@Alligator Ed

The British Council is funded 15% by the UK government. Where does the rest come from?

Their website states they sell training and testing in English language proficiency.

But, it appears they may be just another NED type operation to be used as a front for spooks to operate from.

Russia shuts down undercover MI6 operation in Moscow
...
The decision to stop the activities of the British Council in Russia was made because of the fact that British intelligence MI6 was operating under the guise of this organization, as stated by a veteran of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, Igor Morozov. He recalled that the British side did not agree to the opening iof the Russian Center of Science and Culture in London, whose functions correspond to the officially announced functions of the British Council.
...

#1 . The British Council is funded 15% by the UK government. Where does the rest come from? George Soros? There self-declared mission is to "confer" with the UK gov't to align policies. The British council participated in internal Russian affairs, such as blaming the Skripal poisoning with Novichok on, who else? The Brits made and may still make VX, a Novicihock-Like agent at Porton Down, 8 blocks from the restaurant where 61 OTHER people also were sickened.

Sounds to me like the DNC and the host of pseudo philanthropies operated by the Clinton War machine. DNC acts like an NGO, of course with now blatant cheating. DNC is partially funded by Democrats but also by the US government, funded by the Clinton mafia, along with probably both Soros and the CIA. The DNC of course started screaming about Russian hacking but never provided their servers for governmental or truly independent examination.

The failure of the Brits to provide samples of the poisoning agent is the same as the DNC failing to surrender its servers. Now Tories are as assuredly screaming Russia Russia Russia as the whole Dim party has been, without proof, for 18 months.

Same playbook. Our spooks are definitely educating Whitehall, as if MI-6 needed any.

@wendy davis
in the Hague but at the same time prevent Russia from doing any independent investigation themselves. It's like a prosecutor having all the "evidence" but refusing to let the defendant have any access to it.

It's similar to the secret "investigation" of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Little evidence was released to Russia or the public allowing the "trial" to proceed by propaganda and manipulation in the media. We all know who controls the MSM in the west and how powerful and insidious they are.

From previous reports about CW's in Syria, it is apparent that OPCW reports can be politicized.

Whenever I see international agencies do their work in secrecy I question the results. The OPCW is supposed to be transparent and neutral. Also, why did the UK refuse to allow the OPCW to start an investigation immediately? Will the chain of custody for the evidence have been compromised as it was in Syria?

Implementing the Convention

Every State Party must implement the provisions under the CWC at the national level. This includes enacting penal legislation encompassing all activities prohibited. In addition, each State Party is obliged to provide other States Parties with its fullest cooperation to expedite prosecution.

The Secretariat supports States Parties in their national implementation providing advice and assistance to the staff of National Authorities, in order to help them enhance their skills and expertise to facilitate effective, autonomous, national implementation.

#2

‘Johnson says UK to hand Skripal evidence to OPCW as he points finger at Moscow’, march 18. RT now if you can parse this, i tip my hat to you:

“While Johnson said that London would allow the international OPCW experts in The Hague to review the British analysis of the sample, the UK refuses to enact the mechanism in the OPCW that calls for a thorough investigation, the Russian FM noted. He added that “if you appeal to this organization, you must comply with the provisions of the convention that stipulate filing a request to us, because we are suspected of being a country of origin and even the country which had used this poisoning agent, and, providing us with samples of this agent, so we, together with OPCW experts, can analyze it.”

there are several internal links to try to make sense of it...

more on May's part in it later.

@snoopydawg

NATO appears to have been, most unfortunately, used as a tool in the long-running incremental corporate/military global takeover.

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Operation Gladio is a NATO-backed paramilitary network established after WW2, originally inspired by fear of the USSR. It was also called the "Stay behind network", since if the Red Army invaded Europe, its members would 'stay behind' enemy lines and disrupt Soviet control. Officially non-existant, secrecy was such that these networks were hard for NATO/MI6/Deep state officials to control. Gladio was responsible for bombings, kidnappings and assassinations to such an extent that the network was publicly exposed in Italy in the 1980s and was the subject of a BBC documentary by Alan Francovich some years later.[1] The project was adapted in the mid 1990s as "Gladio B", using "Moslem terrorists" as a substitute enemy image for communists. ...

And here we are, back full-circle to 'Communists' - regarding a no longer remotely Communist country that they themselves warped into crony-capitalism via their routine electoral interference of which they then accuse their previous victim, as an excuse for attacking them - because Putin's been making Russia independent, cleaning out the corruption which the US PTB installed, and providing basic social benefits such as pensions and health care to his people out of their own resources rather than allowing his people and country to be polluted and sucked dry in order to provide maximized profits to The Right People/Corporations.

Meanwhile, The Psychopaths That Be blatantly work with terrorists they've created themselves, one way or another, terming them 'moderate rebels', to disrupt, dispossess and kill civilians. When not starving them with 'official sanctions' also depriving them of medical care. The powerless citizens seem always to be the target, which would be why they seem to always suffer the most.

I have never been able to see any sense in claims of civilian groups harming/killing innocent and powerless citizens as a protest - purportedly directed against those actually having power, doing the damage and clearly uncaring of all resultant suffering and loss of life - thus also triggering public detestation of the group and damaging their own cause. And that's because there wasn't any sense in it and it appears that these maimings and killings of innocent civilians are typically committed around the world because globally interlocked TPTB and their various secret projects wish to control and strip rights from a population, believe that carefully manipulated fear will make a people turn neocon and beg for fascism to be imposed upon themselves, (which unfortunately does work on a number of people, if not nearly as well as the Clinton CorpoDems believe) are manufacturing an excuse to attack/invade a country or apparently to discredit certain groups and their aims - if involving any degree of public good or hope for a better - or any - future for the general public.

We mustnever swallow the propaganda that the pathology instilled in various societies has anything to do with 'human nature'; humans naturally tend toward forming a social contract in one form or another, the possession of and respect for the essential human qualities of ethics and empathy being a basic requirement for species survival.

Psychopaths are parasitic and destructively predate upon others due to mental deficiencies limiting their capacities and perceptions; just because a society can survive for some time with a certain level of these within their midst does not make it acceptable or sustainable to allow the very ruthlessness of their limited and self-interested world-view to gain power over anyone.

TPTB 'hate us for our freedoms' and detest democracy enforcing equal rights for all, the 'social contract', what I term an ideal socialism, where the fulfillment of human needs, including equal rights and protection from predation for all, forms the first priority of (the delegates of) the overall social unit having public ownership and control over all human essentials and natural resources, because the general concept of equality and lack of deprivation for 'lesser beings' underlying these denies TPTB their imposition of their own 'personal exceptionalism', they seeing themselves as being the only Ones Who Matter. The rest of us are either useful or disposable. And in that sense, they are, indeed 'Lizard people'.

Back to:

https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Operation Gladio

...Problems

The power hierarchy of Gladio remains unclear to this day, and is unknown to elected national leaders. When the European Union learned of the existence of Gladio, it passed a resolution mandating national investigations to reveal what was going on, but as of 2016, only 5 countries have done so (including Italy, Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland). A large question mark therefore remains over the role that Operation Gladio has played, and continues to play in influencing events. It seems very likely that the deep state controls these forces whether through the national intelligence services or in more informal fashion. The connection, in particular, with false flag terrorist attacks is particularly concerning.
Operation Gladio B

Full article: Rated 5/5 Operation Gladio B

Sibel Edmonds has exposed an international development of the original Gladio program referred to as "Operation Gladio B", which can be understood as a response in the min 1990s to the subsidence of the Soviet threat after the end of the cold war. As a way of kickstarting the "war on terror", instead of nationalist extremists in European countries, radical Muslims are armed, trained and assisted to carry out terrorist attacks while law enforcement is prevented from intervening.
Introduction
Dr. Daniele Ganser Interview: Nato's Secret Armies - Operation Gladio

Operation Gladio first came to light in Italy in 1990, after over 40 years of clandestine operations. Members of the project revealed that similar projects existed in most if not all countries of Western Europe.[2] These stay-behind networks were, in essence, super secret armies in at least 14 European countries, which were kept secret from the official governmental structures of the host countries – being controlled by other forces such as the CIA and MI6. They remained mostly dormant but were also involved in anti-communist activities including anti-democratic agitation and false flag "terrorism".

The name Gladio, (or ‘Sword’ in Italian) was technically the name given to their operations in Italy, but has since come by extension to stand for the phenomenon as a whole. Evidence of such arrangements, which had been kept secret from both public and politicians democratically elected governments in the host countries for a quarter of a century was revealed through a series of scandalous revelations in Italy and other NATO countries during the 90s, and meticulously documented by Swiss historian Daniele Ganser in his 2004 book NATO’s Secret Armies,[3] arguably the most shocking book ever to be ignored by the corporate media. The evidence contained in Ganser’s book, of terrorism directed against the people by secret armies funded and organised by NATO and answerable to deep state elements within NATO, MI6 and the CIA rather than the respective governments is so shocking that the initial reaction of most people would be to reject it. And yet the claims have been substantiated by juridical inquiries in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium and have been debated (and condemned) in the European Parliament. ...

...The Strategy of Tension

Full article: Strategy of Tension

During his trial, Vincenzo Vinciguerra revealed that, in addition to discrediting left wing political groups, there had been a second aim behind the bombings - to inculcate a climate of fear among the general populace. This was known as the 'strategy of tension' which was intended to generate a pervasive sense of fear which would encourage the population to appeal to the state for protection. As Vincenzo Vinciguerra summarized during his trial:

‘You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public to turn to the State to ask for greater security.’

In Francovich's documentary on Gladio, he described the aim as to ‘destabilise in order to stabilise’… ‘To create tension within the country to promote conservative, reactionary social and political tendencies.’
Bologna1.jpg

In 1990 Judge Casson was given permission by prime minister Giulio Andreotti to search the archives of the Italian military secret service Servizio informazioni sicurezza Militare (SISMI) where he found proof of the existence of the Gladio network, and links to NATO and the United States. Following this, on 3 August 1990 prime minister Andreotti confirmed to parliament the existence of the Gladio networks but claimed they had ceased operating in 1972. This was subsequently revealed to be false by the Italian press. Andreotti then admitted the existence of the Gladio networks and their connection to NATO. ...

... The Scandal Spreads

Fortuitously for the powers-that-be Andreotti’s revelations coincided with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and as a result did not garner the publicity they almost certainly otherwise would have. Even so, the scandal began to spread. In October Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou confirmed there had been a Gladio network in Greece. In Germany a TV programme shocked the nation by revealing how former members of Hitler’s Special Forces SS had been part of a German stay-behind network. The Belgian Parliament appointed a special committee to investigate the existence – confirmed by the defence minister – of a Belgian Gladio network.

Most sensitively the Belgian parliamentarians discovered that the secret NATO army was still active. They found that a secret meeting of Generals directing the secret stay-behind armies in the numerous countries in Western Europe had been held in the secret NATO-linked Gladio headquarters ACC as recently as October 23 and 24, 1990. The meeting of the ACC had taken place in Brussels under the chairmanship of General Raymond Van Calster, chief of the Belgian military secret service SGR (Service General de Renseignement).[5]

In France President Mitterand claimed that the French Gladio network had been dissolved long ago but to his enormous embarrassment Andreotti then claimed the French had taken part in the recent meeting in Brussels. And so it went on. British defence officials refused to comment. In Portugal, contrary to official denials, a retired general confirmed there had been such a network in Portugal, while in Spain former defence minister Alberto Oliart claimed it was childish to "ask whether also under dictator Franco a secret right-wing army had existed in the country because 'here Gladio was the government'."[6]

In Turkey former prime minister Bulent Ecevit went even further and admitted that a secret army had been involved in torture, massacres, assassinations and coups d'etat, prompting the serving defence minister Giray to retort "Ecevit had better keep his fucking mouth shut!"[7]
The EU Debate

In all, 12 EU countries were affected and on November 22 1990 the European Parliament debated the issue.

The tone was set by Greek parliamentarian Ephremidis:

'Mr. President, the Gladio system has operated for four decades under various names. It has operated clandestinely, and we are entitled to attribute to it all the destabilization, all the provocation and all the terrorism that have occurred in our countries over these four decades, and to say that, actively or passively, it must have had an involvement.' Ephremidis sharply criticised the entire stay-behind network: 'The fact that it was set up by the CIA and NATO which, while purporting to defend democracy were actually undermining it and using it for their own nefarious purposes.'

(DG p.21) ...
... He concludes:

The dog barked loudly, but it did not bite. Of the eight actions requested by the EU parliament not one was carried out satisfactorily. Only Belgium, Italy and

Switzerland investigated their secret armies with a parliamentary commission, producing a lengthy and detailed public report.
(DG pp. 23–24)

Silence from NATO, CIA & MI6

NATO reacted to these revelations in November 1990 with confusion. Against a background of newspaper headlines typified by the Guardian’s ‘Bombs Used at Bologna came from NATO unit’, spokesmen first denied the stories and then denied the denials by saying it was a subject which couldn’t be discussed on grounds of military secrecy.

The Portuguese press reported on November 7 a confirmation, NATO secretary General Manfred Woerner was quoted as telling in secret 16 ambassadors of NATO countries, Worner confirmed that the military command of the allied forces - Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) - coordinated the activities of the

"Gladio Network", which had been erected by the secret services in various countries of NATO, through a committee created in 1952.
(DG p.27)

German press confirmed that the so-called Secret Armies were co-ordinated in a special secure wing of NATO HQ in Casteau. Access was via a bank vault type door and papers were circulated with the stamp ‘American Eyes Only.’

The revelations began to mount and a picture emerged of a NATO Clandestine Planning Committee, responsible for the Gladio armies; of protocols which actively protected right-wing extremists from pursuit since they would be useful in anti-Communist activities. The CPC was run by the US with the UK and France as junior partners, with CIA members present at their meetings. Despite numerous revelations from those who took part, the official NATO position was (and is) one of denial. Official CIA response to information requests has been to neither confirm nor deny. In the UK, MI6 was even more cagey, prompting John Simpson on BBC 2’s Newsnight programme in April 1991 to say

'Britain's role in setting up stay-behinds throughout Europe was absolutely fundamental... it has emerged that other European countries had their own stay-behind armies - Belgium, France, Holland, Spain, Greece, Turkey. Even in neutral Sweden and Switzerland there has been public debate. And in some cases enquiries have been set up. Yet in Britain, there is nothing. Save the customary comment of the ministry of defence that they don't discuss matters of national security.'

(DG p.36)

Paradoxically, despite the secrecy, an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum tacitly admitted the existence of the stay behind networks, and subsequent to this, two former Royal Marine officers admitted to having spent time at Fort Monckton near Portsmouth where MI6 and members of the SAS trained foreign gladiators.
Precursors

The original models for the secret armies had been set up in the UK during WW2 by Section D of MI6. Arms caches were buried in anticipation of a German invasion. Initially, this was a purely domestic affair, but in 1940 with the inception of Special Operations Executive (SOE) the same tactics were taken behind enemy lines throughout occupied Europe. Officially SOE was closed down in 1946 and gave way to a successor - Special Operation (SO) - created under the auspices of MI6 to translate the same networks into resistance in countries overrun by the Soviets. Surviving secret units of the Axis powers were targeted and members of the defeated were sometimes recruited for the new anti-Soviet stay-behind networks. ...

... Allan Francovich's 1992 Expose

Full article: Operation Gladio (film)

Operation Gladio (film).jpg

John Major's government continued to peddle the line of not commenting on matters of national security but headlines continued. Newsnight in April 1991 highlighted the evidence that the Gladio networks had operated politically with subversion of the Left. This was reinforced a year later in three ground-breaking documentaries for the BBC by Allan Francovich. Francovich made extensive use of primary sources, focusing almost exclusively on Gladio in Italy and in Belgium, where he looked at the Brabant Massacres and attempted to connect them to the Gladioesque anti-communist group, Westland New Post. His documentary interviews key figures in Gladio such as Licio Gelli, head of the P2, Italian right-wing activist Vincenzo Vinciguerra, Venetian judge and Gladio discoverer Felice Casson, Italian Gladio commander General Gerardo Serravalle, Senator Roger Lallemand, head of the Belgian Parliamentary inquiry into Gladio, Decimo Garau, former Italian instructor at the Sardinian Gladio base, William Colby, former Director of CIA and Martial Lekeu, former member of the Belgian Gendarmerie to name but a few. ...

... Gladio-orchestrated coups in Italy.

One reason the US focussed such attention on Italy was the country had become an ideological battleground between left and right after the Second World War. The communist party was popular and strong and ranged against it on the right stood an ad hoc coalition of the Italian military secret service, right wing extremists as well as the Mafia and the CIA. Much of the wartime fascist bureaucracy survived, with the support of the US. Most notoriously, Prince Valerio Borghese (whose partisan army had killed hundreds of communists during the war), was saved from execution by the protection of the US. Such was the American determination that Italy should not go communist that President Truman signed a top secret order in 1950 which explicitly included invasion of Italy as an option if the country should turn red.

In April 1963 the socialists and communists did well in the polls, with members of the socialist party given cabinet posts but the success was short-lived. The following November Kennedy was assassinated and five months later the Italian socialists were forced out of office by a right-wing coup orchestrated by the CIA and Gladio units.

Code-named 'Piano Solo' the coup was directed by General Giovanni De Lorenzo whom Defence Minister Giulio Andreotti of the DCI had transferred

from chief of SIFAR to chief of the Italian paramilitary police, the Carabinieri. In close cooperation with CIA secret warfare expert Vernon Walters, William Harvey, chief of the CIA station in Rome, and Renzo Rocca, Director of the Gladio units within the military secret service SID, De Lorenzo escalated the secret war. Rocca first used his secret Gladio army to bomb the offices of the DCI and the offices of a few daily newspapers and thereafter blamed the terror on the left in order to discredit both Communists and Socialists. As the government was not shaken, De Lorenzo in Rome on March 25, 1964 instructed his secret soldiers that upon his signal they were to 'occupy government offices, the most important communication centres, the headquarters of the leftist parties and the seats of the newspapers closest to the left, as well as the radio and television centres. Newspaper agencies were to be occupied strictly for the time only that it takes to destroy the printing machines and to generally make the publication of newspapers impossible.' De Lorenzo insisted that the operation had to be carried out with 'maximum energy and decisiveness, free of any doubts or indecisiveness' and, as the Gladio investigation put it, made his men 'feverish and biting'. The Gladiators equipped with proscription lists naming several hundred persons had the explicit order to track down designated Socialists and Communists, arrest and deport them to the island of Sardinia where the secret Gladio centre was to serve as a prison. The document on 'The Special Forces of SIFAR and Operation Gladio' had specified that 'As for the operating headquarters, the Saboteur's Training CAG is being protected by a particularly sensitive security system and equipped with installations and equipment designed to be useful in case of an emergency.' In an atmosphere of greatest tension the secret army was ready to start the coup. Then, on June 14, 1964, De Lorenzo gave the go-ahead and with his troops entered Rome with tanks, armoured personnel carriers, jeeps and grenade launchers while NATO forces staged a large military manoeuvre in the area to intimidate the Italian government. Cunningly the General claimed that the show of muscle was taking place on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Carabinieri and, together with feverishly anti-Communist Italian President Antonio Segni of the right-wing of the DCI, saluted the troops with a smile. The Italian Socialists noted that somewhat unusually for a parade the tanks and grenade launchers were not withdrawn after the show but stayed in Rome during May and most of June 1964 .
(DG p.72)

A second CIA-backed right-wing coup, code-named Tora-Tora,, was planned for December 1970 but was called off at the last minute. Reportedly, the phone call that aborted it came from President Nixon himself.

As a consequence, the Left continued to gain ground in Italy. Foreign secretary Aldo Moro together with president Giovanni Leone flew to the US but were told by Henry Kissinger|Kissinger]] that on no account should the Left be included in government. Aldo Moro’s wife Eleonora later testified that the words used to her husband were, "You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration. Either you give this up or you will pay dearly for it.'" (DG p.79)

Subsequently Moro was kidnapped and murdered.

The Senate commission investigating Gladio and the terrorist bombings suspected the CIA and the Italian military secret service to have organised the abduction and murder of Moro. It therefore reopened the case but found that almost all files on the Moro kidnapping and murder had mysteriously disappeared from the archives of the Ministry of the Interior. The final 370-page report of the commission concluded in 1995 that, ‘It emerges without the shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s a massive operation in order to counter by the use of all means the spreading of groups and movements of the left on a European level.’ However these words were not strong enough for some Senators who continued the investigation under the chairmanship of Senator Pellegrini and concluded in June 2000 that

'those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.

(DG p.82)

Ganser continues his inquiry with an exhaustive but depressingly familiar account of the same anti-democratic crimes being played out in the other countries of Western Europe, both within and without NATO, namely: France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxemburg, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Greece and Turkey. ...

...The terrorist bombings proved to be a means by which Pentagon planners were able to take their own (imaginary or delusional) fears about the rise of the Left and turn them into very real and concrete fears for the populace. The swiftness with which the fear of Communism has since been transmuted following the end of the Cold War into a fear of Islamic terrorism, along with the arrival of the whole security-military-industrial-complex paraphernalia of the "War on Terror" illustrates that this is almost a modus operandi of military planners. It’s as if they can’t help themselves. In light of this information, there is now a vast army of people around the world who reject the official government narrative of what happened on 9/11 and suspect there may have been US government complicity in the attacks. Opponents cry out that such a thing is unthinkable and that ‘they’ would never do such a thing. But as Ganser’s meticulously footnoted history of the Gladio armies makes clear: it may be unthinkable but it certainly isn’t unprecedented.

Ganser’s Conclusion in full: ...

... Based on the fear of a potential invasion after the Second World War highly placed officials in the national European governments, in the European military secret services, in NATO as well as in the CIA and the MI6 therefore decided that a secret resistance network had to be set up already during peacetime. On a lower level in the hierarchy citizens and military officers in numerous countries of Western Europe shared this assessment, joined the conspiracy and secretly trained for the emergency. These preparations were not limited to the 16 NATO member countries, but included also the four neutral countries in Western Europe, namely Austria, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland, on which the author is preparing a second publication. In retrospect it has become obvious that the fear was without reason and the training had been futile for the invasion of the Red Army never came. Yet such a certainty was not available at the time. And it is telling that the cover of the network, despite repeated exposures in many countries during the entire Cold War, was only blown completely at exactly the same moment when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed.

The secret stay-behind armies of NATO, however, were also a source of terror, as the evidence available now shows. It has been this second feature of the secret war that has attracted a lot of attention and criticism in the last decade, and which in the future will need more investigation and research. As of now the evidence indicates that the governments of the United States and Great Britain after the end of the Second World War feared not only a Soviet invasion, but also the Communist Parties, and to a lesser degree the Socialist Parties. The White House and Downing Street feared that in several countries of Western Europe, and above all in Italy, France, Belgium, Finland and Greece, the Communists might reach positions of influence in the executive and destroy the military alliance NATO from within by betraying military secrets to the Soviet Union. It was in this sense that the Pentagon in Washington together with the CIA, MI6 and NATO in a secret war set up and operated the stay-behind armies as an instrument to manipulate and control the democracies of Western Europe from within, unknown to both European populations and parliaments. This strategy lead to terror and fear, as well as to "humiliation and maltreatment of democratic institutions', as the European press correctly criticised.

Experts of the Cold War will note that Operation Gladio and NATO's stay-behind armies cast a new light on the question of sovereignty in Western Europe. It is now clear that as the Cold War divided Europe, brutality and terror was employed to control populations on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As far as Eastern Europe is concerned, this fact has long been recognised, long before it had been openly declared. After the Red Army had in 1968 mercilessly crushed the social reforms in Prague, Soviet leader Leonid Breschnew in Moscow with his infamous 'Breschnew doctrine' had openly declared that the countries of Eastern Europe were only allowed to enjoy 'limited sovereignty'. As far as Western Europe is concerned the conviction of being sovereign and independent was shattered more recently. The data from Operation Gladio and NATO's stay-behind armies indicates a more subtle and hidden strategy to manipulate and limit the sovereignty, with great differences from country to country. Yet a limitation of sovereignty it was. And in each case where the stay-behind network in the absence of a Soviet invasion functioned as a straightjacket for the democracies of Western Europe, Operation Gladio was the Breschnew doctrine of Washington. The strategic rationale to protect NATO from within cannot be brushed aside lightly. But the manipulation of the democracies of Western Europe by Washington and London on a level which many in the European Union still today find difficult to believe clearly violated the rule of law and will require further debate and investigation. In some operations the secret stay-behind soldiers together with the secret military services monitored and filed left-wing politicians and spread anti-Communist propaganda. In more violent operations the secret war led to bloodshed. Tragically the secret warriors linked up with right-wing terrorists, a combination that led - in some countries including at least Belgium, Italy, France, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey - to massacres, torture, coup d'etats and other violent acts. Most of these state-sponsored terrorist operations, as the subsequent cover-ups and fake trials suggest, enjoyed the encouragement and protection of selected highly placed governmental and military officials in Europe and in the United States. Members of the security apparatus and the government on both sides of the Atlantic who themselves despise being linked up with right-wing terrorism must in the future bring more clarity nd understanding into these tragic dimensions of the secret Cold War in Western Europe.

If Cold War experts will derive new data from NATO's stay-behind network for their discourse on limited sovereignty during the Cold War, then international legal experts and analysts of dysfunctions of democracies will find data on the breakdown of checks and balances within each nation. The Gladio data indicates that the legislative was unable to control the more hidden branches of the executive, and that parliamentary control of secret services is often non-existing or dysfunctional in democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. Totalitarian states have long been known to have operated a great variety of largely uncontrolled and unaccountable secret services and secret armies. Yet to discover such serious dysfunctions also in numerous democracies comes as a great surprise, to say the least. Within this debate of checks and balances military officials have been correct to point out after the discovery of Operation Gladio and NATO's stay-behind network that there can never be such a thing as a 'transparent stay-behind army', for such a network would be exposed immediately in case of invasion and its members would be killed by the invasion force. Parliamentarians and constitutional lawyers meanwhile have been equally correct to emphasise that both the armed forces and the secret services of a democracy must at all times be transparent, accountable, controlled and supervised closely by civilian representatives of the people as they represent the most powerful instruments of the state.

This clash between mandatory secrecy and mandatory transparency, which lies at the heart of the Gladio phenomenon, directly points to the more general question of how much secrecy should be granted to the executive branch of a democracy. Judged from the Gladio evidence, where a lack of transparency and accountability has lead to corruption, abuse and terror, the answer is clear: The executive should be granted no secrecy and should at all times be controlled by the legislative. For a secret government, as it manifested itself in the United States and parts of Western Europe, can lead to abuse and even state terrorism. The growth of Intelligence abuses reflects a more general failure of our basic institutions', US Senator Frank Church had wisely noted after a detailed investigation of CIA covert operations already in the 1970s. Gladio repeats this warning with a vengance.

It can hardly be overemphasised that running a secret army and funding an unaccountable intelligence service entails grave risks every democracy should seek to avoid. For the risks do not only include uncontrolled violence against groups of citizens, but mass manipulation of entire countries or continents. Among the most far-reaching findings on the secret war, as seen in the analysis, ranges the fact that the stay-behind network had served as a tool to spread fear amongst the population also in the absence of an invasion. The secret armies in some cases functioned as an almost perfect manipulation system that transported the fears of high-ranking military officers in the Pentagon and NATO to the populations in Western Europe. European citizens, as the strategists in the Pentagon saw it, due to their limited vision were unable to perceive the real and present danger of Communism, and therefore they had to be manipulated. By killing innocent citizens on market squares or in supermarkets and blaming the crime on the Communists the secret armies together with convinced right-wing terrorists effectively translated the fears of Pentagon strategists into very real fears of European citizens.

The destructive spiral of manipulation, fear and violence did not end with the fall of the Soviet Union and the discovery of the secret armies in 1990, but on the contrary gained momentum. Ever since the vicious terrorist attacks on the population of the United States on September 11, 2001 and the beginning of the 'War on Terrorism' fear and violence dominate not only the headlines across the globe but also the consciousness of millions. In the West the 'evil Communist' of the Cold War era has swiftly been replaced with the 'evil Islamist' of the war on terrorism era. With almost 3,000 civilians killed on September 11, and several thousands killed in the US-led war on terrorism so far with no end in sight, a new level of brutality has been reached.

Such an environment of fear, as the Gladio evidence shows, is ideally suited to manipulate the masses on both sides into more radical positions. Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaida terror network manipulated millions of Muslims, above all young male adults, to take up a radical position and believe in violence. On the other side also the White House and the administration of George Bush junior has fuelled the spiral of violence and fear and lead millions of Christians and seculars in the United States and in Europe to believe in the necessity and justice of killing other human beings in order to enhance their own security. Yet human security is not being advanced, but on the contrary decays, as the atmosphere is drenched with manipulation, violence and fear. Where the manipulation and the violence originate from and where they lead to, is at times very difficult to dissect. Hitler and the Nazis had profited greatly from manipulation and the fear in the wake of the mysterious Reichstagsbrand in Berlin in 1933, whereupon the Third Reich and Second World War followed. In 2001 the war on terrorism began, and once again radical critics have argued that the White House had manipulated 9/11, the largest terrorist attack in history, for geostrategic purposes. ...

And people were surprised that Bernie didn't spit defiance at the root of this and make it all go away and seems to be using (actual) Resistance strategy instead.

Can't say that I see how creating secret groups of fascist civilian-attacking terrorists around the world to operate outside of democratic controls and erode the checks and balances enabling democracy's function, purportedly just in case of Communist invasion, apparently until the (fast-approaching, at current rates) end of planetary life, protects democracy.

This current insanity only 'makes sense' if we go back to the US industrialists who sponsored Hitler, introduced fascism as the psychopathic viewpoint of a 'political system', and, when Russian tenacity, defensive ferocity and winter weather defeated their Nazi-proxy's attempt at a first fascist global take-over, collected a core of their pet Nazis well away from the threat of trial for their war-crimes and started over again for a 2nd try, incrementally, using America as their drainable base this time, the Bush family and others among them entering politics and recycling the same - and identifiably familiar - propaganda, terroristic strategy, and False Flags, using their own created (whether controllable or not) terrorists as the excuse to attack/invade - first - the most vulnerable of their targeted resource-rich countries in order to steal their stuff and set up more military bases for the next targets in each step of their dream of Total Global Domination.

That, together with such as Operation Gladio and various secretive anti-democratic groups such as the Trilateral Commission, explains just about everything wrong with the world today, doesn't it? Just put the Russian hatred and paranoia together with those US industrialists pouring money into Hitler's Nazis and, when the perpetual Russian scapegoat defeated the Nazi invasion of their country at great cost and thereby weakened them too much for their armies to enable the planned fascist global take-over, the US industrialists cutting their losses and bringing back that core group of Nazis to start over again - not only to and in America, either. But always with that sick, seething hatred of those pesky Russians having had and still having the nerve to successfully defend themselves and feeling a sadistic need to slander and crush them forever...

And for that they need ever more and bigger nukes and are willing to destroy the world even faster than is their wholesale industrial and military pollution and devastation already destroying it. Anything that they can't hope to own, micromanage and utterly control has to go, even if their own health and survival depends upon it in a reality they believe that they can simply refuse to accept as real.

A relatively small group of psychopaths, their pathologized enablers and order-followers have warped the natural history of the world to produce so incredibly much of the misery in which the world now lives and dies with in the present, in order to take away all potential and future from planetary life, for their exerted control over any remains.

Are we going to just let them finish us off? Kinda looks like it, doesn't it?

#11

and once again the American sheeple jump off the war cliff and give their permission and blessing for it.

I don't understand why Russia hasn't spoken out against the NATO buildup? Putin had to know what was happening.