The Strange Story of an Italian Journalist

Just when we thought the story of the abduction of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena couldn’t get any more strange, the plot took a new twist yesterday. After Sgrena was released by her captors in Iraq, US soldiers reportedly opened fire on the car in which she was travelling as it approached a checkpoint less than a mile from Baghdad airport, killing an Italian intelligence agent traveling with her. UK’s Guardian newspaper reported her story:

Sgrena told colleagues the vehicle was not travelling fast and had already passed several checkpoints on its way to the airport. The Americans shone a flashlight at the car and then fired between 300 and 400 bullets at if from an armoured vehicle. Rather than calling immediately for assistance for the wounded Italians, the soldiers’ first move was to confiscate their weapons and mobile phones and they were prevented from resuming contact with Rome for more than an hour.

While the events will surely be investigated by the U.S. military thoroughly, it’s important not to jump to conclusions too soon. As Little Green Footballs states, “Three hundred to four hundred rounds from an armored vehicle ... and there were survivors? OK, go ahead, pull my other leg.” Additionally, many people believe that her details of events might be colored by her history of anti-Americanism.

Gabriele Polo, head of Sgrena's left-wing newspaper Il Manifesto, asserted, "An Italian agent has been killed by an American bullet. A tragic demonstration which we never wanted that everything that's happening in Iraq is completely senseless and mad."

I’m not quite sure what he means by “everything that’s happening in Iraq,” but judging from the content of his communist newspaper, he must be referring to democracy and the right to vote. None of Polo’s vitriol should be surprising however. Il Manifesto has often created the moral equivalence of taking innocent hostages with the U.S. occupation:

Suffering daily abuses and violence from occupation forces or their proxies, the Iraqis themselves are subjected to routine hostage-taking by the occupiers. If the father is not at home, they arrest his son, or brother, or other relative. Under the pretext of looking for arms, American soldiers and their Iraqi trainees look for jewels and money.

The circumstances surrounding Sgrena’s abduction are also sketchy. While conducting interviews with refugees from Fallujah in Baghdad, Sgrena was taken captive by an unknown terrorist organization calling itself The Islamic Jihad Organization. Iraqi police said Sgrena was accompanied by two Iraqi reporters and an Iraqi driver when several armed men stopped their vehicle. The gunmen released the Iraqis and took Sgrena in her own car. Little is known of her captivity yet (though I have no doubt we will hear all about it). When she was released, she told her colleagues that her captors "never treated me badly."

The Jawa Report speculates that her captive might well have been a hoax, meant to create an audience for her anti-war opinions. So before we jump to the conclusion that U.S. soldiers were “trigger-happy” or deserve to be put in jail, let’s remember the source.