Marching Off Into Tyranny, By Paul Craig Roberts

[Echo In Light]

Marching Off Into Tyranny
By Paul Craig Roberts

05/08/08 "ICH" -- In last weekend’s edition of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn updates the ongoing persecution of Sami Al-Arian by federal prosecutors. Al-Arian was a Florida university professor of computer science who was ensnared by the Bush Regime’s need to produce “terrorists” in order to keep Americans fearful and, thereby, amenable to the Bush Regime’s assault on US civil liberties.

The charges against Al-Arian were rejected by a jury, but the Bush Regime could not accept the obvious defeat. If Al-Arian was not a terrorist, then other of the Bush Regime’s fabricated cases might fall apart, too.

In open view, the US Department of Justice (sic) proceeded to trash every known ethical rule of prosecution. I don’t need to repeat the facts, as they are covered by Cockburn’s articles and in The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Instead, I want to point out another meaning of the Al-Arian case. The Justice (sic) Department itself knows that it is persecuting a totally innocent person for reasons of a political agenda--the need to convince gullible Americans of an ongoing terrorist threat. The existence of this threat is used to justify the Bush Regime’s adoption of police state measures, such as spying on Americans without warrants, arresting them without charges, and refusing to let go of them when they are cleared by juries.

Sami Al-Arian is a fabricated terrorist created by federal prosecutors and judges in behalf of an undeclared agenda. The Al-Arian case proves that terrorists are in short supply and that the Bush Regime has had to create them out of total innocents. The “war on terror” is a hoax used to justify war crimes and the overthrow of America’s civil liberties.

The anthrax scare is one more example of the Bush Regime’s use of disinformation to advance an undeclared political agenda. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us last week in Salon, the Bush Regime used Brian Ross at ABC News to spread the lie far and wide that US government tests proved that the anthrax mailed to various Americans, including prominent US Senators, was made in Iraq by Saddam Hussein. This lie was essential for scaring Congress into passing the Bush Regime’s Gestapo laws, such as the PATRIOT Act, and for overcoming opposition to invading Iraq.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/print.html

When it leaked out that the anthrax actually came from a US government lab, the Bush Regime tried to frame a US scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, but failed. On June 28th, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatfill, “The former Army scientist who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings agreed Friday to take $5.82 million from the government to settle his claim that the Justice Department and the FBI invaded his privacy and ruined his career.” Indeed, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton allowed Hatfill’s attorneys two years to review all news reports and FBI evidence. Judge Walton stated: “there is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-anthrax28-2008jun28,0,5742061.story

The anthrax matter was again news last week when another US government scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, “committed suicide.” Instantly, the deceased Ivins was fingered as the culprit. Overnight a man, liked and respected by his colleagues, who had worked on American biological warfare weapons for years, became a deranged homicidal maniac who decided to murder Americans at random in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by sending them letters containing anthrax.

I don’t believe a word of it. But assume that it is true. Blaming the anthrax letters on Ivins does not resolve the issue of why the Bush Regime lied to Brian Ross and used ABC to put the blame on Saddam Hussein in order to invade an innocent country.

Wouldn’t a government that would lie about something this serious lie about other serious matters?

The Bush Regime stands against against the truth. That is why it pretends to have the power to prevent executive branch officials wanted for questioning by Congress from appearing before the people’s representatives. Nothing could make clearer the contempt that the Bush Regime has for the American people and their elected representatives than its arrogant claim that it is unanswerable to them.

Obviously, neither the President nor the Vice President respect their oaths of office. If they will betray such a serious oath, won’t they lie about everything, even 9/11 itself?

According to the discredited 9/11 Commission Report, a few Muslims hatched a multi-year plot that went undetected by the vast security agencies of the United States and its allies, and within one hour on one morning at four different locations defeated airport security, NORAD, the US Air Force, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s defenses and crashed three hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the heart of the US military. Muslims were able to achieve this fantastic feat operating out of caves in Afghanistan.

We now know for a fact that the “terrorist anthrax attack” had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorists. Even the US Government now blames white American citizens, employees of the federal government, for the anthrax letters that, at the time, were blamed on the “Osama bin Laden al Qaeda plot against America.”

We now know for a fact that this was intentional disinformation planted by the Bush Regime on a gullible and incompetent ABC News reporter, who is a disgrace to journalism. No one denies this.

We also know for a fact that ABC News will not say who planted on ABC the lies that committed the United States to the dishonor of an illegal invasion, war crimes, and executive branch attack on the US Constitution. How can anyone anywhere in the world rely on ABC News when it serves as a disinformation agency for a criminal regime?

One logical conclusion is that the anthrax attack was part of the same false flag operation that pulled off 9/11. The anthrax letters made the “terrorist attack” seem wider and more general. This increased the sense of peril and Americans’ fear and anger, thereby opening wider the door for the Bush Regime’s attack on Iraq and US civil liberty.

Now that the dead Ivins can be conveniently blamed for the anthrax mailings, the Bush Regime can declare the case closed, thus protecting the false flag operation from further risk of exposure.

Many Americans lack the mental and emotional strength to confront the facts. The facts are too unsettling and many are relieved when the “mainstream media” spins the facts away. Many Americans find it too appalling that any part of “their” government, even a rogue operation, could possibly have been involved in any way in the 9/11 or anthrax attacks. No evidence--not even full confessions--could convince them otherwise. Many Americans have welcomed their brainwashing by the neoconservatives: America is pure; her shining virtue causes evil men to attack her; they hate us because we are good and they are evil.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept this make-believe. It does not explain why, in order to protect us from evil men, the US Constitution needs to be dismantled and civil liberties set aside. Our Founding Fathers said that dismantling the Constitution and setting aside civil liberties are precisely what would make us unsafe in the extreme. The Bush Regime has never explained how the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution interfere with any legitimate response to terrorism.

The fact still remains that the Bush Regime responded to 9/11 and anthrax letters with a comprehensive assault on US civil liberty...

Continued:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20435.htm

[marmar]

1. "Many Americans lack the mental and emotional strength to confront the facts."

LOUD SCREAMS from the "Amen" corner!!!!

:applause: :applause: :applause:

[Truth4Justice]

2. Most Mercans are fat, ignorant and semi-happy. Oh and they need Nascar/Football to live.

[JohnyCanuck]

6. Plus, thanks to a corporate media

that functions more as an unofficial propaganda arm of the state than a disseminator of vital information, most Americans have no idea of past US government agencies' involvement in war provocations and false flag attacks or, for another example, the fact that in the 1960's the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff created a plan to stage false flag attacks designed to appears as if they originated from Castro's Cuba in order to justify a military invasion of Cuba.

The Strategy of Tension

SNIP

Yet whichever way you look at it, international terrorism has its origins in the state itself. There are many ways of understanding this, but perhaps the most pertinent for our purposes is contemporary history. We don’t need to go very far back either. Only twenty odd years, to the era of the Cold War, when we were also getting Trigger-Happy trying to defend the “Free World” from the “Evil Empire” of International Communism, as Ronald Reagan put it so aptly.

SNIP

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

Operation Gladio: CIA Network of "Stay Behind" Secret Armies
The "Sacrifice" of Aldo Moro

SNIP

A ‘Strategy of Tension’

In 1990, the Italian Prime Minister had confirmed that Italy’s “stay behind” army, termed “Gladio” (Sword), existed since 1958, with the approval of the Italian government. In the early 1970s, Italy’s communist support was growing, so the government turned to a “Strategy of Tension” using the Gladio network. At a top secret 1972 Gladio meeting, one official referred to making a “pre-emptive attack” on the Communists. As the Guardian reported, links between Gladio in Italy, all three Italian secret services and Italy’s P2 Masonic Lodge were well documented, as the head of each intelligence unit was a member of the P2 Lodge.<3>

Setting up the Network

In 1949, the CIA helped set up the Italian secret armed forces intelligence unit, named SIFAR, staffed in part with former members of Mussolini’s secret police. It later changed its name to SID. At the end of World War 2, a former Nazi collaborator, Licio Gelli, was facing execution for his activities during the war, but managed to escape by joining the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. In the 1950s, Gelli was recruited by SIFAR. Gelli was also head of the P2 Masonic Lodge in Italy, and in 1969, he developed close ties with General Alexander Haig, who was then Assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Through this network, Gelli became chief intermediary between the CIA and General De Lorenzo, Chief of the SID.<4>

Gladio Creates ‘Tension’

Gladio was involved in a silent coup d’état in Italy, when General Giovanni de Lorenzo forced the Italian Socialist Ministers to leave the government.<5> On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded at the National Agrarian Bank, which killed 17 people and wounded 88 others. That afternoon, three more bombs exploded in Rome and Milan. US intelligence was informed ahead of time of the bombing, but did not inform the Italian authorities.<6> In 2000, a former Italian Secret Service General stated that the CIA “gave its tacit approval to a series of bomb attacks in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.”<7> The bombing was linked to two neofascists and to an SID agent.<8>

Testifying in a court case trying four men accused of involvement in the 1969 bank bombing in Milan, General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of military counter-intelligence from 1971 to 1975, stated that his unit discovered evidence that explosives were supplied to a right wing Italian terrorist group from Germany, and that US intelligence may have aided in the transfer of explosives. He was quoted as saying 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 that, “I believe this is what happened in other countries as well.”<9>

The Report

The Italian government released a 300-page report on Gladio operations in Italy in 2000, documenting connections with the United States. It declared that the US was responsible for inspiring a “strategy of tension.” In examining why those who committed the bombings in Italy were rarely caught, the report said, “those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.”<10>

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9556

In his new exposé of the National Security Agency entitled Body of Secrets, author James Bamford highlights a set of proposals on Cuba by the Joint Chiefs of Staff codenamed OPERATION NORTHWOODS. This document, titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage. Bamford himself writes that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.”

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/

[Marblehead]

3. wake up!!

our government is killing us...

[malaise]

4. To the Greatest page n/t

[tpsbmam]

5. K&R n/t

[Hubert Flottz]

7. K&R

[JohnyCanuck]

8. KICK N/T

[WhiteTara]

9. the crux of the situation

The fact still remains that the Bush Regime responded to 9/11 and anthrax letters with a comprehensive assault on US civil liberty...

[Nikki Stone1]

10. kick and recommend

:kick:

[Echo In Light]

11. Kick