Monday, March 21, 2005

What Have John Kerry and Giuliana Sgrena Got in Common?

'FALL OF THE ICONS : A WARTIME PSYOP
What Have John Kerry and Giuliana Sgrena Got in Common?

Part 2 of 'The Sgrena Hit' [Part 1 here]
March 20, 2005 by Fintan Dunne, Editor
http://www.BreakForNews.com


Giuliana Sgrena was not targetted for any insider knowledge of Fallujah war crimes. Far too many independent journalists already have the goods on the USA in that regard. Giuliana was to be taken out as part of a much more sinister gameplan. Like John Kerry, she had become an icon for leftist anti-war hopes. Her death was designed to be a downfall akin to Kerry's - and with the same devestating psychological warfare effects on the opposition to the Iraq occupation.

John Kerry, should take a bow. Then he should take a chopper to some aircraft carrier and pose in front of one of those "Mission Acomplished" banners. Because what just hapened on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq is down to John 'Bones' Kerry.

Protests took place across the world marking the day. Up to 70,000 martched in London, and thousands took to the streets in several US cities. Accounts of the numbers of protestors vary, particularly in London where Socialist Worker claimed 200,00 had protested but police put the figure at 45,000. In any event, although the mainstream media as usual downplayed the protests, the demonstrations were far smaller than previous protests.

"I think Bush's re-election took the steam out of the anti-war movement," said New York activist Michael Letwin told the BBC.

Which is precisely what Kerry's pied piper, alternative candidacy pretence was intended to achieve. The Kerry presidential bid co-opted anti-war sentiment; diverted resistance from anti-war protest to pro-Kerry canvassing; and then disenchanted the opposition to the war when their 'hero" fell without substantially challenging the "stolen election."

The election wasn't really stolen, you see. It's not theft if you hand your DVD player to a thief and fail to report anything to the police. That harsh reality is only recently dawning on Kerry's more stalwart supporters.

However, voting for Kerry was rewarding in some ways. The sheer size of Kerry's winning margin had the U.S. establishment pulling out all the stops to conceal the actual outcome of the election. And the resulting hoopla forced the election fraud issue onto the floors of the U.S. Houses of Congress and into the political awareness of millions of anti-establishment voters.

Although a majority of the left wing were indeed disillusioned (as planned by the U.S. elite), a very significant minority were disillusioned in a different way. They lost any remaining illusions they had about the false political choices offered by the mainstream parties.

In truth, the establishment runs all major political movements in the USA. From the Republicans to Nader. From the Democrats and Greens to the gun-totin' patriots. It's the best democracy money can buy, USA-style.

A key objective of the elite agenda was, and is to use resistance to Bush as a recruiting seargeant for a "grassroots" relaunch of the Democratic Party. That's why we have had the Move-On phenomenon and the lavish funding of the soft left by Bush opponent(don't make me laugh!) George Soros.

Think of it as an outreach program akin to that used to engineer the ascension of Yushchenko in the Ukraine. The process continues with the elevation of Howard Dean to chair the DNC-in a rebound from his pre-arranged exit from the presidential campaign.

Dean and the Dems are still selling hard, buy buying interest is low.

As John Walsh on Counterpunch.org has recently outlined:
"MoveOn is apparently feeling some heat. After an incisive piece by Norman Solomon exposing the pro-war stance of MoveOn, I received an unexpected email today. In it MoveOn calls on its contributors to participate in peace "vigils" sponsored by Sojournors. But Sojournors on its web-site does not call for total and prompt withdrawal from Iraq, only for "lasting peace and security in the region," whatever that means. Sojournors is apparently intent on proving that you don't have to be anti-war to be pro-peace. But that is not the worst of it. MoveOn wants to make sure its stance is not misinterpreted, saying: "The fundamental error of the invasion has left us, as a nation, with no opportunity for a quick fix." "Quick fix" is MoveOn speak for prompt withdrawal."

All of which leftist elite posturing and public manipulation psywar brings us on to the parallels with the assassination attempt on Giuliana Sgrena. [See Part 1: The Sgrena Hit : How They Did It, and Why]

She was not targetted for any insider knowlwdge of Fallujah war crimes. Far too many independent journalists already have the goods on the USA in that regard. Giuliana was to be taken out as part of a much more sinister gameplan. Her's was to be a downfall akin to Kerry's - and with the same psywar dynamic.

Recall that it was after the media had built Kerry up as a darling of the left, that he let himself be taken out by the disillusioning sham "election." The same applies to Sgrena. Once securely adopted as an icon by the left, her planned assassination was meant to symbolically behead the Italian anti-war impetus.

A dead icon is a good icon in psywar terms. Some -like Kerry- fall willingly on their swords. Others are merely taken out.

Being an icon is a dangerous business. Ask John F. Kennedy, whose assassination was the first proof of the effectiveness of this "social psychic shock" psywar gambit.

Ask Diana Spenser, whose untimely death enabled the UK Government's gung-ho support for the invasion. An alive Diana, with a Muslim partner and her opposition to landmines likely extended to include cluster bombs and depleted uranium, would have been an impossible obstacle to UK participation in the Iraq invasion.

"Shock and Awe" is the U.S. military's term for the psychologically-oriented mass bombing of Iraq. "Shock and Awe" is also the modus operandi in political assassinations (JFK, Diana, Sgrena) and in political suicide, Kerry-style.

John Kerry's lasting legacy in American politics will be as the willing enabler of the destruction of Fallujah (a city 300,000 had called home) and the slaughter of around 6,000 mostly civillian inhabitants. Kerry's slick Hari-Kari created the opening. The U.S. military drove through the gap, while a numbed and PsyOp'ed U.S. and world population flailed around trying to understand what had just happened.

Sgrena owes her life to an operational constraint of the "beheading" gambit. It has to look like a hit without being definitively provable as such(see JFK). Despite the difficulties of targetting her inside a vehicle, the idea of having her die in an encounter with a "random" U.S. patrol was perfect cover. Deniable but deadly suspicious.

The resulting deliberately-created uncertainty is a psywar lever, which in tandem with the emotional shock, quite efficiently takes the "Oomph" out of popular movements.

It's a long way from the Baghdad Airport approach road to the computer center which pronounces the Network TV "result" of U. S. elections. It's a long way also from the Fortune 500-funded elite pseudo-democracy of monopoly capitalism to something more akin to real democracy.

The path from here to there winds through a multi-layered jungle of Information Warfare. As you would expect in an Information Age. So far, it has taken us through a landscape of fictional bogeymen like bin Ladin and al-Zarqawi; staged kidnappings to massage public opinion; a Saddam-lookalike to play the "bad guy"; divide-and-conquer bombings in Iraq to try foster civil war; fake heroes of the left like John Kerry; and seminally, the made-for-TV movie which kicked it all off: 9/11. [See WagTheWTC]

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excellent article. Pointing out the dual role of a psyop is especially important. For those that swallow it whole and for those that see it for what it is, the impact is intentional.

Let's hope more psyops fail as completely as the Sgrena assassination.

2:50 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"She was not targetted for any insider knowlwdge of Fallujah war crimes."

This is PSYOP, disinfo.

The attempted assassination of Sgrena was a botched CIA hit, nothing less.

Robert S. Finnegan
Managing Editor
Southeast Asia News
seanews1@yahoo.com

2:07 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Eh? And now?

Robert S. Finnegan
Managing Editor
Southeast Asia News
seanews1@yahoo.com

Snag in shooting probe
Italian government resists finding that U.S. troops committed no wrongdoing in fatal shooting at checkpoint

BY CRAIG GORDON
WASHINGTON BUREAU

April 15, 2005


WASHINGTON -- A U.S-Italian investigation into the checkpoint shooting of an Italian journalist is being held up by a dispute over an initial finding that soldiers attached to a Manhattan-based Army National Guard unit committed no wrongdoing in firing on the journalist's car, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The Italian government is resisting that finding as the investigation winds to a close, and the disagreement has blocked completion of a final report that was expected to be released as early as today, U.S. officials said.

The final conclusions of the report, including whether the soldiers will be found to have erred in any way, is a "moving target," said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation.

Soldiers from the New York-based 69th Infantry Regiment were guarding a temporary checkpoint on the airport road in Baghdad when a car carrying freed hostage Giuliana Sgrena approached March 4, and they opened fire when the car did not heed warning signals. Sgrena was injured and her rescuer, intelligence agent Nicola Calipari, was killed.

The friendly-fire shooting erupted into a national outrage in Italy, and Sgrena and Italian government officials sharply disputed the U.S. version of events, with Sgrena this week again calling them "a lie."

U.S. military investigators initially found that soldiers acted properly by offering warnings, such as flashing lights and warning shots, before opening fire, U.S. sources said.

But the Italian government is objecting to a U.S. wish to include a statement in the final report effectively absolving U.S. troops of any wrongdoing, Italian newspapers reported yesterday. The newspaper Corriere della Sera said the Italian government is asking that there is at least a recognition of some error that prompted the U.S. soldiers to open fire on the car.

Another point of contention is that American authorities have refused to allow Italian investigators to examine the Toyota Corolla, the newspapers said.

Both the Italian Foreign Ministry and the U.S. State Department said the investigation was ongoing. State Department spokesman Thomas Casey also denied reports that military investigators had reached any preliminary conclusions about the shooting.

He noted that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had said on Wednesday after a meeting with Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini that the most important thing was to do the investigation right, not to do it fast.

Fini this week also praised the U.S. decision to allow Italian participation in the investigation and said he was confident that the two nations could come to a "mutual statement" of agreement on the facts of what happened that night.

Italian officials, including Fini, initially blasted the U.S. military over the incident, saying that the car was not speeding toward the checkpoint and that the shots that killed Calipari came without warning.

The U.S. military, however, said the car was speeding toward the checkpoint on a rainy night and failed to heed a series of warnings before troops opened fire.

NBC News reported Wednesday night that the investigation found that U.S. soldiers flashed warning lights at 130 yards out from the checkpoint, fired warning shots at 90 yards and opened fire when it was 65 yards away, a time span of just four seconds. Still, several U.S. military officials have insisted that the soldiers acted properly because of rules of engagement that allow them to open fire if they believe they are in imminent danger.
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

8:26 pm  

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