AP Linked to Disinformation on Shooting

AP Linked to Disinfo on Shooting
by Fintan Dunne, Editor


BreakForNews.com March 6th, 2005

( '? note: breakfornews is the blog I found the most current information about Sgrena yesterday, and is quoted here on duckdoatsu's blog ( '?

Right-wing bloggers are circulating a photo purportedly showing the car in which Sgrena Guiliani was wounded
and her rescuer Nicola Calipari was fatally shot. The photo is being used to discredit Sgrena's account of the
shooting.

It shows a four-door sedan which has only the driver's side window broken and no overt bullet damage to the
bodywork. That contradicts the "hail of bullets" described ! by Sgrena and others. And it boosts the US
military's case that the incident was just a "mishap."

f13018.jpg

At first glance the picture seems legitimate.


Captions which accompany the photo on blogs say it's a still frame taken from an Associated Press video about
the shooting at Baghdad Airport. These captions also give a source link to versions of the video
on
Yahoo and on AP Feedroom.

They make comments like:
"Unless this car is made out of thick metal and bullets bounce off of it,
I don't think this car was shot at more than 10 times."
[source]

"I ask you, does the car above look like it was "riddled with bullets? Either our soldiers are terrible shots
or some people are being pretty loose with the facts in this story."
[source]
But if you are suspicious that the car seems far too little damaged, you might -as I did- check major search
engines for such a high-profile photo. On the Yahoo News Photo site -I quickly found the same vehicle
photographed from another
angle. This time with an Iraqi man standing beside the vehicle.

The Yahoo photo

caption says:
An Iraqi driver stands near his damaged vehicle at the site of the kidnapping of an Italian journalist
outside al-Nahrain University in central Baghdad, February 4, 2005.... Gunmen pulled up alongside her vehicle,
forced her driver and an Iraqi journalist with her out of the vehicle at gunpoint and then drove off with
Sgrena, the sources said.

The driver said that the gunmen hit his car as they were rushing away from the scene following the
kidnapping. (Akram Saleh/Reuters)

Tracking back the "car photo" story through blogs --which credited each other as the tale passed around, the
feeding chain included thepoliticalteen.net,
sayanythingblog.com, [also
1
2] and
the source of it all
littlegreenfootballs.com.


You will gain some insight into the political flavor of littlegreenfootballs.com -the blog which started the
fake story- from this comment
in a related thread on the blog:
"Journalists writing for commie rags are not impervious to bullets if they disregard the American military in
a war zone. One would think Sgrena would be more cautious having just been released as a hostage."

Here, even as the story continued to ooze across the blogsphere, the source of it all had already retracted
their claim it was Sgrena's car.

And they were blaming Associated Press for it all, because in the AP video, the car clip from the February
5th, kidnapping was misleading synchronized with the voice-over describing the Baghdad airport shooting of
Sgrena: "[The video has] a medium shot of this car, changing to a closeup, as the voice-over says, "Coalition
forces fired on a vehicle that was approaching a checkpoint at a high rate of speed." ...So we apparently have
a false alarm here, triggered by a highly misleading AP video. This is not a photo of the car that ran the
checkpoint.
[source]

But even as one piece of disinfo is retracted that last sentence sows another: "This is not a photo of the
car that ran the checkpoint."

There was no checkpoint. Sgrena
recounts that a patrol fired on their car within sight of the terminal building at the airport - not on the
road to the airport. This is just a continuation of earlier disinformation by the US command in Iraq.

The AP video is disturbingly edited. The little green footballs have been suspiciously inept.

But that isn't stopping the popularity of disinformation which serves only to cover-up the likely
assassination bid on a journalist --who was at the time of her imminent departure from Iraq, set to beecome a
heroine of the anti-war movement in Italy and a considerable obstacle to the US/UK and Italian political mafia
and the! ir proto-imperial objectives in Iraq.

See our further coverage: *
Giuliana Sgrena : Means, Motive
and Murder * US attack on
Sgrena was deliberate says companion *
Reporter survives likely
assassination bid by US Special Forces

http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/03/right-wing-bloggers-fake-sgrena-car.html

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