by Philip Coppens
Nexus Magazine,
Volume 14, Number 2 (February - March
2007)
from
NexusMagazine Website
Most terrorist attacks in
Europe, whether attributed to left-wing or right-wing
activists or even Islamist fundamentalists, can be
traced to actions by government-sponsored military or
intelligence agencies.
About the Author:
Philip Coppens is the
editor-in-chief of Conspiracy Times (http://www.conspiracy-times.com
). He has previously contributed seven articles to NEXUS, the most
recent being "Ezekiel's Code and the Ark of the Covenant" (see
13/06). His website is
http://www.philipcoppens.com, and
he can be contacted by email at
info@philipcoppens.com
|
Inner Terror:
Your Government Doesn't Mind Killing You
One of the most controversial and least discussed aspects of Western
society is the notion that Western governments would be able to, let
alone actually, kill their own civilians. But is reality far worse
than what we seem incapable of imagining?
In the movie V for Vendetta, a police detective ponders:
"I want to ask a question. I don't
care whether you answer me or not. I just need to ask this
aloud... The question that I have to ask is: what if the worst
and most horrifying attack in this country's history was not the
work of religious extremists?"
His assistant objects:
"We know it was. They were caught.
They confessed."
The detective adds:
"And they were executed. I know. And
maybe that's really what happened... What if someone else killed
all those people? Would you really want to know who that was?
Even if it was someone working for this government? That's my
question. If our own government was responsible for the
deaths of almost 100,000 people, would you really want to know?"
On 31 December 2006, three people were
killed in the Thai capital Bangkok. The military-backed interim
regime blamed the ousted prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra,
and his supporters as prime suspects. But US security expert
Zachary Abuza said that "it could be the military trying to
justify further crackdowns",1
thus demonizing the former prime minister so that it could continue
to enforce martial law. Whom to believe?
One of the major stumbling blocks to accepting a major conspiracy
(such as the claim that 9/11 was an "inside job" performed or
allowed by the authorities) is the unwillingness to believe that a
nation's institutions would kill its own civilians.
Thailand is not a stable Western nation
and many believe that the Western world is free of such atrocious
acts, whereas the sad truth is that since World War II many Western
nations have seen a long series of state-sponsored
terrorism-directed against its own citizens.
Russia's 9/99
bombings and the stifling of dissent
The deceased Russian dissident and former spy Alexander
Litvinenko argued in his book Blowing Up Russia: Terror from
Within that certain Russian terrorist attacks had been
engineered by the Kremlin.
He alleged that agents from the FSB
(Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, the
successor to the KGB) coordinated the September 1999 bombings
(popularly referred to as the 9/99 bombings) that killed more than
300 people during explosions in three apartment buildings in the
capital Moscow and the southern Russian city of Volgodonsk in a
period of two weeks.2
The Russian authorities, directed by the
newly appointed prime minister Vladimir Putin, blamed the
bombings on Chechen separatists and, in response, ordered the
invasion of Chechnya.
Former FSB officer Litvinenko, Johns Hopkins University and
Hoover Institute scholar David Satter3
and Russian lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov have asserted that the
bombings were actually "false flag" attacks perpetrated by the FSB
in order to legitimate the resumption of military activities in
Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin to the Kremlin and the FSB to
power.
False flag operations are covert
operations conducted by governments, corporations or other
organizations, which are designed to appear as if they were carried
out by other entities than the ones really responsible. The name is
derived from the military concept of flying false colors, which was
practiced in both naval and land warfare. A famous example is
Operation Greif, led by Otto Skorzeny,4
in which he ordered his men into action in American uniforms during
the final stages of World War II.
Litvinenko, Satter and Yushenkov thus charged Putin with ordering
state-sponsored terrorism, aimed at its own nation, killing 300
innocent citizens. This is not just a conspiracy theory emanating
from Russian dissidents or critics of Putin's regime.
Shortly after the final attack (when a truck bomb exploded on 16
September outside a nine-storey apartment complex in the city of
Volgodonsk, killing 17 people), FSB operatives were caught by local
police and citizens in the city of Ryazan planting a bomb with a
detonator in the basement of an apartment building at 14/16
Novosyelov on the night of 22 September 1999.5
An alert resident of the building
noticed strangers moving heavy sugar sacks into the basement from a
car. Explosives experts found that the bomb tested positive for
hexogen and all roads from the town were brought under heavy
surveillance, but no leads were found.
A telephone service employee tapped into
long-distance phone calls and managed to detect a conversation in
which an out-of-town person suggested to take care and to watch for
patrols. That person's number was found to belong to an FSB office
in Moscow.
On 24 September, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB,
stated that the bomb had been a dummy and that the entire operation
was a training exercise.6
The original chemical test was declared "inaccurate" due to
contamination of the analysis apparatus from a previous test. As a
consequence, the General Prosecutor's office closed the criminal
investigation in April 2000.
But despite these official denials, Yuri Tkachenko, the
explosives expert who defused the bomb, insisted that it was real.7
Tkachenko also said that the explosives, including a timer, power
source and detonator, were genuine military equipment. He added that
the gas analyzer that tested the vapors coming from the sacks
unmistakably indicated the presence of hexogen-not sugar, as the FSB
officially claimed. The police officers who answered the original
call and discovered the bomb also insisted that the incident was not
an exercise and that it was obvious from its appearance that the
substance in the bomb was not sugar.8
Litvinenko's prolonged fight for life following the ingestion of
radionuclide polonium-210 in November 2006 was popularly depicted as
Putin's revenge against this whistleblower. But Litvinenko was not
the only or first person to die. Sergei Yushenkov, who shared
his interest in the 9/99 bombings, was gunned down at the entrance
of his Moscow apartment block on 17 April 2003.9
In this case, there may not be a direct
relationship with the 9/99 bombings, as Yushenkov was a member of
parliament and the ninth member of parliament to be shot dead in as
many years, none of the cases ever having been solved. Still, one
member of the Liberal Russia party, Yuly Rybakov, speculated
in the Moscow Times newspaper that Yushenkov could have been
killed for his attempts to show that the security services are
guilty of the 9/99 bombings.10
Yushenkov had been responsible for inviting Mikhail
Trepashkin,11 a
Moscow attorney and a former FSB agent, to assist with an
independent investigation of the 9/99 bombings. After Yushenkov's
death and the collapse of the official investigation, two
Russian-American sisters Tatyana and Alyona Morozova, whose mother
was killed in the 9/99 bombings, hired Trepashkin to represent them.12
While preparing for the trial of the two
Russian Muslims who were officially charged with the attacks,
Trepashkin uncovered a trail of a mysterious suspect whose
description had disappeared from the files. The suspect turned out
to be one of his former FSB colleagues. He also found a witness who
testified that evidence was doctored to lead the investigation away
from incriminating the FSB.
On 22 October 2003, a week before the hearings commenced,
Trepashkin was arrested after what appeared to be a traffic stop
when, he claims, FSB agents stationed on the side of the road tossed
a satchel with a stolen handgun into his vehicle. Trepashkin was
imprisoned, unable to attend the hearings and thus smoothing the
path for an easy conviction of the two Muslim suspects.
However, the Trepashkin story made it
into the Western media and on 20 May 2004, an article in the Los
Angeles Times gave an overview of his tribulations, adding that the
central suspect was FSB agent Vladimir Romanovich. According
to Trepashkin, Romanovich was an FSB contact charged with
infiltrating Chechen criminal groups in Moscow. As evidence,
Trepashkin referred to Romanovich's mysterious release from custody
after an arrest by the organized crime squad several years before.
Trepashkin added that Romanovich was
recognized by the landlord at one of the apartment buildings. The
landlord, Mark Blumenfeld, confirmed that he had worked with the FSB
on a sketch of the man he'd seen, only to be cast aside when his
composite bore no resemblance to Gochiyayev, the man whom officials
had identified as one of the masterminds behind the bombing.
Romanovich subsequently died in a car crash in Cyprus.13
In 2003, Yuri Shchekochikhin, another MP who was on the
independent 9/99 commission, died in mysterious circumstances and is
believed to have been poisoned. Shchekochikhin was taken ill
suddenly and developed awful symptoms: his skin peeled, he was
covered in boils, his hair fell out and he eventually suffered
respiratory failure.
His colleagues were unable to
investigate his death because they were told that the autopsy
results were secret and would not be released even to his relatives.
Shchekochikhin was also an editor at Novaya Gazeta,
the independent newspaper where Anna Politkovskaya, the
fierce Kremlin critic, worked until she was gunned down in October
2006, weeks before Litvinenko died in a London hospital.14
NATO's secret
war in Belgium
Whereas in the aftermath of Litvinenko's mysterious death in
November 2006 people were willing to entertain that Putin
could order attacks against his own citizens, "surely" Putin's
Western equivalents, George W. Bush and Tony Blair,
would be unable to? And as such, a "conspiracy theory" hits its
major hurdle: the willingness to accept one scenario, yet reject an
identical scenario elsewhere closer to if not at home.
Let us therefore begin in Belgium. In 1983, the Cellules
Communistes Combattantes (CCC) was founded in Belgium and
claimed to be the only Marxist revolutionary organization that would
wage an armed fight against the capitalist system. In 1984 and 1985,
28 "terrorist" attacks were committed by the CCC, allegedly in the
hope of engaging the "proletariat" in its revolution.
The figure of 28 is actually a record
number when it comes to armed terrorist attacks by one group in
Western Europe.15 The
CCC targets were, like 9/11 but unlike the 7/7 London bombings,
flagships of the Western economy and American hegemony: factories
that produced military equipment, the headquarters of political
parties or offices, military infrastructure, the police force, a
NATO oil pipeline and banks.
The CCC furthermore operated not in one
specific region but across Belgium, which underlined their
capability to strike anywhere and cause fear anywhere. On 1 May
1985, the group exploded a small van that was placed in front of a
government office but, unfortunately, two firefighters died in this
explosion.
"Unfortunate", for the CCC's campaigns
were organized to minimize, if not exclude, a human death toll.
Indeed, this makes the CCC not fit neatly into those attacks in
which civilian casualties are acceptable. But this was just stage
one.
The CCC became part of the government investigation after Belgium,
together with Switzerland and Italy, set up parliamentary
commissions following the discoveries of "stay-behind armies" in
1990. The scope of the investigation was the extent to which the
existence of a national secret army, coordinated by NATO (and
inspired by the US and the UK in the wake of World War II) within
several NATO and non-NATO states, had interfered with these
democracies.
The Belgian defense minister, the Socialist Guy Co‘me, who
stated to have been unaware of the existence of the secret armies,
had this to say about this secret army's involvement with terrorism:
"Furthermore, I want to know whether
there exists a link between the activities of this secret
network and the wave of crime and terror which our country
suffered from during the past years."16
Co‘me was referring to the years
1983 to 1985 and the CCC, but also to a series of brutal robberies
and attacks by the so-called Nijvel gang, in which the
geographic area around Brussels saw 14 brutal terrorist attacks on
shoppers in supermarkets.
These attacks left 28 people dead and
many more injured in a series of 17 burglaries and armed robberies,
which in late 1985 turned extremely violent. In the three final
attacks, 16 people died during armed robberies in supermarkets in
Braine-l'Alleud, Overijse and Aalst, the gang stealing (in total)
not more than US$56,000 (reducing a human life to $3,500).17
The Belgian Senate inquiry revealed that the secret army was staffed
by Belgian citizens and took its orders from the Belgian State
Security, the equivalent of the Russian FBS or the
American CIA. The cell was code-named SDRA8 and was
directly linked to NATO's stay-behind centers, the Allied
Clandestine Committee (ACC) and the Clandestine
Planning Committee (CPC).
However, the Senate inquiry was unable
to clarify whether the secret army had anything to do with the
Nijvel gang murders, as the Belgian military secret service refused
to co-operate.
Several journalists, including Allan Francovich, suggested
that SDRA8 had linked up with the Belgian right-wing
organization Westland New Post (WNP), an opinion that
was confirmed by WNP member Michel Libert, who stated during
a televised interview that he had been told by his SDRA8
handlers that:
"'You, Mr Libert, know nothing about
why we're doing this. Nothing at all. All we ask is that your
group, with cover from the Gendarmerie, with cover from
Security, carry out a job. Target: the supermarkets. Where are
they? What kind of locks are there? What sort of protection do
they have that could interfere with our operations? Does the
store manager lock up? Or do they use an outside security
company?'"
Libert added:
"We carried out the orders and sent
in our reports: hours of opening and closing. Everything you
want to know about a supermarket. What was this for? This was
one amongst hundreds of missions. Something that had to be done.
But the use it was all put to, that is the big question."18
A "big question" that would soon be
answered, and which had a human death toll of twenty-eight.
The logical conclusion is that there was a NATO-sponsored
secret army operating within Belgium, apparently outside the
knowledge and control of the government itself.
A most interesting statement came from a member of the inquiry,
Hugo Van Dienderen, who said:
"This secret network did more than
prepare for a war against a Communist threat... Agents tried to
infiltrate peace movements. Certain American groups tried to
contact them... A former director of the CIA [William
Colby] leaves no doubt that it was their intelligence agencies
that were at the basis of these networks."19
When Jean Bultot, one of the
suspected killers in the supermarket murders, spoke from his hideout
in Paraguay, he stipulated that certain members of the gang were
indeed part of the national intelligence network. He added, without
being asked, that the activities of the CCC followed the same
formula.
Two police officers, Martial Lekeu and Robert Beijer,
made similar statements.
According to Lekeu:
"There must exist a type of
organization between the members of the national intelligence
agency, the gendarmes and the judiciary department.
In my opinion, the attacks of the CCC are part of the same plan.
One of the caches of the CCC was hired by a brother of a member
of the State Security."20
And thus, the two terror campaigns that
Belgium witnessed in the early 1980s were apparently carried out by
a group of Belgians operating as a secret army, sponsored by an
organization-NATO-to which Belgium not only belonged but whose
headquarters it actually hosted.
Furthermore, though politicians were apparently unaware, the Belgian
intelligence agencies were not, and they specifically and
consistently accused "communists" (the CCC) as well as the "extreme
right" (the Nijvel gang) of carrying out terror activity,
whereas they were actually part of the planners if not executioners.
Remarkably, in 1985, despite never-before-seen protest marches,
NATO installed nuclear missiles in Belgium. This time, it seems
the intended goal was not an invasion.
In 1995, the Belgian Chamber of Representatives organized a
parliamentary inquiry into the effectiveness of the Belgian police
and judiciary with regard to the Nijvel gang investigation.
The conclusions of this inquiry, as well as the earlier Senate
inquiry on SDRA8 and the Chamber inquiry on banditry,
resulted in the preparation of new legislation governing the mission
and methods of the Belgian State Security, which was passed in 1998.
Unlike the US government with its so-called Patriot Act, which was
signed into law on 26 October 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11, the
Belgian government decided to contain the powers of the intelligence
and law enforcement network as much as possible, so that the willful
complicity of the Belgian State Security in allowing, if not
organizing, the deaths of people it was supposed to protect would
not happen again.
Gladio's
terror campaign in Italy
The scope of Belgium's state-sponsored terrorism is minimal compared
to in Italy, where the then prime minister Giulio Andreotti
stated in August 1990 that the report into Gladio21
(the local name for the stay-behind networks) confirmed that in his
country, too, Gladio had been run by NATO with funding from the
CIA.
As early as 1983, the Italian intelligence agencies had published a
study on international arms trafficking which stated that in 1969,
with the agreement of Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger
(Haig was Military Assistant to the Presidential Assistant for
National Security Affairs, Kissinger), the Italian secret services
recruited 400 military officers within the freemasonic Propaganda
Due (P2) lodge. (Interestingly, the Swiss stay-behind
network was known as P26.)
This was later confirmed by former
CIA agent Richard Brenneke, who worked as an arms trafficker
within Gladio. Brenneke stated that the US government had $10
million per month at its disposal for this service.
Brenneke added that P2,
"...was used during the 1970s to let
Italian terrorism explode, as well as in other countries. This
lodge is still active."22
Brenneke was specifically
referring to one of the cruelest terrorist attacks that occurred in
Europe before the new threat of "Islamist fundamentalism" was
identified: the 1980 Bologna massacre.
The Bologna massacre was a terrorist
bombing at the city's central station on the morning of 2 August
1980; it killed 85 people and wounded more than two hundred. The
timed explosive device was left in an unattended suitcase inside a
waiting room, the subsequent explosion destroying the roof, which
collapsed onto the passengers.
The Italian government, led by Francesco Cossiga, and police
authorities first thought that the blast might have been accidental,
then tried to suggest that the militant Red Brigades
(communists, of course) were responsible for the bombing.
But it was then discovered that the
bombs came from an arsenal used by Gladio, and the awful
truth slowly began to dawn.
The commission into this terrorist attack reached its conclusion in
1986, after years of sabotage by the Italian State Security
apparatus.
The conclusion was that,
"a private structure existed in
Italy which was composed of military people and citizens who
co-operated, with the express goal of influencing democracy
through non-democratic means".
To achieve this goal, the group used
terrorist attacks organized by neo-fascist movements.
"There was an invisible government,
in which the lodge P2, certain levels of the secret
services, organized crime and terrorism were intimately
connected," concluded the judges.
Subsequent investigations reached the
same conclusion:
"During several years, a clandestine
group, with extra-institutional connections, operated in our
country with the goal to politically condition the democracy and
to acquire personal power. To achieve its goal, this group used
terrorism."
In short, a nation's authorities,
specifically its intelligence agencies, had organized a terrorism
campaign, killing innocent civilians in an effort to "condition the
democracy" - condition the people, that is, in an effort to prove
that there was an enemy out there, even inside, intent on killing
them.23
As a consequence, the term "strategy of tension" was coined. It is
described as a way to control and manipulate public opinion using
fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents
provocateurs and false-flag terrorist actions.
Throughout the 1980s, the suspected aim
of these actions was to make the public believe that the bombings
were committed by a communist insurgency, with the cause being not
to create an authoritarian government (which itself was a victim of
this campaign) but to make sure that the people accepted the need
for NATO and the need for weapons on its soil aimed firmly at
the enemy "out there" who, as the terrorist campaign had proven, was
inside as well.
In the cases of Belgium and
Italy, the governments fought back and came down against the
self-granted, illegal powers of its security services.
Eventually it was found that Gladio's first terror campaign in
Italy dated back to 12 December 1969, when a bomb exploded in
the National Agrarian Bank in Piazza Fontana, in Milan's centre,
killing 16 people and wounding up to ninety. Giuseppe Pinelli,
a young anarchist, was first accused of the crime. Pinelli then
suffered a suspicious death, which the authorities labeled as
suicide.
But there was more to come. General Gerardo Serravalle, the
head from 1971 to 1974 of "Office R" (the office that
controlled Gladio from within the Italian military secret
service, SIFAR), told the terrorism commission that, at a
crucial Gladio meeting in 1972, at least half of the upper
echelons,
"...had the idea of attacking the
communists before an invasion. They were preparing for civil
war."
Later, he put it more bluntly:
"They were saying this: 'Why wait
for the invaders when we can make a pre-emptive attack now on
the communists who would support the invader?'"24
If we are to transpose this onto
9/11, we should note that there is
substantial evidence that al-Qaeda was indeed planning an attack on
the United States.
But was 9/11 an attack or a "pre-emptive
strike"?
General Serravalle was not alone. Avanguardia Nazionale
member Vincenzo Vinciguerra confessed in 1984 to judge Felice
Casson of having carried out the 31 May 1972 Peteano terrorist
attack, in which three policemen died and for which the communist
Red Brigades had previously been blamed. Vinciguerra explained
during his trial how he had been helped by Italian secret services
to escape the police and to fly away to Spain-very much like Belgian
terrorists were able to escape to Paraguay.
Vinciguerra confirmed Serravalle's warnings:
"I say that every single outrage
that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized
matrix... Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo
[the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s],
was being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist
strategy originating not with organizations deviant from the
institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and
specifically from within the ambit of the state's relations
within the Atlantic Alliance [NATO]...
The December 1969 explosion [in the
Piazza Fontana] was supposed to be the detonator which would
have convinced the political and military authorities to declare
a state of emergency."25
The European
stance against US-sponsored terror
On 22 November 1990, the European Parliament passed a
resolution condemning Gladio, requesting full
investigations-which have yet to be carried out-and the total
dismantling of these paramilitary structures-which has not yet been
proven.
The EP, in its resolution, condemned,
"the existence for 40 years of a
clandestine parallel intelligence" as well as an "armed
operations organizations in several Member States of the
Community" which "escaped all democratic controls and has been
run by the secret services of the states concerned in
collaboration with NATO", itself sponsored by the American
CIA.
In this resolution, the EP denounced
the,
"danger that such clandestine
network may have interfered illegally in the internal political
affairs of Member States or may still do so", especially before
the fact that "in certain Member States military secret services
(or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious
cases of terrorism and crime".
The European Parliament obviously
held the US responsible, for it made the extraordinary directive
that the United States Government should receive a copy of the
resolution.26
The full investigations have not yet occurred; hence, on the
American State Department website, we can read a denial of any
involvement:
"...West European 'stay-behind'
networks engaged in terrorism, allegedly at US instigation...
This is not true."27
Or is it?
Richard Brenneke was a
stay-behind insider. And it is thus perhaps unsurprising that his
name comes up in a "terrorist" and "Islamist" campaign, in which the
lives of 66 US citizens were treated as pawns in a political
maneuver in which the goal was to determine who would occupy the
Oval Office between 1981 and 1984.
The Iran hostage crisis took place from 4 November 1979 until 20
January 1981. During the crisis, the "Muslim Student Followers of
the Imam's Line" held hostage 63 diplomats and three other US
citizens inside the American diplomatic mission in Tehran. During
the 444-day period, the hostage-takers released several captives,
leaving 53 hostages at the end.
The United States launched a rescue
operation, Operation Eagle Claw, which failed and which
caused the deaths of eight servicemen. Some historians consider the
crisis to have been a primary reason for US President Jimmy
Carter's loss in his re-election bid for the presidency in 1980.
But that is not all.
A BAC 1-11 aircraft left Andrews Air Force Base in the late
afternoon of 19 October 1980, its destination Paris, France. Among
its passengers were:
-
Richard Brenneke
-
William Casey, soon to be
director of the US Central Intelligence Agency
-
Donald Greggs, soon to be US
ambassador to South Korea
-
George H. Bush, future
vice-president and president of the United States and
former director of the CIA under President Ford
Officially, Bush claims he spent
the weekend at Andrews Air Force Base, which is of course not
exclusive with what Brenneke has said about Bush; Brenneke
merely adds that Bush left Andrews AFB on a secret mission
that weekend.28 The
incident has become known as the "October Surprise" and
Brenneke was the first to testify, for which he was charged with
perjury though a Federal jury later acquitted him, upholding his
testimony that the flight actually took place.
The crux of the October Surprise is that an agreement was
made between Bush and Casey and the government of Iran to delay the
release of American hostages until after the November 1980 election.
Bush, while in Paris, met with Hashemi Rafsanjani, the
second in command to the Ayatollah and later the president of Iran,
and Adnan Khashoggi, a controversial Saudi Arabian
businessman.
Arrangements were apparently made to pay
Iran US$40 million to delay the release of hostages in order to
thwart President Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. The October
Surprise would grow into the "Iran-Contra scandal", but it seems
that in this long series of scandals and abuse of power, the initial
claim - namely, that civilians were used for political purposes
- was forgotten. Most importantly, the statement that the US
"does not negotiate with terrorists" was here exposed as the
greatest of lies.
Finally, we note that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, several
Saudi Arabians, including members of the bin Laden family,
were allowed to fly out of America at a time when another member of
the bin Ladens was identified as the main culprit in the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The comparison
to Jean Bultot and Vincenzo Vinciguerra and their
flights to safety following their terrorist attacks is no doubt too
logical and simple to be the truth.
The sad truth is that state-sponsored terrorism is not an
invention of the post-World War II political climate. There is a
long list of military false-flag attacks that have served as
pretexts for war. In the Gleiwitz Incident in 1939,
Reinhard Heydrich fabricated evidence of a Polish attack to
mobilize German public opinion and to fabricate a false
justification for a war with Poland-the start of World War II. In
the 1931 Mukden Incident (often referred to as the "September
18 Incident"), Japanese officers fabricated a pretext for annexing
Manchuria by blowing up a section of railway.
The planned, but never executed, 1962 Operation Northwoods
plot by the US administration for a war with Cuba involved scenarios
such as hijacking a civilian passenger plane and blaming it on Cuba
(though in this scenario, no US citizens would die, as only military
personnel would board the plane as civilians and the plane would
later be substituted by a drone).
It is clear that in 1999, the
Russian state, specifically the security service, planted bombs
in people's apartments in an effort to blame Chechen rebels and to
restart a war and again invade Chechnya.
-
Dare we ask whether
9/11 followed the scenario of
9/99, whereby sections of the US intelligence agencies planted
bombs and carried out terrorist attacks, killing 2,973
civilians, in an effort to blame Islamist fundamentalists and to
start wars by invading Afghanistan and Iraq?
If 9/11 and 9/99
eventually turn out to be proved as state-sponsored terrorist
acts (noting that it took Italy 15 years before such conclusions
were reached for their own internal atrocities), both incidents will
only be set apart from the rest because of the massive human death
toll. On average, less than a hundred civilians "need" to die for
the government to invade a country. In 1999, 300 Russians died; in
2001, 2,973 Americans died.
Endnotes
Several books on Gladio, the
CCC and the Nijvel gang have been written in Dutch and
French, amongst these a series of books by the Belgian investigative
journalist Hugo Gijsels. Equally, a lot of sources on the
Russian bombings are in Russian.
Below, an effort has been made to quote
as many English-language, Internet-based resources as possible.
Though this has resulted in a slightly
less authoritative look for these sources, they do show the
difficulty that English-speaking people have in collating the
various pieces of the Gladio puzzle.
1. Associated Press, January 1,
2007, reported in various newspapers and online, e.g., Taiwan
News Online,
http://tinyurl.com/tyew8
2. Various sources, including
http://eng.terror99.ru/
3. Satter, David, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian
Criminal State, Yale University Press, 2003;
http://www.hoover.org/bios/setter
4.
http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Operation:Greif.htm
5.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-satter043002.asp
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/res/papers/Satter_edited_final.pdf
6.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=19795
7. Various sources, including
http://tinyurl.com/yy7stz
8. Satter, David, "The Shadow of Ryazan: Is Putin's government
legitimate?", National Review, April 30, 2002; Satter, Darkness
at Dawn, op. cit.;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings
9.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2958997.stm
10.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2958997.stm
11. Various sources, including
http://eng.trepashkin.ru/
An independent documentary Nedoverie ("Disbelief") about their
campaign was made by Russian director Andrei Nekrasov and
premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival;
http://tinyurl.com/y2puus
13. Various sources, including
http://eng.terror99.ru/who_is_who/index/
http://www.diacritica.com/communique/content/issuefour/e.html
14.
http://www.yabloko.ru/Publ/2006/2006_06/060620_novg_shekoch.html
15. Cellules Communistes Combattantes,
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/
16. Various sources, inc.
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/gladio.htm,
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/synopsis.htm
17.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijvel_gang
18. Various sources, including
http://tinyurl.com/584ol
and
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/documents/collection_gladio/synopsis.htm
19. Various sources, including
http://tinyurl.com/y452cs
20. Various sources, including
http://tinyurl.com/yyghop
(noteworthy for being a site by students for students), but also
http://tinyurl.com/vddm5. The
best overview of Gladio in Belgium is Hugo Gijsels, Netwerk
Gladio, Kritak, Leuven, Belgium, 1991.
21. For a general overview of material on Gladio as a whole,
see:
http://users.skynet.be/terrorism/html/italy_gladio.htm
22. Various, including
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/gladio.htm
23. Willems, Jan (ed.), Gladio, EPO, 1991, see
http://tinyurl.com/u9v2c
24. "Secret agents, freemasons, fascists and a top-level
campaign of political 'destabilization'", The Guardian, 5
December 1990; see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
25. Various sources, including
http://tinyurl.com/y3g67j
26. Joint resolution replacing B3-2021, 2058, 2068, 2078 and
2087/90, available at
http://tinyurl.com/y3yjq2
27.
http://usinfo.state.gov/media/Archive/2006/Jan/20-127177.html
28.
http://sonic.net/sentinel/usa3.html;
http://tinyurl.com/y3yjq2
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