I’ll tell you about the American blunders on Mani Pulite
Attracted by the title on the "origins and aporias", that is, contradictions, of the so-called second Republic, such as to lead one to doubt that it really existed in Italy, although many also speak and write of a third Republic that has already passed or of a fourth incipient, a book just released for Rubbettino edited by Francesco Bonini, Lorenzo Ornaghi and Andrea Spiri, three historians and university professors with bows, made me jump. I found the confirmation, this time properly documented, of the disinformation and approximation of American diplomacy struggling in Italy in the early nineties with the explosion of Tangentopoli.
The merit of the documented approximate approach of American diplomacy operating in Italy, very active in sending reports and so on to Washington, is due in particular to Andrea Spiri. Who was able to consult many documents not completely declassified, to tell the truth, because he found some omissions that prevent, for example, the names and surnames of the Milanese magistrates contacted by the Americans to obtain advances, confidences, forecasts and quant other and inform the superiors, starting with those of the embassy in Rome. Where gradually – in spite of an initial prudence, also caused by an invitation to the deputy prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro in the United States made known although still reserved – they let themselves be carried away by harshly discharging a political leader like Bettino Craxi. To which the United States also owed a great deal in the victory of the Cold War against the USSR, despite the direct confrontation by telephone, and interposed interpreter, between Craxi himself and President Ronald Reagan in the famous night of Sigonella in 1985. During which the departments special forces of the USA, tried to take the place of the Italian armed forces to deliver to American justice, subtracting them from the Italian one, those responsible for the hijacking of the ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean waters. Where the Palestinian terrorists had killed and thrown overboard a paralytic of American nationality and Jewish religion, but before that they kidnapped the passengers and crew of a ship flying our flag.
If Craxi first as a decisive participant in the government majority and then as Prime Minister had not made the strengthening of NATO's missile defenses operational in Italy, thus neutralizing the advantage achieved by the Soviets by deploying their SS 20s over the curtain against European capitals, the starting with the USSR, it certainly would not have ended in the times and ways that have gone down in history for the West. Yet Craxi immediately appeared to the American diplomats, between Milan and Rome, a man worthy of every suspicion, and perhaps even of that lynching in April 1993 a few hundred meters from Montecitorio. Where the evening before the deputies had dared to contest by secret ballot at least some of the corruption and other charges made against the former prime minister by the prosecutors who were now chasing each other in hunting him down.
Only after the suicide in prison, in Milan, of the president of Eni Gabriele Cagliari, but above all the offensive opened in 1994 by the Milanese Public Prosecutor's Office against the new Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, unexpected electoral beneficiary of the "Clean Hands" judicial earthquake, did ceased to think at the American Embassy that "the magistrates – reads a document unearthed by Spiri – follow only the judicial route, the hammers of their decisions have proved effective as guns …. They have embarked on a process of change that they cannot control or to drive completely… ..but as judges their responsibility is to make sure justice is done, not to draw up policies to determine when they have enough ”because“ this is a job that is up to others ”.
Only on December 8, 1994, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, impressed by the treatment also reserved for Berlusconi, did the American ambassador in Rome, Reginald Bartholomew, decide to recognize and write: "In the past we have not been able to gather enough evidence to confirm the 'accusation against the judges of acting for political ends ”. But now – the ambassador reported to the US State Department – we understand well "the growing concern among citizens that the work of the magistrates may respond to purposes of a political nature", despite "a status of quasi-health that has removed them from possibility of criticism by the political class ”. "It will probably take several years before a new balance is established between the powers of the state and for the elected representatives to regain more strength" concluded the ambassador.
Barttholomew died in New York in 2012, at the age of 76, without even having been able to glimpse that "new balance" in Italy that we are all still waiting for. And for which we will perhaps have to go back to betting more than on the small parties as they are, on direct referendum democracy. Which could finally also lift the robes from the discredit in which they too ended up, as the President of the Republic and the Superior Council of the Judiciary himself has just pointed out with his ways on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the mafia massacre of Capaci, which cost the life of Giovanni Falcone , his wife and escort.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/vi-racconto-gli-abbagli-americani-su-mani-pulite/ on Sun, 30 May 2021 04:26:58 +0000.