WORLD Fascist who shot pope bargaining for pardon The Turkish neo-fascist who shot and wounded Pope John Paul II in 1981 is now asking for a par- don, the Italian Catholic weekly II Sabbato revealed recently. Mehmet Ali Agca, interviewed in Rebibbia prison near Rome, hinted to a reporter from II Sab- bato that it was about time he was rewarded for a well-done job with a pardon from Italian President Sandro Pertini. Agca is the sole person on whom the alleged ‘‘Bulgarian connection”’ case rests. The case is due to come to trial soon and will involve Agca and the three Bulgarians he has accused of tak- ing part in a plot against the Pope. So many holes have appeared in Agca’s story implicating Bulga- nian Airlines employee Sergei An- tonov that the prosecution is ex- pected to have no case at all. The Italian lawyer for An- tonov, Giuseppe Consolo, said in a recent interview, ‘“‘The absur- dity of terrorist Agca’s claims about Sergei Antonov’s alleged complicity in the assassination at- tempt is beyond doubt.’’ He noted that the jury has already been picked for the upcoming trial. ‘‘It will be chaired,’’ he'said, “by the well-known lawyer Severino Santiapichi, who con- ducted the most important trials in Italy, including the first one of Agca.”” Agca did not once mention the word ‘‘Bulgaria’’ in his first trial for shooting and wounding the Pope. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no hope of parole. After several months ina maximum security solitary cell, he was visited by two Italian sec- ret service agents. Agca then came out with his ‘‘story”’ about a ‘Bulgarian plot’’ against the Pope. Even more doubt on the alleged “‘case’’ against Antonov arose from two recent events. One is last fall’s stunning revelations about the penetration of the Ita- lian military intelligence agency SISMI by ultra-rightist, neo- fascist and organized crime ele- ments. In addition there are charges by leading Italian social democratic members of parlia- ment that the Italian secret ser- ‘vices are controlled by the CIA. The No. 3 man in SISMI, Gen. Pietro Musumeci, was arrested last fall and charged with setting up a parallel SISMI (called “*Super-SISMI’’) within the intel- ligence agency in the interests of the ultra-rightist Propaganda Due (P2) group. According to Francesco Pazienza, the sinister figure in- volved in much of these opera- tions, the Super-SISMI was or- dered to concentrate its efforts on the Pope and Yasser Arafat, chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Christian Roulette, the French attorney who has published a book on the case (The Connection — John Paul If — Antonov — Agca) has charged that ‘‘the Italian secret service agent Pazienza repre- sented the Italian side in the co- ordination of operations involving several secret services. ‘*‘Pazienze is one of the pro- tagonists in the campaign’’ to smear Bulgaria, the French attor- ney said. ‘“‘It was Pazienza who provided that a TV set would be installed in Agca’s cell and he was the one who arranged Agca’s interviews with Italian secret ser- vice agents in prison.”’ now asking for a pardon. Anatomy of a frame-up The assassination attempt in May, 1981 against Pope John Paul II resulted in the imprisonment for life of a Turkish neo-fascist, Mehmet Ali Agca three months later. After a year in prison, Agca named three Bulgarians as being involved in the plot and, in Nov. 1982, a Bulgarian citizen working in Rome, Sergei Antonov, was arrested. Despite evidence of a CIA-inspired frame-up, an Italian judge in Oct. 1984, ordered Antonov, along with four Turks to stand trial, solely on the ‘‘evidence’’ of Agca. Bulgaria has charged Italian authorities with participating in an anti-Bulgarian, anti- Soviet slander campaign and has demanded Antonov’s release. As the accompanying story reveals, Agca, for services rendered, is After the interviews, Agca told an, Italian investigator that his offer of a reduction in sentence to 25 years if he (Agca) cooperated with the authorities was nothing — the Italian secret services, he said, told him his sentence would be reduced to 10 years if he *‘co- operated”’ with them. In his recent interview with Il Sabbato, Agca said ‘“‘I collabo- rated with Italian justice without putting preconditions or claiming anything in return. I demanded nothing from Pope John Paul II during our meeting either. ‘*Now I want the Italian state to pardon me on humanitarian grounds,”’ Agca insisted. But this report can only deepen the wide- spread suspicion that Agca made up the whole ‘‘Bulgarian plot” story at the bidding of the Italian secret services. It. would have been his only hope of avoiding decades of imprisonment. Another aspect of the affair is that under Italian Law, no case can be based on the testimony of one person. “French attorney Roulette has pointed out that ‘‘in this case, there is not evena single witness. There are Agca’s ‘con- fessions’, plus conjecture in- tended to prop up the ‘plot’ theory. There is no testimonial evidence, no physical evidence proving Antonov’s involvement and a ‘Bulgarian plot.’ There aré no proofs, only the admissions 0 a known criminal, Agca.”’ — Daily World ~ Global strategy of U.S. imperialism — Since 1945, the United States has focussed its national energies and resources upon the effort to create and maintain global military supremacy. Through eight pres- idents, with varying degrees of intensity, the U.S. has engaged the USSR in a steadily escalating. arms race, forcing the Soviets to respond to a continuous stream of new military and technological challenges. In the 1980’s, we are witnessing a qualitative upsurge in this confrontation, so great that it now threatens us with economic catastrophe as well as nuclear holocaust. Yet for many people, the sources of this titanic strug- gle remain obscure. There are any number of current theories: human nature; the nasty ‘‘Soviet threat’’; the symmetrical responsibility of the “‘two superpowers’; even the psychotic personality of Ronald Reagan has been blamed. In fact, the record clearly shows that the United States initiated, and still leads the arms race. For 40 years the arms race, and its political equivalent, the Cold War, have served Washington as an imperial strategy for maintaining its grip on the ‘‘Free World’’, and for meet- ing the global ideological challenge posed by socialism. There are at least five basic areas in which the policies of continuous arms race and Cold War serve these objec- tives: e Hegemony in the First World: Historians like to say that after W.W. II the United States ‘tascended to global responsibility’. In fact, the U.S. galvanized the rem- nants of the capitalist world into a single anti-communist military bloc under its own leadership. Today some 60. - countries are bound to the U.S. through military treaties; there are about 2,500 U.S. military bases in 114 countries around the world; more than half a million American servicemen are permanently stationed overseas. As Canadians are in a good position to know, powerful political, economic and psychological consequences flow from military dependence upon the U.S. When the Cold War deepens, pressure grows to integrate our economy with that of the U.S. and to abandon indeépen- dent policies in the name of ‘‘free world solidarity’’. Inflated military spending at the demand of the U.S. increasingly distorts our economy, limits our options, and reinforces our dependence. e Domination in the Third World: The far-flung mar- kets and raw materials of the underdeveloped world are an American corporate preserve which has frequently been maintained by the application of brute force. The list of U.S. interventions in the post-war period, from Iran and Guatemala to Grenada, is far too long to be rehearsed here. What made it possible in the past for the U.S. to intervene freely and fearlessly throughout the 8 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 20, 1985 News Analysis Fred Weir world was its incontestable strategic superiority. Since the mid-1970’s, however, there has been a wave of Third World revolutions, and a number of nations — Vietnam, Angola, Iran, Nicaragua, and others — have broken free from U.S. domination. U.S. right-wingers’ blamed this on the erosion of American military supre- - macy, and the fact that the USSR has achieved strategic parity. It is partly for this reason that under Carter, and more intensely under Reagan, the United States launched a massive effort to restore its umbrella of strategic superiority. e Profit: No nation as a whole profits from military build-up, and the U.S. provides an excellent example of how crippling military expenditures can be. The infra- structure of American society is crumbling: roads and bridges are falling apart, cities are decaying, social ser- vices disappearing. Yet a particular section of American society — the big corporations — profits enormously from arms production. Z The new arms drive is thus, in part, a response to the growing crisis of U.S. capitalism. Capital is expropriated from the American people, through taxes, and lavished upon big, uncompetitive corporate dinosaurs. The na- tional wealth is being cannibalized to support a dying system. e Economic Warfare: One of the purposes of the escalating series of military threats directed against the USSR since 1945 has clearly been to disrupt and hamper the growth of the Soviet economy. The socialist countries have been forced to divert huge quantities of manpower and resources from other needs to provide for defence. In fact, the U.S.has built certain types of offensive weapons-systems in order to enhance this effect: in the 1950s the Strategic Air Command was created to pose a continuous airborne menace to the USSR. The Soviets had no choice but to construct an enormously expensive air defence network to cover the entire, sprawling expanse of. Soviet airspace. Since 1982, the U.S. has deployed at least 1,360 Cruise Mis- siles, with thousands more to come — a move which has necessitated a massive modernization of Soviet ail _ defences. Rather than accept the principle of peaceful competi- tion, the U.S. has chosen to deal with socialism through military confrontation — with potentially catastrophic consequences for all humanity. e Domestic Control: The imposition of Cold War | standards at home provides an important tool of social control. As the crisis of the capitalist system deepens, we increasingly see ‘‘national security’’ invoked to jus- tify government secrecy and repressive policies. Poli- — tical opponents, such as trade unionists, peace activists and communists, are identified with the ‘‘external threat’? and persecuted as ‘‘enemy agents’’ oF ‘‘dupes’’. It is no coincidence that the height of the first Cold War, in the early 1950s, was also the period of extreme McCarthyism at home. Against the challenge of socialism and national liberation, U.S. imperialism counterposes brute force; and the spectre of W.W. III. Arms race and Cold Wal are, essentially, strategies devised 40 years ago if Washington to prolong a crisis-ridden system and prop up a collapsing global empire. The alternative, long advocated by the USSR and many other nations, is a framework of peaceful co-exis- tence and non-military competition for the hearts and minds of the world’s people. This option has been deci- sively rejected, in practice, by the U.S. The American vision of the future appears to have narrowed to 4 fleeting image of military supremacy. ‘‘Many U.S. decision-makers and spokesmen are coming to believe that time is on the side of the Soviet system; indeed, that ‘history’ itself is going against their own system. The truth, I believe, is that among some sections of the U.S. power elite and some circles of NATO intellectuals, there is a growing sense that the Soviet Union has a momentum and a sense of direction far greater, and more vital than do the United States and ~ other Western capitalist powers. They are very much afraid of the outcome of a peaceful competition be- tween the two systems. Only by an act of military will, some of them believe, can the U.S. win out in this — competition — although what such a ‘victory’ might | mean they do not really know, or at least never say.””