Much has been made in the media and the blogosphere of the release of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and her subsequent wounding at a Baghdad checkpoint by U.S. forces. Itailian security agent Nicola Calipari was killed in the incident.
Since the day Sgrena was kidnapped, Dr. Rusty Shackleford at the Jawa Report predicted her release and said he felt something was “fishy” about the whole story. He has repeatedly written about the Sgrena affair and today blogs his mounting suspicions about the story.
Doesn’t this whole incident seem more than a little odd?
Sgena was kidnapped by her admitted friends in Iraq.
She was kidnapped while on the phone with another journalist.
A tape was released of her begging Italy to cave to the terrorists demands of pulling Italian troops out of Iraq the day before the Italian Senate was to vote on that very issue.
On the tape Sgrena appears to tell the ‘terrorist’ holding the camera to stop. He follows her order as if she is directing.
The tape came exactly two-weeks after she was captured.
One month to the day after her abduction she is released.
On the day of her release her car speeds toward a US checkpoint, fails to stop when ordered, fails to heed warning shots, and the car is ultimately fired upon.
In the end, who looks like the bad guys? The terrorists? The jihadis? The ‘insurgents’? No, the US.
Today, CNN carries Sgrena’s tale. Sgrena, who writes for the communist Il Manifesto, disputes the U.S. version of the story.
[…]Giuliana Sgrena wrote, “Our car was driving slowly,” and “the Americans fired without motive.”
She described a “rain of fire and bullets” in the incident.
The U.S. military said Sgrena’s car rapidly approached a checkpoint Friday night, and those inside ignored repeated warnings to stop.
Troops used arm signals and flashing white lights, fired warning shots in front of the car, and shot into the engine block when the driver did not stop, the military said in a statement.
But in an interview with Italy’s La 7 Television, the 56-year-old journalist said “there was no bright light, no signal.”
Apparently, however, Sgrena cannot keep her story straight, as the very next paragraph shows she told an Italian government official a different tale.
And Italian magistrate Franco Ionta said Sgrena reported the incident was not at a checkpoint, but rather that the shots came from “a patrol that shot as soon as they lit us up with a spotlight.”
Well, Ms. Sgrena, was there a light or wasn’t there?
In an interview with Sky TV, Sgrena said “feeling yourself covered with avalanche of gunfire from a tank that is beside you, that did not give you any warning that it was about to attack if we did not stop — this is absolutely inconceivable even in normal situations, even if they hadn’t known that we were there, that we were supposed to come through.”
So now it was a tank away from a checkpoint that lit up the car? Folks, I’m not buying a word this woman says.