
In early 2000, the ‘security consultant’ was approached by a former colleague from SISMI whom he'd known for some twenty five years. This current SISMI officer told him that he had a source in the Nigerien Embassy in Rome, that they (i.e. SISMI) had no more use for her, but that she could be a source of valuable information for him if he put her on a monthly retainer. They were washing their hands of her, he said. But she could be of use to him.

The ‘security consultant’ met with the woman in question and agreed to pay her 500 euros a month for various documents and materials which came into her hands in the course of her work for the Embassy. Most of the material in question had nothing to do with Iraq or WMD. It dealt primarily with immigration into Italy and Islamist activities in North and Central Africa --- topics of concern to at least one of the 'security consultant's' longstanding clients.

What wasn’t clear at the time, however, was that SISMI hadn’t washed their hands of this Niger Embassy employee at all. She remained a SISMI asset. In fact, the relationship which the SISMI officer had set up was intended to serve as a conduit through which SISMI could conceal its role in the dissemination of what proved to be disinformation.

This was how the forged documents came into the security consultant’s hands.
<snip>

blm

Bush and Berlusconi have always been close friends.
They are both essentially fascist in their belief that corporations ARE the world's superpowers and they just use religion and the theocrats as the footsoldiers to serve their fascist agenda.

They both have their minions in the intel agencies pushing out fascist serving disinformation.

Thankfully, the good guys in the intel community are putting up obstacles to the corporatists' march to fascism.

Minstrel Boy

And Michael Ledeen consulted for Italian military intelligence
I posted this in GD earlier,
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2128960&mesg_id=2129502&page=
but what the hell. I think this is important.

Would you be surprised to learn where arch neocon Michael Ledeen was in the late 1970s, and what he was doing? At the height of Italy's "strategy of tension" - a campaign of false-flag terrorism designed to discredit the Italian left, waged by the fascist CIA asset Licio Gelli and his P2 lodge - he was consulting for Italian military intelligence, and is said to have been an "honorary member" of the lodge. When secret membership roles were published in the early 1980s, Silvio Berlusconi's name was found on it, long before he entered politics.

So, with P2 member Berlusconi in office, and neocon Ledeen's ties to the Italian far right and Italian intelligence, maybe this story comes into focus.

"...terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence."
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8249

From Asia Times:

"Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections - including alleged ties to the P2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s - have long been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" advisor to the new secretary of state, Al Haig.

"Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world's key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html

"In 1980 he entered into a collaboration with Francesco Pazienza, an agent of the Italian secret service (SISMI) and a member of Rome's extreme right-wing Masonic Lodge, P2 (Propaganda Due), headed by the fascist Licio Gelli. In an Italian criminal court in 1985, Pazienza was judged guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and terrorists, among other offenses. Indeed, according to the findings of the court, Pazienza falsified information about the Bologna bombing in order to divert attention away from the real (right-wing) terrorists who had staged the attack."
(excerpt from Herman/O'Sullivan's The "Terrorism" Industry, 1989, quoted http://billmon.org/archives/000653.html ).

From Barbara Honegger's October Surprise, more on Ledeen and P2:

"When the Italian police raided (P2 Lodge founder) Gelli's home in March 1981, it was Michael Ledeen who, at the instigation of Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, offered to buy the list of 953 P2 members in an apparent attempt to keep it from becoming public. Henry Kissinger had also reportedly sent Ledeen to Italy to try to squash an investigation into his and Haig's involvement in the founding of P2.

"On the morning of August 2, 1980, a massive bomb since linked to Gelli...exploded in the waiting room of the central train station in Bologna, killing 81 people and injuring 200 others. General Santorito, the chief of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, who was also reportedly a member of P2, testified in the wake of the bombing that it had been planned by the British-Swiss-American Montecarlo Comite, P2's "sister" organization based in Monaco. When P2 had come under increasing scrutiny in 1979, grandmaster Licio Gelli had reportedly made his base of operations the Montecarlo Comite.... Not surprisingly, reported members of the Montecarlo Comite are Gelli, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Michael Ledeen."


party_line

Marshall wrote about Ledeen's daughter in December-
Who's Who In The Coalition Provisional Authority
Special Baghdad edition
By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Colin Soloway

12/04/03: (The Washington Monthly) Simone Ledeen is serving her country. She is the daughter of Michael Ledeen, the Iran-Contra luminary, AEI scholar, and all-around capo in the neocon mafia. She's 29, a freshly-minted M.B.A., with little to no experience in war-torn countries. But as an advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad, she is, in essence, helping shape one quarter of that nation's economy.

When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5338.htm

salin
Could he be the customer mentioned?
The ‘security consultant’ met with the woman in question and agreed to pay her 500 euros a month for various documents and materials which came into her hands in the course of her work for the Embassy. Most of the material in question had nothing to do with Iraq or WMD. It dealt primarily with immigration into Italy and Islamist activities in North and Central Africa --- topics of concern to at least one of the 'security consultant's' longstanding clients.

This seems to be one of the most significant items in the article.


blm
GREAT reminder, MB.
I'm gonna spread your post to other forums.

hedda_foil
Great post! Please note the similarity of Bologna & Madrid train bombings

And who was responsible for the Bologna bombing. Another confirmation of the initial reaction of many DUers at the time of the Madrid bombing (in light of Aznar's determination to blame the Basques) that the attack was a false flag operation designed to frighten the citizenry into re-electing Aznar. Remember, the polls showed a very close race, and the Aznar internals may just have shown him losing.

blm
Spread MB's post around.
No doubt LeDeen is in it up to his Dumbo ears.

salin
When was Berlusconi elected?

lottie244
The question is from where did the SISMI get the document?
I bet the Italian were not the originators.

party_line

Is your title correct?
Specific details in such an already complicated saga could end up being very important.

SISMA facilitated the circulation of the docs, but do you have additional information that the Italians actually forged them? The actual forgers and the original (pre-Italian) hands that pulled the strings are yet to be discovered, as far as I'm aware. Josh verifies that "the SISMI officer brought the Niger Embassy employee" the documents, but not that he/she or anyone in the SISMI actually created the forgeries.


ChocolateSaltyBalls
Excellent point..........
The most interesting thing to me about these documents is how badly they were forged (i.e. misspellings, signatures of people no longer associated with the government of Niger etc.), and how no-one on the U.S. side of the equation noticed the discrepancies before trumpeting them as 'proof' of Saddam's attempt to jump start his nuclear program.

Kagemusha

This is a pretty extreme form of "facilitation".
It strongly implies a deliberate effort to hide the false nature of the forged documents. Therefore, I don't personally care if they forged the stuff themselves or contracted to some common criminal... they are responsible for cooked intelligence that greatly pleased the Bush Administration and told it what it wanted to hear.

party_line

Would you care if the documents came to the Italians by way of
say...the CIA or the VP or Chalabi? I think Josh's story goes back further in the chain, so where they originated could be really pertinent.


geek tragedy
Oh, I agree
There's definitely more there. But, the deliberate deception of our intelligence services by a member of the "coalition of the willing" by itelf is huge news.



geek tragedy
An excellent point
but Marshall has hinted that the Italians created these docs. NOte this passage:

<snip>
n late 2001, the SISMI officer brought the Niger Embassy employee a packet of documents --- those later identified as forgeries --- and instructed her to slip them in with the other documents she was providing to the ‘security consultant’ on an on-going basis.<snip>

It's pretty clear they knew these docs were forgeries. Whether or not they actually made them is probably impossible to know--but there was a clear intent to deceive.


party_line
Yes, I snipped a piece of it myself
But there are many scenarios that could apply. SISMI could have been acting for or with any number of other entities in passing the docs through the channels they took. I suspect the documents had a different dad- of even more interest to American investigative reporters.

Wilson/Plame/Niger arguments turn on very precise data. What's pretty clear to you here (not unreasonably!), doesn't seem so clear to me.


allemand

The Italian Government kind of denies involvement, but
I can't make sense of the second part of that statement as quoted in La Repubblica:

"In relazione a notizie riportate da alcuni organi di stampa e informazione circa la vicenda Iraq-Niger, il governo ribadisce con fermezza quanto già più volte dichiarato in termini assai precisi e chiari: nessun documento, né direttamente né in forma mediata, è stato mai consegnato ad alcuno, né tantomeno, di conseguenza, sono state svolte attività o intese con chicchessia".

"Peraltro - prosegue la nota - ogni acquisizione informativa di organi nazionali riflette attività ed atti svolti ed acquisiti negli anni 1999-2000 e, al più, nella primissima parte del 2001. Le comunicazioni, i rapporti e le collaborazioni intervenute con organi collaterali esteri sono quelle formalmente rappresentate al Parlamento".

http://www.repubblica.it/2004/g/sezioni/esteri/iraq29/ura/ura.html

The first part states that no document has been handed over to anybody, neither directly nor indirectly, and, consequently, no activities were carried out nor understandings with anybody.

This might be a non-denial denial, because it remains unclear who didn't hand over documents, if it refers only to the government or also to the intelligence service.

The second part reads:
"Moreover/however - the note continues - every informative acquisition by national organs reflects activities and actions carried out and acquired in the years 1999-2000 and, in addition, in the first part of 2001. The communications, the relationships and the collaborations undertaken with collateral foreign organs are those formally represented to the Parliament".

What does this mean? And what is the relation to the first part?



Josh Marshall: Yellowcake documents were forged by Italian Government
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x721389

starroute
Ledeen as fascist -- somewhat tinfoil, but interesting
This is originally from a LaRouche source -- which, as always, means potentially interesting but take with a pinch (or even a handful) of salt. However, if true, it would shed a lot of light on the ideology behind what Ledeen is really up to:

http://www.cecaust.com.au/main.asp?id=culture/synarchism3.htm

Ledeen, the self-proclaimed "universal fascist," has long been under scrutiny by EIR researchers, as a man who has been in the midst of some of the dirtiest covert intelligence operations of the past 30 years. ... The first important influence on Ledeen's life was George Mosse, a German Jewish emigre, who had been on good terms with such Nazi leaders as Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goering. Mosse was so close that Goering offered to make his father an Aryan, and the family was permitted to leave Germany 15 minutes before the law was changed.

The Cambridge-educated Mosse, who would become Ledeen's teacher at the University of Wisconsin, taught Ledeen that despite its "perversion" by anti-Semitism, Fascism ought to be scientifically studied, because the Geist (soul) of Western countries had been suffocated and could only be revived through Fascism or Nazism. It is reported that while Ledeen was working on his Ph.D., he was blackballed for having joined—under Mosse's influence—a cell of the Israeli intelligence-linked movement associated with Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, whom Israeli leader David Ben Gurion referred to as "Vladimir Hitler."

<snip>

But an even more important mentor to Ledeen was Renzo de Felice, an advocate of the Jacobin Revolution in France which led to the emergence of the first modern Fascist, Napoleon Bonaparte. De Felice did not hide his Fascism, as he wrote in The Illuminati and Revolutionary Mysticism, 1789-1900: "There is something in common between my Jacobins and a certain kind of Fascism.... Fascism wanted to achieve the transformation of society and the individual ... a new phase in the history of civilization."

After researching in Italy from 1966 to 1967, where he met scions of the Venetian oligarchy who are "magicians" in cultural warfare, Ledeen wrote: Universal Fascism (1972); "Italian Fascism and Youth," Journal of Contemporary History, July 1969; "Fascist Social Policy," in The Use and Abuse of Social Science, ed, Irving Louis Horowitz; and, among others, Fascism, An Informal Introduction to Its Theory and Practice, by Renzo de Felice, which includes an interview with Ledeen.

party_line
He's a current contributing editor for National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/ledeen/ledeen200407261224.asp
Does he hold any official position now or does he just rub shoulders with power?

TacticalPeak
His daughter helped screw up Iraq. That's quite a crime family.
Who's Who In The Coalition Provisional Authority
Special Baghdad edition
By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Colin Soloway
12/04/03: (The Washington Monthly) Simone Ledeen is serving her country. She is the daughter of Michael Ledeen, the Iran-Contra luminary, AEI scholar, and all-around capo in the neocon mafia. She's 29, a freshly-minted M.B.A., with little to no experience in war-torn countries. But as an advisor for northern Iraq at the Ministry of Finance in Baghdad, she is, in essence, helping shape one quarter of that nation's economy.

When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority.
more
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5338.htm