ROME -- The myriad of European Union organizations in Brussels and Strasbourg have become grottos of secrecy. The shadowy EU government is in effect a non-elected �commission� which makes decisions in secret that affect 450 million Europeans.

On December 13, leaders of the 27 nations signed the Treaty of Lisbon designed to substitute for the EU Constitution that citizens of France and Holland soundly rejected last year. Paradoxically the Treaty of Lisbon promises to promote transparency and accountability.

It does the opposite. In contrast to accountability, little is known about the real activities of the EU�s 1,000 super-paid parliamentarians, of which Italy�s is paid the most, a whopping 144,000 euros annually, over US$200,000, plus travel allowances, super pensions and other perquisites. Paid to engage in the showy but inconclusive sessions in Strasbourg, Italy�s deputies are most of the time in Italy somewhere, appearing on Italian TV as paid experts.

It is a truism that power corrupts.

We think of secrecy as the opposite of transparency. Children�s secret places are magic, intimate, positive. Their magic places exist only for themselves, a haven from a threatening world they cannot understand. Secrecy for children is protection and preservation.

But with time those harmless secrets of childhood gradually become occult and clandestine and evil. That which was once secret becomes the evil to be eradicated. Yet the question remains, how can you cancel that which is secret?

In search of the lost magic of infancy, people as they grow older continue to frequent secret places, some still childish and requiring initiation, such as Masonic Lodges. Organized religions too count on secrecy and mystery to conceal their power fantasies from their faithful. The hooded Ku Klux Klan stands like a landmark along the descent into total secrecy.

Secrecy inevitably deteriorates and becomes evil. It turns its initiates against the world they have never come to understand. What was once a search for magic becomes vindictiveness against perceived threats, then morphs into evil, and finally degenerates into the delusions of grandeur and the madness of omnipotence. Once the downhill process begins there is no stopping the fall.

Power corrupts

No wonder that Power in its will to dominate relies on secrecy. The old English Star Chamber tribunals were held in secret in order to make arbitrary rulings against their adversaries, in a sense to protect the political class from corruption and to purify it.

We know that all forms of power corrupts. But power become secret is the most dangerous. Hitler, the complete totalizer, ended in a delirium of secrecy. The Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, which label secrecy �privacy,� are prime examples today.

The gatherings of such sects and orders are by nature secret, not private or confidential. The non-initiated can�t know whether occult meetings are even legitimate. But if they are legitimate, why are they not transparent? What do they have to hide? The fact is that in our times secrecy has become the supreme evil, one side of the duality of man since Cain.

Italy�s terrorist movement, the Red Brigades, is still shrouded in mystery and secrecy. It is known where they came from but what they became, and why, is still top secret. Most certainly, the red �terrorists� came from among some of Italy�s best youth, were defeated, and then �turned� by occult forces of the state.

The founder of the Red Brigades once told me that the Brigades could have been crushed immediately but the government allowed them to continue . . . for its secret reasons. Again today the image of terrorists running rampant with the blessing of governments rings dangerously familiar. The great secret is that what remained of the original Red Brigades were turned around as an arm of US and Italian intelligence services and used to assassinate the Christian Democrat premier, Aldo Moro, for daring to make peace with the Italian Communist Party.

The Red Brigades, whose following in the nation once counted in the millions, were later employed as the terrorist arm in the �strategy of tension� scheme to pave the way for �special laws� to keep the dreadful Communists out of government. The system is hardly a secret anymore: Power�s own terrorists commit an �clatant crime, and then the government crushes all opposition and dissent. The Red Brigades were the bin Ladens and the al Qaida of the 1970s and 80s.

Secret technology in the service of power

Since technology serves man, we think of it as something good. Yet, it is also said that technology is the root of all evil. We don�t know which is true. How can we know? We only see that gas prices mysteriously rise and life is more and more complex. The official explanations of responsibility only serve to reinforce the web of secrecy -- around the oil question, for example. And around the question of war.

Born in secret, the fabulous arms contracts we read about create jobs for the employees of weapons manufacturers and fortunes for the cabalists. However, since no sane person can support arms production or would approve selling arms to both Iraqis and Iranians as the USA did during the Iraq-Iran war it instigated in the 1980s, secrecy was both means and method -- to the benefit of society, cabalists claim.

Likewise, since no freedom-loving person would approve a Stasi-like Homeland Security for the USA, Osama bin Laden was revived in secret; in secret, al Qaida was magnified and secret forces brought down the World Trade Center.

Secrecy!

Secrecy, for good or bad, rules our lives. This secrecy has created the virtual world in which US power operates, a secret world of virtual reality, where nothing is real and the virtual in fact betrays reality. To some, that might ring technological, therefore, good. Not so! The transformation of the virtual to reality is the supreme evil. Since the virtual world is not the real world, in politics, too, it is false and anti-human.

Secrets! In their cynicism, men of the secret power grottos believe that people are not intelligent enough to bear the truth. With nearly unlimited information literally at our fingertips, there is little excuse for not knowing about the existence of secrets. For it is also true that although some truthful people tell lies, some liars tell the truth. For crissakes, we have to ask about the secrets! We have to demand answers. Or do we want to condone the real finally becoming virtual, and their virtual reality morphing into real reality?

We belong to this society, too. And this society has its weapons for uncovering secrets, weapons like resistance and mutiny.

The ill-famed Australian film, The Secret, irritates Power for suggesting the �Law of Attraction� principle positing that feelings and thoughts attract real events in the world into peoples� lives. Somehow we can wish an event into being, the filmmakers claim. Therefore, the film suggests, Power hides this principle from the public. As far as Power is concerned, the poor public, le peuple, the peones, the plebe, are not supposed to participate in the secrecy of the sophisticated adult world.

In our society, secrecy cloaks in mystery the reasons the USA is in Iraq. So great is the secret that nobody knows for sure what the hell we�re doing there. For by now it is well known and admitted also by the liars that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction.

We also know something about another secret in Iraq: oil.

But the real secret, sometimes discussed in the alternative press, the really real secret is the American intent to stay in Iraq, forever. Eternal occupation. Colonialization was not abandoned after all. France and England had their chance there, now it�s the time of the stars and stripes. The great secret is that Iraq is the vanguard of a new American empire intended to extend from Rome to Mongolia.

The heart of the great American secret

Paradoxically, while the dollar collapses and darkness descends over the land and the US deficit soars to secret altitudes to which human minds could hardly relate even if they were informed, American lifestyle still staggers along largely unchanged.

As in the famous quote of Winston Churchill speaking of Russia, US military strength, too, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. American power is cloaked in secrecy at home and abroad, among America�s multiple intelligence agencies and collaborators around the world. Its real power is a mystery because a growing part of its ineffective brute strength is buried in the misty swamps of Blackwater, and mercenaries from Argentina and Paraguay, and now up to 10,000 South Africans, plus those from Iraq itself, scrambled from among the poor of the empire as were Rome�s formidable legions.

About secrecy Karl Marx was right again when he explained that the secrecy attached to his economic-political theories was just a reflection of human stupidity.