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All News is Lies

July 20, 2005

 

Omnes viae Romam ducunt

 

B y John Laughland

 

On 17^th February 2003, an Egyptian Muslim cleric called Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr was kidnapped in broad daylight on the streets of Milan.  Initially transported to the US airbase at Aviano, Nasr - also known as Abu Omar - was thence sent to Egypt where he says he was tortured.  After a brief release in April 2004, he was imprisoned again.

This is not the first time that suspects in the war on terror have been kidnapped and bundled off to American military installations.  It seems to happen all the time – I myself met men in Kosovo who had suffered that fate in 2001.[1]   Reports appeared in The Washington Post at the end of last year about a Gulfstream jet chartered by the CIA which does little else but ferry suspects to third countries where they are tortured. [2]

However banal, these events from two years ago are creating en enormous political scandal in Italy because, at the beginning of July, a judge in Milan issued an arrest warrant for thirteen CIA agents who are alleged to have kidnapped the cleric.  The Italian government has denied any knowledge of his capture and rendition, but this has only inflamed public opinion even more:  if the authorities knew nothing about it, then the operation was a scandalous infringement of Italian national sovereignty.

The American ambassador to Italy, Mel Sembler, was summoned by the Italian government to give an explanation for his government’s behaviour, but naturally nothing came out of the meeting.  It served merely to underline the poor state of relations between the USA and Italy, which had already been severely damaged on 4^th March 2005 when Major-General Nicola Calipari of the Italian secret service, SISMI, was shot dead by an American soldier while travelling from the Green zone in Baghdad to the airport having successfully negotiated the release of a kidnapped hostage, the Communist journalist Giuliana Sgrena.  The circumstances of Calipari’s death remain extremely controversial in Italy, and most Italians feel that the official explanation given by Washington is inadequate.  They also resent Washington’s refusal to yield up important piece of evidence.  The Italian and American sides issued separate reports on the killing, each side refusing to accredit the other’s version.

Italian-American relations have not been as bad since two American air force pilots were acquitted of any blame for the deaths of nineteen skiers in Cavalese on 3^rd February 1998.  The cable-car in which they were travelling crashed to the ground when an American fighter plane severed the cable by flying underneath it at high speed:  spirited out of Italy to face a tribunal in North Carolina, both the captain and the navigator were freed without charge. 

As if these two affairs were not enough, there is currently a third scandal unfolding in Italy, which concerns the discovery of a secret and unofficial anti-terrorist organisation, Dipartimento studi strategici antiterrorismo (DSSA), which was illegally created within the ranks of the Italian police and security services after the Madrid bombings in 2004.  A Genoese prosecutor has ordered two men to be arrested, and some twenty-five premises across Italy to be searched.  It is alleged that the people who belonged to this unofficial cell within the police were Freemasons and extreme right-wingers: a good deal of the Internet blogging on this issue has focussed on alleged links to a fascist splinter group in Italy, because the two men arrested, Gaetano Saya and Riccardo Sindoca, were founder members of Destra Nazionale-Nuovo MSI.

Two elements link this scandal to the others, and both concern the United States of America and the war on terror.  The first is that the two men arrested say they were also former members of Gladio, the secret underground army which NATO created during the Cold War and which I discussed in a recent issue of All News is Lies. [3]   Gladio’s purpose was originally to stay behind in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and to organise the underground resistance to the putative occupiers.  However, there is strong evidence to suggest that this covert army instead became involved in heavy interference in internal Italian politics, even to the extent of encouraging terrorist attacks which were then blamed on Communists.  If true, then this would show how quickly a war against something can turn into complicity with it, whether the war is against communism, terrorism or drugs. 

The allegations about Gladio were comprehensively rejected in an interview given by the former president of the Italian Republic, Francesco Cossiga, to Corriere della sera on 2^nd July. [4]   He said that the members of Gladio had all been patriots and that he was proud to have been involved with it.  Cossiga said that the two police officers arrested were lying when they claimed to have been connected to the old Gladio.  However, Cossiga inadvertently confirmed what many people had suspected when he said that he was concerned about the potential link between the scandal over the DSSA and the capture of the Egyptian imam.  There is no proof that members of the secret army were involved in the capture – all thirteen people for whom arrest warrants have been issued are American nationals – but the two scandals are linked by the fact that both seems to be infringements of Italian sovereignty by US secret forces:  the DSSA is said to have set itself up in order to receive clandestine finance from, among others, the American government and Israel. [5]

Most intriguingly of all, there might be a connection between the DSSA scandal, the Abu Omar kidnapping, and the killing of Nicola Calipari in March.  The DSSA “secret army” was discovered by Genoese prosecutors during an investigation into the death of an Italian bodyguard in Iraq, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, a video of whose execution members of the DSSA were allegedly hawking for sale.  So both the DSSA scandal and the Calipari killing have an Iraqi connection.  Bloggers speculate openly that Calipari may have been deliberately killed by American soldiers because he had discovered links between Western secret services and so-called Islamist kidnappers, i.e. that his murder was deliberate because he knew too much. [6]

This is speculation.  But the theory that there is permeability between secret services and the terrorist groups they infiltrate seems to be bolstered by the stunning revelation that the kidnapped Egyptian cleric had himself been a CIA agent.  Although Abu Omar is accused of having arranged false passports for people to go to train with Ansar al-Islam guerrillas in Iraqi Kurdistan, [7] this part of Iraq had lain beyond Baghdad’s writ ever since the United States imposed a no-fly zone over Northern Iraq following the Gulf War:  it has been crawling with American agents for a decade and a half.  It seems unlikely that Ansar al-Islam has no connections with Western intelligence, since its leader has political asylum in Norway, a NATO member state, and since it used to be devoted to overthrowing Saddam Hussein’s secular regime in Iraq. [8]

More importantly, mainstream newspapers have also reported that Nasr was fingered as a CIA informer by the Albanian secret services in the 1990s.  Nasr was living in Albania at that time, and the CIA was keeping tabs on – or perhaps controlling – the Islamist mujahadin who were fighting Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, just as the USA had supported the mujahadin in Afghanistan from 1979 onwards.  On 2^nd July, the Chicago Tribune carried a long report detailing Abu Omar’s links with the agency.[9]   The speculation is therefore that he was kidnapped not because he was a dangerous terrorist, but perhaps in order to turn him back into the informer he once had been, or at least to prevent him from talking too much about his activities.  In other words, his fate might be similar to Calipari’s.  

There is a final, extremely intriguing possibility.  It is this:  that the source of the forged document which suggested that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake from Niger – the document which led to the insertion of the famous claim to this effect in the State of the Union address in 2003, and which is now at the centre of the Karl Rove-Valerie Plame scandal in the US – was none other than Rocco Martino, a former agent of SISMI who may also have been involved with DSSA. [10]  The document was provided to the American government via the US embassy in Rome - to which, it seems, all roads currently lead.            

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