Yellow Cake and Black Shirts

We should have been paying attention all along, but particularly since the sadly unsurprising revelation that Italian military intelligence looks to have served as a linchpin in the Niger "Yellow Cake" caper, we would do well to brush up on the strange case of Michael Ledeen

You know Ledeen: arguably Washington's most influential neoconservative. He's resident scholar of the senior neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, and regarded widely as one of the world's leading authorities on intelligence, counter-intelligence and international affairs. From the beginning, and before the beginning, Ledeen has been one of the loudest cheerleaders for the "War on Terror."

Now, do you know of Italy's "Strategy of Tension"? It was a campaign of false-flag terror in the late 1970s, waged by outright fascists who enjoyed the patronage of the CIA, the Mafia and far right elements of the Italian State. These were the Gladio Brigades and Licio Gelli's P2 Lodge, and they intended to discredit the increasingly popular Communist Party, and to ensure it would not take power, by staging terrorist acts in the name of the Left. Their campaign culminated in the Bologna train station bombing of 1980.

Now, do you know where Michael Ledeen was during these years, what he was doing, and with whom he was doing it?

From tompaine.com:

...terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence.

From Asia Times:

Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections - including alleged ties to the P2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s - have long been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" advisor to the new secretary of state, Al Haig.

Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world's key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East.

An excerpt from Herman and O'Sullivan's The "Terrorism" Industry:

In 1980 [Ledeen] entered into a collaboration with Francesco Pazienza, an agent of the Italian secret service (SISMI) and a member of Rome's extreme right-wing Masonic Lodge, P2 (Propaganda Due), headed by the fascist Licio Gelli. In an Italian criminal court in 1985, Pazienza was judged guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and terrorists, among other offenses. Indeed, according to the findings of the court, Pazienza falsified information about the Bologna bombing in order to divert attention away from the real (right-wing) terrorists who had staged the attack.

From Barbara Honegger's October Surprise:

When the Italian police raided (P2 Lodge founder) Gelli's home in March 1981, it was Michael Ledeen who, at the instigation of Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, offered to buy the list of 953 P2 members in an apparent attempt to keep it from becoming public. Henry Kissinger had also reportedly sent Ledeen to Italy to try to squash an investigation into his and Haig's involvement in the founding of P2.

On the morning of August 2, 1980, a massive bomb since linked to Gelli...exploded in the waiting room of the central train station in Bologna, killing 81 people and injuring 200 others. General Santorito, the chief of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, who was also reportedly a member of P2, testified in the wake of the bombing that it had been planned by the British-Swiss-American Montecarlo Comite, P2's "sister" organization based in Monaco. When P2 had come under increasing scrutiny in 1979, grandmaster Licio Gelli had reportedly made his base of operations the Montecarlo Comite.... Not surprisingly, reported members of the Montecarlo Comite are Gelli, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Michael Ledeen.

And this assessment, translated from the Italian:

One of the most dangerous of these "bad teachers" is Michael Ledeen, promoter of the the idea of "universal fascism". These days he does not stop threatening war against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, and has evidently been chosen once more by the establishment to manipulate institutions and threaten those who oppose his dangerous and wicked madness. On the other hand, Ledeen has a long history of interference in Italy's strategic choices. During the Moro case he was among those "most suspected" of having misled the enquiries, with the collaboration of the "bretheren" of the P2. It was wondered and it is still wondered why the Italian magistrates do not carry out adequate enquiries about him and his work

And now, from the man himself. Some of Ledeen's own words, on a leadership trait he admires, from his book Universal Fascism:

In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging... we are rotten.... It’s true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are properly led.

Back to Italy, for some of his thoughts on the fascist era:

...fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country.

And on Mussolini himself:

He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism.

The resemblance between the recent mass murder in Madrid and the Bologna bombing extends, I suspect, well beyond the scale of carnage.

Why do some insist on calling these people neo-fascists? I see nothing new here.