The CIA's Pot finally finds a kettle, as if it forgot about the entire Cold War.

Liberal guilt's blind spot has never been as large as right now!

Paolo Taviani, Italian career politician.

As minister of defense in the 1950s he

helped make permanent a network

that rigged his country's elections for

years and actually controlled political

parties for the CIA.

(By Gcoletti 

- Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Yes reader, you are now living in the Twilight Zone. The Democratic Party and its poodle media are parroting the line that Vladimir Putin manipulated the 2016 election. After failing to unearth any evidence of the Russian autocrat actually influencing the vote, they are now trying to pin the responsibility for smearing Hillary Clinton on him. That's playing it as if only one "bad actor" hacked Clinton, when in reality last year the Senate Homeland Security Committee revealed that three other countries were the originators of other hacks: Germany, South Korea, and China. So now they care about hacking? And how about the credible belief that Chinese government connected tycoons like Wang Wenliang have been trying to influence Clinton and her crony Terry McAuliffe for years. Is that not tipping the scales of our government?

Let's talk about election manipulation and the CIA. If there's an American government agency that has lost any ability to speak about the integrity of that process, it's the Central Intelligence Agency. The reason lies ironically in the Cold War and its efforts to keep Soviet influence out of allied countries. But first I'll address the allegations of this year's election.

Caring After the Fact

I'm not going to state here that Russia did not attempt to influence, rig, or manipulate the 2016 US presidential election. Unfortunately, media outlets like CNN, the NY Times, and more are only focusing on this angle of the manipulation of election manipulation. How many times have there been revelations of voter fraud operations, or exposure of the ease with which it can be accomplished á la Project Veritas. This issue cropped up in Detroit now that the recount process has revealed that in 37% of precincts there, the ballots cannot even be recounted properly, but national reporters also conveniently ignored the arrest of a Democrat state representative in Connecticut for 19 counts of voter fraud. It doesn't matter, because election officials there will never be held to account for their utter failure to do something as simple as COUNT PIECES OF PAPER AND CORRELATE THEM.

Do unto others as you would have done to you?

But this isn't about the domestic officials that have allowed elections to become a mockery. It's more a matter of an organization like the Agency pretending to actually care about electoral integrity. It's not as if the issue doesn't matter, of course it does. However, why should we trust the federal body most known for corrupting elections to now be the judge of whether ours is legitimate? Let's also speak of the idiocy of protesting the manipulations against Hillary Clinton, a candidate not only suspected to have used cronies to rig the Democratic primary this year, but who stated on tape to a Jewish newspaper in 2006 that the USA should have done something to ensure a favourable result for that year's Palestine legislative election. If it was wrong now then how about then? And how about all of the other countries where the CIA was active in manipulating the vote? Seriously, when did we start taking advice on democratic process integrity from an organization that rigs democratic elections?

Philippines

Colonel Lansdale and Pres. Magsaysay.

Like many states in the post World War II era, the Philippines had been laid to waste by combat between Axis and Allied powers, and needed to be rebuilt. Moreover, part of its anti-Japanese resistance underground was the communist Hukbalahap movement, known in English as the Huks for short. The CIA began to promote the pro-western Ramón Magsaysay within the Philippine government as the replacement for the weak leadership of President Elpidio Quirino. At that time the country's presidency was limited to one term anyway. Magsaysay was crucial to using covert tactics to counteract Huk insurgents while he was secretary of defense under Quirino from 1950-53. Then in 1954 CIA officer Edward Lansdale, Magsaysay's patron, acted as his virtual campaign manager in winning that year's election to succeed Quirino. The result was that the CIA received one of its most sympathetic world leaders at a time when it needed third world supporters. While American troops were being plugged into the meat grinder of Korea, China had fallen to communism, and French Indochina was beginning to fall, the Philippines regime under Magsaysay would set the tone for the island nation being one of the most stalwart US allies during the Cold War.

Independent Senator Grace Poe

lost this year's election presidential.

Once considered an advantage, being

perceived as too close to the US

may now be a liability there.

In 1965, Ferdinand Marcos rose to power in the Philippines, another pro-US strongman and would not leave the presidential palace until 1985 by which time he had soiled his country's system with the corruption of his and his wife's excess. The Manila Times, the oldest English daily in the country, has posited that of the nation's presidents both before and after total independence from the USA in 1946 (also on July 4) only one of its chief executives directly challenged American authority until the current one, and that was Joseph Estrada. The paper's analyst Yan Makabenta even claimed that this year one of the candidates, Sen. Grace Poe, was likely the American favourite as opposed to Rodrigo Duterte the actual winner who has made it clear that he's no stooge of the Obama Administration.

Gladio 1 -- Greece

In the 1960s, the USA and USSR were engaged in a full-scale secret campaign to undermine each other's allies in Europe. The Cold War was nominally a conflict between free liberal governments and market economies in the West as opposed to communist dictatorships and planned economies in the East. Beneath the surface however there were nefarious characters on both sides including unrepentant Nazis and their collaborators, organized crime figures, and corrupt officials in government, the media, and the church. Does that sound familiar?

Grigoris Lambrakis, a Greek anti-war

politician, was considered a threat

by his nation's right-wing shadow

groups, and they eliminated him in 

1963 once he had become a symbol

of international pacifism.

(Vradini). 

In Greece, the British had helped fend off a communist insurgency that started in the final stages of World War II, and by 1946 the country's first post-war elections were boycotted by the communist party. In 1961 the elections were alleged very strongly to have been rigged in order to retain the right-winger Constantinos Karamanlis in power. Karamanlis kept his hands clean while other Greek anti-communist radicals assaulted and sometimes murdered opponents such as Grigoris Lambrakis, an independent anti-war politician. What would not be revealed publicly until years later is that Greece was one of many NATO members (and non-members, see below) that were actually partially run not by their elected officials, but by networks of CIA supported networks known collectively as Operation Gladio.

Living in Europe in the late 1960s,

many youth were inspired by the 

anti-establishment message of Z, a

critically acclaimed work by French-

Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras.

 Derived from a scan of the poster 

(Cinema V)

The Lambrakis assassination would be the seed of one of the greatest political thrillers ever made, known simply as Z, a French language novel and film that would become iconic among the Cold War anti-establishment left. Yet in Greece itself the CIA and its Gladio cronies were rarely were challenged. In 1967 a group of mid-level military officers overthrew the democratic government and set up the "Regime of the Colonels". Even after that regime fell apart Greece's security and defence establishment remained largely dominated by loyalists of the Gladio network that pulled the strings behind the throne. The Cold War presented a major challenge for western democracy as a system. How could nations with new social liberties contend with the threat of an attractive ideology that would bring stability and security -- such as communism? Evidently these leaders such as Karamanlis felt they could not do so without stacking the deck.In some instances such as the Lambrakis assassination one could make the argument that  more was lost than gained for the integrity of free democracy.

Austria -- Gladio and more

In 2016 the results of Austria's presidential runoff were annulled when massive voter fraud was uncovered in the Central European country. The truth is, many people of differing political stripes are nervous of Austria's political choices, based on the fact that Hitler himself was born and emerged from Austria. Following WWII, the western allies that would become NATO were facing two unseemly possibilities: That the Soviets who occupied the eastern sector of the country would pry it into their sphere of influence, or alternatively that veteran unrepentant Nazis would recover power through their old boy networks. The second issue was solved by banning ex-Nazis from voting and holding office, at least in the early post-war period. The issue of communist domination was more complex, as the country had been divided into 4 zones occupied by the USA, Britain, France, and the USSR, with Vienna being in the Soviet zone and also divided among the Allies. 

Austria's sovereignty was
achieved through a neutrality
agreement, negotiated by
Pres. Julius Raab in 1955.

In 1955 Austrian state president Julius Raab was able to negotiate an end to the occupation in an ingenious move that averted the permanent division of Austria as had happened in Germany in 1949. Under the Austrian State Treaty, the country would maintain strict neutrality in the Cold War. This suited the Soviets who preferred to have Germany separated from Italy by a non-NATO neutral country in the event of a land war. 

Whereas officially Austria was neutral, behind the scenes the truth was far from it as Austria's state institutions and much of its population much preferred western style democracy over communism. Austria became one of the non-NATO member states to have active Gladio cells throughout the Cold War. While this was not necessarily an election manipulation, what the CIA and allied agencies were doing in Austria was in direct contravention of the State Treaty, and had it been publicly exposed during the Cold War it would caused an international incident with the USSR by having breached the terms of their agreement.

Italy -- The Epicenter of Gladio

Alcide de Gasperi is un-heralded

in the post-WWII history of Europe

as W. Germany's Adenauer and France's

De Gaulle are more famous. However,

his dominance during that period helped cement 

an almost 50 year Christian 

Democrat dominance of the nation's politics. By 
Democrazia Cristiana - 
http://www.abitarearoma.net/19-agosto-1954-laddio-
di-alcide-de-gasperi/, 
Public Domain, Link

In the aftermath of WWII Italy was torn in many directions. There were monarchists, Catholics, communists, socialists, liberals, and even unrepentant fascists, none of whom could get along. The strength of the communist resistance that had fought to topple Mussolini in the latter stages of the war made Italy one of the most vulnerable states in Western Europe to Soviet subversion. In 1946 the communist PCI and socialist PSI each won over one hundred seats in the nation's new democratic parliament. However, since the ouster of the Fascist regime in 1943 the nation had been governed by 4 prime ministers, and the monarchy had been discontinued in 1946 due to the unpopularity of King Vittorio Emanuele III and his son Umberto II. 

The DC version of Democracy -- 1948

By 1948 Italy was low hanging fruit for communist subversion. In that era there was one institution that retained its central place in the national consciousness and united Italians from Trento to Sicily: the Roman Catholic Church. Italy was then as it is now an overwhelmingly Catholic society. The CIA harnessed this national identity with the religion in order to promote Christian Democracy (DC), a conservative political movement fronted by the northerner Alcide de Gasperi. The DC was competing with the PCI and PSI's new united Popular Democratic Front (FDP), a party that was expressly against the developing treaty that would form NATO. 

In 1975 the US House of Representatives Pike Committee on Intelligence revealed that the CIA had both directly and indirectly funded the DC and other anti-communist politicians in the 1948 election, and spread smears against the FDP politicians. This was acknowledged in the 2006 NY Times eulogy of CIA officer F. Mark Wyatt, one of the earliest agency operatives in Italy. The American influence was not limited to the CIA, as Italian immigrants were urged to write their relatives in order to lobby for them to vote against the communists, and Frank Sinatra's already iconic status as a representative of the community in America was used to make pro-USA election broadcasts to Italy.

Strategia della tensione

For the next few decades Italy was governed by the DC, sometimes in coalitions with the Socialist Party (PSI). Italy's Cold War battlegrounds were not limited to the ballot box, but also spilled into banks, plazas, and train stations. Whereas in the West we associate terrorism with the Middle East, during the 1960s and 1970s militant organizations skewing left or right waged bloody warfare against either the state or civilians in order to bring about the revolutionary change that they envisioned. In Italy the communist underground was known as the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) and they recruited mainly from the leftist student populations. The BR's most infamous activities were bank robberies, murders of police officers, and the kidnapping and murder of CD politician Aldo Moro, a leading moderate who had tried to broker a compromise between the CD and PCI. In 1981 they kidnapped US Army Brig. Gen. James Dozier and held him captive for 42 days before an Italian tactical police team rescued him.

In order to counteract the BR, the CIA and its NATO counterparts made a pact with the devil, Italian far-right fascists such as Vincezo Vinciguerra that stated in sworn testimony that their terrorist acts such as the 1980 Bologna train bombing were actually done with the full complicity of the Italian state and its American allies. Vinciguerra's Nuclei Armati Rivoluizionari, a splinter faction of the Ordine Nuovo (New Order, another non-parliamentary fascist group). Subsequently, Italian political scandals involving Socialist Party politician Bettino Craxi and his DC coalition partner Giulio Andreotti helped bring much of Gladio's particulars to light, although this would lead to only more confusion. To this day, many of Italy's most traumatic and seedy events of the anni di piombo (Year's of Lead) are believed to be to an extent part of Operation Gladio's false flag operations. The NATO intelligence services used these bloody acts of terrorism, whether the Moro murder, or the Bologna bombing, in order to promote a public desire for stability in the form of the corrupt DC-PSI power-sharing group. 

Is Gladio with us today?

The residual effects of Gladio continue to be felt in European states, both within NATO and outside of it, and perhaps in the European way of dealing with security issues. The willingness of both the CIA and its local counterparts to allow violence to occur in order to achieve political goals has been used as an accusation against the EU leadership for their failure to prevent Islamic terrorist attacks in London (2005), Madrid (2004), and more frequently since then. In the Madrid case for example 34 of 40 suspects implicated in the bombings that killed 191 people were revealed to have been subjects of police investigations prior to the event, or even police informants. The same has been said to have been the case during the anni de piombo. Whereas the activities of those years virtually eliminated the threat of communist revolution in Western Europe, they also undermined confidence in the ethical and moral integrity of European governments. No European politicians were ever successfully prosecuted for covering for Gladio, and there is a belief that among both the progressive left and anti-state rightists in the West that the network was an incubator or parallel structure to the elitist Bilderberg Group; indeed Polish exile Jozef Renzinger was the founder of Bilderberg and a leading early proponent of European unification.

False flag operations were among the most common tactics that were attributed to Gladio. A "false flag" is not necessarily staged, but may be a violent event that was simply allowed to happen with the foreknowledge of authorities. On that note, the same issues present in Gladio have been thrown at all of the US politicians from Ronald Reagan through both Bush presidents, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama. The claim that false flags cannot exist is easily refuted by the events of the anni di piombo, and the US influence on elections abroad.

The Vlad and Barry Show

The Obama-Putin relationship

has seen better times than during

this photo showing a face-to-face 

encounter on Sept. 5, 2016 

(thesun.co.uk).

With that said, under what grounds can Obama and his backers use the CIA as a source for claiming that the 2016 US presidential election was manipulated by Russia? There is a case to be made on their part; Russia is by no means a promoter of democracy among its closest allies having promoted puppet regimes that undermine their enemies in Moldova, Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere. Could Donald Trump be another puppet of  his? If there was definitive proof of this, that would have been released in similar manner  to the Wikileaks spills on Hillary Clinton. 

However, if these allegations were to be true, then what of the similar ones leveled against Clinton regarding her acceptance of funding from Arab princes from Qatar and Saudi Arabia among others through her charitable foundation? What of Obama's poorly received public statements against the Brexit prior to its June 2016 vote? American neo-conservatives have also heavily criticized reports that Obama and John Kerry's State Department sent funding to opponents of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu during his 2015 reelection campaign. This much was admitted by the pro-Clinton Bloomberg News in February 2015, as Obama and Netanyahu were publicly feuding over the proposed Iran Nuclear Accord.

So is foreign manipulation of American political processes a type of comeuppance for our own actions abroad during the Cold War, or perhaps afterward? Unfortunately, we do not need foreign actors to corrupt our political processes; American politicians from Bernie Sanders on the left to Ron Paul on the right have decried the influence of lobbyists and their money on policy. One thing that will not provide anymore clarity on this issue is CIA involvement. There's nothing that an agency that has undermined electoral integrity so many times abroad can do to restore  it here at home.