Strategy of tension

There’s been a steady uptick in media reports about terrorism over the past week—not only about the horrific events in Mumbai, India (which naturally got the most attention), but about serious bombings in Iraq, and the announcement of an Al Qaeda plot to attack the New York subway system.

It makes me nervous.

The head of Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, has been asked to meet with the Indian Prime Minister. Pakistan’s government has hastened to reassure India that it didn’t have anything to do with the Mumbai attacks, which India has, at this point, identified as the work of Kashmiri separatists. Presumably, a few choice questions to the ISI chief from India’s own intelligence agencies (who, in 2001, were the ones to let the FBI know that $100,000 in funding for the 9/11 attacks came from the ISI—a fact the 9/11 Commission thought too unimportant to include in their report) should clear up whether Pakistan was officially involved or not.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of living in the 21st century Wonderland the world has become is the fact that we may never know who did anything in the clandestine underworld of terrorism. The eternal question of “Cui bono?” (“Who benefits?”), from a particular terrorist act, can yield a whole variety of beneficiaries—governments, gangsters, gun smugglers, drug dealers, private armies, or multinational corporations—who may be interrelated in any variety of ways. And most of the people involved may not even have any idea of what’s really going on.

It’s a looking glass world.

I’m far from the only one to wonder if there’s a New World Order dimension to what, as of this writing, is still going on in Mumbai. It could turn out to be very “convenient” for certain interests.

There’s been much concern recently among the power elite about the stability and even viability of the Pakistani government, the only Islamic state with nuclear weapons (but whose chief nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, has had a mysterious long term relationship with the CIA). But the circumstances of a potential nuclear war between India and Pakistan, instigated by the murkiness of ISI’s historic involvement with “terrorists,” could certainly be used to justify greater NWO involvement in Pakistan’s domestic affairs—already under Predator drone assault in the northwestern tribal areas of the country.

One of our more prophetic commentators, Chris Floyd (www.chris-floyd.com), published a column on Monday, “Security Blanket: Western Democracy and the Strategy of Tension,” about the postwar history of the use of “false flag” terrorism by the US government to advance American foreign policy—by staging terrorist attacks that are then blamed on enemies of the US, thereby justifying American counter-reaction.

The most famous example of this tactic was Operation Gladio, which terrorized Europe for decades, and which we know about because it was exposed by high-level operatives. The philosophy behind this operation (whose most infamous act was the 1980 bombing of the Bologna, Italy, train station, which killed 85 people) was described in 1991 by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti: “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force…the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.” This policy, fascist to its core, was known as “the strategy of tension.”

If, like me, you’ve been feeling a little tense lately, it may be deliberate.