Peter Dale Scott

Introduction: Structural Deep Events and the Strategy of Tension in Italy

From an American standpoint, it is easy to see clearly how Italian history was systematically destabilized in the second half of the 20th century, by a series of what I call structural deep events. I have defined these as “events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which violate the … social structure, have a major impact on … society, repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”2

The examples in Italy, well known to Italians, include the Piazza Fontana bombing of 1969, the Piazza della Loggia bombing of 1974, and the Bologna railway bombing of 1980.

These bombings, in which over one hundred civilians were killed and many more wounded, were attributed at the time to marginal left-wing elements of society. However, thanks chiefly to a series of investigations and judicial proceedings, it is now clearly established that the bombings were the work of right-wing elements in collusion with Italian military intelligence, as part of an on-going “strategy of tension” to discredit the Italian left, encourage support for a corrupt status quo, and perhaps move beyond democracy altogether.3 As one of the conspirators, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, later stated, “The December 1969 explosion was supposed to be the detonator which would have convinced the political and military authorities to declare a state of emergency.”4

Vinciguerra also revealed that he and others had also been members of a paramilitary “stay-behind” network originally organized at the end of World War II by the CIA and NATO as “Operation Gladio.”

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Revelation Exposed in Email Correspondence Between Private Intelligence Firm and Mexican Diplomat

By Bill Conroy

Special to The Narco News Bulletin
August 20, 2012

A high-ranking Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization member’s claim that US officials have struck a deal with the leadership of the Mexican “cartel” appears to be corroborated in large part by the statements of a Mexican diplomat in email correspondence made public recently by the nonprofit media group WikiLeaks.

The Mexican diplomat’s assessment of the US and Mexican strategy in the war on drugs, as revealed by the email trail, paints a picture of a “simulated war” in which the Mexican and US governments are willing to show favor to a dominant narco-trafficking organization in order to minimize the violence and business disruption in the major drug plazas, or markets.

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Adam Serwer - September 4, 2012

What a difference four years makes.

In 2008, Democrats were eager to draw a contrast with what they then portrayed as Republican excesses in the fight against Al Qaeda. Since then, the Obama administration has in many cases continued the national security policies of its predecessor—and the Democratic Party’s 2012 platform highlights this reversal, abandoning much of the substance and all of the bombast of the 2008 platform. Here are a few places where the differences are most glaring:

Indefinite Detention
2008: “To build a freer and safer world, we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.”

2012: Nothing. The Obama administration has maintained the practice of indefinitely detaining certain suspected terrorists. It has also made use of “proxy detention,” by which foreign countries detain US citizens under questionable conditions, although the administration did do away with the Bush-era “black sites.”

Warrantless Surveillance/PATRIOT Act
2008: “We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live. We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. We reject the tracking of citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war…We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years.”

2012: The platform is silent on this issue. This isn’t surprising since, at the urging of the Obama administration, congressional Democrats passed up the opportunity to reform the PATRIOT Act when they had a majority in both houses of Congress.

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Justin Stares - 06 September 2012

If European commissioners attend the Bilderberg ’shadow world government’ events at the taxpayers’ expense, doesn’t the public have a right to know what goes on behind the closed doors? PublicServiceEurope.com dissects the commissioners’ latest expenses claims, including first-class flights

European Commissioners who attended the latest meeting of the secretive Bilderberg group have been accused of double standards for refusing to reveal any details of what was said during the seminars while charging the taxpayer more than €4,000 each to cover their expenses. Spanish Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia put in an expenses bill of €4,322 following the four-day meeting in the American state of Virginia - which brought together political leaders, the private sector and royalty in what has been dubbed a ’shadow world government’.

Meanwhile, the expenses of Dutch European Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes totalled €4,167, while the expenses of Belgian Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht came to a mere €980 as he combined attendance at the May event with a separate trip to Washington. The figures were revealed by the commission itself in response to a parliamentary question by Philip Claeys, a Belgian MEP who wanted to know if the bureaucrats were attending as private individuals or as representatives of the European Union. According to the event’s official website “participants attend Bilderberg in a private and not an official capacity”, although according to commission president Jose Manuel Barroso the three were indeed representing the Brussels executive. Responding to Claey’s question, Barroso said that “the travel expenses incurred were paid by the commission, as for any mission”.

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An impassioned Brian Lilley tells us what we already know: that the mainstream media is lying when they report that the mohammadan riots are a response to the film “The Innocence of muslims.”

NEAL UNGERLEIDER | SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

The U.S. Army and DARPA have concluded field tests on next-generation binocular replacements that read human brain signals and have a 91% threat detection success rate. They might just help you control your car with your thoughts too (seriously).

Binoculars on the battlefield are fine, as long as soldiers know what they’re looking at. But when a target’s not so clear or, say, a shopkeeper with a broom could easily be mistaken for an insurgent with an RPG, the eyes–even the conscious, rational mind–might not be the best tool for threat-spotting and quick reaction.

So a new system from military think tank DARPA is instead going straight to soldiers’ brainwaves to spot real threats–from far away, or amid a crowded landscape.

The concept might sound familiar to science fiction readers: Augmenting human soldiers with brainwave-reading computers. The Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) is a threat detection system for troops in the field that simultaneously scans warfighters’ brainwaves while a camera surveys the area. The binocular replacement system detects a specific kind of brainwave (the P300, which is involved in stimulus evaluation and categorization), combines that info with a camera feed, and processes it all through an algorithm in near-real time to feed back an almost-instant threat assessment. (Think: every cyborg POV shot in every Terminator movie ever made.) Sounds pretty out there, but testing indicates 91% of enemy targets were identified in the field, compared with the 47% spotted by U.S. warfighters in action today who aren’t using the new system.

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July 20, 2011 By Krell

As boys, they were confined to the Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass. during the 1940s into the 1970s, often on the basis of a single faulty intelligence test. With no possible way of being released, they were considered “morons” or “imbeciles”… less than human. They were completely at the mercy of the state run institution. Torture and sexual abuse was rampant.

One example was “Red Cherry Day” where all the boys were required to sit in a circle. Then each boy’s name would be called, one by one. The boy who was called would be required to stand up, go to the middle of the circle, pull down his pants, and then be beaten with a switch until his buttocks were “Cherry Red”.

But perhaps the worst part is the human experimentation at the boys home. In doing research for nutritional study for Quaker Oats, scientists from MIT started serving up oatmeal dosed with high levels of radiation. Those boys that participated in the study were told that they were joining a science club.

Of course the boys thought that they were given special treatment in receiving the oatmeal every day. In fact, if requested they would get to have additional helpings of the oatmeal along with extra milk. But nobody mentioned to the boys that the milk was also dosed with radiation as well.
How could such a horrific condition occur? Doesn’t this sound like something during the concentration camps of Nazi Germany? The link may surprise you.

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Bruno Waterfield - Sep. 23, 2012

Two-faced’ politicians have opened the door to an EU superstate by giving up on democracy, Václav Klaus, the veteran Czech statesman, tells Bruno Waterfield.

The new push for a European Union federation, complete with its own head of state and army, is the “final phase” of the destruction of democracy and the nation state, the president of the Czech Republic has warned.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Václav Klaus warns that “two-faced” politicians, including the Conservatives, have opened the door to an EU superstate by giving up on democracy, in a flight from accountability and responsibility to their voters.

“We need to think about how to restore our statehood and our sovereignty. That is impossible in a federation. The EU should move in an opposite direction,” he said.

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Privacy - A Postmortem

(or Cell Phones, GPS, Drones, Persistent Dataveillance, Big Data, Smart Cameras and Facial Recognition, The Internet of Things, and Government Data Centers Vacuuming Google and Facebook, Oh My!)

Jam-Packed with real-world examples.

Ariel Sabar - September 18, 2012

Harvard researcher Karen King today unveiled an ancient papyrus fragment with the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife.’” The text also mentions “Mary,” arguably a reference to Mary Magdalene. The announcement at an academic conference in Rome is sure to send shock waves through the Christian world. The Smithsonian Channel will premiere a special documentary about the discovery on September 30 at 8 p.m. ET. And Smithsonian magazine reporter Ariel Sabar has been covering the story behind the scenes for weeks, tracing King’s steps from when a suspicious e-mail hit her in-box to the nerve-racking moment when she thought the entire presentation would fall apart. Read our exclusive coverage below.

Harvard Divinity School’s Andover Hall overlooks a quiet street some 15 minutes by foot from the bustle of Harvard Square. A Gothic tower of gray stone rises from its center, its parapet engraved with the icons of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. I had come to the school, in early September, to see Karen L. King, the Hollis professor of divinity, the oldest endowed chair in the United States and one of the most prestigious perches in religious studies. In two weeks, King was set to announce a discovery apt to send jolts through the world of biblical scholarship—and beyond.

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John W. Whitehead - 09/18/2012

Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state’s steady incursions into our lives. It’s coming at us with a lethal one-two punch.

To start with, there’s the government’s integration of facial recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1 billion boondoggle that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government’s current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation’s growing network of surveillance cameras to not only track your every move but create a permanent “recognition” file on you within the government’s massive databases.

By the time it’s fully operational in 2014, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of “iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.” One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13 million facial images, gleaned from “criminal mug shot photos” taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having “accumulated face image databases that in their size dwarf the Earth’s population,” it’s only a matter of time before the government taps into the trove of images stored on social media and photo sharing websites such as Facebook.

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Jake Wallis Simons - September 19th, 2012

It has been revealed that last month there was another covert attack on Iran’s nuclear project, in which the power cables to the Fordow Enrichment Plant were blown up. As with all attacks of this sort, at least two purposes were served. Firstly, the development of nuclear weapons was disrupted; secondly, it was intended to have a damaging impact on Iranian morale.

The perpetrators of this operation remain unconfirmed, but the immediate suspects will naturally be the Mossad. This may be true, but in much of the Muslim world there is a perception of the Israeli military machine as having a superhumanly long grasp. Notwithstanding Israel’s various inconclusive recent military operations, it maintains an almost mythological status. The legacy of Entebbe, Operation Wrath of God and the Six Day War lives on: the reputation of Israel’s military and secret services is so fearsome that it has been blamed for everything from the Breivik massacre in Norway to shark attacks in the Red Sea.

For its part, the Mossad has always seemed keen to perpetuate this reputation. Their attacks have always been as flamboyant and audacious as they are deadly. From the 1996 killing of the Hamas suicide bombmaker Yahya Ayyash, whose head was blown off by a booby-trapped mobile phone, to the assassination of the Hamas weapons smuggler in Dubai two years ago, for which operatives disguised themselves as tennis players (in Israel, tennis kit has become a standard fancy dress outfit), Mossad operations command the attention of the world. Even magnetic bombs on motorcycles have entered our cultural consciousness, and have sparked (failed) copycat attacks.

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Richard Weikart - September 19, 2012

Recently Oxford philosophy professor Julian Savulescu moved his campaign for “moral enhancement” out of the ivory tower and into the mainstream. This month Reader’s Digest is carrying his article, “It’s Our Duty to Have Designer Babies,” in which he promotes the idea that “people have a moral obligation to select ethically better children.” By select he means to screen embryos genetically to determine which will have superior moral traits.

As a historian, I find his suggestions troubling. They seem to parallel the misguided attempts of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century, which promoted the artificial selection of individuals by controlling reproduction. This led not only to compulsory sterilization laws in many U.S. states, but also to the Nazi campaign to kill the disabled, during which physicians murdered more than 200,000 people.

In his article Savulescu tries to assure us that the new eugenics that he is proposing is essentially different from the early eugenics movement. The objectionable feature of the early movement, he claims, was its compulsory nature, while the new eugenics is voluntary.

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Willliam Schambra - 18 September 2012

The professional elites trained in these world-class institutions would have the expertise necessary to guide, shape, and mold the American people.

Psychology and sociology would find the uniform rules of human behavior beneath all of its confusing and superficial diversity so lamentably reflected in America’s small communities.

Political science would teach us how to reorganize public life according to those rules, moving us away from divisive state and local allegiances, toward an inspiring and ennobling great national community, quietly and rationally administered by cosmopolitan elites according to the unassailably objective principles of scientific management.

Among the most valuable of the sciences supported by the first foundations was the emerging study of human biology known as eugenics.

Thanks to the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of biological inheritance at the beginning of the 20th century, we now knew what the root cause of human pathology truly was, namely bad genes.

Nearly every form of human misbehavior or misfortune – from promiscuity to shiftlessness to dipsomania to the all-encompassing “feeble-mindedness” – could be traced back to defective “protoplasm.”

And so America’s major philanthropies eagerly poured their resources into the promising science of eugenics. Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Mrs. E. H. Harriman (as she always described herself) – widow of the railroad magnate – provided the funds for Harvard biologist Charles Davenport to establish the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in New York in 1911.

The ERO would be the international center for eugenics research and public policy advocacy until it was finally closed in 1939 – when even its philanthropic sponsors could not fail to heed the ominous signals emanating from Germany about the implications of a vigorous eugenic program.

If philanthropy in general was hostile to local community, eugenics was doubly so. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Charles Davenport’s magnum opus, entitled Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911 and dedicated to Mrs. E. H. Harriman.

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