“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

I had a son three months old
flushed into the toilet in the silent night
the doctor said ‘no heartbeat’ three times
and I shed stupid tears in the plasticized
smudged room to the barricades
being a father was good for that while

If you lived in Naples, you’d discover that here it is impossible to have something copied. The appointee, workman or craftsman, will always make for you a different object; he considers himself under the actual spell of his own geniality, mysterious and uncontrollable. If you go to the gallery, and give a look at the copyists, you’ll realize that they all change at least one detail; everyone betters the masterpiece with some of his own. Luckily there are the women, who are more practical: In no other city of the world they are equally needed to keep life in balance.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

So much for the industrial world of reproduction.

About Abu Omar again. His story I already covered in this post, but there’s another sickening part of it I wanted to go over.
It’s the one told in this old article from corriere.it, and it is so incredibly insulting I don’t know what to make of it.
Well, the article is one and a half years old, and the story is almost four years old already. So maybe it is just the stench all around it.
What you gonna do. I was busy with other shit back then so it’s now or never.

The article considers the point of view of one of the CIA agents who directed and organized the unlawful kidnapping of Abu Omar on Italian soil and who is now investigated by the Italian justice.
What is more disturbing is the tone of this article. It is difficult to describe, but very common in the Italian media. It is a bit of childish, a bit of intimidating, and all superficial. A typical deceiving propaganda piece even unaware of being propaganda.

“Bob” is the CIA agent in question. He is described as “never arrogant, sincere, practical”, he “comes from the streets, loves action”. Guido Olimpio, the journalist writing this piece while standing on his knees, draws Bob’s bio as he was the character in foreground of a novel. And not the criminal that he certainly is (keep reading).

…and what he learned on the streets he took with him inside the “Company”, the CIA. Since he was born in Honduras… he speaks perfect Spanish, one more reason to send him over in Central America on a mission. A special theater of operations. He… moves among despotic regimes, corruption, guerrilla groups. He loves action… He infiltrates an opposition group managing to gain control of it: they yell ‘death to gringos’, but they don’t know it is a real gringo who is assisting them.

And so the brown-nosing vomiting goes on. Then Mr. Olimpio comes to the actual Abu Omar case and Bob’s role in it.

Many of the inquiries about radical terrorism succeed thanks to his technical help. Spying devices so small they can be hidden in a copy of the Koran… pictures, names, electronic traces left by satellites in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Iran.
For the U.S. intelligence Milan is an outpost of Al-qaeda and Abu Omar is the emir. They follow him since his days in Albania, when he was involved in a plot to destroy the U.S. embassy in Tyrana [note: As a matter of fact, Abu Omar used to work for the CIA back then, as we explained, a detail Mr. Olimpio seems to ignore].
The CIA decided to get rid of Abu Omar on the eve of the Iraq war, worried he could organize a retaliation against U.S. targets [note: Abu Omar was under surveillance 24/7 from the Italian justice and the CIA. I firmly doubt he could organize an actual attack against sensitive targets without having himself and all the other supposed terrorists easily caught, with a lot more evidence of him being a terrorist than any form of torture could ever provide]. It is Bob who sets the trap up, with the help of the “cavemen”, the removal-team sent by Langley…

Abu Omar ends up in an Egyptian prison and Bob goes with him because he has to take part to the first terrible interrogations, accompanied by torments and tortures [the italic is mine].

So, this adventurous agent, this noble figure is actually one who not only helped to kidnap but also to torture Abu Omar.
It is all admitted, all natural. Everything is fine under the sky. “Bob” and the other thugs. Funny how all the evil is admitted but they won’t give you the names.

What those tortures are about you can read it in the other article I already linked twice. It’s all material for one of the many hypocritical tribunals, if they weren’t just the lousy show-tribunals they are. I don’t feel like commenting with anything else.

The milk of buffaloes (Italian buffaloes: see picture above). With the milk of buffaloes in Campania they make the “real” mozzarella (not the glossy white plastic you can find on most pizzas nowadays). But buffaloes are wild animals, not easy to tame and milk. Here is a bit of a story Guido Piovene run into, at the breedings in Paestum, Campania (y. 1953). Makes you think at the very beginnings, the mysterious moment when men began to tame wild animals with wise respecful tricks. I doubt things are still made that way though.

This primitive animal is strange and intelligent. She refuses to be milked if her calf is not attached at her nipple; only then, to feed him, she releases her precious milk, which otherwise she can hold back. And so, for each milking, the calf is shown to the mother; this ceremony, though, requires a sort of rite. At the moment of birth delivery, the only man the buffalo recognizes, the keeper, yells her name into her ear. The name does not consist of one word, but of a sung phrase. The buffalo does not forget the phrase anymore; it becomes her proper name forever, and at the same time the plea of the calf asking for milk. Even among two hundred buffaloes, each one of them knows her own distinguished phrase. The keeper told me some of them, which I transcribe from the local dialect: “She meddles in everything; you’re never happy; the song is nice to hear; I like her because she’s good looking and young; Donna Rosa controls them all; you are being presumptuous; I am truly beautiful”. Other phrases, according to the moods of the keeper, reflect political ideas or sport passions; with some the keeper take advantage of his master, and even insults him, since the master cannot interfere between the buffalo and the keeper. As I said the phrases must be sung; it is an oriental chant, certainly of remote origins, similar to the one the muezzin sings from the minaret, and that the keeper sings at dawn before the cattle. After the song the buffaloes get out of the cattle and docilely give themselves to the milkers; without the magic phrase they wouldn’t come out and they would use all their wild fury to rebel against any attempt to milk them.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)

On this blog I often quote passages from journeys in Italy recorded by travelers. From now on I want to call these quotes “once upon a land”, since they mostly revolve on what the falling country was, and isn’t anymore. (I know it’s a little too conservative as approach, but I do believe conservatives are needed in a society as much as liberals are.)

For example, I will quote from the monumental Viaggio in Italia (“Journey in Italy”) written by Guido Piovene in 1953, at the time of the other transformation of Italy which was in the end the same transformation still happening today (the erasure of the Italian rural culture).
Piovene was a conservative christian, and not entirely happy with the deeds of Italian modernity. At the time as a writer he was laughed at by all the liberals and the communists, but today I believe it is more clear what was it all about.

In his book Piovene details everything from landscape, folk culture, urban life, activities and crises between modernity and that thing you had right before modernity back then. It’s the perfect vademecum of what cannot be found in Italy today.
It makes a moving read because everything he describes is lost, and also because the regional characters he identifies so thoroughly, and the passions and the faults, are still visible as ghosts in the background of the Italian regions today.
Hedonist Veneto, reserved Umbria, practical Lombardia, imaginative Campania, passionate Emilia and so forth. Regardless TVs and freeways, the Italian regions could still be like those small states, each with its superficial or profound differences in the culture, the attitudes and habits of the people.

If only we weren’t aware that this is the left-over of the past, and not at all an indication of what tomorrow will be, given that tomorrow will probably simply and justly be half Muslim and half superficial soulless western culture and nothing more.

I read that folks are disappointed by Tom Cruise’s wedding here in Italy. They say he acted like a snob. Strange. Hollywood stars are usually so humble and totally not self-centered.

Tom married some Katie Holmes, who is, as singer Laura Pasini brilliantly remarked the other day, not the daughter of John.

My personal feelings for such events are, predictably, of complete disgust, boredom and bitter amusement.

First of all, even rocks should be aware by now that this marriage is once again a set up, that the guy is still in the closet but either totally gay or totally in love with his own image.
Second, what the fuck do they want getting married in Italy?
They fly in to a castle, hang there a quarter of hour, get the soul of Scientology to bless them, take pictures and fly away.
The only thing they know about Italy is that supposedly here there’s something called La Dolce Vita. But where was it? Somewhere between the sky and the earth, probably.

Now, Tom and Kate: Thanks for nothing, guys. Once again it has been proved that all those fuckers who claim to love this country don’t know shit about it, neither they really want to look at it.
You want to come and use Italy as the nice background of the phony postcard of your life? Be my guest, you’re just another tourist. The only difference is that shameful lot of fans screeching and crowding the outsides like peasants at the princess’ marriage, cheering for you everywhere you go.
You did fine ignoring them. I would have too, ’cause that’s what they deserve.
Plus nobody was really participating. We are all a bunch of hypocrites around here, didn’t you know it?

Right after the elections, in the spring of 2006, italyisfalling.com stated clearly that the supposed defeat of Berlusconi (who was losing with an incredibly slight minority at the senate and in fact coming out very powerful when everyone thought he was done for) could in fact be considered a positive outcome for him, in a very difficult moment for the country.

During the astonishing night and day after the vote, with Berlusconi calling for a recount and even for the invalidation of the elections before the results were out, we, with many others hinted at possible electoral frauds, although not in the sense Berlusconi was tactically and hypocritically suggesting.
The results were not coming out, with unexplainable delay: and when they did come out, they had numbers completely different from the exit polls, which is always a sign of rigged elections (Cf. Diebold/Sequoia U.S. elections 2000-2006).
That night Berlusconi was still nominally Prime Minister, and his faithful minister for Home affairs, Pisanu, was in complete control of the vote count. Twice he left the control room during the night to go to report to Mr. Berlusconi at his mansion, with a highly irregular if not illegal procedure. Nobody ever explained why he did that, or what the long delay was for.

But, do you know what happens, right? If you cheat not to win when everyone is expecting you to loose, but you cheat to loose the less possible, you make it very hard for your opponents, the winners, to call you on your responsibilities. Just like for the 2006 midterm elections in the U.S.: The winners cannot be too harsh on the losers, something the citizens wouldn’t understand. And also, calling for a fraud with the risk of not being able to prove it, could actually turn out to be the worst possible way to win, and, in the Italian case, to start a new government with a hard way to go.
This is probably why, during the night of the elections, the Italian winning leaders declared their victory with the most harried, stiffen expression on their faces, apparently with the intention to never publicly discuss again what really happened during that night.

But why am I going over this today, months and months after the vote?
As it happens, far from home this Sunday afternoon I was watching for the n^th time in my life a rerun of Stagecoach (with its beautifully translated Italian title Ombre rosse, “Red shadows”) on channel 7. During the commercial break I switched on the third channel were a journalist, Enrico Deaglio, was telling about his new documentary, Uccidete la Democrazia!, “Kill Democracy!” about the supposed electoral fraud of the 2006 Italian elections.
Wow. For a while I forgot about the Ringo Kid and Dallas and the rest of the bunch, doctor included, and listened to him, amazed.

This journalist was explaining how, for the first time in our history, the 2006 political vote counted one million and a half “white” vote less than the projections. The “white” vote are all the voting papers where the voter didn’t mark anything, no name or symbol. Those votes don’t count and no one can claim them for its party or coalition.
The journalist argued that, because the drop in the number of white votes was considerable and homogeneous all over the country, no matter if coming from a “red” or “blue” region, this could play as fair evidence that something strange happened at a superior level, in Rome, at the ministry of Home Affairs where all the local results converged to be counted.
Small cities have been counted where, said the journalists, the Home Affairs reported an absurd, unsound zero “white” papers. This in a disillusioned country were the “white” vote is always on a rise.

So, while Berlusconi was calling for a fraud perpetrated by “communists” on a local level, supposedly it was him, in Rome, perpetrating a fraud using the “white” papers for his own party and this way reducing his loss considerably, later finding himself in the perfect position to undermine the new weak government.

All yet to be proved, of course. But asking questions seeming the only logical way to approach the truth.

I switched back to “Red Shadows”: The doctor was smiling: He had just managed to assist the successful birth of Mrs. Mallory’s newborn baby girl, and in silence was getting back to his bottle. Around him admiration and gratitude were expressed with the same silence. He was obviously in need to get back to his usual condition of dealing with the world: getting stoned. Nobody could patronize him about that anymore, because he had done dutifully right.

I always sympathized with the doctor, like I think every decent person who ever watched this legendary film did. I wished my country was a little like him: always stoned (as it is), but capable of getting out of it when necessary.

Yes, struggling for once to make right what is wrong before getting back to the usual lovely state of drunken stupor: That would be a chance for the falling country.

This post follows part I of my comment and translation of the testimony Mr. Abu Omar, kidnapped by CIA and italian agents, wrote from his prison in Egypt. Please read part I first.

They gave me only stale bread to eat, the one with sand in it that rottens your teeth. You cannot wet it and you cannot refuse it, because they have to keep a skeleton alive… They used to interrogate me in the office near the cells, so that the other detainees could hear the screams and cries caused by torture… my hair and beard turned all white…

At the beginning the guards undressed me, threatening to rape me, shocking me with cattle prods: one grasped my genitalia and mashed them when I would not talk… then they stretch me down on an iron door that they call ‘the wife’: there I got kicked, shocked with electric wires while they showered me with cold water.

They never gave me the Koran: it was always dark in the cell, but I just wanted to kiss it, to hold it tight.

Because of the beatings I completely lost my hearing from one ear… I also suffered a torture called ‘the mattress’. In the torture chamber they put a soaked mattress on the floor attached to the electric current. Then they tied my hands and feet behind my back. One sat on my back with a wooden chair and the other one turned the electricity on. I was always scared and often I fainted. Now I cannot go on describing the tortures I suffered.

I forgot to say that the first times they tortured me they cursed Italy, because it gave me political asylum. They told me: Italy handed you over to Egypt. Nobody came from Italy to liberate you from torture.

That’s right, my country handed this guy over to the torturers. And then tried to cover it all.

I know many will argue that, because this guy is jihadist and a terrorist he is exaggerating his conditions to obtain a political point against his enemy.
Unfortunately, the experience since this whole madness of torturing began is that Muslim victims tend to underplay what they went trough. They often omit all the sexual humiliations, the rapes, the religious offenses, the use of menstruating women or bleeding pigs during the tortures and so on.
If you want detailed examples of what torture means today, and why many details in the movie “Road to Guantanamo” were therefore certainly underplayed by the victims, check this incredible collection of news items about the matter. Remember, everything has been authorized by the American Attorney General already so you cannot impeach anyone for this.

Aside of the fact that Abu Omar was a CIA informer and thus he’s no regular jihadist or terrorist, what if in fact what he says is just all true or underplayed? Can you go to sleep with that? What if the ‘wife’ and the soaked mattress are actually there, and others are now undergoing the same treatments, right now as you read these lines?
And what if all this underworld of torture fueled by the CIA is there only to create an enemy which isn’t real? Does anybody remembers George Orwell?

And so, what is more sickening with this story? The fact that the war on terror is basically a fraud, staged by governments, and therefore all these crimes are inexcusable?
No, they would be inexcusable anyway.
What is more sickening, that those who elect themselves as paladins of security, freedom and democracy are in fact spreading fear, totalitarianism and arrogance? It probably always was like this.
Maybe the fact that ‘someone’ offered Abu Omar two million dollars not to testify about his kidnapping and therefore discharge the Italian secret service?
Or, finally, the fact that this whole story is used here in Italy — as we write — for the political struggle against the old establishment of the secret service, now that the newly installed political elite pledged a reform in a more ‘modern’ ‘anti-terrorism’ declination? Because we all know what that modern declination is, right?
The Orwellian technological control of the population that is taking place everywhere in the very lucky western nations? You must have noticed that.

No, I don’t know what is more sickening. Maybe the joyful phony bliss of the Italians, who are still so mysteriously convinced to be “good” and “tolerant” and “different”.
The inventors of fascism.

A note to the reader: with this post Italy is falling is back on line after almost six months. This blog will be updated again, although probably less frequently. It will mostly revolve around politics and the Italian society and other related depressing issues. There won’t be personal stories of the author anymore. Those have all been moved down deep and may resurface in the next future. That day I will maintain my word and give their whereabouts to those I had promised to be the same shit.

OK.

Corriere.it published two days ago a digest version of the written testimony of Abu Omar, kidnapped by CIA and Italian agents in Milan almost four years ago and who is still in prison today.

Abu Omar was a cleric at the mosque of Via Quaranta in Milan. This mosque is said to be a den of extremists, although illegal activities remain to be proved. Anyway since the kidnapping of Abu Omar there isn’t a single Italian newspaper omitting to label him as “terrorist” or calling him “famigerato” (infamous). As of today, though, no charge was officially brought against him, and his alleged involvement with Iraqi insurgents is only on the news, but not anywhere in the tribunals. As always, if I may add.

Omar’s kidnapping is everything but simple to understand. First of all, “Why would the U.S. government go to elaborate lengths to seize a 39-year-old Egyptian who, according to former Albanian intelligence officials, was once the CIA’s most productive source of information within the tightly knit group of Islamic fundamentalists living in exile in Albania?” (Chicago Tribune, July 3rd 2005).
It is also important to understand this scenario: The Italian police had been monitoring Omar’s activities for months before the kidnapping, and apparently the Italian secret service was active during the kidnapping. So, why nobody alerted the Italian justice that the CIA was interested in interrogating Abu Omar and was about to put its hands on him?
Again, from the invaluable Chicago Tribune article:

When Milan prosecutors applied for an arrest warrant for Abu Omar, the only charges listed were “association with terrorists,” aiding the preparation of false documents and abetting illegal immigration.
Although police had grounds for Abu Omar’s arrest, the tap on his phone and the microphones hidden in his apartment and the Via Quaranta mosque made him far more valuable as a window into the comings and goings of other jihadists.
“When you find an important member of an organization,” the senior prosecution official said, “you don’t arrest him immediately, you follow him. When Nasr disappeared in February [2003], our investigation came to a standstill.”

The thing is, the CIA could trust Berlusconi’s government to a certain extent, but not the Italian police and magistrates who, after all, had to operate according to law.
The way I see it, the real question is: why did the CIA kidnapped this man, officially to force him to collaborate, when in fact he was a collaborator already, and under surveillance of the Italian Justice? He who was considered helping jihadists to organize the Iraqi insurgence?
And was he in fact a double agent? (That wouldn’t be news, given that the supposed mastermind of the London bombings used to work for the MI6.) And also, what was the real purpose of having him tortured? To obtain from him valuable informations (the informations that the Italian Police was already obtaining by having him under surveillance) or instead, to make sure that that informations were confined to the underground world of rendition flights?

“That’s how I’ve been abducted from Italy and tortured in Egyptian prisons.”

The following testimony leaked out of Egypt because the Italian magistrates are incriminating those CIA and Italian officials who perpetrated Abu Omar’s unlawful kidnapping. Therefore, according to rogatory international laws, this procedure forced the Egyptian government to let this piece of evidence slip through.

The overall response of the Italian government to this investigation so far has been adamant: they simply classified as “Secret of State” any evidence on their side to impede the Italian magistrates to get any proof of what really happened (how was the Italian Secret Service involved by the CIA? Why nobody alerted the Italian police and magistrates of the operation? up to what level was the Italian government informed? was this case isolated? etc.)
The official version, according to the CIA, is that Mr. Abu Omar was consenting and collaborative during his arrest. Anyway, his testimony states exactly the contrary. And worse.

So, I translated and added few notes to the text. Corriere.it wasn’t going to translate it for its phony, pampering international version anyway.

I, Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr, know as Abu Omar, Islamic kidnapped in Milan on February 17th 2003, still detained in the prison of Tora in Cairo, am writing my testimony from the inside of this grave: I grew thin, my illness got worse, I am in very critical conditions. My face was transformed because of torture.

I’ll explain the kidnapping now. I was walking from my house… going toward the Mosque for the noon pray.
(…) I had 450 euros in my pocket (400 to pay the rent) [unrelated note: don’t get yourself any strange ideas. This is an incredibly low price to pay the rent for. In Milan rents range from 900 to 1500 euros a month and even much more: Omar must have had a very good deal with his landlord], my Italian passport of refugee, Permit of Stay, mobile phone, health insurance card, house keys. … Getting out I saw a white van passing in front of me. In front of a public garden I saw a red FIAT. The driver came toward me running. He pulled his badge out: I am of the police. I gave him the Permit of Stay and my Italian passport. He got his mobile phone out and called someone. He looked American: blond hair, pale complexion…[corriere.it here notes that this officer is in fact Luciano Ludwig Piron, an italian policeman of German ascent who admitted his involvement in the kidnapping].
Then the white van stopped near the sidewalk. I couldn’t understand anything, I just saw two individuals lifting me up: they looked completely Italian… my kidnapping was witnessed by an Egyptian woman too [Corriere.it notes that this eyewitness was in fact already verified by the magistrates].

As they flung me into the van, I tried to react, but they started punching me in the belly and all over my body. Inside everything was dark. They tied my hands and feet… I was shaking for the blows and I started foaming from my mouth. Then I heard the two Italians arguing, one of the two was screaming: they ripped open my clothes and gave me a cardiac massage.
About four hours later, always with hands and feet tied together, they moved me into another vehicle, I don’t even know if it was another van or a small airplane.

After another hour of travel I realized that I had come to an airport, from the noise of the planes. I heard many steps, seven-eight people walking toward me. The ripped my clothes off with knives and dressed me up again at incredible speed. They also removed the blindfold for few seconds to take pictures. There were many people with commando military outfits. They blindfolded my entire face and head with a large tape, with holes for the nose and mouth… The plane took off, it was beastly cold. I was restrained and stifling. They put me an oxygen mask on…. When we landed, I was bleeding from my hands. (…)

In Cairo an Egyptian Official told me: “there are two pasha in this room, two very important officials of the secret service”.
Only one of them spoke, in Egyptian, and said: “do you want to collaborate with us?” The other one, probably an American Lieutenant, wasn’t speaking but then I overheard him saying: “if Abu Omar agrees, he comes back with us in Italy”.

My cell was six feet long and three feet wide, no light. It was in a building of the Secret Service.
They tied my hands and one foot, made me walk, I fell and they laughed. They went on with electric shocks, fists, slaps. They brought paper and a pen asking me to write down my life outside Egypt, they showed me pictures of Egyptians, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, all Italian residents… I had problems with my bones and respiration. The interrogations went on for seven months, until the 14th of September 2003, but they felt like seven years.

After another trip, they brought me to another building where I felt a bunch of hands hitting me all over my body. They told me: “even the blue fly doesn’t come in here.” There was an incredible stench… I remained six months and a half inside that place, Amn-El-Dawla… The cell was without air, bugs and rats walked all over my body… when the guard entered the cell, I had to kneel, otherwise it was the electric cattle prod for me.

(to be continued in the second part, where the worst of the torture will be revealed, and also why this story made me sick to my soul.)

William Blake is one of those who are responsible for my attraction to the English literature. Here are two things I learned from him.

First, everything that lives is Holy.
This makes Holy the devil too. Because the devil is nothing but pure desire without reason, it is duty of our imagination, creativity, honesty to try and understand what moves and drives evil. Since evil is within and without and anyway.
Whatever the sort of experience populating evil, it not very far from innocence, given none of the two covers a great deal of the world, which in the greatest part is unknown and unexplored.

Second, evil and good (devourers and prolifics) must fight their battle.
“Whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence”.
Understanding and admiring or pitying every aspect of life doesn’t mean we can ignore this opposition. Unfortunately we can’t.

I spent most of my life believing that everything was either boring or evil. I started off desperately wishing to be good and always failing. I learned the inevitable spin by which every single drop of good rots into evil or just is wasted away.
It was a mistake.
Only recently I finally saw that a war between good and evil can actually be in place, everywhere, in every time and place and way. It just isn’t the kind of war priests and politicians and kings pictured for us. I don’t know what kind of war is but I recognized its existence when I accidentally recognized myself into it. I was acting on one of the sides and therefore I was fighting against the other side.

I mean, It’s not that I believe that something so ambiguous and fluid like evil or good actually exists physically somewhere. It doesn’t. Still, given the limits of language and understanding, I am admitting this oversimplification as useful. In given moments, it can be revealed as true.
I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow, but now I feel like a war is going on. Blake explained to me the war started a long long time ago and will never come to an end until mankind will be around. That’s why, he said, we never made much fuss about it. Or if we did, the fuss was the illusion.