Who killed Neda Agha-Soltan?

Editorial, Workers World, June 24, 2009

Consider this scenario:

A CIA-trained sharpshooter takes position on a rooftop in Tehran. His contact on the street below, waiting with a camera, calls. “She just got out of the car. A perfect target.”

He takes aim. Shoots. He disappears.

On the street, the contact takes the video of the young woman, her face visible and unscarred, helped by people on the street around her, bleeding to death.

Within an hour, the video arrives to an Iranian contact in the Netherlands, to the BBC, to the Voice of America. It becomes part of a much bigger story.

Is that what happened to Neda Agha-Soltan? We admit it. We don’t know. But you don’t know either. And the story outlined above is—if anything—more reasonable and more believable than the story spread and repeated ad infinitum by the powerful Western media propaganda machine.

The young woman, whoever she sympathized with, was in no confrontation with the authorities. Nor with paramilitary forces. She was away from the main demonstration. Why, when there were no significant gunfights and no big fighting in the area, would any state official, police or army, shoot an unarmed woman who wasn’t even at the protest and who had no political history?

How was it that the photographer had contact with the media most closely connected with the intelligence forces of the two major former colonial powers in Iran—Britain and the U.S.?

Coincidences happen. But here a lot happened at once. Was someone behind it?

What we can be sure of is that the corporate media based in the imperialist countries are powerful weapons that in times of crisis sow confusion among the masses and mobilize public opinion in support of the rulers and to demonize the oppressed and exploited.

In these times of the Internet, we have to remember that disinformation spreads with the same lightning speed as information.

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