Tibet riots staged?

I had been meaning to cut down on the Tibet stuff but I read today that the PLA may have incited the riots using “agent provocateurs”. This conclusion was according to images from British satellites.

What caught my attention was this image (unfortunately, I don’t know where/when it’s from):

I guess you could say it’s photoshopped, but I can also say pictures of violence in Chinese media are too, and we won’t get anywhere on that line of argument.

Now, I don’t know if it’s true that these recent riots were staged, but I found another article which described the same tactic used in 1989. Here’s an exerpt:

According to Mr. Chen Pokong, a Han Chinese who was a member of the student democracy movement, then a political prisoner in China, and now a respected economist and commentator living in the U.S., the riot scene this March “was quite similar to that of March, 1989. A group of young men in their twenties acted in a well organized way. They first shouted slogans, then burnt some vehicles near the Ramoche Monastery, and then broke into nearby stores and robbed them, and finally burnt many of the stores.”

Or how about this even more compelling quote written by Mr. Tang Daxian:

On the dawn of March 5, the Armed Police in Tibet received the action order from the Chief Commander of Armed Police headquarter, Mr. Li Lianxiu.…The Special Squad should immediately assign 300 members to be disguised as ordinary citizens and Tibetan monks, entering the Eight-Corner Street and other riot spots in Lhasa, to support plain-clothes police to complete the task. Burn the Scripture Pagoda at the northeast of Dazhao Temple. Smash the rice store in the business district, incite citizens to rob rice and food, attack the Tibet-Gansu Trading Company. Encourage people to rob store products, but, only at the permitted locations.

Personally, I suspected that the CCP got sick of all the demonstrations and found some excuse to crack down — but I gave them the benefit of the doubt and assumed they just got a little heavy handed and angered the monks to violence.

The picture and articles put it into a whole new light — and unfortunately, it’s not positive at all.

If anyone can debunk this or give an explanation for it (other than calling it a bunch of lies), I’d love to hear it.