Pepe Escobar

The Enchanters came / Cold and old,
Making day gray / And the age of gold
Passed away, / For men fell
Under their spell, / Were doomed to gloom.
Joy fled, / There came instead,
Grief, unbelief, / Lies, sighs,
Lust, mistrust, / Guile, bile,
Hearts grew unkind, / Minds blind,
Glum and numb, / Without hope or scope.
There was hate between states,
A life of strife, / Gaols and wails,
Dont's, wont's, / Chants, shants,
No face with grace, / None glad, all sad.
W H Auden, The Golden Age

We have, unfortunately, no post-modern version of Dante guided by Virgil to tell a startled world what is really happening in Europe in the wake of the recent Italian general election.

On the surface, Italians voted an overwhelming "No" - against austerity (imposed the German way); against more taxes; against budget cuts in theory designed to save the euro. In the words of the center-left mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, "Our citizens have spoken loud and clear but maybe their message has not been fully grasped." In fact it was.

There are four main characters in this morality/existential play worthy of the wackiest tradition of commedia dell 'arte.

The Pyrrhic winner is Pier Luigi Bersani, the leader of the center-left coalition; yet he is unable to form a government. The undisputed loser is former Goldman Sachs technocrat and caretaker Prime Minister Mario Monti.

And then there are the actual winners; "two clowns" - at least from a German point of view and also the City of London's, via The Economist. The "clowns" are maverick comedian Beppe Grillo's 5 Star movement; and notorious billionaire and former prime minister Silvio "Bunga Bunga" Berlusconi.

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Naomi Spencer

An investigative report by the British Guardian and the BBC’s Arabic language service links top US officials to atrocities carried out by Iraqi police forces after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. General David Petraeus and Bush-era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others, worked directly with US officials overseeing death squads, secret prisons, and torture practices in US-occupied Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died and millions were displaced as a result of the chaos that the atrocities produced.

The memos and reports featured in the Guardian /BBC documentary come from the 2010 leak attributed to Army Private Bradley Manning and published by WikiLeaks. The Obama administration has protected the officials linked to the abuse, many of whom remain on the government payroll; David Petraeus was Obama’s CIA director until last November.

The Guardian /BBC report, published as a documentary, focuses on the role of retired Colonel James Steele, who worked with Petraeus and Rumsfeld. A Special Forces veteran of Vietnam, Steele was sent in 1984 to El Salvador, where he trained and directed counterinsurgency operations. As many as 70,000 left-wing opponents of the Salvadoran regime were murdered by government death squads.

In 2004, amid rising armed resistance in Iraq and rising antiwar sentiment in the US, the Bush administration turned to the “Salvador option.” The methods Washington used in the 1980s in Latin America were quickly recycled into assembling Shi’a-majority death squads targeting Sunni Iraqis—who were at the time the heart of the anti-occupation insurgency.

John Negroponte, the head of the US embassy in Honduras in the 1980s, was appointed ambassador. David Petraeus was given command to oversee the creation of a new Iraqi military police force.

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Chris Floyd

The truth-telling of the imprisoned Bradley Manning continues to bear rich fruit, even as he faces a lifetime in prison for acting on principle to save innocent lives and prevent his country from staining itself further with war crimes. This week, the Guardian released a special investigation into the hideous regime of torture that the United States imposed and empowered during its years-long rape of Iraq.

The Guardian report draws on the trove of documents that Manning gave to Wikileaks (and the now diplomatically "sequestered" Julian Assange) to provide new details on the direct links of America's highest officials -- including the bipartisanly adored and now much mourned retired apparatchik David Petraeus -- to the torture of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In many ways, of course, it's hardly a revelation that American forces were deeply involved in torture during the "extraordinary achievement" (B. Obama) in Iraq.

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