Tag Archives: mafia

ITALY-GATE: Leonardo Tied To Bribes, Chinese Covid Contracts

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The pieces of the Italygate puzzle are falling together in short order.

Maria Zack’s investigation tied the Italian part of the election hack to the German part.

She showed that when Trump voters broke the algorithm in play on election night November 3, the new algorithm was transferred on request from a US State Department official in Rome through a satellite leased by the Vatican from Leonardo company in Rome to  Scytl’s backup servers in Frankfurt and thence to Dominion Voting Systems back in the USA.

However, it wasn’t clear how or why Leonardo might be tied to the Chinese end of the hack. Chinese IP addresses as well as Iranian and other IP’s were found on forensic analysis of computers used in the election.

Now comes news of a bribery scheme over Chinese masks in which the Italian government has charged one Mario Benotti, chief of a public-private research unit devoted to medical electronics for use in such things as disaster management and also a journalist with strong relationships with the Vatican, US and Italian universities and bodies concerned with climate change and renewable energy.

Now, get this:

Benotti has very close ties to Leonardo, a part of Finmeccanica Group.

Leonardo is already under investigation for money-laundering, through Google payment platforms [some of whom are also targets of the investigation].

Meanwhile, the massive criminal trial of the ‘Ndrangheta is revealing its profound interpenetration of business and bureaucracies in Italy and elsewhere and its reliance on drug and human trafficking and the laundering of proceeds from that. The Vatican bank has been implicated in money laundering and there are rumors of ties between the ‘Ndrangheta and the Vatican.

No doubt there is a Leonardo tie there as well.

Now comes the Benotti connection to the Covid scamdemic.

Disaster management has from the incept been one of the most lucrative ways in which taxpayer money is redistributed to private contractors. Among disasters, a world- wide plague has repeatedly been war- gamed by the globalists in their end run for totalitarian global government because it ties in perfectly with their propaganda that human beings must be controlled in order to stem the ecological damage which enables increasingly dangerous plagues.

The Covid panic is thus intimately tied to the Climate agenda that Pope Francis has powerfully endorsed. Covid forces public to private redistribution of wealth at lightning speed using a global medical emergency as the pretext.

That redistribution would be considerably ramped up if the false Catholic and corrupt Chinese tool Joe Biden became president.

That is why it is on a  server leased by the Vatican at a defense contractor in Rome that the election theft in favor of Biden hinges:

In The News reports:

The Guardia di Finanza, Italy’s financial crime unit, has opened an investigation into a bribe scheme involving a 1.2 billion Euro deal with China for the acquisition of face masks at the height of the Covid19 pandemic in that country last year. Italian authorities accuse plotters of pocketing 12 million euros in illicit commissions in exchange for contracts given to the Chinese for the masks.

The accusations were so serious in fact, that Italy’s Protezione Civile or Civil Protection Agency’s headquarters were raided last month. (Protezione Civile is loosely-akin to the U.S.’ Federal Emergency Management Agecy or FEMA.)

At the heart of the scandal is Mario Benotti, the head of OPTEL, a public-private research consortium in the field of advanced electronics in the medical, civil and military arenas. As head of the group, Benotti has had close ties with Leonardo SpA, Italy’s billioin-dollar defense contractor.

Benotti has denied any wrongdoing, however. He issued the following statement to the Italian Journalist Agency or AGI, (translated):

“I made myself available to the country at a very difficult time. It was March, Italy was in lockdown. Masks and respirators were missing. People died like flies. I did it as an entrepreneur and taking advantage of my personal friendships that have nothing to do with either the politicians in the government or with those of the opposition,” he said.

“Since I am president of a public private consortium that has relationships all over the world, I made myself available to help find the masks that Italy did not have…if there were better offers than ours, they could have chosen to contact them,” he added.

Leonardo is currently at the center of allegations that equipment owned and operated by the firm was used to facilitate interference in the Nov. 4 U.S. presidential election.

The timing of the opening of the face mask investigation is notable because it was the very next day that Leonardo SpA personnel were arrested on suspicions of hacking sensitive military data on Leonardo’s network.

One of those arrested was Arturo D’Elia, the whistleblower who says he is in possession of evidence of the election interference plot. News of the plot broke in Italian media four days before D’Elia was arrested for the suspected hacking.

The face-mask investigation is also notable in light of last week’s announcement that Guardia di Finanza is investigating another alleged commission-kickback scheme, this one directly involving Leonardo SpA as well as U.S. tech giant Google.

Google is accused of facilitating the illicit movement of funds to Italy that were paid as bribes, according to authorities.

Maria Zack, Chairwoman of NationsInAction.org, a government accountability organization, alleges SpyGate and ItalyGate have been funded with the help of $400 million secretly funneled to Italy in the waning days of the Obama administration.”

Kingsford Capital And The Captured Media

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Mark Mitchell at Deep Capture has some interesting details about the extensive influence of hedge-funds, specifically Kingsford Capital, on the reporting of stories in the financial press:

“Another focus of my investigation at CJR was the appalling bear raid on a collectibles company called Escala. Not only was Escala the victim of massive amounts of illegal naked short selling, but a hedge fund convinced the Spanish government that Escala’s parent company, based in Madrid, was fleecing investors in philatelic collectibles. Continue reading →

Doug Valentine On The Empire of The Lie

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Douglas Valentine, author of several masterful books on national security and the CIA, talks to Susan Mazur about Tim Weiner´s new book on the CIA (“Legacy of Ashes”), the nexus of finance and espionage, and the propaganda campaign that lets Americans think the CIA is a force for good.

Here´s a snippet:

“Most of what Weiner writes about the CIA is already known. It’s a history book with a bias, not an expose, at least not for the Vietnam generation. He doesn’t even really get into the current Bush administration. He gives us a predictable treatment of William Casey and the Contras, when there was an incredible revival of the CIA under Casey.”

And that´s precisely what I´d say about exposes that appear in establishment outlets, even if they seem to be literary and anti-establishment (Vanity Fair, New York Times, even,  perhaps Rolling Stone, although much less so). They are less about exposing as about controlling the terms of the discourse, that is, the boundaries within which discussion can take place.

Another insight from Valentine:

“Angleton thought William Colby might be a mole. Angleton exposed the divisions within the CIA after 1966, the Colby vs. Helms factions. He also represented the literary sensibility the CIA once had, where finding secrets was like teasing the meaning out of a poem. Now we have sledgehammer spies.”

(Colby, by the way, died in a ‘boating accident’ in Maryland, on the day that a prosecutor got permission to set up a grand jury to probe the death of Frank Olson, who was involved in chemical warfare research and had been one of the subjects of the CIA´s mind control experiments. The CIA claimed Olson jumped to his death from a hotel window, although his injuries, according to the autopsy, could as well have been inflicted by a blunt instrument. I should note that at the time of his death in 1996 Colby´s name was being used on the letter head of Strategic Investments, a publication of Agora Inc. (co-owned by my co-author), according to several reports, although I can´t confirm to my satisfaction the exact status of that association. Several unconfirmed reports also link Colby to knowledge about the death (or killing, according to some) of White House deputy counsel, Vincent Foster, a preoccupation at the time, of Agora co-founder James Davidson)

More from Douglas Valentine:

“The CIA gets oodles of money from the arms business. Most of their income comes from criminal activity.

The Russian Mafia operates with a sort of impunity. And so does the Israeli Mafia. And one of the reasons they have this sort of impunity is that they’re sharing their profits with the CIA.

And I think a lot of CIA money is capital investments. They’re like movie producers. They want to overthrow the Iraqi government, they go to companies like Halliburton and others who are going to profit from the overthrow of Iraq. And like the executive producers of some movie, they get them to ante-up some cash. Telling them, don’t worry about it, the government contracts you get in return will cover your investment. Plus they have the old boy network – which now is so far flung.

Suzan Mazur: Plus some of the military contractors are organized crime and have had contracts since the 50s.

Doug Valentine: Exactly. Which bring us back to Barry Seal (Iran-Contra). Because in 1972, Barry Seal was to fly some arms and some explosives into Mexico. What the Brooklyn Drug Task Force found out is that this guy named Murray Kessler, who was involved with the Gambino family in Brooklyn, had an arms manufacturing company in New Jersey where the guns and the bombs came from.

Suzan Mazur: And some of these arms merchants also had security clearance during the McNamara and Clifford years of heading the Defense Department. They make weapons for the US government and some for whoever they feel like.

Doug Valentine: From my perspective, the spy industry and especially the arms industry, is the foundation on which the American empire is built. The United States has a military budget of I think $300 billion dollars and the CIA budget is like $50 billion – that’s a year. Together that’s bigger than the gross national product of any country in the world. And in the meantime we’re worried about 20 guys in Al-Qaeda.

[Lila: This statement is inaccurate, as both GDP and GNP in most developed countries were near or over a trillion in 2007. See current figures here. I think the author might have been misquoted on this and might have meant “many countries,”  for example, in the developing world. However, projections for 2010 place US military spending in excess of 1 trillion, if all military-related expenditures are included).

Continuing with the interview:

“Suzan Mazur: Which exploits of the agency do you consider the most diabolical – aside from the fact that one of its founding fathers molested two of his own children – and a reason why the CIA should have been dismantled years ago?

Doug Valentine: Your readers don’t want to know that answer. The most dastardly thing that the CIA has done is to wage this campaign of psychological warfare against the American people. Where the American people don’t see the CIA for a bunch of basically American KGB agents who are conducting criminal activities around the world. There’s a movie called The Usual Suspects with a much feared criminal named Keyser Soze. And Keyser is talking to a cop and he says the greatest trick that the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist.

And this is what people like Weiner are doing with books about the CIA that don’t explain it for what it really is. They’re part of a propaganda machine that’s making the American people see the CIA in mythological terms as good guys, crusaders, as Lawrence of Arabia – when, in fact, they’re criminals. They’re part of THE GRAND LIE.”

My Comment

The piece is long and, for an intelligence aficionado, packed with illuminating detail. Among other things, Valentine touches on James Jesus Angleton, the most compelling of the spy masters (since he was chief of counter intelligence, I should call him chief spy hunter), the extensive role of private intelligence (which I touched on in my Abu Ghraib book), as well as the manipulation of Wikipedia, which Valentine regards as considerably influenced by the CIA.  This confirms my own long-standing observations about Wikipedia.  On crucial topics, it stays within the bounds of  debate allowed by  Western establishment interests and is very far from being an objective or quasi-scholarly affair. (I use the term Western because despite a substantial component of foreigners, the predominant interests served are the interests of the state and the military-industrial and financial industries), the most influential and powerful of which are Western. I do not use the terms capitalist, because I see the establishment as essentially a technocrat or money-managing class, working against capital formation in many respects.

And a final word, from the lips of Bill Colby himself:

“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.” [Researching the sources of this phrase, I find several sites like this claiming that it is “fake” and to be found unsourced only in a 2000 book by David McGowan, from whence it’s been repeated endlessly on the web. I’ll check up on this but for now am leaving the quote up.]

Was this tongue-in-cheek, or meant to be taken literally? You decide..