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Understanding Shadows- a MUST-READ by M. Quilligan Part 1

Dear readers,

this evening I am very happy to introduce you to a book which convinced and conquered me from first sight. It is the well-researched work by Irish journalist Michael Quilligan entitled “Understanding Shadows”, an eye-opener, a book revealing many examples of truth opposed to the politics of lies all governments of the world pratise.

As citizens we are victims of the lies and manipulations of our governments. And this is particularly true for the USA, Britain, France, Israel, … and for Germany as well. Among other subjects, the author talks about Israel and Palestine, the UK and Ireland, sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and describes so many facts around the lies of our governments. However, as the title says, the book would like to achieve a positive aim, which is the one of understanding by revealing these shadows, one by one.

In this  post and in the following the editorial team of ProMosaik e.V. wants to present two reviews the author sent me. Before giving the word to the two reviewers, I would like to shortly introduce them:


Basil Miller is a retired Irish journalist (Irish Times,
Sunday Business Post, UPI).

Des Wilson is a Catholic priest. He was a curate in the staunchly republican
West Belfast area from 1966 – 1975.
He resigned his clerical  position in 1975 after
disagreeing with the local Catholic bishop over the use of church resources
during the Troubles. He was awarded the Pax Christi Peace Prize in 1975,
received an honorary award in Peace Studies from Manhattan College in 1976. He
has been a prolific columnist with the Andersonstown News, and is the author of
‘An End to Silence’.
Happy to read your comments to these two reviews. Please read and share the information about this wonderful book to open your eyes and your friends’ eyes.
Thank you
Dr. phil. Milena Rampoldi
Editorial Team of ProMosaik e.V.



Mass Deception and the Manipulation of
our Minds
June 13,
2014, Basil Miller
Book
Review: Understanding
Shadows: The Corrupt Use of Intelligence
. Michael Quilligan, Clarity
Press. $21.95



A
convenient narrative of our times, prevalent in news media, entertainment
channels such as TV and movies, and across a wide range of literature, is that
the ‘intel’-led security
state began in 2002 just months after a tight and cheaply funded operation by a
previously little-known group brought down New York’s twin towers
and killed almost 3,000 people.

This narrative,
which has developed multiple strands and threads, by now woven into a fabric
which goes virtually unquestioned, is false, as this book demonstrates.

Michael Quilligan’s
focus is on the weapons of mass deception which elites and states use to keep
us ignorant. His book is a meticulously researched and corroborated
survey of how ‘intelligence’ is used to hide, distort, and bury the truth of
great events, and instead implant a ‘version’, a narrative, which reflects the requirements
of the rulers of the world and serves to conceal reality.




Intelligence
services and their linked military, criminal, and undercover ‘assets’, do a lot
of things, of which spying is perceived as the most exciting and glamorous. But they
do more.

For example, they
murder. The French secret service’s assassination of a Greenpeace photographer
in New Zealand is an egregious example, another the almost incessant stream of
doorstep killings and public executions by Israel’s Mossad. And now we have
daily murder by drone and missile on the orders of a former law professor who
became President of the United States, carried out from secret bunkers by
agents of one or other of the plethora of intelligence agencies which have been
so expanded since 9/11 as to constitute a state, an unanswerable
state, within a state.

They torture. And
they manipulate. Without scruple, they use corruption and the already corrupt
to further their aims and objectives. The result, inevitably, is more
corruption.




Ranging across seven
crucial periods and events, Quilligan reveals an elaborate tapestry of
mystification, manipulation and false consciousness, carefully crafted to
ensure our continued ignorance or bewilderment.

Perhaps the
best-known example of the corrupt and perverted use of intelligence is to the
fore. The infamous ‘September Dossier’ used by Tony Blair to trick the House of
Commons into voting for the invasion of Iraq, and the less familiar but equally
fake February Dossier, combine to give a textbook example, in ‘Seeing Things
Invisible’, of how ‘intel’ aimed at pleasing political masters, the desires of
those masters, and the established mechanisms of deniability and distance, all
combined to deceive both the people and their representatives and to sanction a
murderous,  illegal and destructive act of aggression which served the
interests only of a neo-con elite.

But Quilligan does
more. He shows how London, derided by the French as ‘Londonistan’ for
harbouring Islamic militants wanted for French crimes, hidden in a sea of over
500,000 devout Muslims, ignored all the signs of home-grown jihad until
that fateful day in July 2005 when four bombs ripped through trains and a bus
in the city. He shows how the reaction, or over-reaction, far from containing jihadi
militancy, served only as a recruiting sergeant to press more Muslims into the
arms of the militant preachers.




And he shows how the
roots of Londonistan can be traced to Algeria, to an anti-Islamic civil war
launched against the National Salvation Front, swept to office with an overwhelming
landslide but immediately denied power by a military coup. Democratic Islam
died in 1991, says Quilligan, and the subsequent conflict, in which 200,000
Algerians were killed, most by the state, provided the raw material for a
different Islam, fired by refugees from both Algeria and coup-master France,
whose ‘intel’ agencies had such a big hand in it.

In ‘Slouching
Towards Jerusalem’, he dissects the moral corruption at the centre of the
Israeli state, the curious Israeli relationship with the United States
epitomised by the refusal of the latter to publicly investigate the deadly June
1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, and the savage consequences, for
Palestinians, for Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs, and for
Israelis too, which have flowed from it.

And central to all
that is the ferocious Mossad, whose assassination squads and proven techniques
became a model for the USA, and the internal security service, Shin Bet, whose
surveillance and repression remains a keystone in maintaining supremacy over
Palestinians and Israeli Arabs alike. And dissident Israelis.


Quilligan travels
the globe: South Africa, Iraq, the Vatican State, Russia to America in the
recapitulated and strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina, by
train and boat from Moscow to Florida — and Ireland.

The looting of South
Africa by a corrupted African National Congress and by NATO corporations since
1994 forms the theme of ‘The Itching Palm’, with some very apt lessons for
Ireland about what happens when accumulating personal wealth gets in the way,
as it always does, of using national resources and economic policy to relieve
poverty and inequality and generalise the benefits of economic expansion.

The Vatican, and the
Catholic Church in general, comes under scrutiny both for its historic
involvement in and cover-up of endemic and widespread sexual abuse of children
and its intimate and corrupt relationships with politicians, governments and
dictatorships, the Mafia, and money-laundering banks, several of which it still
owns or does business with. The verdict, not surprisingly, is harsh.




For those who see
Francis I as a reforming breath of fresh air, the fate of Pope John Paul I may
bring pause, but what will certainly become clear is that Francis has done little
or nothing to root out the subterranean corruption which underlies hundreds of
years of abuse of the innocents, and of innocence, which the Roman Church has
practised and the Vatican has concealed. Nor is there much sign of a new
financial regime shorn of the blatant criminality typical of the IOR (the
Vatican Bank) and its collaboration with Mafia, Nazis, right-wing terror gangs,
drug cartels, military regimes — and other crooked bankers.

Quilligan has a
remarkable knack of presenting a comprehensive survey, packed with spellbinding
detail and stretching across lengthy periods — decades, in some cases — in a
very short space. He manages always to remain fully aware of the overview,
situating his voluminous material entirely in context while buttressing his
conclusions with a forensic inevitability.

It’s a specialist
interest, but this book can be taken either as a first-class introduction to
the field or, for the already familiar, as an absolutely essential summary of
the seven areas covered.

His final chapter,
‘The Butcher’s Apron’, is a masterly survey of the Troubles in Northern Ireland
— or, to be more accurate, the island of Ireland, from 1969 right up to the
present day. And if you pause, thinking ‘but the war ended almost 20 years
ago’, just reflect on the fact that the Smithwick Tribunal took two and a half
years to report on allegations of collusion by gardai in the deaths of two RUC
officers, largely due to deliberate obstruction by the British government and
its — yes, indeed — security services and officials. It had been expected to
last six months. Or that the Dublin and Monaghan bombings of 1974 remain to be
fully explained, for the same reasons.




The British called
their ‘mission’ in Northern Ireland Operation Banner. They like to claim
it as a textbook success, but in a mere 74 pages Quilligan gets beneath the
surface to show just how great a failure it was, not only in terms of not
winning the war, but in exacerbating and prolonging a crisis situation that
need not have lasted 25 years nor caused so many deaths and so much economic
and societal damage.

From this survey, it
is impossible to avoid one simple and depressing conclusion. The use of
‘intelligence’ as it has been practised by ‘the West’ — primarily by US,
British, French and Israeli agencies, with a supporting cast of bit players
including Irish (both Garda intelligence based in its Harcourt Street ‘Puzzle
Palace’ and the Army’s G2) in addition to Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and a
host of Mid-East and Asian outfits — has brought only disaster.

Not only has it
prolonged conflicts, it has deepened them. In some cases, it has created
conflict where none existed. It has provided false ‘evidence’ to justify new
wars. It has multiplied the misery of millions by exacerbating conflicts, as in
Syria now or the largely unreported murderous brush wars in Libya since the
murder of Gadhafi. This shadow world is called ‘intelligence’, but in
Quilligan’s account it emerges as a monster of myopia and stupidity.

One thing is
abundantly clear when you put down this book. If none of these acronymic
entities existed, the world would be a fairer, more peaceful, and a better
place.