Rosa Calipari,
widow of Major General Nicola Calipari of the Italian military Security
and Intelligence Service who killed by
American troops at Baghdad Airport last March 4, after rescuing kidnapped
Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, called on all political forces to support
the Italian judiciary's quest for truth and transparency in the death of her
husband.
"Let the
[political forces] guarantee support for the investigation which the judiciary
is carrying out to identify those responsible for my husband's death,"
Rosa Calipari said.
She is convinced
that the truth can be obtained only through the efforts of the Roman judicial
investigating commission, which at this time is awaiting the results of
experts' ballistic and other analyses of the car involved in the shooting. This
investigation, she claims, is being frustrated by the Americans, along with the
complete silence of the Italian government.
"My husband's
homicide," she adds, "cannot be allowed to become yet another of
Italy's 'mysteries."
Mrs. Calipari is
referring to countless unsolved political crimes -- from the murder of Prime
Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 to the massacre of 80 people and wounding of 200 in
the Bologna train station bombing in 1980 -- that point to collusion between
the Italian secret services, trained and funded by the CIA, and
Anglo-American-dominated NATO intelligence, which sought to reverse the
electoral progress of Italy toward a coalition government of national unity
that would welcome the powerful and then respected Italian Communist Party as a
partner.
In spite of the
Italian Communist Party's official separation from Moscow and recognition of
Italy's participation in NATO, the idea of a multi-party sovereignty for Italy
was anathema to the George H.W. Bush's CIA (the senior Bush was head of the CIA
in 1976 for one year), to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and to then
Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Alexander Haig.
The
terrorist crimes of the Italian "years of lead," carried out by
neo-fascist or Mafia elements, were subsequently blamed on the left to
discredit it in the eyes of the electorate and were part of the infamous
"strategy of tension," born and bred within the intelligence
institutions of the Anglo-American allied command of post-war occupied Europe
to stem, subvert, and thwart the advance of socialist and democratic forces in
Europe (to look up this intelligence saga, research Stay-Behind and Gladio, the
names of secret subversive operations for Europe under the eventual umbrella of
NATO).
The decade of
false-flag terrorism in Italy in the1970s, clearly documented through various
trials and parliamentary investigations, is attributed by most Italians to
planned interference by foreign powers (mainly American) in tandem with
opportunistic pro-American, home-grown national elements and various parties'
that sold out to create a state of civil war and terror whereby the population
would consent to a loss of civil rights and welcome the "shadow
government" of powerful corporate, right-wing forces, friendly to American
interests. Call it a rebirth of fascism.
Many Italians
today, following the news emanating from Iraq, are skeptical of reports that
attribute suicide bombings and other terror attacks to shadowy
"terrorists" of the Zarqawi ilk, fundamentalist fanatics, Sunni
recalcitrants, and lumping break-away Shiites like Moqtada Sadr in the same
bloody cauldron of crazed lunatics -- all of whom seem, at one time or another,
to have as their objective the extermination of civilians. How, skeptics ask,
does this benefit the resistance, which traditionally depends on the
collaboration of the tacit but helpful masses? The polarization of Iraqis into
simplistic religious identities ignores their roots in a national (largely
Arab) identity -- one that already fought and ejected British rule. Such a
polarization can only be the product of "orientalist" propaganda -- the
soft-sell of invented reality by western "scholars," convenient
[mis]interpreters of Arab and Muslim life eager to feed the imperialist hunger
for facile stereotypes in order to dupe or confound naive Westerners with what is in reality false
knowledge.
When Italians
fought in the resistance against occupying Germans in WW II, the resistance
fighter was first and foremost an Italian, and only secondly a liberal, a
Christian-Democrat, a monarchist, a socialist. One doesn't fight occupation by
turning one's crosshairs on one's brother or sister if he wants to succeed in
liberating the country. Or do we want to believe that Iraqis are somehow
inferior to other occupied people and prefer to slaughter one another? That is
certainly the picture someone wants us to buy. During the Vietnam War, they
used to tell us that "Life in Asia was cheap." They obviously want us
to fall for the same canard in Iraq, seasoned Italian observers suspect, having
witnessed a decade of maneuvers of the terrorist genre to turn Italians against
one another for the prize of the Italian state under the domination of foreign
if invisible boots.
Recent events in
Basra confirm the average Italian citizen's suspicions. The two Britons, held
by Iraqi police, were SAS, British special forces. Dressed as civilians but
wearing tribal Arab headgear, they were seen planting bombs in a Basra street
and perhaps instantly pursued. Had they succeeded, who do you think would have
been blamed? They were speeding at a checkpoint and refused to stop.
British tanks and
helicopters were deployed to secure their release because Iraqi police refused
to give them up. The police station was leveled -- you've seen the pictures.
Angry mobs stormed British positions. What this whole process, which even the
liberal British press characterized as a a break in "trust" between
occupying Brits and subject Iraqis (an imperialist, paternalistic term only an
empire, however former, could dream up!) -- reveals is that 70 percent of Iraqi
police, trained and armed by the Brits, is loyal to anti-occupation forces and
specifically to Sadr. Now, how are the invasion apologists going to spin this
one? And isn't it odd that Zarqawi was nowhere around?
For this -- however
they spin it -- is resistance. This is the real thing. People and police
fighting on the same side -- for the same cause. No
suicide-movie-script-evil-doer here. Because this snafu was not planned -- worse,
the plan to create mayhem and perhaps turn popular support for resistance
against it went awry.
Rosa Calipari spoke
judiciously -- out of lived national and personal experience with the
tricksters of empires. Though her husband was a secret service agent, he did
not work for the Americanist Party, the Berlusconi clique. In fact, the
contingent within SISMI dedicated to national sovereignty and the security and
safety of Italian citizens is being dubbed the "Caliparist" faction,
and it is heavily under attack by forces loyal to Washington (the campaign to
savage SISMI's Director Nicolò Pollari by the Italian chief of police, for
example) to the point of revealing the identities of secret agents -- "burning"
them, Rove-style.
To get an idea why
Nicola Calipari's death has become a national symbol for the repeatedly frustrated
aspirations for sovereignty and liberation from the bloody ties that bind Italy
to Washington since 1945, through state corruption, terror, and blood, we need
only hear Rosa Calipari's words on the kind of decent human being he had always
been: "He was a criminal lawyer, but he couldn't find it in him to defend
the Mafiosi. So he entered the police force. He was a man who strove to make
institutions accessible to the people, advancing a process of democratization
of the forces of order."
He was one of the
incorruptible ones. An idealist. Worse, a man for the people. In the war of
Bush's terror, therefore, he was of no use -- a meddlesome inconvenience.
Luciana
Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. She
can be reached at lbohne@edinboro.edu.