Italian masonic leader Licio Gelli dies aged 96
Source: BBC
18 minutes ago
An Italian financier who was linked to several of the country's most troubling episodes has died at the age of 96.
Licio Gelli was the grandmaster of a notorious masonic group, Propaganda Two (P2), which included prominent Italian politicians and military figures.
P2 was exposed in 1981 and accused of conspiring with right-wing extremists and the mafia to undermine governments.
Gelli was born in 1919 and first became involved in politics as part of the fascist movement of Benito Mussolini.
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35115576
ETA
Italy's murky masonic leader Gelli, linked to decades of plots, dies
...
Exposed in 1981, P2 was accused of conspiring with right-wing extremists and the Mafia to destabilise governments through bombings and violence, often blamed on extreme leftists.
Gelli was sentenced to 12 years in jail for fraud in connection with the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, whose boss Roberto Calvi -- known as "God's banker" for his ties to the Vatican -- was found hanged under a bridge in London in 1982.
Gelli was also found guilty of obstructing justice during investigations into one of the darkest episodes in Italy's recent past -- the 1980 explosion of a bomb at the Bologna train station which killed 85 people.
A Rome judge in 1995 linked Gelli with a 1970 plot for a military coup in Italy, but the case was shelved because a statute of limitations had kicked in, meaning the crime could no longer be prosecuted.
Link: http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-italy-gelli-idUKKBN0TZ1N620151216
ck4829
(35,078 posts)And Licio Gelli praised Berlusconi's government, said it was bringing P2's agenda to life.
inanna
(3,547 posts)was today....
PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)Was a false-flag operation to make it appear that it is a Masonic Lodge affiliated with the Freemasons, in fact The Knights of Malta (SMOM) and other related reactionary elements of the Church created it to discredit the Freemasons. The Knights are a sworn enemy of Freemasonry. Berlusconi is a Knight of Malta.
I am not affiliated with the Freemasons.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)P2 was at the nucleus of a 1970 coup attempt in Italy, the Franco-Algerian inventors of "disappearing" people out of helicopters into the ocean, the guys who shot the Pope, soldiers who made fun of democracy like Singlaub and North (they often flew in for klatsches in Buenos Aires before 1982), the Perons and their wizard-advisor, Adm. Massera (who said that Freud, Marx, and Einstein were a Judeo-Masonic plot to undermine Christian space-time; if you had Lacan on your bookshelf you were disappeared), and a bunch of mafia banks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_Due
they also put up that snazzy Giordano Bruno statue in Rome
they can be summed up in two quotes:
PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)Birds of a feather.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)Which is basically about this particular set of conspiracies. In the Eco way, of course.
sofa king
(10,857 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Good memory, yours, sofa king!
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Gee, some of those banksters of old have some kind of connection to the people who lie America into wars for profit these days. Oh well. What a coincidence.
Growth of Reagan's Contra Commitment
excerpted from the book
The Iran-Contra Connection
Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era
by Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott , Jane Hunter
South End Press, 1987, paper
EXCERPT...
P-2, the Republicans, and Ledeen
But P-2 had equally strong links to both the CIA and the Republican Party. Under President Nixon, the CIA allocated X 10 million for centrist and right-wing parties in the 1972 Italian elections. The U.S. Embassy in Rome was acutely divided over whether the money should go through Sindona, who appeared to have "a direct line to the [Nixon] White House," or Italian Intelligence Chief Vito Miceli, implicated in a 1970 CIA-financed coup attempt with delle Chiaie. Both Sindona and Miceli, as it happened, were part of the P-2 connection.
Sindona's U.S. investments were partnered by the Continental Illinois bank headed by Nixon's first Treasury Secretary, David Kennedy, and his interests were represented by the law firm of Nixon and his Attorney General John Mitchell. "In Italy, Sindona orchestrated the efforts of the neo-Fascist deputy Luigi Turchi to garner support for Nixon's election campaign. Sindona even offered S I million, on condition of anonymity, to CREEP treasurer Maurice Stans. The offer was refused." Turchi's efforts were co-ordinated by Philip Guarino of the Republican National Committee, a P-2 associate later implicated in the plotting to help Sindona escape prosecution.
We have seen how in 1980 Cline's associate, Michael Ledeen, published an article (at the beginning of the 1980 election campaign) "savaging Admiral Stansfield Turner for forcing Ted Shackley (one of Edwin P. Wilson's senior CIA contacts, a veteran of the anti-Allende operation) out of the agency. A year later Michael Ledeen, in his new capacity as the Reagan State Department's expert on terrorism, was now in a position to help close off the investigation of those (specifically Shackley and von Marbod) who were being investigated along with Edwin Wilson, perhaps the world's most notorious ex-CIA terrorist.
Ledeen's efforts in 1980 on behalf of Shackley were paralleled by a dirty tricks campaign on behalf of Reagan in alliance with P-2 members of the Italian intelligence service SISMI. The chief of these, Francesco Pazienza, was a financial consultant of Roberto Calvi at the Banco Ambrosiano. Pazienza was ultimately indicted in an Italian court (with Ledeen as an unindicted co-conspirator) for luring President Carter's brother Billy into a compromising relationship with Qaddafi during the 1980 presidential campaign. According to Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead, the prosecuting judge ...had evidence that "SISMI was the architect of the scandal over
Billy Carter," and that the material in this case was gathered mostly by Pazienza and by his American friend Michael Ledeen...." Pazienza availed himself of SISMI both for the use of some secret agents and for the expenses of organizing the scandalous plan. It seems that the organizers got a huge payoff for 'Billygate.' Moreover, [SISMI chief] Santovito [a P-2 member] and Pazienza got great advantages in return from American officials."
Ledeen published his Billygate stories in three pro-Israeli publications: the New Republic of Martin Peretz, and two journals controlled by Sir James Goldsmith, the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano-linked oil company BRISA, and later one of the multimillionaires consulted by Reagan in his Project Democracy.
In 1980 Ledeen was also in high gear, allegedly again with assistance from Pazienza, as a propagandist for the notion of a terrorist threat requiring a beefed-up U.S. intelligence response. Given access in 1980 to a Czech defector from twelve years earlier (Jan Seina), Ledeen elicited from him the information, which Seina had never volunteered in his extensive CIA debriefing, that the Soviet Union maintained a network of terrorist training camps as part of its plan for global domination. According to Herman and Brodhead, Ledeen had Seina reaffirm the contents of a purported document on Soviet sponsorship of terrorism which Seina had willingly claimed to be authentic a decade earlier, and which was in fact a CIA forgery shown to Seina for the purposes of testing his credibility.
This document and corroboration then became central to the case built by Ledeen and his friend Claire Sterling to show that the KGB and Bulgarian drug traffickers had plotted to have the Turkish fascist Mehmet Agca kill the Pope. This story was of course augmented by the "confession" of the assassin, whose testimony was later discounted as not credible. This confession now appears to have been generated by P-2 SISMI agents linked to Ledeen, among whom may or may not have been Pazienza.'
What inspired Michael Ledeen's zeal on behalf of Reagan and the shadow network? European journalists have suggested that an unspecified "huge payoff" to the SISMI P-2 organizers of Billygate was followed by a payment of at least $120,000 plus expenses from SISMI to Ledeen in 1980-81, after Ledeen "sold old U.S. intelligence reports to SISMI at stiff prices." But there are indications that Ledeen had an affiliation, not just with SISMI, but (like his ally Pazienza) with P-2. There are unexplained stories that "Ledeen had links with Gelli...and that Ledeen, on behalf of the State Department, had tried to buy 480 P-2 files photocopied by the Uruguayan interior ministry" after a raid provoked by the P-2 scandal revealed by the investigation of Sindona.
It is obviously a convenient arrangement when P-2 contributions and favors to a right-wing U.S. President can be followed by the release of S 10 million in unvouchered CIA funds for political use by P-2. No doubt their knowledge of such arrangements must have fuelled the zeal of Carter and Turner to cut back on the CIA's clandestine services. Conversely, the CIA's cutback on clandestine operations and subventions spelled both political and financial disaster for parallel operations, such as Wilson's and Sindona's, which had fattened on CIA handouts. The end of U.S. intelligence subsidies to Wilson's company Consultants International is clearly responsible for Wilson's move into the illegal Libyan deals for which he was eventually jailed. The same drying up of the CIA cash flow to right-wing assets appears to have contributed to the failure of Calvi's Banco Ambrosiano; and of another intelligence-related bank whose operations interlocked heavily with Wilson's: the drug-linked Nugan Hand Bank of Australia. Thus CIA reforms had the effect of building a powerful coalition of both Americans (ousted CIA clandestine operators, the Taiwan-Somoza lobby, the ASC) and foreigners (WACL, P-2), determined to restore the clandestine operations which had been cut back by four different directors of central intelligence (Helms, Schlesinger, Colby, and Turner).
Whatever the details, it appears that the P-2 Republican connection remained as healthy in 1980 as it had been in 1972. Licio Gelli, the head of P-2, was invited by Republican bigwig Phil Guarino to Reagan's inaugural ball.
CONTINUED: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/ReaganContraCommit_TICC.html
The ultra right nationalists have spawned warmongers, child molesters, banksters and greed-heads, the War Party...in short, the BFEE.
PeoViejo
(2,178 posts)Station Chief in Rome at the Time who had to get out of town because the Italian Government wanted to speak with him about the Bologna Train Station Bombing. So the powers that be send him to Latin America, where he could ruminate with his fellow Caballeros de Malta.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/11/ben-carson-duane-clarridge-foreign-policy
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/the-terror-trail-that-wont-grow-cold-dark-forces-bombed-bologna-station-in-1980-killing-85-at-a-1509705.html
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Series. The reason Carly doesn't quit is she knows that way she always a very real chance.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027212038#post1
But the rest of us, not so much gravy from the train. At least we can enjoy the television.
DonCoquixote
(13,616 posts)the right wing can never be honest about what they want or what they do.
alcibiades_mystery
(36,437 posts)these conspiracy theories.
I liked it. Short, but alright. It's no Foucault's Pendulum, but definitely in the Eco line of winking at conspiracy theorizing as a pathology of semiotics.
Codeine
(25,586 posts)shows, before he went bananas.