Exclusive GNNTV Excerpt: The Road To 9/11: Wealth, Empire, And The Future Of America

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/3242/Excl...ure_of_America

By Dr. Peter Dale Scott
Tue, 14 Aug 2007 10:11:57 -0500

Terror, oil and the "shadow government"

In this exclusive excerpt from his powerful new book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), UC Berkeley professor emeritus Peter Dale Scott asks whether there is a connection between America’s historical use of terror as a political weapon and the recent moves by the Bush administration to suspend the Constitution and create a “shadow government” in the wake of the next terrorist attack:

The strategy of tension in Europe and America

The idea that sectors of government might sponsor extremists in acts of terrorism against their own people is, initially, almost unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable possibility has clearly happened in Italy, with the celebrated bombings of Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 and the Bologna railway station in 1980. (Sixteen people were killed in Milan, and eighty-five in Bologna.) Although anarchists took part in these bombings, and were initially blamed for them, it developed that the bombings were part of a “strategy of tension” orchestrated by Italian military intelligence.1

The responsibility of Italian intelligence services has been definitively established by Italian courts and parliamentary investigations. As Stanford historian Thomas Sheehan wrote in the New York Review of Books, “Later the [Piazza Fontana] massacre was traced to two neofascists, Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura, and to an agent of the Secret Services (SID) named Guido Giannettini. Giannettini fled the country, but continued to receive checks from SID for a full year. He and three high SID officials were eventually jailed for conspiracy in the massacre.”2

But the Italians found responsible have implicated U.S. covert actions in Italy, beginning with the efforts by the Office of Policy Coordination to defeat the Communists in the 1948 Italian elections. General Vito Miceli, the Italian head of military intelligence, after his arrest in 1974 on a charge of conspiring to overthrow the government, testified “that the incriminated organization, which became known as the ‘Parallel SID,’ was formed under a secret agreement with the United States and within the framework of NATO.”3

Former Italian defense minister Paulo Taviani told Magistrate Casson during a 1990 investigation “that during his time in office (1955–58), the Italian secret services were bossed and financed by ‘the boys in Via Veneto’—i.e. the CIA agents in the U.S. Embassy in the heart of Rome.”4 In 2000 “an Italian secret service general said . . . that the CIA gave its tacit approval to a series of bombings in Italy in the 1970s to sow instability and keep communists from taking power. . . . ‘The CIA wanted, through the birth of an extreme nationalism and the contribution of the far right, particularly Ordine Nuovo, to stop (Italy) sliding to the left,’ he said.”5

The evidence for some degree of U.S. involvement is massive but also problematic.6 There is no doubt that the United States, operating partly through NATO, sponsored and funded so-called stay-behind paramilitary groups in Italy and other NATO countries (in Operation Gladio); and there is no doubt also that the cadres and munitions of these groups were used in the strategy of tension. For some time critics of U.S foreign policy have stressed the role of CIA assets and Gladio terrorism in the Greek Colonels’ coup of 1967: “The Gladio ‘Sheepskin’ group was involved in a campaign of terrorist bombings, which were blamed on the left, and two days before the election campaign was to begin, a military coup brought to power a junta led by George Papadopoulos, a member of the Greek intelligence service KYP [who had been on CIA payroll since 1952].”7 This was the climax of a period in which Greece was afflicted with “an intelligence service gone wild” and “a shadow government with powers beyond the control of the nation’s nominal leaders.”8

Even clearer is the continuous U.S. intervention in Italian politics after 1948, to block the formation of any government supported by the Communist Party. In 1972, for example, CIA disbursed $10 million to political parties, affiliated organizations, and twenty-one candidates, mostly Christian Democrats. Ambassador Graham Martin, against CIA advice, gave a further $800,000 to General Miceli, the Italian head of military intelligence.9 Miceli would be tried two years later for his involvement in the 1970 Borghese coup attempt, which the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969 was designed to assist. Eventually he and all other defendants would be acquitted.10

What is not yet clear, at least to me, is the degree and level of conscious U.S. direction for Italian state violence against civilians. The official Italian Senate investigation into Gladio concluded “without the shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s to counter by the use of all means the spreading . . . of the left.”11

But at what level were these elements, and with what central authorization? Undoubtedly Gladio units contributed to the Eurofascism of the 1980s, but by then many if not most Eurofascists were anti-American as well as anti-Soviet. Whatever the details, the perversion of Operation Gladio into sanctioned attacks on innocent civilians illustrates the dangers of top-down power, especially when it is off-shored and removed from the checks and balances of an open public state.12

At least some Americans believed themselves in the strategy of tension. William Harvey, when CIA station chief in Rome, reportedly recruited his own “action squads” and suggested that the head of the Italian intelligence service SIFAR (later SID) “use his ‘action squads’ to ‘carry out bombings against Christian Democrat Party offices and certain newspapers in the north, which were to be attributed to the left.’”13

More important, European sources allege that one of the masterminds of the 1969 plot, Guido Giannettini, was invited in late 1961 to give a three-day lecture course to U.S. military officers in Annapolis, on “Techniques and Possibilities of a Coup d’Etat in Europe.”14 A few weeks later Pentagon officials began drafting the plans known as Operation Northwoods, the first known American application of a strategy of tension. As summarized by ABC News, “the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.”15 This was at a time of developing U.S. Army interest in so-called counterterror as a technique in counterinsurgency, as developed by Nazis, French theorists of guerre révolutionnaire, and East European émigrés now attached to the U.S. Army.

Thus one cannot clearly distinguish between the managed violence advocated by Italian strategists of tension and those aping them in the United States. International security analyst John Prados has put the issue very forcibly: “In this age of global concern with terrorism it is especially upsetting to discover that Western Europe and the United States collaborated in creating networks that took up terrorism. In the United States such nations are called ‘state sponsors’ and are the object of hostility and sanction. Can it be the United States itself, Britain, France, Italy, and others who should be on the list of state sponsors?”16 It is alarming moreover to note that the Piazza Fontana bombing was planned by a “parallel” structure, outside government control, as a prelude for a military coup.17

End Part I