March 06, 2005

Sgrena shooting a 'blunder'

An Iraqi minister challenged Sunday the allegation that US troops in Iraq fired deliberately on Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena after she was released following a month-long kidnap ordeal.

"Why would the Americans want to stop a journalist from being freed?" asked Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin in an interview with the Belgian public television channel RTBF.

Amin, who spoke at the end of a visit to Belgium, said a military blunder was a more likely explanation for the incident, in which an Italian intelligence officer was killed and Sgrena was injured when US troops opened fire on their car as it approached a checkpoint.
[To put it bluntly, our troops at the checkpoint saw a speeding car, tried everything to get it stop without success and then fired on it, thinking it was a suicide car bomber.--Jen]

"I don't know who the driver of the car was and if he knew the rules... a thorough inquiry must be carried out," the minister said.

"Errors are made in difficult security situations, in zones where people are targeted by terrorists.

"You must not forget the criminals who created this situation, it is the abductors who are responsible," he added.

Sgrena was wounded when the convoy taking her to safety was fired on by US troops near Baghdad airport on Friday.

On her return to Rome she said she might have been targeted deliberately by the troops because the Americans opposed negotiations with her kidnappers.

Any negotiation with terrorists is a mistake, but in Italy's case, particularly, there's reason to believe that they've paid large ransoms for their people kidnapped in Iraq and in Sgrena's case that it may have been $1,000,000.
Not only that, but being a Communist (the BBC actually refers to her as a "former Left-wing militant", so terrorist tactics are nothing new to her!) with the IslamoNazis, journos like Sgrena will give favorable coverage to the "insurgents,"
portraying them as noble "freedom fighters."
Actually, the Left is getting a lot of mileage out of this one strange incident in addition to the reasons given already.
it makes Useful Idiots like Eason Jordan look right:
"Ah, yes, U.S. troops are targeting journalists."
Back at home in Italy, it stirs up anti-war and anti-American feeling like nobody's business.
While we must acknowledge that Italy and PM Berlusconi have been strong and invaluable members of the Coalition, this incident has upset even stalwart ally Silvio, who is naturally concerned for his countrymen, and Italy's "anti-war" movement has been larger than it should be, but smaller than that found in most other EU countries, but look for it to get bigger and louder after this weekend.
And, of course, the incident makes Iraq look like a lawless "quagmire," where trigger-happy American cowboy soldiers who
I can't keep order in Iraq unless it's at gunpoint are universally hated by the locals.
Check out this featurette on Drudge right now:
No One Safe on Baghdad's Roads, Iraqis Say.
It's as if all Iraqi gratitude for their liberation which reached a groundswell in the wake of their Jan. 30 elections has just melted away with this one event.
Piffle!
If Ms. Sgrena wasn't on the side of the terrorists, she'd have been murdered by them by now and the MSM would have a tiny column about it in the middle of their papers, instead of the reams of sloppy, detail-poor stories we've had since Friday.
And if U.S. troops were deliberately targeting her as a journalist, she wouldn't be alive today to do her whining about them.
If Iraqis really thought that their streets weren't safe because of U.S. soldiers, you wouldn't have seen 60% of the Iraqi electorate voting on Purple Finger Day.
The dirty details as to what really happened will emerge soon enough, but until then, Sgrena is the global Left's Darling of the Moment™.
Minister Amin is right--the abductors are the ones responsible for what happened to Ms. Sgrena and the U.S. military should be absolved once again of any malicious wrongdoing.