Cossiga lashes out

The former President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, has said that a recent audio tape in which Osama bin Laden attacks the former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, as an American lackey, is a fabrication invented in the studios of Berlusconi’s own media company, Mediaset, in order to curry support for the tycoon as a potential victim of terrorism. “Circles close to Palazzo Chigi [the Prime Minister’s office], the nerve centre of the Italian intelligence services, point out that the fact that the tape is a fake is proved by the fact that Osama bin Laden ‘confesses’ that Al Qaeda was the author of the attacks of 11 September against the twin towers in New York, whereas all democratic circles in America and Europe, especially those of the centre-left in Italy, now know perfectly well that that disastrous attack was planned and implemented by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world in order to put Arab countries in the dock and induce the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan.” [Corriere della sera, 30 November 2007]