Irish 'involved' in Bolivia 'assassination attempt'

[Cathar]

lol You've gone so far off topic, there is a thread for 9/11 on here you know!!

Actually it's not really off topic. ERF was a convert to Islam.

I'm wondereing did he become one before or after 9/11. ??? [COLOR="Red"]Mr. EduardoRF converted 2003 to Islam and called himself the spokesman for the Independent Iraqi Government !!!!![/COLOR]

After 9/11 wextern Intelligence agencies were scrambling to build up new contacts to replace what was seen as a failure in communications.
ERF was employed by the Hungarian Intelligence services and trained in an elite KGB school in Moscow. In college after "leaving the service" he continued making reports, He then went on to become a reporter with the Cuban news service. He switches then to an Opus Dei paper and the BBC (around the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc) before going to Croatia.
He sets up a mercenary unit there (allegedly financed by Opus Dei and Overseas agencies) at a time when western intelligence agencies were acting as agent provecateurs. His unit included active serving british soldiers (AWL).
They allegedly engaged in black ops. etc etc,
From Criatia he appears to have gone to Bosnia. He was definitely in Kosovo.
Afterwards "humanitarian missions" in Sudan, indonesia and Iraq.

Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of “one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists

It goes back to the central question whether this guy is a "rogue male" or a deniable asset?

[Cathar]

Ibolya Fekete director of 'Chico (2001) on ERF, Kinoeye | Hungary: Ibolya Fekete interviewed about Chico (2001)

Look, he is different, because he is from Latin America. I used to say that European mentality is to "think about it" [laughs]; and then, maybe, if you are forced to, you will act. That it is much better to think about it and to analyse, you know... Between making the decision and executing the action there are many, many further steps. He is a kind of personality that thinks and acts. That is a different temperament, for sure. In a way, this character is like a UFO in Europe. But these are the characters that are always sharpening the situation. We used to say "it is very complex, the situation is complex" [laughs]. This is always a good reason to think a little more about it instead of doing anything. But these special kinds of characters are sprouting up in one second, no more hesitation, make your choice. They are the ones that are always making the trouble.

From the lone, masculine soldier in the beginning he evolves into a mother figure to his band of internationalists, to his self-created family. Do you see Chico's search, his journey in the film, as an attempt to find a home?

If you are not given a very strong and clear identity at the very moment of your birth, it is such a confused and upside-down world that you don't have many chances to find a place to be at home. It is very difficult in this world. That is the secret of the whole Chico's character, that once you are not given those things, once you try to search for it and you can't find it anywhere anymore, then you create it for yourself. That's what he tries to create: this is our village, this is our place, and we are a group.

There is a big attraction towards the few people who really have the strength and desire to make this. People don't really want to be together, they just miss it. But if someone says, "Yes, do it!" then it's a very big strength. It is another question that it has its dangers. I mean, finally, it can happen very easily that all the boys will die...

The world of war is a very male world, it is ruled by the concept of masculinity. Still your main character seems to have many female traits. He is not a masculine superhero or fighter. How did it feel for you as a woman to make a film that is set in this male domain?

[Cathar]

Opus Dei the CIA and Croatia.

Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, written by Robert Hutchison, a prominent investigative reporter who has for years been a correspondent for Canadian and British journals, states in the introduction that Opus Dei "is the strongest pressure group within the Roman Curia." It has a spiritual dimension but "has also infiltrated into the political, financial and educational infrastructures of numerous countries." It is also quite wealthy, with assets larger than General Motors.(in excess of $2billion)
It controls "eight universities and eight institutions of higher learning worldwide" as well as "an interlocking complex of broadcast networks and publishing houses that makes it a media giant on a par with Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation."

The founder of Opus Dei was Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, a native of Spain preceding and during the Franco regime. His first major political work was to develop a secular movement to oppose the Marxist threat. "It enjoyed CIA backing and marked the beginning of a working relationship between Opus Dei and the CIA"

A number of chapters discuss what Esvcriva called pilleria (dirty
tricks) which he justified by asserting that "our life is a warfare of love, and for Opus Dei all is fair in love and war." There was pilleria in connection with the way in which Opus members built its financial empire --- They were also active in Chile through the Institute for General Studies which the CIA financed at the direction of President Nixon. It was that Institute that planned the coup against Allende by General Pinochet in 1973. Not only did Pinochet have Opus Dei ministers in his regime, but also his foreign minister was later identified as a CIA agent by the LosAngeles Times, as reported by Penny Lernoux in her book, People of God.

John Paul II not only increased the power of Opus Dei but also with haste beatified Escriva, the Opus Dei founder, and took a hard line toward those he regarded as enemies. He was deeply involved in the Balkan crisis, encouraging Catholic Croatia's independence from Yugoslavia. The Pope and Opus Dei saw Croatia as a Catholic bastion against Muslim influence in the Balkan area, as well as against Serbia.

The Croatian government had wanted help from a group of retired U.S. military officers known as Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI) in order to build a professional army along U.S lines. Only a few days after the Pope's visit to Croatia in September 1994, the State Department approved MPRI's aid to Croatia. MPRI employed about 150 people and was led by top U.S. generals. Opus Dei was reputed to be behind this strategy; and despite the United Nations embargo, U.S. arms deliveries were made to Croatia. The British and French did not like this violation and called it to the attention of the State Department and Pentagon leaders, but the FBI, led by FBI director Louis Freeh, did not investigate.
Hutchison's book about Opus Dei asserts that its Washington network 46 which. ..extended from the Papal Nunciature. to the White House, the FBI and the Pentagon, provided the Croats with the right contacts" and the know-how to get what they wanted.

View International Cultic Studies Association's e-Library Member Resources

John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (“gypsies”).

[Thac0man]

Opus Dei the CIA and Croatia.

John Paul also beatified Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac, the leading Croatian cleric who welcomed the Nazi and fascist Ustashi takeover of Croatia during World War II. Stepinac sat in the Ustashi parliament, appeared at numerous public events with top ranking Nazis and Ustashi, and openly supported the Croatian fascist regime that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma (“gypsies”).

Elevating bullsh*t to a new level. The condemnation of the Stepinac by the Communist government did not take any account of Stepinacs actions during the war which involed lobbying for a sanctuary for Jews and the instructions that Catholic priests should allow the baptising of Orthodox christians as catholic if their lives were endangered, and that said baptism had no binding hold over the Orthodox christians, who were free to return to their own church once danger had passed. A basic reading of Stepanics history, not the Communist Yugoslav government version, makes all of that clear. You have adopted the politically motivated communist version as the whole truth, it is no such thing, even if avowed modern day communists slavishly accept it.

In reality communists Yugoslavia has been as widely rejected by Serbians as it has been by Croatians. Also while the Ustashe movement and its symbols are illegal in Croatia today, the Nazis other allies, the Serbian Chetniks are lauded as heroes and enjoy wide spread and popular supprt amongst Serbian politicians. Indeed Titos and his communist Partizan movement scored their greatest battlefield success against the combined SS and Chetnik forces at the Battle of Neretva:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Neretva

And I doubt Opus Dai has the influance on US foreign policy your teneous linkage suggests.

You seem to be of the belief that clergy should have or did have politcal authority in the Balkons. That is not true despite the actions of a few extremists as the catholic church was based in Rome and not tied to national identity, unlike its Orthodox counter parts. Yet your version of history ignores one Nazi ally to credit another, the Chetnik movement, and is based on evidance produced by Communists who were rejected by both the Ustasha and Serbian nationalists. Monumental revisionism.

[toxic avenger]

For once I'm in agreement with Thac0man, Stepinac's story is a lot more complicated than merely stating he was complicit in genocide, he was not, completely the reverse. He was in fact nominated twice by Croatian Jews for the Jewish title of 'Righteous Among the Nations' for his help and assistance, and Churchill condemned his imprisonment (hardly likely if he had been complicit), his son Randolph going to visit him in prison. He was beatified because his show-trial was a Tito set-up and his incarceration hastened his death. He was deserving of criticism, but the allegation that he was complicit in the butchery (and I know how many Catholic clerics very much were complicit) is utterly untrue. Opus Dei are not my cup of tea either, I dislike elitist groups, but some of the claims made against them are no better than Da Vinci Code stuff. Once again, I don't want this thread descending into this re-fighting the grievances, real or imaginary, of the Balkans, we have enough to be getting on with...

During this period of genocidal activities by the Ustashe, in May 14, 1941 Stepinac sent a letter of protest to Pavelić upon hearing news of the massacre in Glina, demanding that "on the whole territory of the Independent State of Croatia, that not one Serb is killed if he is not proven guilty for what he has deserved death."[24] On Sunday May 24, 1942 to the irritation of Ustaša officials, he used the pulpit and a diocesan letter to condemn genocide in specific terms, though without bringing himself to mention Serbs:

All men and all races are children of God; all without distinction. Those who are Gypsies, Black, European, or Aryan all have the same rights.... for this reason, the Catholic Church had always condemned, and continues to condemn, all injustice and all violence committed in the name of theories of class, race, or nationality. It is not permissible to persecute Gypsies or Jews because they are thought to be an inferior race.[25] He also wrote directly to Pavelić, saying on February 24, 1943:[26]

The very Jasenovac camp is a stain on the honor of the ISC. Poglavnik! To those who look at me as a priest and a bishop I say as Christ did on the cross: Father forgive them for they know not what they do.

Rijeka


Later Stepinac called on government officials to stop the persecution of Jews and others and urged them to distinguish between people implicated in wrongdoings and others who were racially profiled or just held as "hostages". He also sought tolerance for people in mixed marriages and people who converted to Catholicism. Stepinac advised individual priests to admit Orthodox believers to the Catholic Church if their lives were in danger, such that this conversion had no validity, allowing them to return to their faith once the danger passed.[27] He was also involved directly and indirectly in numerous efforts to save hundreds of Jews, before and during the war. Dr. Amiel Shomrony alias Emil Schwartz was the personal secretary of Miroslav Šalom Freiberger, the chief rabbi in Zagreb, until 1942. In the actions for saving Jews, Shomrony acted as the mediator between the chief rabbi and Stepinac. He later stated that he considered Stepinac truly blessed since he did the most and the best he could for the Jews during the war.[28] Reportedly the Ustaša government at this point agitated at the Holy See for him to be removed from the position of archbishop of Zagreb, this however to no avail as the Vatican City did not recognize the Croatian state, despite Italian pressure.[29]
In late 1941, a letter began circulating allegedly written by the Croat Prvislav Grisogono of the Independent Democratic Party to Stepinac, condemning him in gruesome detail for crimes against Serbs.[30] Grisogono was interred at the Banjica concentration camp at the time of the letter's spreading and upon his release wrote to Stepinac, telling him that it was a forgery.[30] The forger of the letter is alleged by Grisogono's descendants to be Adam Pribićević. Despite this, the letter was used by both the Serbian and Yugoslav governments.[30] Milan Grol, president of the Democratic Party and minister of communications in the Yugoslav government, also denounced the letter as a forgery, but it was still broadcast on the government's radio program in exile.[30]
Stepinac and the papal nuncio to Belgrade mediated with Royal Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian troops, urging that the Yugoslav Jews be allowed to take refuge in the occupied Balkan territories to avoid deportation. He also arranged for Jews to travel via these territories to the safe, neutral states of Turkey and Spain, along with Constantinople-based nuncio Angelo Roncalli.[31] He sent some Jews for safety to Rev. Dragutin Jesih, who was killed during the war by the Ustaše on suspicion of supporting the Partisans.[32]
In 1942, officials from the Kingdom of Hungary lobbied to attach the Hungarian-occupied Međimurje ecclesiastically to a diocese in Hungary. Stepinac opposed this and received guarantees from the Holy See that diocesan boundaries would not change during the war.[33] Stepinac travelled to the Vatican in 1943. There he came into contact with the Croatian artist Ivan Meštrović.[34] According to Meštrović, Stepinac asked him whether Croatian leader Ante Pavelić knew about crimes being committed in the state. When Meštrović replied that he must know everything, Stepinac broke into tears.[35] Meštrović did not return to Yugoslavia until 1959 and upon his return met with Stepinac again, who was then under house arrest.[36] Meštrović went on to sculpt a bust of Stepinac after his death which reads: "Archbishop Stepinac was not a man of idle words, but rather, he actively helped every person─when he was able, and to the extent he was able. He made no distinctions as to whether a man in need was a Croat or a Serb, whether he was a Catholic or an Orthodox, whether he was Christian or non-Christian. All the attacks upon him be they the product of misinformation, or the product of a clouded mind, cannot change this fact....".[34]

Aloysius Stepinac - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Galmor]

Where do you get all of this info toxic?

[toxic avenger]

Where do you get all of this info toxic?

I was aware of Stepinac's story some time back because a similar claim was made and I remembered researching it and finding out it wasn't true, that in fact it was a travesty of the truth. The link above is simply the Wikipedia page on Stepinac...

[Galmor]

I was aware of Stepinac's story some time back because a similar claim was made and I remembered researching it and finding out it wasn't true, that in fact it was a travesty of the truth. The link above is simply the Wikipedia page on Stepinac...

I see. I’ve been reading through bits and pieces, and I must say its one hell of a thread, I can see where the interest is coming from as it seems to jump out of the screen almost- whereas many of the other threads tend to be a lot more mundane. In fact, it’s like a foreign affairs newspaper on p.ie. Out of curiosity, is this event also linked with the IRA Columbian 3?

[cactusflower]

Hubert Butler from Kilkenny wrote and researched into this.

At the heart of the Croatian work is, of course, the figure of Monsignor Alojzije Stepinac, the Archbishop of Croatia during the Quisling regime. Although there is no single essay devoted to Stepinac alone, Butler’s J’accuse, his shrewd and meticulous portrait of a compromised prelate, belongs to one of his quintessential modes: the focus on the single personality through which a wider historical, cultural and/or ethical picture is adumbrated. Most of these figures — such as Anton Chekhov, Boucher de Perthes, Ernst Renan, Carl von Ossietsky, Mr. Pfeffer of Sarajevo — are drawn from Butler’s eclectic pantheon of intellectual heroes, and in his hands they become universal parables for the struggle of the independent spirit against the conformist tide of history, culture or scholarship.

Only in the writing on Stepinac does this pattern vary decisively. The figure of the Archbishop is Butler’s great parable for something at odds with the cussedness he extols in his heroes — not something more complex, necessarily, but something more opaque, fluid, unsettling, elusive. The Monsignor’s is a parable about a breakdown in the ethical machinery connected to the absence of that independence of spirit.

Butler does not simply lay charges at the door of the Archbishop. With the forensic eye for inner detail that characterizes all his writing on personality, he is interested in something more important, more exemplary of a social process than simple moral condemnation. Butler avoids any sense of anathematizing the character of Stepinac, whose courage, piety and personal kindliness he emphasizes. Moreover, there is no suggestion that the Monsignor belongs to the same moral universe as actual war criminals like Paveli, Artukovi, and Eichmann.

Nonetheless, Butler does not shirk from making a decisive comparison with them in the matter of the process of behavior. For Butler, Stepinac is another avatar of the Organization Man, subset Ecclesiastical. In a period of Alice-in-Wonderland values, institutional order itself, in a sense, is the problem. “The Organization Man’s fatal respect for orderliness”[12] becomes integral to the vastness of the criminal enterprise. In bureaucratic cases like Eichmann and Artukovi, who were dutiful cogs in the momentum of the state, the role of the Organization Man is now well-understood. But what I think Butler saw in the figure of Stepinac — what he first saw firsthand in the Municipal library in Zagreb — is a less obvious form of the phenomenon, a corollary of the first, though perhaps no less essential to that breakdown in the ethical machinery: the Organization Man in proximity to crime.

These two faces of the Organization Man are so entwined as to suggest the continuum of human nature itself. If Eichmann and Artukoviã are instances of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, then Butler on Stepinac concerns what I would call the gentility of evil — so long as we understand the word evil as a moral evaluation of consequences and not an explanation of its metaphysical provenance.

http://www.archipelago.org/vol5-1/vol5no1.pdf

There is a final twist to the Stepinac file. The most astonishing of all, perhaps: Butler’s visit, during the 1950 trip, to the imprisoned Archbishop himself, recounted in a single brief essay, “A Visit to Lepoglava.” If one is not already familiar with the Balkan writings, it is easy to miss the drama of the encounter. In this exemplary moment of the ethical imagination in the 20th Century, the writer confronts the object of his writing. Butler and his Quaker companions have only a few minutes to ask the essential questions in French:

I said I had read a letter he had written to Pavelitch … protesting against the barbarity with which the conversion campaign had been conducted and that I had never doubted his dislike of cruelty. But why, when he wished to regulate this campaign, had he chosen as one of his collaborators Mgr Shimrak…. Mgr Shimrak’s enthusiasm for the disgraceful conversion campaign had been well known and publicly expressed. I had myself looked up his published address in his diocesan magazine Krizhevtsi…. The Archbishop gave the stock reply he had so often given at his trial (which incidentally has become the stock answer among the flippant of Zagreb to any awkward question): Notre conscience est tranquille.[24]

[toxic avenger]

I see. I’ve been reading through bits and pieces, and I must say its one hell of a thread, I can see where the interest is coming from as it seems to jump out of the screen almost- whereas many of the other threads tend to be a lot more mundane. In fact, it’s like a foreign affairs newspaper on p.ie. Out of curiosity, is this event also linked with the IRA Columbian 3?

No, not at all. It is interesting if only because the image of Irish people in South America has always been one of 'brothers in arms', people with a similar heroic struggle against imperialism who in turn sent out people like Daniel O'Leary at the side of Bolivar (there is an O'Leary Square in the centre Caracas full of tricolours in his honour and he is one of the few buried beside Bolivar in the Pantheon). All of a sudden friends of mine there are asking me in astonishment how an Irishman could do this, is Ireland itself complicit, etc., and the automatic goodwill that Irish people receive in Latin America is threatened (and I know that's illogical and unfair, but there is a polarised and manichaean politics in much of Latin America and this is the reality of it). And all because of this one bloody idiot. So I really want to know what the hell he was doing there and I want it to be emphasised that this was a solo run in which Ireland is not complicit, and that most of us are utterly opposed.