Tests Show 2 (Military-Type Automatic) Weapons Used Against Greek Police Bus

[tekisui]

Source: AP

ATHENS, Greece: Ballistics tests show two military-type automatic rifles were used in an attack on a riot-police bus in Athens, authorities said Wednesday.

While street violence sparked by the police shooting of a teenager has eased, the discovery raised fears that far-left extremist groups may be taking advantage of the unrest to renew attacks on the police.

None of the 19 officers on board was hurt in Tuesday's pre-dawn attack, in which at least seven shots were fired at the bus as it passed a university campus.

Protests and attacks on the police have continued since the fatal Dec. 6 shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, which sparked the worst rioting Greece has seen in decades.

Despite a lull in violence over the past few days, protesters have vowed to keep on the streets.

"Christmas is off this year, the Virgin had an abortion," read a slogan painted on a central Athens wall.

On Christmas Eve Wednesday, about 700 mainly young protesters marched peacefully through Athens' main shopping district to demand the release of those arrested during the rioting. Demonstrators sang carols with protest lyrics and scattered fliers, as dozens of riot police looked on.

Chanting "Priests, thieves, pedophiles," protesters sprayed slogans on metal boardings outside Athens Cathedral, painted anarchist logos on the 19th century building's marble columns and tore down a Greek flag.

more: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/12/24/europe/EU-Greece-Police-Shooting.php

[Hydra]

1. Cuz you know, we far lefties are SO SCARY!!!

We ain't got nothing on the Right or the police...but we're the bogeymen. Strange world.

[tekisui]

2. Strange indeed.

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Another invocation of the "Strategy of Tension"?

The “strategy of tension” denotes a highly secretive series of interconnected covert operations conducted jointly by the CIA and MI6 largely in Western Europe during the this period. Well-documented by several respected historians, confirmed by official inquiries, and corroborated by former intelligence officials, the “strategy of tension” is one of those unsavoury moments in contemporary history that we don’t learn about in school, or even university.

My favourite book on the subject, and the most authoritative in my view, is Dr. Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (2004). Published in the UK as part of the “Contemporary Security Studies” series of London-based academic press Routledge, Ganser’s study is the first major historical work to bring the “strategy of tension” into the mainstream of scholarship.

During the Cold War, indeed through to the late 1980s, the United States, United Kingdom, and Western European governments and secret services, participated in a sophisticated NATO-backed operation to engineer terrorist attacks inside Western Europe, to be blamed on the Soviet Union. The objective was to galvanize public opinion against leftwing policies and parties, and ultimately to mobilize popular support for purportedly anti-Soviet policies at home and abroad – most of which were really designed to legitimize brutal military interventions against nationalist independence movements in the “Third World”.

SNIP

The existence of this secret operation exploded into public controversy when in August 1990 upon the admissions in parliament by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, the existence of ‘Gladio’ was exposed as a secret sub-section of Italian military-intelligence services, responsible for domestic bombings blamed on Italian Communists. Ganser documents in intricate detail how a subversive network created by elements of western intelligence services – particularly that of the US and UK - orchestrated devastating waves of terrorist attacks blamed on the Soviet Union, not only in Italy, but also in Spain, Germany, France, Turkey, Greece, i.e. throughout western Europe. Despite a number of European parliamentary inquiries; an European Union resolution on the Gladio phenomenon; NATO’s close-doors admissions to European ambassadors; confirmations of the international operation from senior CIA officials; and other damning documentary evidence; NATO, the CIA and MI6 have together consistently declined to release their secret files on the matter.

http://nafeez.blogspot.com/2007/05/strategy-of-tension.html

[tekisui]

4. Very interesting.

Thanks.