Ex-opposition leader calls for 35-year-old inquiry into death of Pier Paolo Pasolini to be reopened
By Michael Day
Thirty-five years after Pier Paolo Pasolini's battered body was found on a bleak beach near Rome, the government is under pressure to reopen the inquiry into the mysterious murder of the iconoclastic film maker.
Walter Veltroni, the former leader of the opposition, has written an open letter to the Justice Minister, Angelino Alfano, asking why, despite the mass of unanswered questions, authorities have yet to make amends for an investigation that "was riddled with holes, like many others of the time".
The letter, published yesterday in Corriere della Sera, Italy's biggest daily newspaper, says recent advances in forensic science should allow investigators to finally address many of the doubts surrounding the killing in 1975 of the gay Marxist intellectual, whose films included The Gospel According to St. Matthew.
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After being savagely beaten, Pasolini was run over several times by his own car. Inside the vehicle, investigators found a jumper that belonged to neither the murder victim nor the 17-year-old convicted for the crime. There were also bloody fingerprints that were not checked.
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See also:
Because He Knew: Reopening Pasolini's Case
L'assassinat de Pier Paolo Pasolini agite toujours l'Italie
Friday, July 23, 2010
The film maker, the confession and the murder that refuses to die
On modern servitude
Jean-François Brient: On modern servitude
“Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind. “
King Lear, Act IV, scene 1, William Shakespeare
Modern servitude is voluntary, endorsed by those slaves who crawl on the surface of the Earth. They buy the merchandises that enslave them every day more. Slaves run after alienating jobs that are gently given to them if they prove to be tamed enough. They choose the masters they will obey. For this absurd tragedy to happen, it has been necessary to dispossess slaves from the awareness of their own exploitation and their alienation. Here is the bizarre modernity of our time. Contrary to slaves from antiquity, servants from the Middle Ages or the working-class from the first industrial revolutions, today we are contemplating people that are totally enslaved. The difference is that they are unaware of their enslavement and those who are aware, choose to ignore it. They ignore rebellion which should be the only genuine reaction of the exploited ones. Slaves accept without question the pitiful life that was planned for them. Renouncing and resignation are the sources of their misfortune.
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Google Launches Cover Up Of ‘Google Spies’ Story
By Steve Watson, Prisonplanet
The ongoing saga with Google censorship has continued today as it emerged that once again the search engine giant removed a key term from it’s trends pages.
Alex Jones yesterday asked his readers and listeners to send the term ‘Google spies’ to the top of the trends charts in the latest effort to fight back against the company’s censorship of his films on YouTube.
The term related to a story we prepared detailing how Google is intimately linked with U.S. intelligence and has a history of censorship and surveillance.
Within a short time the term had hit the top spot with the “volcanic” status added (see below – click for enlargement).
As you can see, the effect of the term being pushed to the top of the trends charts is that bloggers and journalists pick up the story and begin to document it. A snowball effect ensues and millions of people all over the world are more likely to be directed toward the story.
However, within half an hour the term had been completely removed by Google and resulted in no news story links. These actions replicated Google’s activity in the days beforehand when it removed other terms such as ‘The Obama Deception’, ‘Infowars’, ‘Fall of the Republic’ and ‘Google Censorship’ – which had all become some of the most searched topics on the internet.
This is the epicentre of the infowar. Events over the past couple of days have shown that you, our readers, have the power to take the issues we cover and literally make them the widest read items on the internet.
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COINTELPRO and the Omaha Two
In 2007, veteran journalist Michael Richardson began writing a series of articles for OpEdNews.com about Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, who are two Black Panther political prisoners known as the Omaha Two. Richardson argues that they were framed for the 1970 murder of a policeman as part of the FBI's notorious counterintelligence program, dubbed “COINTELPRO.” This top-secret and illegal operation was a dirty war on the entire US Left, including the civil rights & Black liberation movements.
Illustrating this program's intent, a March 3, 1968 COINTELPRO memo discussed the need to stop "the beginning of a true black revolution," and to "prevent the rise of a 'messiah' who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement… Through counterintelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential troublemakers and neutralize them." Another stated goal was "to prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist organizations, especially among youth. Specific tactics to prevent these groups from converting young people must be developed." One specific tactical approach was expressed in an April 3, 1968 communiqué arguing that "The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries."
In terms of scale, the FBI's war of repression against the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s was greatest against the Black Panthers. Many Panthers, like Chicago leader Fred Hampton, were assassinated outright, while others were framed for murders they did not commit. A few of these Panthers, like Geronimo Ji Jaga and Dhoruba Bin Wahad, had their convictions overturned and were released, but many of the COINTELPRO survivors remain in prison today.
In addressing why the Panthers were targeted so intensely by COINTELPRO, Noam Chomsky wrote in 1973: "A top secret Special Report for the president in June 1970 gives some insight into the motivations for the actions undertaken by the government to destroy the Black Panther Party. The report describes the party as 'the most active and dangerous black extremist group in the United States.' Its 'hard core members' were estimated at 800, but 'a recent poll indicates that approximately 25 percent of the black population has a great respect for the BPP, including 43 percent of blacks under 21 years of age.' On the basis of such estimates of the potential of the party, the repressive apparatus of the state proceeded against it to ensure that it did not succeed in organizing as a substantial social or political force."
Michael Richardson is now working on a book about the Omaha Two and an archive of his definitive OpEdNews.com series about the case is available here. This year, he began a new series of articles at Examiner.com, exploring the broader history of COINTELPRO, along with a continued focus on the Omaha Two, viewable here.
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image from http://www.spitting-image.net
