Pentagon lied about hostage shooting; Whitehouse don't get the resistance. posted by Richard Seymour

Well, the European news agencies have been reporting this for some time now, and it has appeared in the Australian media, yet ABC just 19 minutes ago could only say "Story of Italian Hostage's Release Unclear" . The BBC, which at least covers it, can only bring itself to say that "details remain unclear" .

She was released by Iraqi insurgents holding her captive after negotiations carried out by Italian intelligence. The story relayed by the Pentagon was that the car had been speeding toward a check-point and the boys had just been a little bit over-zealous with their index fingers.

Not so, according to Guiliani Sgrena, the released hostage. It wasn't a check-point, and they weren't speeding. Doug Ireland has the goods:

"Our car was rolling along at normal speed, so it was impossible for there to have been a misunderstanding," Scregna told the Italian magistrates who've been charged with investigating the murderous incident, according to the Italian wire service Ansa-- which also says her account has been confirmed by one of the Italian secret service agents in the car with her, who was likewise wounded. These two testimonies from the victims of the shooting completely contradict the Pentagon's account that Sgrena was in a speeding car that was heading straight for a checkpoint and was shot at to stop it. In fact, says Scregna, there was no checkpoint--"just a patrol that started shooting at us as soon as they bracketed their headlights on us." In the same dispatches, Sgrena's boyfriend, Pier Scolari, says Washington wanted to eliminate her because Scregna--who'd reported extensively on the abuses at Abu Ghraib--had "important new information, and the U.S. forces didn't want her to get out of Iraq alive," according to the Nouvel Obs. Scolari went so far as to speak of an "ambush."

Well, smack my arse and call me a tart, I am not one bit surprised. Iraq Body Count, for anyone who has time and energy to hoke through the database, carries veried reports of many car shootings in which innocent drivers and their kids copped it near a security check-point.

Meanwhile, an interesting look at the resistance in Iraq at the Beeb. There's some of it I would take issue with - you know, those moments where you realise they're talking out of their Alistair Campbells - but it's still worth a look. Examples of Campbells? They claim, as do many news outlets drawing their information from quasi-official sources, that the bulk of the resistance attacks are carried out by "networks loyal to the former Ba'athist regime", although they attribute most suicide bombings to non-Iraqi militants like Zarqawi. Doug Ireland carries a link to an article by Michael Schwartz in Tom Dispatch, which:

goes a long way to demolishing the current White House/Pentagon claim that the Iraqi insurgency has a centralized command and control structure constructed by an alliance between Ba'athist and Saddamist recalcitrants and the administration's current hobgoblin, the odious Abu Massab al Zarqawi (a claim that our easily manipulated mass media have largely transmitted uncritically.)

Schwartz suggests why "the foundation upon which these descriptions are built -- that these forces now dominate the resistance, supply its leadership, or provide the bulk of its resources -- is likely to prove profoundly inaccurate. This is most easily seen by consulting -- of all sources -- the CIA, which issued a contrary report about the time the Newsweek article appeared.

"According to the CIA, the Zarqawi faction and his Saddamist allies were 'lesser elements' in the resistance, which was increasingly dominated by 'newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting.' There is, in fact, a vast body of publicly available evidence in support of the CIA's perspective, including, for example, most first-hand accounts of the resistance in Falluja and other cities in the Sunni triangle.

"In the short, dreary history of America's Iraq war, our leaders have repeatedly acted on gross misconceptions about whom they were fighting -- sometimes based on faulty intelligence, but sometimes in the face of perfectly accurate intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another instance where they believe their own distortions, and it is worthwhile attempting to understand the underlying pattern that produces this almost predictable error.

"One way to characterize this propensity to mis-analyze the resistance is to see that all the portraits thus far generated of the Iraqi resistance have been based on the assumption that it is organized into a familiar hierarchical form in which the leadership exercises strategic and day-to-day control over a pyramid shaped organization. Such a structure is described by both military strategists and organizational sociologists as a 'Command and Control' structure.... No one exercises such control over the forces that fought against the Americans in Falluja or Sadr City and those that are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi and other Sunni cities that boycotted the recent elections.

"Guerrilla wars violate the command-and-control portrait in two important ways: local units must, by and large, supply themselves (since an occupation army would be likely to interdict any regular shipments of supplies); and they are likely to have substantial autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lend themselves well to central decision making)... [Guerrillas] are less vulnerable to attacks on supply lines and to the targeting of commanding officers -- two key strategies of conventional warfare.

"The resistance in Iraq reflects this dialectic of guerrilla war. The mujaheddin in Falluja, for example, seem to have been notoriously decentralized; even local clerical leadership reportedly achieved only a tenuous discipline over the troops. This same lack of discipline, however, made it impossible for the U.S. to identify and eliminate key leaders. During the second battle for the city in November, their hit-and-run tactics allowed them to hold out for over a month against a force with overwhelming technological and numerical superiority. The command and control portrait is not a useful tool when it comes to analyzing a large component of the Iraqi resistance, and it is of little use if it is applied to the movement as a whole..."

Schwartz article here .