Roberto Calvi's death and the War on Terror: the parallels

From Adnkronos:

 

Italy: Murder of 'God's banker' echoes war on terror says author

 

Rome, 28 Sept. (AKI) - By Alison Dickens - The mysterious death of Italian banker Roberto Calvi at the height of the Cold War presents parallels with the modern day 'war on terror' the author of a new book on the Calvi case, Rome based journalist Philip Willan, told Adnkronos International (AKI).

He believes that Calvi, found hanged beneath a London bridge in 1982, was murdered, and argues that his killing "opens up a vast panorama on the true nature of recent history and how the Cold War was fought."

Willan argues that Calvi played a key role in an ‘unholy alliance’ against communism in Italy involving senior political and intelligence figures, as well as shady associates and highly questionable practices.

That web of intrigue, spawned by the Cold War, raised similar dilemmas to those posed by the current battle being fought by western nations against Islamist terrorism, Willan said.

"To what extent do you form alliances with warlords and suppress civil liberties to fight a 'common enemy?'" he asked.

The Cold War context to Calvi’s killing a quarter of a century ago involved "people in power in an emergency situation turning to organised crime and using very unusual and unscrupulous tactics to prevail, causing serious harm to Italian society in the process, " Willan stated.

Calvi was chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano – then Italy’s largest private bank which went bust soon after his death - and a member of the Italian secret P2 masonic lodge.

He was known as "God's banker" because of the illicit financial dealings that connected him to the Vatican's then-bank the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR).

Calvi joined the P2 in 1975 to obtain vital political protection for the Banco Ambrosiano, Willan said.

The banker shifted money around the world to fund illegal arms purchases for anti-communist movements from South America to Poland, Willan argues in his book ‘The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi.'

In the process, Calvi became a ‘nerve centre’ for secret services and other forces combating Soviet influence in Italy, which had the largest communist party of any western nation.

Calvi was found hanged beneath Blackfriar's Bridge in the City of London on 18 June, 1982, his pockets weighed down with bricks and stones, and with over £7,000 in cash on him...

 

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US military's 'gay bomb' wins tongue-in-cheek award

From New Scientist:

 

Military wins Ig Nobel peace prize for 'gay bomb'

05 October 2007

Jeff Hecht

 

US military plans to create a weapon that would put a new twist on the slogan "make love, not war" were among the many off-beat ideas honoured at the 2007 Ig Nobel awards. A study of jet-lagged hamsters, some "bottomless" soup bowls, and an in-depth examination of sword-swallowing also earned prizes.

The tongue-in-cheek awards are organised by the humorous scientific journal the Annals of Improbable Research for research achievements "that make people laugh – then think". The ceremony, held at Harvard University, is traditionally attended by several real Nobel laureates, including one who swept paper airplanes from the stage for several years before receiving the Nobel prize in Physics.

The Ig Nobel peace prize went to the US Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Ohio for its 1994 plan to develop a weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another, an idea later dubbed the "gay bomb".

Details of the scheme were uncovered in a declassified document (pdf) that suggests a strong aphrodisiac would be "completely non-lethal" but could be seriously disruptive "especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behaviour."

Other ideas put forward in the document include chemical weapons that would attract angry or aggressive bugs, or that would give enemy troops "severe and lasting halitosis", thus making it hard for them to blend in with civilians...

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The Gnosticism of William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs - 20th Century Gnostic Visionary

 

In 1984, in Boulder, Colorado, an interviewer asked William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), “What religious persuasion would you consider yourself?” Without hesitating, Burroughs replied, “Gnostic, or a Manichean.” ¹

Upon reading those words, suddenly everything made sense.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the above conversation occurred in 1984. In many ways, Burroughs was a far more lucid and accurate analyst of twentieth century politics than even George Orwell, whose speculative concept of “newspeak” in his 1948 novel 1984 was quickly overshadowed by the real-world machinations of post-WWII Madison Avenue advertising techniques and Washington D.C. public relations firms.

Superior to Aldous Huxley’s brilliant 1958 collection of essays, Brave New World Revisited, Burroughs’s 1974 book The Job is a must-not-live-without essential guide to charting the opaque labyrinth of obfuscation and lies regularly constructed by the Reality Studio to protect itself from the light of scrutiny. Unlike his more naïve contemporaries among the Beat literary movement, Burroughs never took his eye off the twitchy sharpshooter in the corner, the wild card in the deck known as Control. ...

... This basic theological structure applies to almost all of Burroughs’s work. Burroughs’s strong sense of morality, of the distinct difference between right and wrong, is often lost in the lurid morass of details concerning his personal life. His heroin addiction, his homosexuality, his arrest in Mexico for the accidental death of his wife, his early experimentation with yage in South America and his later fascination with Wilhelm Reich’s unorthodox theories regarding orgone energy – all of these unusual aspects of his life, though admittedly intriguing, are often reduced to gossipy anecdotes that threaten to diminish the importance of the work itself.

Burroughs was never the star of his own novels, not even in his highly autobiographical debut, Junky. The central figure in all his novels is war – a continuous war between Freedom and Control, what Burroughs himself might very well refer to as “good and evil.” ...

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NZ public has opportunity to write laws

From the BBC:

 

NZ police let public write laws

New Zealanders have been given the chance to write their own laws,
with a new online tool launched by police.

The "wiki" will allow the public to suggest the wording of a new
police act, as part of a government review of the current law, written
in 1958.

Police say they hope to gain a range of views from the public on the
new law before presenting it to parliament.

The wiki, one of the first of its kind in the world, is open to any
internet user, police say...

 

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Israeli activists launch campaign to rebuild demolished Palestinian homes

Resistance Begins...And So Does the Repression

 

Lucia Pizarro
International Coordinator
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
PO Box 2030, 91020 Jerusalem, Israel
info@icahd.org

Yesterday, June 11, 2007, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) announced the launching of a campaign to rebuild the home of every Palestinian family whose house is demolished over the coming year.  We held our launch in conjunction with the 40th year of the Occupation, for which we returned to the place where the Occupation began—the few houses of what had been the historic Mughrabi Quarter where, on the night of June 11, 1967, 135 Palestinian families were roused from their beds in the Middle of the night and their neighborhood demolished so as to create a plaza in front of the Wailing Wall.  It was an act that had nothing to do with either the war or with security.  It represented only the creation of the first "fact on the ground" of thousands that would come asserting exclusive Israeli claims over the entire country.

The ICAHD activists, accompanied by Israeli, Palestinian and international press, were met in the Quarter's sole remaining mosque by Mahmoud Masloukhi, the Mughrabi Quarter mukhtar, who offered words of greeting and spoke of the night 40 years ago when his home was demolished.  Aisha Masloukhi, Mahmoud's sister, also spoke of her experiences that night and what happened to the Quarter's residents in the years following that traumatic night.

Jeff Halper, ICAHD's Coordinator, told the assembled Mughrabi Quarter residents that we had come as Israelis not only to remember the night the Occupation began but to take responsibility for the actions of our government, responsibility Israel has tried to avoid all these decades.  ICAHD's latest campaign, he said, went beyond mere acknowledgment and solidarity, however.  It represents a further intensifying of ICAHD's resistance to the Occupation.  Meir Margalit, ICAHD's Field Coordinator, then presented a general overview of Israel's house demolition policy and its impact on the Palestinian population.

After fielding questions from the press and doing interviews, the ICAHD activists, accompanied by Palestinian residents (and a contingent of Border Police and undercover detectives), proceeded to the home of Naim Kabaja, whose one-room home in the Muslim Quarter was demolished last week.  There we began construction of the first official house of the campaign (though we have built 10 over the month of May in preparation).  First thing this morning (the 12th), inspectors of the Jerusalem Municipality arrived and took their pictures.  Within a day or two a demolition order will be placed on the rebuilt home, and within a week the house will likely be demolished again.

ICAHD will stay at the family's side and will resist any attempt to demolish the home.  Crucial for the success of our resistance is the international support you can offer us. Follow our website—and those of ICAHD USA and ICAHD UK—for updates and information.  Mobilize community organizations where you live, professional associations and your political representatives.

Through this campaign we can focus intense international pressures on Israel to stop demolitions and, by raising public consciousness, to generate international opposition to the Occupation as a whole.  Let us begin by saving the Kabaja home!

http://www.nimn.org/articles/whats_new/000651.php

Intel folks unhappy with Contractor Liability Bill

From Secrecy News:

"...Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill to extend federal legal jurisdiction to crimes committed abroad by U.S. contractors in war zones such as Iraq, so that such crimes could be prosecuted in U.S. courts.

But before the bill (H.R. 2740) was passed, it triggered alarms by those who were concerned that its provisions could undermine U.S. intelligence activities.

"The bill would have unintended and intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations," the White House said without elaboration in an October 3 statement (pdf) outlining its opposition to the bill.

[ ... ]

More fundamentally, he complained, the new bill "applies the entire criminal code to the new category of potential offenders and could implicate the authorized business of the intelligence community employees and contractors."

[ ... ]

The motion was approved, but not without some critical commentary.

"The [Forbes] amendment raises serious questions about the activities its proponents may be seeking to protect," said Rep. David Price (D-NC), who authored the new bill.

"Given that my bill only targets activities that are unlawful, why do my colleagues feel the need to clarify that it does not affect activities that are permissible?"

"What activities are contractors carrying out that are permissible but not lawful?" Rep. Price wondered aloud..."

Full article >>

Top secret tourism

The Joy of Snooping

Posted on Aug 30, 2007

Truthdig’s James Harris and Josh Scheer speak with Harry Helms, author of “Top Secret Tourism: Your Travel Guide to Germ Warfare Laboratories, Clandestine Aircraft Bases and Other Places in the United States You’re Not Supposed to Know About,” which his critics have called a handbook for terrorists. Helms explains why his work doesn’t threaten national security and what it’s like to visit some of the most secret sites in America.

 

"...Harris: Why do you think that this is a good book for others to read?  What’s the most important chronicle you think you wrote here?

Helms: I think the whole purpose of this book was not really so much the purpose of a travel guide, but to make some of these sites transparent.  We pay for this top-secret government, sometimes with our taxes, sometimes with curtailment of our liberties.  And for people who purchase this thing, and who are really the owners of it, we have the right to know just exactly what is being done in our name and for what purposes.  I’m not one of these Pollyannas who thinks you can conduct an entirely open government in a dangerous world.  No.  Obviously there are some military secrets that have to be kept secret.  But [what] I’ve discovered doing this book is that most of these secrets relate to things like mismanagement, failed projects, ineptitude, waste and in some cases possible dishonesty.  That’s what I want to explore, and that’s one reason that I find that a lot of these claims about national security are less about the nation’s security and more about the security of some of the people conducting these projects and wasting our money...

 

...Scheer: It seems like—.  Are you recommending this for me?  So, say, I want to go to Plum Island or the Nevada Test Site; we should handle this with care, right?

Helms: As I said in the book, visiting these sites is like visiting an art museum.  You can look all you want, but you can’t touch.  You can go up to the border, you can drive by the border, you can sit and look over the border, but don’t put a foot over.  These are very highly guarded sites.  You will be nailed, and chances are you will be fined and perhaps subject to imprisonment.

Scheer: Well, not just imprisonment, but what you were saying just a second ago about ... deadly force [being] authorized; I’d be kind of nervous about getting shot.

Helms: There are things you have to realize is when you step over the border in some of these areas, it’s almost like you’ve entered a foreign country.  Local police cannot enter these sites.  The local civil law enforcement authorities have no power or authorization whatsoever on these sites.  It’s really almost akin to the fact that since the end of World War II, large sections of the U.S., particularly in the West, have been controlled by this occupying power.  What I call the top-secret government, the one that directs these classified activities.  The normal rules and regulations, etc., the rest of us have to live by, those are totally gone..."

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China: forgotten biowarfare victims

"...In China, hundreds of victims of biological warfare are still suffering from painful wounds, more than 60 years after their villages were attacked with anthrax, glanders and other biological weapons agents.

Beginning in 1932, the Japanese Army developed and tested biological weapons in occupied Manchuria, the northeastern part of China. In 1936, they built a huge laboratory complex in Ping Fan, a small village near the city of Harbin. This unit became later known as Unit 731 and operated until the end of war in 1945.

In Ping Fan, the Japanese army developed and produced in huge quantities biological warfare agents such as the causative agents of plague, anthrax, typhus and many others. Also a broad variety of delivery systems were developed and tested, from porcelain bombs to plague-infected fleas. A most gruesome aspect of Ping Fan were the human experiments. Several thousand prisoners were tortured and killed in the death laboratories of Unit 731, not only to test biowarfare agents, but also to pursue other medical research. Not a single prisoner of Ping Fan survived..."

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