Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [231]
Tagliabue also downplays the court decision by making it an unsurprising event. “Few people were surprised by the verdict,” states Tagliabue. But the failure to find the Bulgarians guilty should have been quite surprising, given the earlier assurances by Sterling and associates that the Bulgarians were clearly behind the plot, and that, as Paul Henze stated, the “evidence” has “steadily accumulated to the point where little real doubt is now possible.”2
An alternative frame would have been as follows: After a three-year investigation and lengthy trial, backed by the resources of the Italian state, and despite the powerful interests in Italy and the West with a stake in finding the Bulgarians guilty, the prosecution still failed to persuade an Italian jury of Bulgarian guilt. These vested interests and their propaganda vehicles were given a bone to chew on, however, in the form of a decision to dismiss the charge for “lack of evidence,” rather than complete exoneration. This then allowed the propaganda agencies to frame the case in the Tagliabue manner.
Protection of the Italian Judicial Process
Throughout the history of the case, the U.S. mass media blacked out evidence of the compromised quality of the Italian institutions involved in pursuing the connection. Investigating Judge Martella was always treated as a model of probity, and conflicting facts were ignored.3 Operating in this tradition, Tagliabue wastes space on a gratuitous and irrelevant accolade to Martella (which is also given a subheading for emphasis). His statement that “Few people stood up to assail the magistrate” is absurd, as the trial witnesses were asked to give concrete evidence on the facts of the case; they were not in a position to assail the pretrial investigating magistrate, and any such attempts would have been impermissible in the courtroom. Only the Bulgarian defense was well qualified and able to assail Martella, and they did so, in effective statements on March 4–8, 1986, that were unreported in the Times and the rest of the mass media. Tagliabue points out that although the trial was supposed merely to verify the findings of the preliminary investigation, in fact the prosecution did a great deal of new investigative work. This suggests that the trial court may have found Martella’s investigation sadly lacking, but Tagliabue never addresses the point.
Agca’s Desertion of the Case
An important part of the apologetic framework is the claim that Agca, who had presented an allegedly coherent version of a connection up to the trial, suddenly did an about face and refused to testify altogether. Tagliabue devotes several paragraphs to this theme, eventually suggesting that Agca’s increasingly erratic behavior “may have been designed to torpedo the efforts of the court.” He suggests that the prosecutor couldn’t overcome this difficulty, so that the loss of the case is lodged in Agca’s behavior rather than in any inherent deficiencies in the prosecution’s case.
In reality, Agca’s claims emerged very slowly and contradictorily, with dozens of retractions that, taken together, are best explained by coaching, outside information, and guesses by Agca as to what Martella and the press would like to hear. There is no reason to believe that Agca ever offered or settled upon a coherent version of a Bulgarian connection. On the contrary, it appears that his version changed continually, and that the final result in Martella’s report was Martella’s own arbitrary synthesis.4
The claim that Agca became more erratic during the trial is also not based on evidence. Agca’s persistently erratic behavior was obscured by the secrecy of his earlier testimony, but it