This Week You Need To Know
'Strategy of Tension' Bombs Set Off Political Quakes in Europe
by Jeffrey Steinberg
Seventy-two hours after Synarchist terrorists launched a new "strategy of tension" with a string of deadly bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, Spanish voters turned out in unprecedented numbers, on March 14, to bring down the right-wing Popular Party government of Prime Minister José Aznar (Aznar was not seeking re-election, but had hand-picked his successor). The defeat of the Popular Party also represents a crushing defeat for the George Bush/Dick Cheney Administration in Washington, for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and, most of all, for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconiwho all participated in the so-called "coalition of the willing" to invade and occupy Iraq.
Evidence has now surfaced that, in the 48-hour period following the Madrid bombings, the Aznar cabinet devised two options, "Plan A" and "Plan B," for what amounted to a coup d'état. "Plan A" involved a declaration of martial law, and the suspension of the elections for the duration of the terror crisis. "Plan B" involved a several-month delay in the elections. Both options were presented to the Spanish King Juan Carlos, and he rejected them both, according to Spanish news accounts. Spanish television blacked out the mass demonstrations against the Aznar government, that took place all over Spain on March 13. By that point, the Popular Party knew that they would be swept out of office the next day.
Once before, in 1981, King Juan Carlos had rejected a right-wing coup attempt, this one involving a group of Spanish generals and young officers linked to the old Franco Fascist apparatus.
Prior to the March 2003 Iraq war, Spanish citizens had participated in mass demonstrations against the conflict, with an estimated 85% of all Spaniards strongly opposing the action. Nevertheless, on the eve of the election, polls showed the Popular Party ahead of the opposition Socialist Party by a narrow margin. On election day, with an 82% voter turnout, including a record-setting turnout by young voters, the Socialists won over 43% of the vote, driving Aznar's party out of power.
Lyndon LaRouche identified the Spanish vote as a "fundamental shift in geometry" in all of Europe. "This is not something that can be reversed. Berlusconi is in big trouble, along with Blair and Bush," LaRouche said.
Both the policies of Aznarparticularly his participation as junior partner in the Bush-Blair imperial war schemesand the Madrid bombing itself, represented a clear signal that the same Synarchist bankers who put Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco in power in the 1920s and '30s, during a previous period of global financial collapse, intend once again to install fascist regimes, to impose slave labor austerity and bail out the financial oligarchythrough wars and genocide.
Under Aznar and Berlusconi, a new Black International was being given wide berth to organizenot only in Europe, but all over Central and South America as well. In LaRouche's judgment, sane forces in Europe decided that they could not allow a repeat of this horror, and moved, following the Madrid attacks, to nip the Synarchist upsurge in the bud. The confirmation that the Aznar regime was contemplating a coup, under the cover of the terror attacks, adds further confirmation to this assessment.
Bologna Bombing Revisited
On Thursday, March 11, a total of ten sophisticated remote-detonated bombs went off on three Madrid commuter trains. Over 200 people were killed, and several thousand injured. Had all three trains been on schedule, they would have all been inside the Madrid station when the explosions occurred. This could have caused a level of deaths on a par with the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
Prime Minister Aznar, desperate to parlay the bombings into an election win for his party, personally phoned editors of major Spanish newspapers, to insist that they name the Basque separatist ETA as the authors of the attacks. When a group of Moroccans were arrested, based on evidence obtained from three bombs that were timed to go off later, but were found and defused, other media began screaming that the bombings were the work of al-Qaeda.
The reality, however, is quite different. Neither ETA nor al-Qaeda had a past profile of such actions; and both groups had been under intense scrutiny by both Spanish and French security services, ever since 9/11. The term "al-Qaeda," furthermore, has become an almost meaningless term, referring to a wide range of organizations and networks that oppose the new American imperial doctrine of Cheney and company. They range from Islamists to Arab nationalists, to leftists and rightists around the globe. These terms are meaningless in the context of the reality of the "new international terrorism," with its interface with a vast global underground economy of drug and weapon traffickers, offshore money-laundering centers and other criminal networks.
Even more to the point, Lyndon LaRouche has been warning since August 2003 of a new 9/11 attack against the United States or allies of the United States, to be blamed on Hispanic terrorists. (See documentation)
LaRouche made this assessment on the basis of two factors: First, on July 24, 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney had spoken at the American Enterprise Institute and virtually assured the audience that there would be another massive terrorist attack on the U.S.A., possibly involving the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Second, since early 2001, there were significant stirrings from the surviving neo-fascist networks of the 1970s and early 1980s "strategy of tension"in Italy, Spain, France, and throughout the Western Hemisphere, particularly Argentina and Mexico.
These overt Synarchist groupings centered around the leading Franco fascist in Spain, Blas Piñar, whose son was recently promoted to the rank of General in the Spanish Army, despite having been implicated in the failed right-wing putsch attempt in the early 1980s. In Italy, one of the veterans of the "strategy of tension" terror campaign, Roberto Fiore, returned home after 20 years exile in Great Britain, and immediately entered into a high-profile political alliance with Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the Fascist dictator, who heads a neo-Fascist party and is in the Italian parliament. In Argentina, the network is centered around the Carlist magazine Maritornes, which intersects the Christendom College apparatus of extreme right-wing "Buckleyite" Catholics in the United States.
While neither ETA nor al-Qaeda have a profile of carrying out the kinds of train attacks that occurred on March 11, the Black International networks, now being revived in Europe and the Americas, do. In August 1969, the event that kicked off the entire "strategy of tension" was the simultaneous bombing of 10 trains in Italy, including four train stations around the country. In August 1980, the same apparatus blew up the train station in Bologna, killing 80 people and injuring many more.
In each of those instances, the actual terrorists were members of right-wing underground cells, like Ordine Nuovo and the Nucleus for the Defense of the State. But the bombings were staged in such a way that, for years, police believed that they were the work of left-wing terrorists. This was the essence of the "strategy of tension:" Create chaos through blind terrorism, and lay the basis for fascist military coups.
The failure to see the obvious parallels to the "strategy of tension" on the part of European and American intelligence services, LaRouche has warned, could be the result of more than mere incompetence. There is a long history of contamination of the Western intelligence services by the very oligarchical factions that promoted Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and their heirs today. The contamination runs from the top down, beginning with the private financial institutionstypified by Lazard Brothers, Banque Worms, the Bank of England from the time of Montagu Norman, and the Harriman, Morgan, and Mellon interests in the United States.
Even before the end of World War II, individuals like Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, both top officials of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) and later, founders of the CIA, were negotiating secretly with top Nazi officials, to secret them out of Germany along with vast Nazi seized wealth, to regroup under the aegis of the Cold War against communism. These top Nazis and Fascists were smuggled into South America, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, later to resurface as the architects of the "strategy of tension" destabilizations.
A Moment of Truth
The electoral outcome in Spain has delivered a serious setback to the financial oligarchs behind this new Black International offensive. However, the setback will be inconsequential unless there is a serious counterintelligence campaign to clean out these resurgent terroristsin Europe, in the Americas, and elsewhere. Otherwise, the Madrid attacks will prove to have been merely the opening shot of a new terror war, aimed at destabilizing governments and paving the way for a new Synarchist world order of bankers' wars and Schachtian looting.
Lyndon LaRouche and EIR have a track record of more than 30 years of exposing this Synarchist insurgency. In the pages that follow, we provide a representative sampling of the vast dossier that EIR has published on this vital subject. The footprints of the Synarchist International are all over the Madrid bombings; yet, for the moment, every leading intelligence service in the world, with few exceptions, appears blind-sided. The World War II archives of the United States military and intelligence services are full of documentation of the pivotal role of the Synarchist international. In France, military intelligence files, accumulated by resistance forces within Vichy, are also of relevance.
With the death of Franklin Roosevelt, and the severe right-wing turn in the United States under President Harry Truman, the Synarchist apparatus, which had been all but dismantled in the Americas, was saved and promoted. Nevertheless, the institutional memory is still accessible, and the legacy of the international mobilization to defeat the Synarchist insurgency must be revived, if the world is to avert several generations of a Schachtian New Dark Age.
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