| Sgrena Sets the Record Straight | 2005-03-29 20:34 0 comments |
 by Flemming FunchRemember Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who was freed in Iraq, and shot at by U.S. forces, and her rescuer, an Italian intelligence agent, killed? There's an interview with her where she sets the record a bit more straight. Transcript, audio, video. It indicates quite clearly that the official U.S. government version of events is a fabrication. The official story was that their car was driving on one of the most dangerous roads in Baghdad, and didn't stop when asked to at a checkpoint, and the soldiers were afraid for their safety, so they shot in self-defense. They weren't on that road at all. They were driving on a secure VIP road, going directly from the secured Green Zone to the Baghdad airport. A road only used by military and embassy personnel. There was no checkpoint. There was a tank standing off the side of the road, which didn't signal in any way for them to stop. The tank shot at them from behind, without warning, with a high caliber gun. A four inch bullet penetrated her lungs and her shoulder. Oh, it could of course still have been an accident, a mistake, a misunderstanding. Maybe the Italians forgot to notify the Americans that they were going to take that road, and maybe they were supposed to, I don't know. But the cover story is false. And, quite obviously, we're only even hearing about this because this is a high profile, very well covered story, involving government officials and journalists. If it had just been some ordinary Iraqies who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, they would just have been bitterly buried by their families, and at best, if somebody bothered to count them, they would have been part of some statistic. You know, like 100,000 dead Iraqies, who all happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. |