911 - strategy of tension - Gladio - Tell

Gladio, Turkish Counter-Guerilla and Ergenekon, a devilish trio
KRISTINA KAMP İSTANBUL -- 01.02.2008

In August 1990 Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti openly admitted for the first time what had long been denied: the existence of a secret army inside the Italian Secret Service (SIFAR) codenamed “Gladio,” Latin for “double-edged sword.”

Moreover, Andreotti also claimed that a network of secret, unofficial armies controlled by NATO and the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been set up all across Europe. The British secret service, MI6, as Andreotti revealed, was also involved.

Up until today, a full investigation into these secret NATO armies, some of which also seem to have been linked to terrorism and crime, has not been carried out -- and Swiss historian and security expert Daniele Ganser says this is neglect with serious consequences. “Ergenekon could be an outcome of the old Turkish Counter-Guerilla,” he says. In an exclusive interview with Today’s Zaman, he explains the structure of these secret armies, what the “tension strategy” was during the Cold War and what it could be today.

“What we can definitely prove nowadays is the existence of these secret armies. And we have a good amount of knowledge on how they were structured,” Ganser says.

Facing an increase in the popularity and strength of communist and socialist parties in some countries, like Italy and France, worries emerged in Washington and London that these countries’ inner security could no longer be ensured. Secret, unofficial armies were then set up, Ganser says and adds: “NATO was simply afraid of being weakened from within.”

Secret armies all across Europe

The network of secret armies, he says, spread across Western Europe in its entirety, including Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Luxemburg, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Greece -- and Turkey.

According to Ganser, in the event of a Soviet invasion, these secret, anti-communist soldiers would have operated behind enemy lines, strengthening and setting up local resistance movements in enemy-held territory, evacuating shot-down pilots and sabotaging occupying forces’ supply lines and production centers.

The strategic planning came from London and Washington. NATO assumed the general coordination of all such behind-the-scenes organizations on an international level under the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), linked to NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), which is always commanded by an American general, Ganser asserts, adding, “It is absolutely obvious that there were these meetings, even if NATO refuses to comment on Gladio today.”

The secret armies were trained by British and US special forces. To ensure their anti-communist commitment, some members of the secret armies were recruited from the extreme-right margins of society. In Germany, former Nazis were active in the unofficial armies. The codenames for the armies varied from country to country; “Absalon” in Denmark, “Gladio” in Italy, “P26” in Switzerland, “ROC” in Norway and “SDRA8” in Belgium.

Gladio-like structures in Turkey

In Turkey a secret army was set up and codenamed “Counter-Guerrilla.” “Today we definitely know about its existence,” says Ganser.

Gen. Kemal Yılmaz, the chief of the special forces in Turkey at the time, officially confirmed on Dec. 3, 1990 the existence of Counter-Guerilla. He explained that the “stay-behind” army was under the command of the Turkish Special Forces and had the task “to organize resistance in the event of a communist occupation.”

“But though we know a lot of things, many of this secret army’s activities and involvements remain in darkness,” Ganser says. How strongly NATO and US intelligence backed and supported the use of terror in the countries in order to discredit the political left during the Cold War remains a subject of ongoing research. “Nonetheless, it is certain that at least some massacres ... [and] military actions had been organized, promoted or supported by men inside state institutions,” Ganser states.

An “important source of evidence” supporting the theory that Counter-Guerrilla also engaged in torture, he points out, comes from Talat Turhan, a former Turkish general who said he had been tortured in a villa in Istanbul’s Erenköy district by a team led by retired officer Eyüp Ozalkus, chief of the National Intelligence Organization’s (MİT) interrogation team for the combat of communism. “They blindfolded me and bound my arms and feet. Then they told me that I was ‘in the hands of the Counter-Guerrilla unit operating under the high command of the army outside the Constitution and the law.’ They told me that they ‘considered me their prisoner of war’ and that I was ‘sentenced to death’,” Turhan later revealed.

However when Bülent Ecevit, after the Italian revelations of 1990, implied to the press that Counter-Guerrilla units might have been involved in domestic terror and announced he suspected Counter-Guerrilla involvement in the Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul in 1977 -- where half a million citizens had been fired upon by snipers during a protest rally on May 1, leaving 38 dead and hundreds injured -- acting Turkish Defense Minister Safa Giray snapped, “Ecevit had better keep his ... mouth shut!”

Terrorist attacks were backed by state authorities

“Terror is an unbelievably strong means to manipulate and frighten the population,” Ganser underlines. “The real victims of a terrorist attack are not those left dead -- the real victims are those people who are affected by becoming afraid. The public [will then] ... turn to the state to ask for greater security.” Several Italian sources have confirmed this, among them Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a convicted right-wing terrorist who himself took part in this so-called “tension strategy” in which terror was manipulated to influence the political climate. “This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened,” Vinciguerra says.

It can be the state itself or a private group of people who try to force the government to act according to their will, to legitimize a war, for example, Ganser explains, adding that he “could well imagine” that Ergenekon is a kind of successor organization of the Turkish Counter-Guerilla of those days. “We know that these groups recruited heavily among the Turkish Grey Wolves [a youth group linked to the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP)],” he states. “As long as this original phenomenon is not fully examined, its subsequent structures will remain [a mystery], too.”

He also says he would “not be surprised” if some of the attacks allegedly perpetrated by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are later revealed to have been the work of some clandestine Turkish organizations to legitimize Turkish military intervention. “Terror is a very powerful weapon for constructing enemies,” Ganser emphasizes.

However, he says, these are assumptions that need further investigation and what is really missing to that end is a parliamentary fact-finding commission. “Neither journalists nor scientists can do this work properly; what is really needed is the state’s engagement in the investigations. It is the legislature that must investigate the executive, it’s the job of the parliamentarians to shed light on this,” he concludes, saying that examining these kinds of secret armies is therefore the natural first step in approaching the problem of the “deep state.”

Who is Daniele Ganser?

Swiss historian Daniele Ganser currently teaches in Basel University’s history department and in previous years researched foreign and security policy at the renowned Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s (ETH) Center for Security Studies and Military Academy. His important book “NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe” was recently translated into Turkish. www.danieleganser.ch

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Terrorists: Assassins Or Freedom Fighters?
By Gaither Stewart 27 January, 2008 Countercurrents.org

“When the oppressed man can find justice in no other way, then he calmly reaches up into the sky and pulls down his eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and, like the stars, imperishable. When no other means remains, then he must needs take up the sword.”
(Friedrich Schiller, William Tell)


Daggers flashing under moonlit Middle Eastern nights. Secret societies conspiring against religious oppressors. Justice! Assassins sent from paradisiacal gardens to roam over Arabian deserts to kill in the name of the Prophet. Revenge! The skill of the kill! The contagious frenzy of killing! Kill, kill, kill! Armageddon! Oh, the fear! The terror! Stop your evil ways or in the quiet of the night the Hashshashin will exact justice.

In the year 1090, followers of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam occupied the mountain fortress of Alamut in the mountains south of the Caspian Sea and 100 kilometers from today’s Tehran. Under their leader Hasan I Sabbah they quickly refined killing to an art. In the West the violent sect became known by the name of Hashshashin because of their fanatical dedication to their religion. Persecuted by the Sunni branch of Islam, the Assassins left their gardens to murder leaders of their oppressors. Perhaps the name Hashshashin derived from “hashish users,” the drug they ingested before their deadly attacks. When Marco Polo on his way to China he too visited the mountain fortress and called them Ashishin. Assassins!



The Hashshashin referred to themselves as Fedayeen, which means something quite different. The now familiar word means no less than “freedom fighters.” The term Fedayeen has been used by Arab militant groups throughout history: volunteers dedicated to causes in which the government fails to act. A lonely business from the start!



For our purposes here, the Assassins of then were associated with resistance against foreign occupation or tyranny. And as a rule resistance is not a joyful affair. The Fedayeen made of murder a meticulous system for killing targeted individuals in public, without however, as historians note, the loss of innocent life … and they never considered suicide.



I just read an article by T.E. Lawrence about British occupation of today’s Iraq and the resistance it caused, published in the London Sunday Times of August 2, 1920. The letter could have been written today. History repeating itself. The eternal return. Lawrence of Arabia accused the British government whose 92,000 soldiers in Iraq couldn’t control three million Arabs in “revolt” against the invader. He spoke of the British “assassination” of tens of thousands of Arabs sacrificed in the name of colonialism and the popular insurrection it had caused. Terrorism was never mentioned: only colonialist oppression and the popular insurrection of the Arabs.



A thousand years ago and one hundred years ago and again today, there has always been confusion between terrorism and resistance. As it was for mainstream Islam, it is a point of view for today’s US administration that sees terrorists under every rock, that blames every failure on largely unidentified terrorists, and justifies each of its own nefarious crimes on generic terrorism.

Since terrorism is most often a point of view, perhaps literature can actually deal better with that slippery terrain. Still, what Power so unceremoniously, so handily labels terrorism, has become fixed and omnipresent in our day-to-day lives. But since it is no joking matter either, we have to treat it seriously, severely … also somewhat terroristically.

As Schiller wrote in his 1804 play, William Tell, (written in the aftermath of the French Revolution to justify tyrannicide), that which for Power anywhere and at any time is terrorism, for the oppressed will always be resistance, revolt and rebellion. RESISTANCE! Neocon America instead simplifies a complex matter. It applies the label “terrorism” to any and every form of resistance to American imperialism abroad and today, at home, Power attaches the label to dissidents and anti-globalists and anti-war protesters and no-sayers under convenient provisions of the Patriot’s Act and other such illegal and anti-Constitutional legislation. Unfortunately, history is not an American forte.

In certain times and certain places genuine terrorism is so complex as to be an almost taboo subject. Paradoxically official USA stutters and stammers at finding a proper name for American rightwing militias, Christian fundamentalist subversives, abortion clinic bombers or Ku Klux Klan lynchers. For such groups, “terrorists” would work quite well. Yet, the streams and rivulets and byways of terrorism are so shady and labyrinthine, and government propaganda so intense, that the observer searching for truth tends to lose his way among definitions and distinctions and political correctness.

Such built-in complications are then intensified by the difficulty of recognizing “institutional terrorism”, i.e. terrorist acts organized by the state in order to justify harsh restrictive measures and laws, authoritarianism and in the most extreme cases, war. September 11 is the clearest example of institutional terrorism, though that historic date is far from the only one. We remember sinking of the US warship Maine in the Havana harbor that justified the Spanish-American War. What about Pearl Harbor to ignite World War II? And the Bay of Tonkin for Vietnam?

About Legitimate Resistance, the Strategy of Tension and Agents Provocateurs



The strategy of tension is an old story; yet, after all this time, agents provocateurs continue to be strange words to the untuned American ear. Italian “terrorism” of the 1970s and 80s, coming on the heels of the youth, student and worker uprisings in revolutionary 1968, illustrate the meanings quite well.

Terrorism is first of all defined as a method of political struggle based on the systematic use of violence—assassination, sabotage, kidnapping, and today human suicidal bombers—practiced by political extremists or by secret organizations of a nationalistic nature.

The second aspect of the definition is less recognized: terrorism—according to my encyclopedia—is also the instrument used by a political regime to grasp and to retain power.



A terrorist is thus a member of an organization that uses terrorism and who executes terrorist acts.
Or, he is a member of a regime whose existence is based on terror. Nazi Germany was a terrorist regime. Ditto Stalinist Russia. Resistance to them was sacred. Now we have the entire Neocon structure and strategy that has attacked aggressively the entire world in the name of US imperialism. By definition, it is a terrorist regime.



By extension, terrorist crimes are both those committed in revolt against a state to damage the collective and not specific individuals and they are violent acts against an oppressive regime.
Again by extension, terrorist crimes are likewise the criminal acts of an oppressive regime against the oppressed. This is the key: institutional terrorism is the catalyst for “insurgency” and “resistance” throughout the world today. The short geographical list is easy to pinpoint: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine.

Thus terrorism is the story of relationships between power/authority and its subjects, and between oppressors and oppressed. We are used to the words, power and authority, often used synonymously, as if they were equivalent. But that’s not the case at all. Power and authority are not the same thing, and the distinction between the two concepts is significant.
Power [pouvoir, potere, Macht] implies the faculty to act, and in our minds is related to force, coercion and violence, in the sense of “authoritarian.” That is why I like to capitalize the word Power used in that sense. When one hears the word “terrorism”, the responsibility of Power must always be in front of your eyes; otherwise you will miss the point.



Authority instead implies legitimacy, in the sense of “legitimate authority,” or the legitimate faculty to act or perform. The distinction is between legitimate authority on one hand and crude naked power on the other. Authority can be good or evil; naked Power will never be good. As we all know, authority too, like democracy itself, is a shaky business because the criteria for who establishes and who legitimizes authority, varies from time to time and place to place. Authority and democracy stand on the edge of an abyss, perpetually menaced by power, easily transformed into authoritarianism.



In the same way, opposition to legitimate authority and opposition to naked power/authoritarianism differ: democratic opposition to legitimate authority should suffice in a democratic setting. But when the democratic process is inhibited, more violent means become necessary. In an article “Is There A Good Terrorist” in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash cites Schiller’s for Power pertinent lines from Wilhelm Tell:
“When the oppressed man can find justice in no other way, then he calmly reaches up into the sky and pulls down his eternal rights that hang there, inalienable and, like the stars, imperishable. When no other means remains, then he must needs take up the sword.”

The reality is that you can feel horror at indiscriminate killing and bombs and kamikaze attacks and still hold to and even encourage the use of “legitimate terrorism”, that is, resistance and armed rebellion, against naked illegitimate Power. As Hezbollah learned easily in south Lebanon, armed resistance pays: it permitted the clearing of their land of Israeli occupiers. Resistance always pays!

Some years ago, at the end of a daylong interview with me in Paris—where he was a political refugee—the former Italian terrorist theoretician, Lanfranco Pace, defined himself as “living testimony to the limits of western democracy that is a precious possession that must be constantly enriched. Democracy,” he said, “is a mobile frontier. At times there is less of it, and one must fight for it.”



The result is that golden rule: what for the oppressed is resistance, resistance to naked power—as we see today at all latitudes peoples of the world oppressed by the tentacles of the global octopus-like market economy, by poverty and hopelessness—for the oppressor smacks of conspiracy and terrorism. Like Iraqis in 1920 and today, nationalistic Hungarians in 1956 considered themselves freedom fighters; for their Soviet oppressors they were terrorists in a conspiracy against the New Order. Like the Jewish Stern Gang in British occupied mandatory Palestine were terrorists for the occupiers, but for the Zionists were “Freedom Fighters For the Freedom of Israel.” Lack of true information still makes evaluation of the nature of Afghan resistance impossible but instinct suggests that also Taliban insurgents against the foreign invader consider themselves freedom fighters, Fedayeen, just as they were called when they were armed by the USA to fight against the Soviet invader.

Since oppression today is global, no one should be scandalized that resistance to that power is also global. It is no surprise that three-quarters of the world is up in arms against US power—either naked military power or disguised by the misnomer, globalization. A good rule is to substitute the word globalization with imperialism. It usually works.

The argument that problems of ethnic, religious, economic and political opposition have emerged precisely from the liberalization of political freedoms in third- and fourth-world countries brought by golden globalization rings hollow and hypocritical in the face of the testimony to the growing poverty of 4/5ths of that world. Wider political freedoms might create more spaces for rebellion and unleash wider resistance and violence, but evidently the near universal rebellion today is the effect of pervasive poverty and hopelessness, not of newly acquired freedoms.
Moreover, for the hungry the risks of rebellion and terrorism will always be thousands of times better than sitting in apathy and waiting.

The origins of modern terrorism are problematic. They have been since the French Revolution. As justified as the French were to rise up against oppressive aristocratic rule and ugly poverty, Robespierre was one of the first in the modern era to up continually the ante of revolutionary goals precisely in order to increase the obstacles to their achievement and to create the necessary tensions in order to justify crushing the enemies of his power. Robespierre’s terror was transformed into naked power at work against peoples’ natural tendency toward reaction. Throughout modern times his trick of tension strategy has been used over and over by authoritarian power—used to crush opposition.

Tension strategy is always and always a tactic of oppressors. It refers to first permitting, stimulating, organizing, or even committing terrorist acts, in order to turn around and crush all opposition to the regime.



The use of agents provocateurs is an old story with which Americans should familiarize themselves. Old as Adam! Go out into the world and sow discord! Make the people rise up, then crush them. On an international level we are familiar with the Gulf of Tonkin as first the provocation, then the subject of “false consciousness” inculcated in the American public, and the catalyst for the Vietnam War. In recent days, the US fleet, just barely in international waters along the coast of Iran, is playing the role of provocateurs to incite Iranians to react so as to undertake the stratospheric bombing the Neocons are itching for.

It’s an old story. Every place in the world peace movements are anti-government. Washington hates peace movements. Protesters are reviled as troublemakers, evildoers. Anyone against the war is a potential terrorist. Protest equals terrorism. The FBI infiltrates and tries to cripple the protest movement from within. It’s an old strategy—enticing protesters to criminal behavior—then arresting them. The agents provocateurs join the protesters and break store windows. It’s against the law to break store windows. So the cops beat up the demonstrators and arrest them. Sometimes agitators are police agents. They run wild in the streets. They pretend to be demonstrators. They attack the police and throw bombs. The infiltrators create tension between police and demonstrators. Anti-war marches become a kind of war. The government and its police and its press then blame the demonstrators for the violence. The best way to defame pacifists is to link them to terrorism. The public will call for law and order. And the government will crack down on all its political opponents … and go ahead with its wars.
(Extracted from the novel, Asheville, by Gaither Stewart)



In most circumstances, terrorism is too weak to overcome the power of the modern state/regime. Terrorists of Italy’s Red Brigades naively believed that the state had a heart that could be attacked. They lost. As a rule, terrorists lose. Most of the European terrorist organizations that mushroomed after the world-wide student protests of 1968 were defeated, though those based on nationalistic aspirations such as ETA in Spain and IRA in Ireland, that is, resistance movements, hang on and still today raise their heads from time to time. Now, US imperialism has created an entirely new field, a new wave, a new historical framework, for resistance: across most of Latin America, the entire Middle East and Asia from Iraq to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Resistance has been born. And it will not be defeated by military force. It will not go away



In the 1970s and 80s European secret services infiltrated and crushed the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) in Italy, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion) in Germany, and Direct Action (Action Directe) in France. In the process and in application of the strategy of tension they exploited the same terrorist organizations, keeping them alive in name in order to blame them, in the name of freedom, for the limitations placed on personal liberties. Today the name Al Qaida, the real existence of which is dubious, is used precisely in the same manner. Al Qaida is omnipresent, forever available to be blamed for institutional terrorism in order to justify all the patriot acts and no-fly lists and house searches and arbitrary arrests and detentions and tortures and concentration camps.



BRIGATE ROSSE

Italy’s Red Brigades [Brigate Rosse-BR] formed Europe’s biggest, best-organized and most powerful “terrorist” organization. An elitist organization emerging from the 1968 protest movement, its rank and file came from the universities and factories. It comprised the most idealistic, the best part of the nation’s youth— la miglior gioventú, according to the title of a recent film depicting that generation sparked by resistance. The BR at one time claimed the admiration and moral support of millions of Italians.

Its organizational structure is of interest because the organizers of Al Qaida (Pakistani and US intelligence services) seem to have borrowed from it since US Special Forces just can’t seem to locate that bearded man in a cave or his cohort riding his mule over remote Afghan mountain paths. At the BR base was a brigade of up to five persons, who provided arms and logistics; the brigades formed poles, which in turn formed a city column. The columns made up fronts that directed national political operations, controlled by an eight-man strategic directorate. The supreme level was a 4-5 man executive committee that conducted international relations and made major decisions culminating in the abduction and eventual murder of ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
The co-founder of the Red Brigades, Alberto Franceschini, told me that the Brigadists never considered themselves terrorists. They “resisted” US power in Italy and the one-party system governing the nation. Franceschini pointed out that the chance of armed rebellion inevitably increases to the degree that political power is insufficient and incapable of mediation. The first, the real Red Brigades, were the resistance born on the Left. It aimed at splitting the big Italian Communist Party vertically, recruiting its left wing, and then overturning the authoritarian state. It aimed at revolution. Yet, when police finally decided to crack down, 5000 terrorists flowed into Italy’s jails, while 500 escaped abroad, the majority to France.




What does that very Italian story mean?

It means that Power wanted and needed the BR.



It means also that Power knew that the Resistance understood it.



No wonder that as time passed former leftwing terrorists came to call themselves “West European guerilla” to combat imperialist efforts to weld European countries into the homogeneous structure it has assumed today, integrated in the instrument of imperialist power, NATO.

On a practical level, the Europe’s terrorists-guerilla lost. That partially accounts for European military forces involved today in America’s madness in Afghanistan, where Italian soldiers have fallen and only yesterday two Dutch soldiers died for neocon illusions of grandeur.

I offer this brief look at the Red Brigades in order to show another example of tension strategy. Franceschini told me that police could have crushed them quickly; however, their existence was convenient to the corrupt, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet regime of Christian Democracy, and to its ally, the United States of America. Red terrorists everywhere were the excuse for reactionary anti-Communism during the Cold War in Europe, Asia, Africa and even more brutally in Latin America, in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina. Fantomatic red subversives, and, in the name of the defense of democracy, for a mass of anti-democratic emergency laws, high security prisons and questionable justice as has happened in the USA today. Terrorism was the excuse. Italy, in close collaboration with the CIA, became in fact a bulwark against the Soviet Union, and its government managed to keep a firm hand on the Italian Communist Party, Europe’s biggest CP. “Red” terrorism was the weapon with which authoritarian power held at bay the Communist Party, which by the 1980s had become in practice a social democratic force.



The real Red Brigades died in the late 1970s. After their Executive Committee and/or Strategic Directorate were infiltrated by Italian and American secret services, the Red Brigades became a riddle. After reporting for many years on European terrorism and after many meetings with terrorist leaders, my guess is that it became an empty name in the service of governments and secret services.



EPILOGUE: In this mid January, the Rome Daily, La Repubblica, got its hands on heretofore top secret documents of the British Foreign Office revealing that in 1976, the election year in which the Italian Communist Party (PCI) garnered 34% of the vote, NATO weighed a “coup d’état” in Rome to keep the Communists out of the government. One released document states verbally: “An authoritarian regime in Italy would be more acceptable than a government including Communists.”
According to the documentation the plan was eventually discarded for fear that the powerful workers movement in Italy would bring about a Civil War and/or fear of Soviet intervention. The coup didn’t happen, though US-backed Fascists made several weak attempts. The “Italian question” continued to be the subject of NATO, of frantic communications and secret high-level meetings. Because the NATO role was crucial in the Cold War, the mere thought of the Trojan Horse of Italian Communists in a member government made Washington shiver in horror.

Though the coup was ruled out, US subversive intervention in its vassal state of Italy were intensified. Terrorism was always a chief avenue for US control of Italy. After the real Brigadists were arrested the CIA infiltrated and turned some leaders of the second wave of Red Brigades. Fascist terrorists meanwhile bombed trains and assassinated NATO leaders; often the Left was blamed. The US meanwhile supported the organization of the secret Gladio army that would have been Italy’s military arm after the coup. Fascist militants described to me their military training camps in Sardinia and in the Abruzzi Mountains near Rome. New prisons were pinpointed while lists were drawn up of dangerous subversives to be arrested.



For NATO planners the recruitment of some BR leaders was the culmination of the refinement of the instruments of tension strategy. It was that late version of the Red Brigades, which in 1978 abducted and assassinated the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro whose strategic plan of so-called “historic compromise” foresaw Italian Communists in the national government. The Red Brigades took the full blame.



Today, G-8 leaders label anti-globals and peace protesters “terrorists” and “enemies of democracy” and call for emergency measures against them. They arrest anti-globals right in front of the White House. Anti-globals on the other hand consider themselves non-violent freedom fighters for a better world. As a rule, police and/or police-guided, infiltrated or stimulated “terrorists” such as the Black Bloc are the aggressors against the anti-global peace movements.
No sane person believes that terrorism can be eradicated with military might. It is now a truism that every bomb that falls in the poor world spawns another terrorist, many of whom, unlike the Assassins of a millennium earlier, are eager to strap explosives around their bodies and blow themselves to pieces on a crowded square, place, piazza, or Platz of the rich world against the naked power that impoverishes them. If one accepts with Schiller that the oppressed will reach to the heavens to grasp their rights and resist their oppressors, then the dire warnings from Washington of more and more terrorism ring grim.

While America-Empire allegedly searches for efficacious measures to combat terrorism, more sincere American leaders are advised to examine aspects of European experience as a guide to both what not to do, and to what can be effective. They should not be deluded: No security measures, no no-fly laws, Patriot Act measures, secret concentration camps and torture can eradicate what Power defines as terrorism and the oppressed define as resistance until America unites with the rest of the world.

Here is more info on the current events in Turkey, DEEP STATE as it becomes available!

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Insights of a Canadian Lawyer: Was 9/11 an Inside Job?

by Hal. C. Sisson, QC

In mid January 2008 united 9/11 Truth Movements across Canada, spearheaded by Victoria and Vancouver branches, sent a petition letter to the heads of all Canadian political parties and to every Member of Parliament. The letter requested two things:

a. A call for a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001 by an independent and impartial tribunal, plus

b. Open discussion in Parliament of, or a national referendum on, the proposed integration of Canada, the United States and Mexico into a North American Union, under the Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement, (originally signed in 2005 in Waco Texas by then Prime Minister Paul Martin); an Agreement that has never been discussed outside of a cabal of senior government officials and military and corporate leaders.

The first request (a) follows in the wake of questioning in the Japanese Parliament (Diet) by Yukihisa Fujita of the Japan Democratic Party, as to the conspiracy theory of 9/11 presented by the U.S. Bush Administration. He asked just how terrorists could possibly have attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

Six years ago the U.S. Administration and their intelligence agencies stated they would present convincing evidence that foreigners of a Muslim Arab persuasion were the perpetrators of the tragic crime of 9/11. This evidence has never yet been forthcoming. People ask why? Can’t the United States prove their allegations in court? And why does the FBI say they have no hard evidence of the involvement of Osama bin Laden?

On the other hand, millions of people around the world have amassed a great deal of solid evidence of incomplete investigation, missing evidence, unsubstantiated conclusions and outright lies as to the facts and the full story of 9/11. So much so that it is impossible not to conclude that at the very least the events were in some measure allowed to happen - the motive being the persuasion of the American public to condone the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq -- and is Iran next?

The Japanese queries were presented at about the same time as former Italian President Francesco Cossiga told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper, the Corriere della Sera, that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job and that all the intelligence services in America and Europe know it was an inside job of a false flag nature.

Who else is of the same opinion? Twenty-five former U.S. military officers have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and called for a new investigation. They are among the rapidly growing number of military and intelligence service veterans, scientists, lawyers, university professors, engineers and architects challenging the Bush government’s story. Former German Secretary of Defence Andreas von Bulow said, “The official story is so inadequate and far-fetched that there must be another one.”

Every action the U.S. government or its intelligence services take, good, bad or indifferent, is now prefaced by the words “since 9/11 we have to do this, we have to do that, we have to do the other” -- every atrocity anywhere in the middle east or in the world is immediately attributed to a vague group called al Qaeda and the concept of a perpetual but profitable to some ‘War on Terror’.

The Canadian Government can no longer deny that the official story told by the Bush Administration is complete nonsense. This discredited version of 9/11 events as promulgated by the Bush Administration is the justification for Canada’s bloody involvement. If Bush’s version of 9/11 is a lie, like his story on “weapons of mass destruction”, then Canada must ask why it should continue to sacrifice its sons and daughters and spend its resources in a distant country that never attacked or threatened Canada’s security.

Truthers think that the Canadian Parliament should seriously and openly discuss and investigate these matters before they continue their present course of action or run the risk of being drawn into wider conflicts in Iran and Pakistan That is why they are calling on the Canadian Government to launch its own independent investigation and Official Enquiry into 9/11

Addressing point (b) - the request that there be an open parliamentary discussion of the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement (a grandiose extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)). The most recent meeting was August 20, 2007 when Stephen Harper, President George W. Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon went to Montebello, Quebec for a secret meeting of the SPP, more transparently described as the North American Union, part of the larger Globalization agenda called the New World Order. Many organizations including 9/11 Truth tried and are trying to inform Canadians what was and is being discussed in a veil of secrecy and a deafening wave of silence from the Canadian and American media. Big decisions at committee level are being made behind closed doors while publicly masking the true intention.

This writer proposes to use a cautionary tale to illustrate the approach that should be taken before entering any Agreement whose implementation involves the dismantling of Canadian sovereignty, and which seeks, in the words of MP Denise Savoie, ‘to merge our security policies and practices with those of the United States, leaving Canada with a government with less authority, less control over our natural resources and less autonomous and sustainable economic, social, cultural and environmental policies’.

Warning -- the anecdote I am about to relate contains a scene involving sex and therefore may not be acceptable to the sensibilities of those who wish to remain unaware that such an activity may be rampant in our society. Reader discretion is therefor strongly advised:

“Fast Eddy wanted desperately to have sex with this really cute, really hot girl in his office… but she was dating someone else. One day Eddie was so frustrated that he went to her and said, “I’ll give you $100 if you let me have sex with you…“

The girl looked at him, and then said, “NO!”

Eddie said, “I’ll be real fast. I’ll throw the money on the floor, you bend down and I’ll finish by the time you’ve picked it up.”

She thought for a moment and said that she would consult with her boyfriend… so she called him and explained the situation. Her boyfriend says, “Ask him for $200, and pick it up the money real fast. He won’t even be able to get his pants down.”

She agreed and accepts Fast Eddy’s proposal. Over half an hour goes by and the boyfriend is still waiting for his girlfriend’s call. Finally, after 45 minutes the boyfriend calls and asks, “What happened…?”

Still breathing hard, she managed to reply, “The bastard had all quarters!” …

The lesson to be learned here is one of business management, and certainly is one that should be adopted by the Canadian Parliament in relation to the SPP -- “Always consider a business proposition in its entirety before agreeing to it. Otherwise you are likely to get screwed!”

And if the Canadian public doesn’t want to be forever picking up Fast Eddy’s American quarters they had better figure out how to stop the SPP, now, before it is too late.

About the writer:

Hal Sisson, Q.C., R.C.A.F. armourer in World War II, is a reformed lawyer who practiced law in Peace River, Alberta for thirty-five years and has been resident in Victoria, B.C. since 1985. Author of ten published books including the best selling Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons (with his partner Justice Dwayne Rowe); and his latest Modus Operandi 9/11 that exposes the White House lies about 9/11, the machinations of the New World Order and the "War on Terror", and does so featuring salty humour in the form of a novel. International croquet and marble player and collector, his major hobby was stand-up comedy and writing and performing in Western Canada's longest running (25 years) burlesque revue, Sorry 'Bout That.
http://www.halsisson.ca/

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