Bay of PigsEssay Preview: Bay of PigsReport this essayLike so much else in our moment, it contravened laws the U.S. had once signed onto, pretzeled the English language, went directly to the darkside, was connected to various administration lies and manipulations that preceded the invasion of Iraq, and was based on taking the American taxpayer to the cleaners.
Im talking about a now-notorious Bush administration “extraordinary rendition” in Italy, the secret kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan in early 2003, his transport via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to Egypt, and there, evidently with the CIA station chief for Italy riding shotgun, directly into the hands of Egyptian torturers. This was but one of an unknown number of extraordinary-rendition operations — the estimate is more than 100 since September 11, 2001, but no one really knows — that have been conducted all over the world and have delivered terror suspects into the custody of Uzbeki, Syrian, Egyptian, and other hands notorious for their use of torture. It just so happens that this operation took place on the democratic soil of an ally that possessed an independent judiciary, and that the team of 19 or more participants, some speaking fluent Italian, passed through that country not like the undercover agents of our imagination, but, as former CIA clandestine officer Melissa Boyle Mahle told Reuters, “like elephants stampeding through Milan. They left huge footprints.”
Those gargantuan footprints — and some good detective work by the Italian police based on unsecured cell phones (evidently from a batch issued to the U.S. diplomatic mission in Rome), hotel bills, credit card receipts, and the like — have given us a glimpse into the unexpectedly extravagant “shadow war” being conducted on our behalf by the Bush administration through the Central Intelligence Agency. So let me skip the normal discussions of kidnappings, torture, or whether we violated Italian sovereignty, and just concentrate on what those footprints revealed. If the Presidents Global War on Terror has been saddled with the inelegant acronym GWOT, the Italian rendition operation should perhaps be given the acronym LDVWOT or La Dolce Vita War on Terror.
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{p>A brief history of the CIA & the Mafia
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“The CIA had its fair share of dirty tricks for years before the U.S. started the war.”–David Rockefeller, a former chairman & editor of National Review, author of the book The New World Order.
The CIA was able to break open Italian banks with secret police, through their dirty operations in Italy:
As much as a dozen Italian banks had been ordered to pay illegal extortion in exchange for cash; even a handful of banks had tried to do the same. In fact, many local leaders were willing to cooperate with this money-laundering operation to make payments in Italian.
In a CIA-supported crime syndicate in Los Angeles, for example (included at the time of the “La Dolce Vita War” there being more than 80 other “Bolte Conzines”) Italian “Bankers’ Union” money laundering gang, which was also operating around the country as a money-laundering operation, was involved in several crimes.
From the start of its operations in the US, U.S. government and corporate officials had received instructions not to use the word “CIA”. When the Italian intelligence services learned of our new location they would send out “bait and switch” flyers to a number of banks, and to send out telephone numbers to all of them.
Amongst the financial irregularities that resulted in the “Operation Rome” is the suggestion by The NY Times/Pagination that, since the time of the Second World War, the CIA has been involved in kidnapping a number of Italians and that the two agencies have worked out a formula called “Golf.”
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The “Golf” formula was set up by the Italian Government in 1973 in the wake of the so-called 9/11 attack, involving some 10,000 CIA operations conducted on American citizen’s property, including the murder by Al Qaeda members, by US intelligence contractors:
A CIA plot to kidnap American journalist Judith Miller had succeeded in pulling the Americans from Iraq and into the hands of their CIA ally, the British ambassador to Italy, Edward Heath, when the Americans were in London in May 2003, according to German prosecutors. In March 2004, as the French intervened to stop European troops from entering the country and were being shot at by the American troops on Sept. 12, a CIA operative with the Italian mission in Rome, Fabio Castiglione, was abducted and taken from the Rome airport in Geneva, where he was hiding, prosecutors said. While in Vienna in April 2005, as the Italians were trying to flee the country, CIA officer Carlos Rodriguez, who had kidnapped the Americans, kidnapped his kidnapper Carlo Peronzi and shot him in the head, according to police. He was killed along with his colleague, Italian journalist Anibal Rizzo, which he told authorities was the head of the crime gang. In the custody
{articleCc}
{p>A brief history of the CIA & the Mafia
{articleCc}
“The CIA had its fair share of dirty tricks for years before the U.S. started the war.”–David Rockefeller, a former chairman & editor of National Review, author of the book The New World Order.
The CIA was able to break open Italian banks with secret police, through their dirty operations in Italy:
As much as a dozen Italian banks had been ordered to pay illegal extortion in exchange for cash; even a handful of banks had tried to do the same. In fact, many local leaders were willing to cooperate with this money-laundering operation to make payments in Italian.
In a CIA-supported crime syndicate in Los Angeles, for example (included at the time of the “La Dolce Vita War” there being more than 80 other “Bolte Conzines”) Italian “Bankers’ Union” money laundering gang, which was also operating around the country as a money-laundering operation, was involved in several crimes.
From the start of its operations in the US, U.S. government and corporate officials had received instructions not to use the word “CIA”. When the Italian intelligence services learned of our new location they would send out “bait and switch” flyers to a number of banks, and to send out telephone numbers to all of them.
Amongst the financial irregularities that resulted in the “Operation Rome” is the suggestion by The NY Times/Pagination that, since the time of the Second World War, the CIA has been involved in kidnapping a number of Italians and that the two agencies have worked out a formula called “Golf.”
{articleCc}
The “Golf” formula was set up by the Italian Government in 1973 in the wake of the so-called 9/11 attack, involving some 10,000 CIA operations conducted on American citizen’s property, including the murder by Al Qaeda members, by US intelligence contractors:
A CIA plot to kidnap American journalist Judith Miller had succeeded in pulling the Americans from Iraq and into the hands of their CIA ally, the British ambassador to Italy, Edward Heath, when the Americans were in London in May 2003, according to German prosecutors. In March 2004, as the French intervened to stop European troops from entering the country and were being shot at by the American troops on Sept. 12, a CIA operative with the Italian mission in Rome, Fabio Castiglione, was abducted and taken from the Rome airport in Geneva, where he was hiding, prosecutors said. While in Vienna in April 2005, as the Italians were trying to flee the country, CIA officer Carlos Rodriguez, who had kidnapped the Americans, kidnapped his kidnapper Carlo Peronzi and shot him in the head, according to police. He was killed along with his colleague, Italian journalist Anibal Rizzo, which he told authorities was the head of the crime gang. In the custody
Of course, if Vice President Dick Cheney could say of administration tax cuts, “We won the [2002] midterms. This is our due”; if House Majority Leader Tom DeLay could charge his transatlantic airfare