Here’s an interesting example of a conspiratorial explanation for recent events. Neda, the woman whose death in the Iranian election protests was captured on YouTube, has become a potent symbol of the brutality of the crackdown. As with most such symbolic events, there’s some debate as to the reality of the situation:
Iranian Leaders Blaming CIA, Protestors for Killing Neda
In his Friday prayer sermon, senior cleric Ayatollah Ahmed Khatami called for the government to protest the “leaders of protests, who were supported by the United States and Israel, strongly and with cruelty so it will be a lesson for everyone.”
Khatami also said that 26-year-old protestor Neda Agha Soltan, shot last Saturday and memorialized by protestors as a martyr for their cause, was killed by those protestors.
“The proof and evidence shows that they have done it themselves and have raised propaganda against the system,” Khatami said. “I say hereby that these deceitful media have to know that the ordeal will be over and shame will remain for them.”
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“Well, if the CIA wants to kill some people and attribute that to the government elements, then choosing women is an appropriate choice, because the death of a woman draws more sympathy,” Ghadiri said.
So this is interesting. As proof, it’s claimed that the bullet used was of a type not generally used in Iran – therefore, the Iranian security forces didn’t do it.
This situation hits on a couple of points that bear mentioning. First, this is a classic example of a purported false flag attack – an attempt at provocation by committing some act of war while pretending to be someone else. The Iranian government, in this case, is saying that the CIA (or whoever) shot this unfortunate woman to stir up world opinion against Iran. The CIA, of course, is a particularly good scapegoat in this case. It’s an attempt to disclaim responsibility while simultaneously pinning the blame on a fairly evil foreign organization.
The thing is, this could certainly be true. We simply have no real way of knowing due to the information embargo in Iran. The Warren Commission cannot be convened over Twitter, and in any case the witnesses who’ve given conflicting reports can’t be interviewed to sort out the contradictions. There are reasons why it’s probably not true – wouldn’t the CIA have used an Iranian bullet if they were trying to pull off an elaborate false-flag protestor-killing hoax? Did they just go around shooting random sympathetic-looking women until one of their relatives pulled out a cell phone to capture her very photogenic death on video?
I think that just everyone involved understands that the Neda affair is all about framing and message control. The Iranians claim that the CIA is trying to control the discourse on Iran by portraying the police and the Basij paramilitary group as inhuman monsters. Neda’s death was certainly all over the news before the rest of Michael Jackson’s body joined his nose in Deathsville USA, so there’s a grain of truth to that – her death has become a rallying point. Of course, this is less because of some nationalistic CIA-driven desire to destabilize Iran and more due to the fact that her blood on the sidewalk might as well have spelled out “RATINGS BONANZA” in faux-Arabic script.
Politically speaking, this is an excellent move by the Iranians. The Neda video was a compelling indictment of the regime’s crackdown on the protests, so they’re disputing its authenticity. The debate then shifts exclusively to that video – I have no doubt that we’ll soon see a great deal of back-and-forth over What Really Happened. This has the effect of shifting attention away from the other hundred or so other people who have been killed in the protests, the raids on student dormitories, and the videos of Basij forces firing indiscriminately into crowds. They can’t really blame that on the CIA, so they don’t – they just talk about something else.
I’d say that I hope the Neda video debate doesn’t take up too much airtime until the information conduits improve somewhat and we can do more than speculate, but really, any news coverage of Iran amid the Michael Jackson clusterfuck would be a welcome change at this point.
Tags: CIA, conspiracy, false flag, Politics
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