The bilionaire behind Trump's sucess

So much noise, fake news, about Putin and then we find out that the real guy behind Trump's success is 100% made in the USA, as everything behind the blondie elderly far-right decadent phenomenon.

From The Real News:

Also it seems already that all that spam about "getting along with Russia" was just electoral propaganda: his appointees are now clearly saying that Russia is the enemy to beat. So once again there was no choice in foreign or imperial policies in this US election, the Deep State always wins:

→ Finian Cunnigham (op-edge at RT): 'Deep State' wins… Trump is being tamed to toe the line.

NATO's Auditor General murdered while investigating finances of terrorism

Chandelon and NATO flag

Yves Chandelon probably step a bit to deep into the shadow government of NATO, loosely known as Gladio Network, never dismantled nor properly investigated and seemingly each day more aggressive and totalitarian.

The high accountant was found over 62 miles from Lens, the city where he lived — and nearly 87 miles from his place of work in Luxembourg. Chandelon also owned three registered firearms, but an unregistered weapon was discovered near his body, reports Global Research, echoing the Free Thought Project.

... more bizarrely it has been reported locally that the gun which killed him was found in the glovebox of the vehicle, says the Daily Express. 

It is a clear case of murder with a poor pretense for "suicide". 

Most likely the Auditor General found who was actually financing the terror attacks in Germany and France that have shattered Europe in the last months, and probably these were the very same "deep state" of NATO that finances DAESH and Al Qaeda terrorist networks in Syria and fascist criminals in Ukraine. And quite probably he was ready to report, to speak out, else he would have been spared (no need to call attention unless you must... or are a lousy criminal). 

Of course, these conclusions are provisional and speculative but we do have hints in strange circumstances surrounding the terrorist attacks on French soil particularly, and we also know for sure that it has been NATO and its satellites who have financed the terrorist in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Ukraine and the almost forgotten Yemen war. He might know too much about who ordered the murder of the Russian ambassador in Turkey this week, we can't be sure of what exactly he found but it's a clear case of destroying evidence, of silencing a potential whistleblower, as has happened way too often in the past, from Petra Kelly to Michael Hastings.

We live in a dictatorship with a pretense of "democracy", a pretense that is every day shallower and less credible, because the "deep state" is precisely pushing hard in favor of a police state at all levels, of monolithic mass media and of everything being subservient to the NATO-ist imperial project.

Nice: another false flag attack?

Still digesting the confusing info on the Nice massacre but since the very beginning things looked pretty odd: the attacker did not carry any real weapon, how was the truck allowed to enter so deep into the city (trucks that size are not allowed to circulate inside urban areas, much less under emergency law, much less in an area cut to all traffic). 

But something is particularly perplexing: the brother of the alleged "terrorist" says he was not even religious at all:

We are depressed, no one from the family believes media reports. Mohamed couldn't have done it. He has not prayed, he is not religious and has not practiced religious rituals. I do not think that he has committed it on religious or extremist grounds.

So we have a "terrorist" that probably spent all Ramadan feasting, who did not bow before Allah? It makes less sense than the "terrorists" of 9-11, who spent all the time getting high and going to discos. He rather looks like a scapegoat, a random person put in the cabin, surely drugged unconscious, to be presented as a "terrorist". 

Who drove the truck then? Well, something we have learned in the last few years is that a modern hyper-electronic vehicle can perfectly be hacked and driven remotely. It seems that all the trajectory was straight, what makes the manipulation much easier. 

So that is my working hypothesis: someone else, someone within the deep French State, did it, blamed "the Moors". 

In any case my condolences to all the victims. 

PD- It has been recently known that six French military police officers deployed near the Bataclan concert hall did not intervene because they had strict orders of only acting in self-defense. What the fuck?!

Let's not fall to the official deceit on Islamist terror, please

The DAESH attacks in Paris and Brussels should be a total political scandal, because it is obvious to those who dare to scratch the surface that they are under the command of those who rule NATO, EU and their member states. The exact details may be murky but overally it is clear that we are under attack by our own rulers. 

Sadly enough, almost nobody seems willing to hang the bell from the cat's neck but rather feel more comfortable ranting inside the official discourse, regardless of the exact details of their empty discourses. 

Let's get specific. For example, Toni Cartalucci explains at Global Research:

All of the suspects have been under the nose, on the radar, and in the prisons of Western security agencies on and off for years, yet were still able to carry out at least one high profile terrorist attack – possibly two, and with the vast majority of the suspects involved having traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS before inexplicably being allowed to re-enter Europe and rejoin society without consequence – as if inviting them to take their extremism to the next level.

Let's not forget that the supply lines of DAESH are controlled by NATO, specifically Turkey, whose Hitler-loving President Erdogan even dared to predict an attack in Brussels just a few days ago (astonishing "coincidence").

Even the official channels of DAESH in the Internet are apparently run by NATO and allies. Specifically the Twitter accounts of DAESH propaganda have been tracked via IP to the British Department of Work and Pensions. This ministry has rejected any responsibility claiming that they sold a large bloc of IP addresses to two Saudi firms, Saudi Telecom and Mobile Telecommunications Company, but it does not matter the least because Saudi Arabia is a very close ally of NATO (and of DAESH, Al Qaeda, etc.) and it is ridiculous to think that they would operate without Royal Saudi and NATO/Pentagon consent.

Another specific, already mentioned in this blog, is the implication of a French agent, former security chief of the fascist party National Front and akin to super-judge Marine Le Vert, Claude Hermant, in the sale of weapons to the DAESH cells that attacked Paris. Luckily for us Europeans, there are honest provincial judges who dare to investigate these matters, because all the anti-terrorist apparatus of Europe would not.

There are many more specifics but in many cases we would be going back to the origins of DAESH, a schism of Al Qaeda/Al Nusra, and its financing and even training by the USA and allies. But this is something they even dare to admit, as they do regarding the CIA training and equipment of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. They just pretend that the experiment went wrong at some point, that the Islamists have the tendency to bite the hand that feeds them. However nothing suggests, beyond mere words, that anything has changed at all. Obviously Turkey would not be supplying DAESH and buying their illegal oil if NATO was truly at war with DAESH, or, if they did, they would face the rage of the White House, which has the resources to put Turkey back in line easily. Nope. 

The reality is that DAESH, like Al Qaeda before, is nothing but a useful puppet, a convenient fake "enemy" under control in two ways: first, the direct operative control of the Western and allied secret services and, second, the effective control that prevents them from going rogue: that Islamism is a ghetto ideology that can never spread outside very specific cultural groups (unlike what may happen with Communism, a truly universal and genuinely antagonistic ideology) and that every single reactionary ideas recycled from the feudal period are expendable and can't last for long for intrinsic reasons of inviability. 

In fact this recycling of ideas from the Ancien Régime is typical of fascism and conservatism, but their practical function is only to serve as pretext to more practical goals: repression, imperialism and exploitation. In this case it is not even "Muslim" imperialism to what Islamism (at least the Sunni version of it, under tight Saudi control) serves to, it serves only to the imperialism of the West, largely against "Muslim" nations themselves. For example DAESH has been used to threaten key states like Indonesia or Nigeria against their drift towards more independent stances that may favor China and harm US/Western imperialism. 

But, beyond being a pretext for imperialist intervention or a tool in the Cold War II, islamo-fascist terrorism serves another key purpose inside the West: to sow fear that serves to justify repression and a drift towards a quasi-fascist political system, towards a totalitarian police state. Fortunately Europeans are showing to be less gullible in this aspect than their North American "friends" and attempts to enshrine a permanent state of emergency, as already happens in the USA, are being stopped. However that is the agenda of the NATO Empire and its key oligarchic shadow leaders: to consolidate itself as true formal and authoritarian empire, Roman style, and therefore it is likely that we will suffer more attacks until we either break free from NATO and Capitalism or we bow to the designs or the dark "masters of the universe", whose only real power is the control of token money (i.e. nothing too real, nothing that cannot be destroyed by democratic legislative action, because only law backs, or not, the dark magic of money).

I want to close this entry to an appeal to the real left: comrades, please, stop being so gullible and "good-ist", no real leftist, progressive, socialist alternative can be construed on the acceptation of the falsehoods of the official discourse. I know that it is not easy to challenge the mainstream discourse, built mostly by the bourgeois media at the service of their wealthy masters, but nothing is easy in the class war, so please, do your homework, document the many many inconsistencies in that official discourse and denounce them with all the loudspeaker power you can muster. What else?!

Islamist terror: nobody points to the culprits

First of all my condolences and solidarity with the victims of the Brussels attacks. Nobody surely deserves that but much less random civilians. 

But then I must say that, when Hollande and others talk of "war", they are not declaring "war" to the perpetrators but to the victims. Because the only victim of the police state is the common citizen, just as the victims of the terror attacks: the police state, the emergency laws are not any solution but exactly what the terrorist bosses intend. 

Even more bewildering is that nobody is declaring sanctions, war or whatever other punitive measure against those states who support DAESH. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are the most prominent and unrepentant ones, with lots of evidence pointing to them in spite of the discourse: the DAESH could not exist without them: Turkey controls its supplies routes but only feigns to "attack" DAESH as a pretext to murder Kurds, Saudi Arabia is not only the main human source of the terror group but also the principal financier and has been moving many of them between Syria/Iraq and Yemen, according to their priorities. Saudi Arabia has been in fact for four decades already behind Sunni Islamist terror worldwide, initially (1980s) in Afghanistan and Algeria primarily but then worldwide. Of course neither of these two could have ever done anything without the support of the United States and its local colony: Israel. While Israel has hidden better its own trail, the USA is well known to have created DAESH and equipped it. To this day it has done nothing to stop Turkey and Saudi Arabia from keeping the terrorist monster alive, on the contrary, it seems that "the problem" for them is only the legitimate governments of Damascus and Baghdad. 

So when are the sanctions and blockade against Saudi Arabia begin? When will Turkey be expelled from NATO and denied any kind of credence by the European Union? If you guys want to make "war" against DAESH terrorism, that's the way to go: attacking, not necessarily by military means, the states that support it, namely Turkey and Saudi Arabia (as well as others, but primarily these two rogue regimes). 

As far as anyone knows neither Iran, nor North Korea, nor Syria, nor Russia, nor any of the capricious victims of US-orchestrated imperialist sanctions supports the DAESH in any way, instead "our allies" do, "we" do. Why are "we" bombing ourselves? Should not we declare "war" on "us" (or should I capitalize "US")?

Let's get real: this is not a time for hystery nor for rallying the masses around those who support DAESH against a ghostly threat. The threat is within NATO, it controls state and even imperial level resources, and therefore the only possible "war" is internal within the imperial alliance against all those who feign outrage but actually allow or even promote this kind of senseless terror. We must wake up, this is just the burning of the Reichstag at another scale and, as soon as we scratch the surface, we can't but know it. 

The enemy is inside, the war, the only possible war, the only logical and fruitful one, is against those who control DAESH inside our very own states and imperial alliance.

Did France organize the terror attacks in its own soil?

I would not be surprised at all. In fact it has been my suspicion from day one considering what is DAESH, who arms, leads and equips it, the obligatory "cui bono?" question and the disproportionate reaction of declaring a permanent state of emergency in the Hexagon, just as happened in the USA after 9-11. 

But until now I had no evidence, just reasonable suspicion. Exiled French investigative journalist Thierry Meyssan shares now evidence, first published by the Croat newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, that strongly supports the case.

The evidence is that the weapons used in the attack, and also the previous one against a controversial magazine and a Jewish supermarket, were bought in Croatia and moved to France through customs officers associated to the far-right National Front (FN) party, Claude Hermant. 

Hermant is a shadowy character involved in what seems to be the so-called Deep State (or Gladio Network, which operates through all NATO and beyond), specifically the security department of the National Front (DPS), a true autonomous mini-army with wide connections with the overall state and not just the FN and, in opinion of Meyssan, directly controlled by the Elysée rather than by the FN:

In summary, Mr. Hermant belonged to a structure which, under cover of the security unit for the Front National, was unofficially charged by the Élysée with secret missions overseas. Today he is paid for freelance work by the Customs and the Gendarmerie, still without any official status. According to Slobodna Dalmacija, he bought decommissioned weapons in Serbia and recommissioned them himself, and that these were the weapons used in the attacks of January and November.

One could naively expect that maybe the police and judiciary would eventually unveil all this but in fact it seems most unlikely when the whole apparatus of the state is involved. Certainly Hermant, who is the weak link, was imprisoned but only because an independent tribunal from Calais got involved and not by the super-judges of Paris on charge of the main investigation: Christophe Tessier, Nathalie Poux et Laurence Le Vert. Le Vert, who is sadly well known to Basques for her many repressive interventions, is incidentally (but surely not accidentally) sister of Gérard Le Vert, the former boss of Hermant in the DPS. 

Meyssan concludes:

In conclusion, either Mr. Hermant was working on infiltrating the terrorist cells who perpetrated the attacks, without their action having been prevented, or else – and this is less probable – his current superiors, probably in the Élysée, themselves participated in the organisation of the attacks. But it still has to be determined why, and in whose name, Claude Hernant’s superiors acted as they did.

Why would it be less probable, Mr. Meyssan? Isn't it apparent that the attacks serve the interest of the deep French state, primarily, against its own population and, secondarily, against the Syrian people and state? Isn't it obvious that the state of emergency, an effective dictatorship with few concessions for free expression and right to protest, is what the regime was looking for?

Another question would be why is France pursuing this totalitarianism right now, when it has no obvious threats (the social conflict arena has been pretty much idle since the general strike of 2010 and the Real Left is making no gains in elections)? My suspicion is that it is part of a wider pan-European plan but that somehow, at least by now, it has not been fully implemented, not yet, not in other states (although the Spanish "muzzle law" is pretty much the same thing, just that with no pretext at all). Why is France of all the European states leading the way to outright fascism?

"Patriot Act" in France

The DAESH attacks in Paris are, I understand, controlled and authorized by NATO's "Deep State". Much like the 9/11 attacks in the USA 14 years ago, they have two objectives:

1. To provide a "Pearl Harbor" style justification for foreign military intervention, in this case clearly focused on Syria and ignoring the actual supporters of the DAESH, such as Saudi Arabia and its Gulf vassals, Turkey or the United States, among others (Putin recently mentioned 40 countries, several of which have seats in the G20). 
2. To induce a state of panic among the European population, French particularly, in order to push ahead with anti-democratic and repressive new legislation and de facto measures. This part can be split in three categories:
1. Anti-immigration (in spite of the fact that the authors of the attacks were French or Belgian and that they had been freely traveling in and out of the Schengen area without police ever interfering).
2. Against free transit of people in the European Union. This is about the only good thing we get from this confederacy: that the artificial borders are less apparent. 
3. Reinforcement of authoritarian tendencies and particularly of the police state, dismantling democracy and human rights for the sake of "security".

However the police state clearly failed to prevent the attacks, attacks that had been announced (for example the erratic Spanish political analyst J. Verstrynge considered a French 9/11 style attack certain and immediate in a debate two weeks ago, citing French government sources). The Schengen area was already suspended on the pretext of the Climate Summit and this was totally useless: the terrorists could travel between Paris and Brussels unhindered. Many increments of the police state (telecom spying without judicial authorization, among others) had already been approved after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and these were totally useless. The police state is useless, especially if it is the Deep State who organizes the attacks. Without purging our own hawks and secret services this kind of attacks can only happen once and again, if the shadow commanders think they are useful for their agenda of rallying the masses in favor of militarism, imperialism and repression. 

Anyway, what is happening now (source: Gara) is that President Hollande and PM Valls (what's up with France's hyper-successful police ministers: first Sarkozy, now Valls?) are promoting an increase of the police state. By the moment there is an extension of the state of emergency for three months, much more than the usual 12 days. But what they are proposing is a change of the constitution to the worse. In spite of the French nationality of the terrorists, their focus is xenophobic: allowing banning the entry in the Hexagon to double nationality citizens, speedy ways of expulsion of immigrants, and even the removal of the nationality for those indicted with "terrorism" charges (not for looting the public treasury like Sarkozy?). This last measure goes against the International Declaration of Human Rights which clearly states that people have the right to a nationality and not to be deprived of it. 

They will also forbid associations inciting to hate but it does not seem like the fascist National Front and their xenophobic discourse will be included.

Additionally more jobs will be created in the police apparatus: 5000 new gendarmes, 2800 new judiciary workers and 1000 new border officers. 

An interesting read is also Tierry Meyssan's article on the attacks. A bit clouted with lots of details but emphasizing that it is the Deep State who's running the show, largely the Pentagon directly (people like Petraeus, Clinton or Allen, and of course we can't forget the long menacing shadow of Sarkozy). Interestingly he mentions that the very day of November 13 the emergency services of Paris held a drill of reaction against multiple terrorist attacks. Coincidence? This kind of "coincidences" happen too often, so most certainly not.

Why are West Ukraine's spies so scared of what may happen to their families?

As the Kiev Junta prepares to attack the rebel regions of the East with a massive military buildup, three spies were captured by the militias of the People's Republic of Donetsk. They are part of an "elite" intel force known as Alpha and, although they legally do not have to as they were caught in civilian clothes, Donetsk Republic will grant them PoW status. 

→ Russia Today .

Most interestingly, the spies expressed concern about the well being of their families back in Western Ukraine:

One of the detainees hinted that they were afraid for the wellbeing of their families. “If I did something wrong,” he said, “I think nothing good would happen to my family.” Although there were no direct threats to their families, he said that was because the “mechanism was not launched” as they were abiding by orders. 

What's that mechanism? Who is threatening the families of the Junta's spies? Is that the Ukrainian Nazis (Svoboda, Right Sector) or is it  simply NATO's Gladio network (the deep state terrorist backbone of the US Empire)? Actually they are both probably the same in general lines, as Gladio has always relied on far-right extremists of Christian, chauvinist and anti-communist ideas.

This group is unrelated from the alleged "OSCE monitors", who are actually envoys from individual Western states (not OSCE as a whole but specifically Germany, Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, all them NATO members), and who are accused by Donetsk to be NATO spies and which may be used in prisoner exchange in the context of a hypothetical de-escalation that will most likely not happen.

There is a persistent rumor on the Internet about the Kiev Junta rapidly losing support within NATO, not because they are Nazis, nope, but because they are extremely inefficient, and have been given an ultimatum until Wednesday to bring the East on their knees or lose support. 

So it is very possible that they try something in the next few days and that it may happen to be a massacre, or also a fiasco, as soldiers have in the past refused to attack the civilians.

Gladio: Nato's shadow state (III): against communism by any means necessary

The third article[es] of Daniele Ganser on the Gladio affair (French version) is most interesting for the present time, especially as communist forces like SYRIZA in Greece (or maybe others in the near future or at sub-state level, as may be the Basque case) aspire to reach to power by purely electoral means.

Some, very naively, expect the state apparatus to obey them as soon as they reach power but the reality is quite the opposite and the increased Nazi penetration in the Greek police forces is the proverbial tip of the iceberg that evidences that the deep state of the Balcanic country is getting ready to counter such an eventuality by all means. 

Gladio investigations established that NATO is not merely a defensive alliance but first and foremost an anti-communist organization of global reach. They also evidence that the real command is in Washington and not Brussels, with Europeans being relegated to a secondary role as auxiliary forces of the American Empire. Role that nevertheless many exert enthusiastically. 

A key organism is the hyper-secret Security Bureau, created in 1949 and whose declared mission is to coordinate, oversee and implement NATO's security policies. It's top officer is the Security Director, main councilor of NATO's Secretary General and President of the Security Committee of NATO. This committee gathers the chiefs of security services of NATO member states and discusses matters such as espionage, terrorism, subversion and other threats, including communism. 

In other words: it coordinates all NATO secret services. However some such services seem to have acted independently from their governments with full blessing by NATO. According to Portuguese newspaper Expresso (1990):

It seems evident that NATO applies a criterion of restricted trust. Under such doctrine some governments are not active enough in the struggle against communism, so it is not useful to inform them about the activities of the NATO's secret army. 

In a closed doors meeting, whose details were revealed by Portuguese media, Manfred Wörner, then NATO's Secretary General, explained that the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) coordinates the activities of the Gladio network through the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC), created in 1952. 

This network was first created in Italy as early as 1947 (the same year in which the CIA was organized) and then extended to the rest of Europe: France, Belgium, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and Greece.

Former NATO Secretary General Joseph Luns declared to the press that he had no knowledge of the network. Luns implied that every secret operation was part of NATO, emphasizing that NATO is controlled by the USA and that the Commander General of the organization (SACEUR) is always a US-American appointed by Washington (the Deputy SACEUR has been mostly British but, since 1980, also occasionally German).

Thomas Polgar, retired CIA officer, acknowledged that there exists "a sort of group in charge of planning non-conventional war". He also emphasized US control of this department. 

According to the Belgian parliamentary committee, this organization was founded even before NATO itself with the name of Clandestine Committee of the Western Union (CCWU), which coordinated the allied secret services. This seems to be the same as the Security Bureau, as it's known nowadays, but was known for long as Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC). 

The first public evidence of the existence of secret anti-communist protocols was revealed in 1966, soon after De Gaulle retired France from the NATO structure (not the alliance itself) and expelled NATO headquarters from French soil. It was De Gaulle himself who denounced such protocols as a violation of national sovereignty.

According to US journalist Arthur Rowse (1994):

A secret clause of the original NATO treaty stipulated that every country candidate to adhesion must have established first a National Security authority in charge of directing the fight against Communism through clandestine citizen groups. 

Italian journalist Giuseppe de Lutiis found that in 1949, in the event of joining NATO, Italy had to sign a protocol establishing an unofficial organization in charge of guaranteeing the alignment of Italy's internal policies with those of the Western bloc by all means necessary, even in the event that the population would manifest a divergent inclination.

NATO officers have confirmed on condition of anonymity that such protocols explicitly protect far right members considered useful in the fight against communists. Even West Germany signed such protocols, in which it explicitly agreed to abstain from prosecuting notorious Nazi activists (Searchlight 1991).

The CPC was all the time directed by Washington, with a secondary role for London and Paris (before De Gaulle's walk out). In all CPC meetings there were CIA officers. A parallel structure is the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC), created by order of the fourth SACEUR, Lauris Norstadt, in 1952. It's more relaxed and horizontal ambient allowed Gladio commanders to share their networks more effectively.

To this day NATO still denies the existence of either the CPC or the ACC. But even former CIA officers like Thomas Polgar have acknowledged them as very real. However no public debate has ever existed in the North American federation on these matters. Just a few journalists have attempted to inquire on these matters but had no or very limited success. 

Britain must also be mentioned. In 1991 the BBC reported that the role of Great Britain in the creation of these "stay behind" networks was central. This should surprise nobody considering that London was deeply implicated in the ascent of European fascisms in the 1920s and 1930s, including that of Hitler, naturally (just that he got off the leash by threatening to invade Russia single-handedly, which would have given Berlin too much power if successful). British democracy is a mere facade, serving as cover for terribly secret entities like the MI6, whose very existence was only revealed to the public in 1994.

Almost nothing of the British dirty war is known to this day. Nobody in Westminster seems concerned: the regime has 100% of the seats or almost.

Main source[es]: Daniele Ganser "Gladio: Por qué la OTAN, la CIA y el MI6 siguen negando" (also in French). 

Previous entries: I, II.

Gladio: NATO's shadow state (II)

I continue here synthesizing the most important historical data provided by Daniele Ganser at Voltaire Network in Spanish and French on NATO's secret army, popularly known by its Italian codename Gladio. 

As we saw in the previous entry, Andreotti's confessional discourse revealed that Gladio existed in all other NATO member states and that it was a NATO organization under US ultimate control. His discourse took place however on August 2nd 1990, the very same day in which Saddam Hussein's Army (baited by Washington, who winked to him implying that it was a well earned prize for its efforts against Iran) invaded Kuwait.

The non-free European media saw in that developing conflict the perfect excuse to ignore, as much as possible, the murky story of Gladio. However some investigations did took place, notably in Belgium. 

Most governments tried to avoid the matter altogether or at least minimize its relevance. The most notorious were the British, whose ministers declined again and again to make any comment "on security issues". The Parliament also avoided pushing any investigation.

France explicitly denied the existence of such network in its soil, claiming that it had been disbanded in the 1950s. Andreotti replied that France was present in the latest meeting of the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC), the command of the stay-behind network, in 1990, what forced the authorities to argue that it was just a preemptive force which played not active role.

Portuguese authorities also stepped in to deny that the local Gladio branch was used in defense of the Fascist regime of Salazar. However a retired general contradicted them. 

In Spain, Minister Oliart laughed at the questions by journalists as naive: "here the government itself was Gladio", he said, meaning the fascist government of Franco. However the incipient investigation on the continuity of the Spanish Gladio after 1978 were curtailed by simply firing the journalists researching the matter, as I recall clearly. 

In Denmark the minister in charge was contradictory, appealing to the confidentiality of the matter, while denying the existence of the secret state in the most vague terms. 

In Norway, the authorities acknowledged the existence of the local Gladio but rejected to discuss its details on the grounds of being top secret. 

Luxembourg also acknowledged the existence of the stay-behind network but denied that it had any other activity than being prepared for the event of a hypothetical Soviet invasion. 

In the Netherlands the Prime Minister assumed all the responsibility and denied that the network was under NATO command. 

Greece was the first state to be splashed by the Gladio scandal after Italy. The Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou claimed with his characteristic cold blood that, as soon as he discovered the existence of such secret army in 1984, he commanded its elimination. Some MPs demanded an investigation to find out the role played by the Greek Gladio in the fascist dictatorship but the government ignored them. 

In Germany there was some investigation on demand of the Green Party, while the media revealed that former members of the SS took part in the secret army. Not just in Germany: in other countries also extreme right activists had been recruited into Gladio.

Hans Klein, Speaker of Helmut Kohl's government appealed to military secrecy in order not to reveal any details. The opposition used the scandal for the upcoming elections, being a clear case of unconstitutional structure, which was even compared to the Ku Klux Klan.

A parliamentary commission was created. In it Burkhard Hirsch, on charge of the secret services in Kohl's government, recognized he was very unease with the matter, claiming that he had never heard of it before. He said with unusual sincerity for a spy chief:

If something can remain secret for so long, and you can trust my long experience, is because there is something rotten. 

As soon as the conservative government declared that the socialdemocrat ministers of past governments were also privy to those secrets, the SPD abandoned all belligerence. Therefore the commission met in secret in spite of the protests of Die Grünen. 

One wonders what role played this secret organization in the murder of Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian just a couple of years later. Back in the day it was rumored that they were in the course of investigating something big, possibly this very imperial secret army.

The biggest investigation took place in Belgium, where PM Wilfried Martens declared to ignore everything about it. He said with apparent worry:

I have been Prime Minister for the last eleven years but I have always ignored the existence of a network in our country. 

The investigation revealed that the actual commander of the Belgian Gladio was the secret service boss General Raymond Van Calster. Van Calster initially denied everything but later he admitted that it existed with a mere intelligence goal for the hypothetical event of a Soviet invasion. 

There was great worry because, as in Italy, indiscriminate terrorist attacks had been performed against the civilian population. In 1980, mysterious men dressed in black opened fire against supermarket customers in Brabant, killing many.

But maybe the most striking case with repercussions reaching to this very day was the Turkish one. Ankara admitted that Gladio existed in the country and pretended, as in other states, that it was a mere passive network in preparation of a Soviet invasion. 

However it soon became known by mouth of former PM Bülent Ecevit that the Turkish network, eventually known as Ergenekon, was deeply involved in tortures, terrorist attacks and murders.

In 1996 a car accident at Susurluk killed three not-so-unlikely buddies: a member of the anti-Kurdish terrorist groups, a top police officer and a member of Parliament. Thousands protested against the "deep state".

Two years later, PM Mesut Ylmaz had to acknowledge the existence of a death squad at the very heart of the state with full knowledge of the authorities. The Ergenekon case was only brought to trial recently, but it seems that only some of those involved have been prosecuted, those against whom Erdogan's Islamists wanted revenge. The bulk are probably still at large.

Main source[es]: Daniele Ganser "Cuando se descubrió el Gladio en los Estados europeos…" (also available in French).

Gladio: NATO's shadow state (I)

When Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said that the attackers of September 9th 2001 were "America's chicken coming home to roost" he was nailing it. However the chicken are not, as he implied, bearded Islamists but rather Christian right-wing extremists who make up the real shadow government in Europe, that overseas province of the USA, and now also in the homeland as well. 

Daniele Ganser has written for Voltaire Network a series of articles in Spanish (most also available in French) on the "stay-behind" network of NATO known popularly as Gladio, it's Italian name. 

The work is almost monumental but I will try to synthesize here and in future articles the most essential of it, because it is something that we must all know about, surely more important than electoral politics and the like.

The first article deals with the best known Gladio network and the only properly deserving that name: the Italian one. 

Bologna station after the NATO attack

Between 1969 and 1987, the so-called years of lead, several terrorist massacres against civilians took place in Italy, inspiring fear and serving as pretext to persecute the communists, who were blamed for the attacks (just as they were blamed for the Reichstag fire by the Nazis). Not just the Brigate Rosse were persecuted until their annihilation but many many intellectuals and activists who had no part in armed struggle were as well.

Italy had the belated luck that a judge, Felice Cassone, eventually began investigating the many issues surrounding all these massacres and political attacks. As it became known in the trial, almost 15,000 acts of political violence shattered Italy between those dates, many of them being brutal indiscriminate attacks in which 491 people were killed and 1181 injured.

Cassone indicted one man, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a fascist member of the secret organization Ordine Nuovo (New Order), who confessed that he enjoyed total protection by a whole well-positioned network in Italy as in other countries.

In the trials, General Giandelio Maletti, former chief of the Italian counter-espionage, declared that not just nearly all the Italian state was involved in Gladio but that every single attack was approved by the White House and the CIA. In his own words:

The CIA, following the orders of their government, wanted to forge an Italian Nationalism able to counter what they considered a slide to the Left and, with that goal, they could use far-right terrorism. (...) One was under the impression that the Americans were willing to do anything to impede that Italy leaned to the Left. (...) Don't forget that it was Nixon who was the head of the government and Nixon was not any common guy, he was a very smart politician but a man of very unorthodox methods. 

In 1988 the Italian Senate created a commission to investigate the matter. It was a difficult process, as witnesses did not want to speak, documents were destroyed and the Right sabotaged the investigation all they could. However in 1990 Gladio was confirmed as a very real thing. 

However the conscience of this terrorist network existed since long before. In 1974, another judge, Giovanni Tamburino, brought General Vito Miceli, commander of the SID (military secret service, later SISMI) to trial, accused of creating a secret organization that gathered civilians and officers alike, whose goal was to stir an armed insurrection in order to illegally modify the Constitution and the composition of the government.

Miceli, who had also been chief of NATO's Security Bureau, declared in anger:

Did I have a super-SID under my command? Of course! But I did not organize it myself in order to stage a coup, I merely obeyed the orders of the USA and NATO!

Giulio Andreotti

Sadly Miceli got away on bail and the network remained poorly known until the revelations of quasi-permanent Prime Minister Andreotti in 1990, who acted only on demand of the Senate and in a climate of many investigations, which even put the very godfather of Italian politics in jail for some time. It was the only occasion in which Gladio was revealed in full.

Andreotti edited his first written declaration. However Senator Gualtieri, President of the Commission, had made copies of the original version. When compared, it became obvious that Andreotti had edited all the references to international connections and the existence of Gladio in other states. 

It was such a poor trick that in his final version Andreotti admitted that Gladio was a network extending through all NATO, which in Italy was originally agreed between the CIA and the local secret services as a "stay behind" network against possible Soviet invasion. 

This cooperation was structured within NATO's Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), founded in 1959, which was part of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). In 1964 the Italian secret services got incorporated also to the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC). 

However Andreotti's report was in some contradiction with the declarations of Vinciguerra in the sense that the veteran politician claimed that Gladio was not involved in the terrorist attacks. He also declared that every single Prime Minister was informed of the existence of the stay-behind network, causing major embarrassment to the other Prime Ministers of the First Republic. Only the then President Francesco Cossiga acknowledged the fact, declaring his "pride" for contributing to its creation in the 1950s and to be able to keep such a secret for so long. 

Subsequent political turbulence forced his resignation in 1992.

Meanwhile Andreotti had confirmed in public audience that Gladio was a NATO structure and that it existed also in other member states, mentioning by name Germany, Greece, Denmark, Belgium and even France.

The Senate Commission concluded that:

Those massacres, those bombings, those military operations were organized, instigated or supported by people who worked for the Italian institutions and, as was discovered more recently, by individuals linked to the US intelligence structures.

Those are the "chickens" who came back "home to roost". Let's not forget that G.W. Bush' administration was almost exactly that of Nixon.