"I warned Bush about Iraq": Italy's PM
October 30, 2005 - 6:24AM
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, on the eve of a trip to Washington, said he repeatedly tried to persuade US President George W Bush against invading Iraq.
The Italian leader voiced his unease with the military operation to topple Saddam Hussein during a television interview to be broadcast on Monday - the same day he meets Bush.
Berlusconi is one of Washington's strongest allies but he did not send troops to join the invasion, preferring to despatch troops only after the fall of Baghdad.
"I tried many times to convince the American president not to go to war," Berlusconi was quoted as saying by La7 television network, which recorded the interview.
"I tried to find other avenues and other solutions, even through an activity with the African leader (Libya's Colonel Muammar) Gaddafi. But we didn't succeed and there was the military operation."
One of Berlusconi's staff said he knew Berlusconi had given La7 television an interview, but could not confirm the comments.
Berlusconi pulled about 300 soldiers from Iraq earlier this year as part of a phased withdrawal, leaving about 2,900 troops there.
He is trailing in opinion polls ahead of April elections to centre-left rival, Romano Prodi, who promises to withdraw all Italian forces from Iraq if he is voted into office.
The context of Berlusconi's answers in the interview were unclear since La7 only provided small excerpts.
The Italian leader has been defending himself against accusations in Italy that the country's intelligence agency, possibly after government pressure, passed-off fake documents to Washington used to bolster claims of Iraq's nuclear ambitions.
The documents purported that Iraq was seeking to buy uranium from Niger.
His office has sent out two statements in the past week categorically denying the accusations, made by left-leaning La Repubblica newspaper.
Sismi intelligence agency chief Nicolo Pollari is due to address a closed-door parliamentary panel over the matter on November 3.
Bush cited intelligence that Iraq sought uranium from Africa in his State of the Union address in 2003 before the Iraq war.
The claim fuelled criticism from the husband of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, whose identity was later leaked, sparking a scandal that led to the indictment of Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby.
"I have never been convinced that war was the best system to make a country democratic and help it escape dictatorship, even a bloody one," Berlusconi was quoted as saying by La7.
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Italy entangled in 'yellowcake' papers scandal
Opponents of Berlusconi accuse his government of a whitewash
Los Angeles Times
October 30, 2005 By Tracy Wilkinson,
ROME -- Secret meetings. Spies. Forged documents. Government denials. Burglary.
As Washington braced for a special prosecutor to announce indictments, Italy was reliving its own small but significant role in "Niger-Gate," the scandal that surfaced as the Bush administration made its case for war in Iraq.
If all roads lead to Rome, so do the rumors: Washington's current problem with the leak of a CIA officer's identity has tentacles here.
Former U.S. diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, whose wife was the CIA operative whose identity was leaked, was dispatched in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger, about the time documents asserting exactly that surfaced in Rome.
The documents were determined to be forgeries, and Mr. Wilson said he found little evidence to back the claim. Yet the assertion was used in early 2003 by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to illustrate the threat posed by the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.
Who exactly forged the documents, which included letters and purported contracts, remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of the affair.
Speculation about how the papers were produced in Rome -- and complaints that the Italian government has done little to find out, or to come clean -- dominated political debate in Italy last week, especially in the leftist newspaper La Repubblica, which has dedicated page after page of breathless prose to the matter.
Among its claims, La Repubblica has suggested that the head of Italy's military secret service, Nicolo Pollari, disseminated the false information to the Bush administration on orders from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a loyal ally eager to give Bush a helping hand.
La Repubblica reported, and Bush administration officials confirmed to the Los Angeles Times, that Mr. Pollari met with then-deputy National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley on Sept. 9, 2002. Mr. Hadley later took the blame for including the incorrect claim in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
Mr. Pollari went directly to Mr. Hadley, as well as to other administration neo-conservative contacts, because CIA agents in Rome were rebuffing his overtures -- apparently not considering the documents to be credible, La Repubblica reported.
Mr. Pollari will go before a closed hearing of the Italian parliament this week to explain his role. The Berlusconi government has repeatedly denied that SISMI, as the military intelligence service is known, fabricated the now-discredited dossier.
"The government flatly denies any truth to the allegations, as per our communiques issued in July 2003 and August 2004," an official statement said last week. The newspaper reports are "false and devoid of all foundation," the government said.
The murky saga involves one Rocco Martino, an occasional Italian spy and businessman, who initially peddled the documents. He has told reporters over the last few years that he obtained the papers through a contact at the Niger Embassy in Rome (which, incidentally, was burglarized in 2001) with the help of another officer from Italian military intelligence, and that he sold them to a French intelligence agency, with which he occasionally traded.
Through his lawyer, Mr. Martino declined an interview this week. "The less I say, the better," the lawyer, Giuseppe Placidi, quoted Mr. Martino as saying. The lawyer would only say Mr. Martino, who was questioned by Italian prosecutors last year, did not realize that the material was fake and did not obtain it from military intelligence.
Mr. Martino is a problematic figure. La Repubblica described him as a "failed carabiniere [policeman] and dishonest spy" and a "double-dealer" who plays many sides of every fence and was fired from his job in the Italian Secret Service.
In 2002, the documents came into the hands of an Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, working for the magazine Panorama, which is owned by Berlusconi, the prime minister.
Ms. Burba has not publicly identified her source, except to say he was a usually reliable "security consultant," and she declined to do so again Thursday in an interview. But news reports have said Mr. Martino was her source. On orders from her editor, she handed copies of the documents over to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. Separately, she traveled to Niger to check out the claims herself -- notably, that Iraq was attempting to buy 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from the African country -- and concluded the report was not reliable.
Ms. Burba, now 43, is an experienced journalist who has worked extensively in Africa, Bosnia and Kosovo. She said she wanted to press ahead with efforts to investigate the case further and determine who forged the documents, but her magazine never published any additional reports.
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BERLUSCONI bio, from the Wikipedia:
"According to Forbes Magazine, Silvio Berlusconi is Italy's richest person, a self-made man with personal assets worth $12,000,000,000 (USD) in 2005, making him the world's 25th richest person. He has often been accused of using his political power to enforce pieces of legislation tailored to increase his personal riches, and through capricious interpretations of corporate control, it is said, he avoids breaches of the rules on conflicts of interest that he himself enacted.
"Silvio Berlusconi has a rather long record of judicial trials, accusing him or his firms of several crimes including false accounting, tax fraud, corruption and bribery of police officers and judges. Some of Berlusconi's close collaborators, friends and firm managers have been found guilty of related crimes, notably his younger brother, Paolo, who in 2002 agreed to pay 52 million euros to local authorities in a plea bargain for various charges including corruption and extortion. However, in none of these trials has he ever been convicted. In some cases he has been fully acquitted of the charges, in others he has been acquitted with dubitative formula (not proven), or acquitted because the statute of limitations expired before a sentence could be issued; in one case a previously granted amnesty extinguished the crime (perjury) before the sentence came into effect. The Italian legal system allows the statute of limitations to continue to run during the course of the trial. Consequently, the delaying tactics adopted by Berlusconi's attorneys (including repeated motions for change of venue) usually exceeded the lifespan of the charges pending.
"Some of the suspicions about Berlusconi arise from real or perceived blank spots in his past. Notably, in 1981 a scandal arose on the discovery by the police of Licio Gelli's secret freemasonry lodge (Propaganda Due, or P2) aiming to move the Italian political system in an authoritarian direction to oppose communism. A list of names was found of adherents of P2, which included members of the secret services and some prominent personalities from the political, industrial, military and press elite, among which Silvio Berlusconi, who was just starting to gain popularity as the founder and owner of "Canale 5" TV network. The P2 lodge was dissolved by the Italian parliament in december 1981 and a law was passed declaring similar organizations illegal, but no specific crimes were alleged to individual members of P2. Berlusconi later (1989) sued for libel three journalists who had written an article hinting at his involvement in financiary crimes and in this occasion he declared in court that he had joined the P2 lodge "only a very short time before the scandal broke" and "he had not even paid the entry fee". Such statements, however, conflicted with the findings of the parliamentary commission appointed to investigate the lodge's activity, with material evidence, and even with previous testimony of Berlusconi, all of which showing that he had actually been a member of P2 since 1978 and had indeed paid a 100,000 Italian liras entry fee. Because of this he was indicted for perjury, but the crime was extinguished by the 1989 amnesty.
"Berlusconi's career as an entrepreneur is also often questioned by his detractors. The allegations made against him generally include suspects about the extremely fast increase of his activity as a construction entrepreneur in years 1961-63, hinting at the possibility that in those years he received money from unknown and possibly illegal sources. These accusations are regarded by Berlusconi and his supporters as empty slander, trying to undermine Berlusconi's reputation of a self-made man. Frequently cited by opponents are also events dating to the 1980s, including supposed "favor exchanges" between Berlusconi and the former prime minister Bettino Craxi, indicted in 1990-91 for various corruption charges; and even possible connections to the Italian Mafia, the latter accusations arising mostly from the curious circumstance that he employed for two years, as a stableman in his Arcore villa, the wanted mafia boss Vittorio Mangano. Berlusconi acknowledges a personal friendship only to Craxi, and of course denies any ties to the Mafia, stating that he was absolutely not aware of who Mangano really was when he employed him. Heated debate on this issue was recently (2004) triggered again when a Forza Italia senator and long time friend of Berlusconi, Marcello Dell'Utri, was sentenced to 9 years by the Palermo court on charge of "external association to the Mafia", a sentence on which Berlusconi refused to comment.
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Citizen Kane on Steroids
Silvio Berlusconi wins, democracy loses in Italy
by Martin A. Lee
In These Times magazine, June 2001
A change of government in Italy is easy to ignore given that it happens so often. But the May 13 ballot won by billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi warrants special attention. His election as prime minister of Italy's 59th government since World War 11 should trigger alarms in any self-respecting democracy.
A flamboyant demagogue with extremist allies, Berlusconi ran as head of a far-right-tilting, populist coalition that embraced openly racist and neofascist parties. The Italian media-mogul-turned-politician compares himself to Napoleon, delights in ridiculing AIDS victims and is chummy with Rupert Murdoch. Convicted four times on charges of perjury, falsifying financial records, tax offenses and bribery, Berlusconi has a shady track record with several criminal indictments still pending. He was voted into high political office despite allegations of Mafia connections and questions about how he acquired his personal fortune.
A walking, talking conflict of interest, Berlusconi has his fingers in practically every big-business pie in Italy. He is one of the world's wealthiest men, presiding over a $14 billion financial behemoth that includes Italy's biggest publishing house, its leading advertising agency, its wealthiest department-store chain, a major investment firm, extensive real estate holdings, the country's top soccer club and, most significantly, Italy's three main private television networks.
As prime minister, Berlusconi also will control Italy's three public TV stations, thereby commanding the attention of 90 percent of Italy's viewers. Nearly the entire broadcasting system in the world's sixth-largest industrialized economy will effectively rest in one man's hands. "It's a situation without precedent in the Western world," says Giovanni Sartori, professor emeritus of political science at Columbia University and a longtime observer of Italian politics.
Likened to "Citizen Kane on steroids," Berlusconi enjoys a concentration of power over information that exists in no other democratic country. Without his domination of the airwaves, he never would have emerged as a significant political figure in Italy. "Sua Emittenza" ("His Transmittance"), as Berlusconi is widely known, marshaled his opinion-molding
TV and print venues to demonize his adversaries and further his own political ambitions. Blatantly biased "news" broadcasts on Berlusconi's networks were virtually indistinguishable from campaign ads and press releases hyping his candidacy.
During the campaign, Berlusconi was the most visible presence on Italian TV, while his opponents received perfunctory coverage at best. Because Italy's state television doesn't run political commercials, Berlusconi's three national networks exercised a virtual monopoly on election advertisements. His rivals were in the unenviable position of having to shell out money to Berlusconi or forsake TV ads. "This is the only country in the world where the political parties must pay their political adversary in order to run an election campaign," says Giuseppe Giulietti, a parliamentary representative of the Left Democrats, the main party of what is now Italy's center-left opposition.
Outspending their rivals by more than 20-to-1 and taking advantage of disproportionate access to national media, Berlusconi's coalition was able to secure absolute majorities in both houses of parliament. His own party, Forza Italia, is the biggest vote-getter in the country.
Berlusconi's principal governing partner is Gianfranco Fini, a suave, 49-year-old politician who cut his teeth as leader of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), Europe's oldest neofascist party. Berlusconi publicly aligned himself with Fini before the MSI chief gave his organization a face-lift and renamed it the National Alliance in 1995. The National Alliance recently grabbed 11 percent of the vote, ensuring that Fini will be deputy prime minister in the new regime.
Fini claims that he is now a mainstream conservative, but the identity of his party remains inextricably bound up in its fascist heritage. Despite Fini's attempts to distance himself from the most extreme elements of the National Alliance, many of its members still harbor nostalgia for Mussolini's Blackshirts. Francesco Storace, Fini's close associate and National Alliance president of the Lazio region, wants to rewrite school textbooks, which he says give a Leninist slant on Italian history.
Forza Italia also made an electoral pact in Sicily with Fiamma Tricolore (Tricolor Flame), an unapologetically fascist sect.
Popular among skinheads and neo-Nazis, Fiamma Tricolore is led by Pino Rauti, a veteran of the terrorist underground. Four members of Ordine Nuovo (New Order), a neofascist group formed by Rauti, are currently on trial for a 1969 bomb attack in Milan that killed 16 people and injured 84 others.
And then there's Umberto Bossi, head of the xenophobic Northern League, which holds the balance of power for the ruling coalition in Italy's lower house of parliament, even though it polled only 4 percent of the vote. Bossi's crude and incessant immigrant-baiting has drawn comparisons with Austrian far-right leader Jorg Haider, who was among the first to congratulate Berlusconi for his electoral triumph. Bossi has called for the Italian navy to shoot at ships suspected of carrying undocumented immigrants into the country. Strident anti-immigrant rhetoric was also a staple of Berlusconi's campaign, while his TV stations stoked public anxiety by depicting Italy as a nation overrun by foreign criminals.
Not surprisingly, the six criminal cases still pending against Berlusconi haven't gotten much coverage on his networks. If his legal wrangles are discussed at all on privately owned Italian television, it is to provide an opportunity for Berlusconi to lash out at his detractors. He claims that all such charges are Communist-inspired slander. In the world according to Berlusconi, "Communists eat babies" (his own words), and a conspiracy of left-wing magistrates is hell-bent on undermining his mandate to save Italy.
Portraying himself as an outsider who defeated the business establishment, Berlusconi says he'll run the country as "ltaly Inc."-applying the same energy and skills that made him a successful entrepreneur. The myth of the self-made man is central to Berlusconi's mystique, but there is no such thing as a self-made billionaire, especially in a country like Italy. A former nightclub crooner on Mediterranean cruise ships, Berlusconi built his business empire not by bucking the establishment, but by paying it off. Although he fashioned an image of himself as a maverick newcomer untainted by the corrupt old guard of Italian governance, he owes much of his success to a shadowy network of economic and political power brokers.
In the late '70s, Berlusconi secretly joined Propaganda Due (P-2), an elite, fascist-leaning masonic lodge that is often mentioned in accounts of Italian intrigue. Described by Italian judges as an illegal "state within a state," the P-2 had high-level connections to Italian intelligence agencies, the armed forces, leading financiers and captains of industry. P-2 members have been implicated in nearly every major political scandal that has shaken Italy since the mid-'60s-including neofascist bombings, coup plots and a major smuggling operation that specialized in arms and drugs, while laundering dirty cash through front companies owned by the Vatican Bank.
Berlusconi's name was found on a list of P-2 initiates after a 1981 police raid in Tuscany. Of the 963 names on the P-2 roster, most were prominent Italians. The list also featured several dubious characters from Argentina, including: Gen. Juan Peron, the former president; Jose Lopez Rega, head of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a notorious death squad; and Adm. Emilio Massera, a member of the military junta responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people during the "dirty war" of the '70s and early '80s.
Convicted of making false statements about his P-2 membership, Berlusconi managed to escape unscathed from the scandal thanks largely to Socialist Party chief Bettino Craxi, who became Italy's prime minister in the mid-'80s. Craxi was the best man at Berlusconi's second wedding, and both men were adept at exploiting the lucrative system of political patronage and illicit pay-offs that flourished in postwar Italy. Craxi was instrumental in thwarting early attempts to rein in Berlusconi's media outlets, and Berlusconi, in turn, actively promoted Craxi on his TV stations.
During this period, Craxi and other right-wing political leaders in Italy knew they could count on unflinching support from Washington, which propped up a political order that was riddled with corruption in an all-out effort to keep the sizable Italian Communist Party from gaining power. But when the Cold War ended, so did the Communist threat, and the entire political edifice in Italy crumbled overnight.
Hundreds of public officials were arrested in the early '90s as the result of a "clean hands" campaign by Italian magistrates who uncovered massive corruption and Mafia influence within the mainstream parties. Craxi fled to Tunisia to avoid a prison sentence. Prosecutors in Milan subsequently traced $6 million that had been funneled from Berlusconi's Finnivest company to foreign bank accounts controlled by Craxi, who died in exile last year.
Staving off a series of legal challenges, Berlusconi surged forward at a propitious moment to fill the void created by the precipitous demise of the two leading mainstream right-wing forces in Italy, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists. Suddenly bereft of party protection, which had always been crucial to his commercial success, Berlusconi needed to enter the political arena directly. So he founded Forza Italia, which governed briefly in 1994 before giving way to six-and-a-half years of lackluster, center left rule.
The political bankruptcy of the center-left coalition is partly to blame for Berlusconi's comeback. Rather than passing tough antitrust measures to break up Berlusconi's media assets, the center left government focused its attention on imposing major cuts in social welfare programs and stringent economic prescriptions required by the European Union. Meanwhile, unemployment remained at chronically high levels. With dissatisfaction palpable at the grassroots, the "Olive Tree" alliance, as the center left was called, sought to keep open the possibility of including Berlusconi's party in a "national unity" government, should the need arise.
Nobel Prize-winning dramatist Dario Fo bemoans the short-sighted strategy of the Olive Tree coalition, which miscalculated when it assumed that Berlusconi's tangled web of companies and his checkered past would render him politically vulnerable. "In a thoroughly slavish manner," Fo says, "the left kept Berlusconi in the game, because they believed this was the best way to improve their prospects. This is the only reason that things have advanced as far as they have."
Those who underestimated Berlusconi will pay a steep price.
Martin A. Lee is the author of Acid Dreams and The Beast Reawakens, a book on neofascism.
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