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Italian Journalist Shot in Iraq Rejects U.S. Account
OME, March 6 - The Italian reporter wounded when American troops opened fire on the car carrying her and Italian secret service officers to the Baghdad airport just hours after her release from kidnappers rejected today the United States' version of the incident and refused to rule out that she was intentionally targeted.
"The fact that the Americans don't want negotiations to free the hostages is known," Ms. Sgrena said in a telephone interview with Sky TG24 television. "The fact that they do everything to prevent the adoption of this practice to save the lives of people held hostages, everybody knows that. So I don't see why I should rule out that I could have been the target."
The White House called the shooting a "horrific accident" and promised a full investigation.
Ms. Sgrena, a 56-year-old reporter for the communist daily Il Manifesto was hit with shrapnel in the shoulder in the shooting Friday night at a checkpoint in western Baghdad. An Italian intelligence agent, Nicola Calipari, tried to shield her from the bullets and was killed. Mr. Calipari's body was flown to Italy late Saturday, and today lay in state at Rome's Vittoriano monument, where hundreds of Italians filed by, paying their respects.
"I remember only fire," Ms. Sgrena wrote in today's issue of Il Manifesto. "At that point a rain of fire and bullets came at us, forever silencing the happy voices from a few minutes earlier."
While Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a staunch ally of President Bush, has demanded an explanation for the shooting, other government officials indicated that the incident would not threaten the mission of its roughly 3,000 troops stationed in Iraq.
"The military mission must carry on because it consolidates democracy and liberty in Iraq,'" Communications Minister Maurizio Gasparri told ANSA, an Italian news agency. "On the other hand, we must control - but not block - the presence of civilians and journalists, who must observe rules and behavior to reduce the risks."
In the days and hours following the shooting, United States officials, from the American ambassador in Rome, to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, to President Bush expressed regret and condolences for the shooting. But questions immediately arose over whether the shooting would strain relations for the two allies.
"The incident could have very serious political consequences," Italy's La Stampa daily said in a front page editorial, adding that relations between the two governments had "suffered an immediate deterioration."
Members of Italy's center-left coalition said that if what they considered Mr. Berlusconi's deference to the United States continued following Friday's shooting, he risked losing popular support in Italy, which was overwhelmingly against the war in Iraq.
"Berlusconi could be weakened by a weak position toward America," said Paolo Gentiloni, a center-left member of the lower house of parliament. "The fact that we are allied doesn't mean that we can forget what happened. The fact that the situation there is very dangerous, cannot justify what happened."
The American military said the car carrying Ms. Sgrena and the Italian agents was speeding to the airport as it approached a checkpoint. Soldiers shot into the engine block after trying to warn the driver to stop by "by hand-and-arm signals, flashing white lights, and firing warning shots in front of the car," a statement said.
But Ms. Sgrena refuted that account, telling the Italian television channel La 7, "There was no bright light, no signal." She added that the car was traveling at "regular speed."
Ms. Sgrena was abducted on Feb. 4 in Baghdad after conducting several hours of interviews with refugees from the decimated city of Falluja.
Gunmen pulled up in front of her car as she was leaving and dragged her into their vehicle. Her Iraqi employees managed to escape.
Two weeks later, Ms. Sgrena's captors released a video showing her tearfully pleading for her life and asking for the withdrawal of all the American-led forces. The words "Mujahedeen Without Borders," presumably the name of the group holding her, appeared in digital red Arabic script on a backdrop.
Days after that video was released, tens of thousands of Italians marched through Rome demanding that she be returned.
Agriculture Minister Giovanni Alemanno was quoted as saying it was "very likely" a ransom had been paid for Ms. Sgrena's release. Ms. Sgrena told reporters that she did not know if a ransom had been paid, but she had said that her captors "never treated me badly."
Nevertheless, Ms. Sgrena told Sky TG24 that "I will not return to Iraq." Her captors, she said, had made it clear that "they do not want witnesses and we are all perceived as possible spies."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/international/europe/06cnd-italy.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Americans don't want negotiations to free the hostages," Ms. Sgrena said. "They do everything to prevent the adoption of this practice to save the lives of people held hostages, everybody knows that. So I don't see why I should rule out that I could have been the target." [source]
The official US cover-story of the events at Baghdad airport, when their forces fired at a car carrying Italian reporter Giuliana Sgrena is now completely discredited.
There was no incident at a checkpoint on the road from Baghdad center to the airport.
For the record, Sgrena says there were, in fact no checkpoints on that road at all when she and her fellow Italians were making their way to the airport. Instead it was when the group was in sight of the terminal building that a US forces patrol opened fire on their car.
There was no limited gunfire aimed at the car's engine to disable it.
Instead there was a hail of hundreds of shots, which left the vehicle so peppered with holes that the US command in Iraq is too embarassed to admit where the car is now.
An AGI report confirms the severity of the gunfire by US forces:
> Gabriele Polo, editor of the newspaper il Manifesto, confirmed the violent gunfight and the fact that US soldiers shot hundreds of shots against the car in which they were travelling, saying that "this is what they said to us yesterday at the Prime minister's office while it was actually happening." [AGI]There were no warning shouts and flashing lights to warn a speeding car to slow down.
The BBC reports:
> "Ms Sgrena told Italian radio of the "rain of fire" on her car, which she said was not going particularly fast."And the only lights -were those used to illuminate the interior while firing at the occupants.
This goes way beyond a security lapse.
Now that we know more, the incident at the airport looks at least as consistent with an ambush as it is with a "mishap." Don't expect the corporate media to pursue that line of inquiry.
In the mainstream media world the lies by the US remain mere anomalies. In the war-spun media world nobody questions if say, Donal Rumsfeld would have been left to make his own way to the airport? Would Paul Wolfowitz?
In the real world, a vital VIP such as Sgrena would have been meet by a US patrol already alerted to meet them and guarantee their safety while preparing to board a plane to leave Iraq. But instead of 'meet and greet,' the Italians were dealt 'maim and murder.'
Unless of course that was the whole idea.
Sgrena, was abducted while waiting outside a Baghdad mosque to interview refugees from the US-led assault on the city of Fallujah in November. She has worked for leftist Italian newspaper Il Manifesto since 1988. The paper is opposed to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Some suspect that Sgrena has specific information on US war crimes in Fallujah which could be damming if known internationally. Even without such further confirmation there is already clear evidence that banned weapons were used by US forces. [Details in our article Fallujah's 9/11]
The blitz featured weapons of mass destruction: banned napalm-type munitions, and at least two types of chemical poison gas. If these reports prove true, the US military commanders and their political superiors, who ordered the atrocities could be tried these and other war crimes.
That's plenty of motivation to keep the truth from coming out. As a result, aid agencies in Iraq have felt the heat of US intimidation designed to keep them quiet. Most are afraid to publicly air their evidence. The reports filter out through humanitarian groups' headquarters staff --based outside Iraq, and through independent journalists.
But there is more to this than a cover-up of Fallujah. This kidnapping fits a pattern of previous suspicious hostage-taking.
Take the recent case of Margaret Hassan, another real friend of the Iraqi people. She was taken by a large force -some of whom wore suits and others Iraq National Guard uniforms. Hardly a jihadist rabble.
Or take the spectacular publicity surrounding the beheading of Nick Berg. The US media pretended that nothing was amiss. But internet sleuths uncovered over 50 anomalies in the beheading video. Some of these were clearly deliberate errors. This indicated the video was artfully designed to keep controversy running and ensure widespread viewing of the grotesque event.
The video was a deviously clever construction which had significant psychological effects on those who viewed the material. The same psychological impact is ensured by the relentless public angst induced by mass media coverage of high profile Iraq hostage-taking.
All of which is fully consistent with a black operation: a psychological warfare program in support of US war objectives in Iraq.
The objectives: prevent western public sympathy for the Iraqi resisance to the invasion; maintain a climate of fear; traumatise by shock of exposure to gruesome scenes and scenarios; and emotionally involve ordinary American, Britons and Italians in support of the war, by enmeshing ordinary middle-class citizens in the war - as victims.
This is a modern version of the dirty game the US played in South America. Well studied psyops tactics for a communications era where the information war for western public opinion is as povital as the ground war in Iraq.
It is a campaign sanctioned at the highest levels of the US political and military command. A US leadership which does not hesitate to order torture; sanction chemical weapons and wage unequal war with radioactive weapons would not hesitate to sacrifice a few westerners.
Especially "communist" ones.
And are the media pointing out this uncomfortable, but entirely predictable reality behind the gut-wrenching tragedy?
A quick browse through mainstream news to see what they are saying about the shooting leaves one wondering what planet most mainstream journalists are living on -or what colour blinkers are they wearing.
This BBC article focuses on the people who held her hostage, saying that "Sgrena never thought she would be taken hostage telling the story of the people she deeply cared for."
But how sure are we that it was the people she cared for -who took her hostage?
If anything this article highlights, without intending to, the reasons why US forces might target her and then claim it was an "unfortunate incident":
> "Sgrena was one of the founders of the peace movement in the 1980s"Being a peace activist makes you an opponent of what the US military are doing in Iraq.
> "She refused to become embedded with the US military during the war."It was clear from early on in this invasion the attitude towards unembedded reporters.[more]
> "she interviewed an Iraqi woman who said she was held atInterviewing a woman, who was held in the notorious prison where torture abounded would not go down very well with the US military.
Abu Ghraib prison for 80 days by US forces"
> "Sgrena's outspoken anti-war stance should have endeared her toPerhaps it did. Because who is to say who took this woman hostage?
Iraqi insurgents fighting the US-led forces"
And so, to the pertinent questions. The ones largely unasked by the media:
- Exactly who held her hostage?
- What was the motive?
- Why was such a high profile, newly released hostage,
not given a military escort to the airport?
- In any event, why was there no radio contact to the
US checkpoint -warning of her passage?
- Are such radio contacts part of normal protocol for routine
VIP traffic between the airport and central Baghdad?
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