I can agree with that yto a certain extent. Considering they are at threat of losing their lives by giving the reasonable doubt to the moving vehicle.
Consider the alternative. The car either gets close enough for a maximum damage detonation and kills allot of soldiers or it gets past them and runs into the airport and kills lots of innocent civilians. You cannot judge excessive force just based on a peacetime roadblock. Hundreds of people have died in checkpoints by not being attentive and aggressive. The airport has to be the most sought after target by the inurgents. And I am sure the soldiers know this and act accordinlgy to keep it safe.
If you assert it’s not a hit, I just saw a news report that said there were dozens of cars on that road at the time and this one car was the only one shot at. Do you think they play lottery with who they shoot at or do you think that car was doing something different?
Very odd, if that’s her position now it certainly has changed. Here she states she was fired on by ‘tanks’ - immediately "without any light or signal.’
Do we have anyone here who can speak Italian and can read the original interview? The English translation the Beeb is using feels a little clumsy, and I wonder if it might account for the “hundreds of shells inside the car” and the “tanks” remark (Lady, if you’d been fired on by tank shells…you and everybody else wouldn’t be giving interviews to anybody.)
This is totally ridiculous. We don’t know enough about what happened here to debate ANY of this bullshit…execept the actual OP which was, ‘Was Freed Italian Hostage’s Guard Murdered by US Forces?’ implying that the US DELIBERATELY targetted said journalist. I think we can all agree (unless rjung or someone similar comes into the thread) that the US didin’t deliberately target this woman…or she would be dead.
Why should we believe those in the car claiming they were going slowly? Why should we believe ANYONE in this event? Witnesses to these kinds of things are notorious for being poor observers, and also for conflating their stories to make them look in the best possible light. ALL the ‘evidence’ I’ve seen presented in this thread so far has been anacedotal…and is breaking down along purely partisan lines as far as who you believe or don’t believe.
The knee jerk reaction from those opposed to the US is, unsurprisingly, that the US soldiers are lieing and the Italians are paragons of virtue, and also keen observers in a pretty confused situation. The ones who support the US of course take the exact opposite view. I fail to see that either side has a higher credibility than the other on this event…both stories are equally suspect IMO reguardless of what either said. When I see some unbiased FACTS, not anacedotes of what happened (like, say, pictures of the ‘bullet ridden’ car, some forensic data on exactly how many gunshot wounds were received by the occupants of the car, etc), THEN maybe we can draw a few conclusions.
This may or may not be true, but I thought there was another cite claiming this was a patrol, not an actual formal checkpoint. To me (if its true) this seems more logical…the Italians may very well have been driving fast, and they might not have known there was a patrol there (they probably DID know where the formal checkpoints were).
If it was dark then there was a lot of room for confusion. Having NOT been informed about this move appearently by the Italians, the soldiers would have simply seen a speeding car going down a road at night. The soldiers may or may not have given adaquate warning before opening fire…its hard to tell, again because it was a confused situation and because the only thing we have to go on is anacedote…which is HIGHLY unreliable.
This story has all the hallmarks of a confused muddle that you get with a regular traffic accident, with both sides telling a markedly different story. Neither is necessarily lieing, but both saw different things from a different perspective…and naturally humans want to ‘spin’ things so that they look good and the other guy bad.
Lots of bullets fired, or lots of bullets fired INTO THE CAR? There is a difference. This should be easy enough to check out. How many bullets hit the one person killed? How was the reporter wounded and what were the extent of her wounds? I can tell you that if you fire a hundred bullets into a car, its is HIGHLY unlikely that anyone is going to walk away…and certainly not walk away in anything but critical condition with several bullet wounds. Is this the case?
Personally, FWIW, I’d say the story is somewhere in between the two versions…with the fault laying on BOTH sides, though I tend to blame the Italians more if they didn’t check this all through before hand to insure an incident like this wouldn’t take place. I seriously doubt the US generally hoses down any car coming up to a random checkpoint…if they did, reguardless of the vast US propaganda machine, we’d hear about it. I also have doubts that the Italians, unless they were complete idiots, would attempt to drive quickly through a known US checkpoint. Maybe additional, non-anacedotal information will come to light soon about this incident.
Until then, perhaps we should stick to the OP about whether or not the US DELIBERATELY targetted this journalist. Perhaps someone could say why the US would do such a thing (and give a plausable reason of the non-tinfoil variety), or why the journalist survived if the US WAS targetting her…after all, they obviously had an hour to wack her if they REALLY wanted too. For that matter, why wouldn’t the US have made it look like an accident? Gotten the CIA to dress up as insurgents or something, planted a road side bomb, etc?
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I say again. EVERY source I’m looking at talks about multiple hits on the car I’m bias.
Heh. I love it. When you say against opposing cites that there is only one bullet your being objective but when I say that based on past events it’s not unknown for American troops to fuck up while carring out checkpoint duty.
Just one example
Sounds pretty familiar so far doesn’t it? It would have stayed that way as well if a journalist wasn’t with them and reported the event
Forgive me if I don’t immediately buy the official US version. I didn’t buy the Brit’s official versions either when they said they legitimately shot civilians in Northern Ireland at check points. It turned out that while some of those event where “clean kills” some of them where panicking kids with guns and some where just plain murder.
I’m cynical by nature and am unwilling to accept “official” versions at face value. Call that bias if you will but it’s not bias again the US it’s bias against officialdom in general as I’m sick and tired of being lied to every fucking day.
CIA dressed up as insurgents? HA! Even that wouldn’t have fooled many on this board. In fact – I’m sure the CIA would have slipped up once again and made a true analysis way - way too obvious for some on this board. Recall that Nick Berg was wearing the US issued orange jumpsuit, with video showing the US issued white plastic chair, with overweight US operatives dressed up as al Qaeda (with white arms showing) – oh, and they forgot the blood!! — From these facts we soon discovered that it was all CIA theater to to fool us into thinking that terrorists, rather than the US government, who had killed Berg. These guys are just too smart for the CIA! Wouldn’t work —
And yet, you swallow whole the Italian’s version of events. I don’t think you are cynical by nature…just selectively cynical. You swallow the Italians version because it fits your political expectations, nothing more. If this isnt’ the case, perhaps you could point out WHY you buy their version more than the US’s version that doesn’t have to do with a knee jerk anti-government/anti-American reaction…because I fail to see that EITHER version is more credible than the other.
So, let’s try throwing some numbers at this. Probability, say. There are three statements I’m seeing made here.
1: TARFU: The US Soldiers shot a onrushing vehicle that tragically contained the Italians, who ignored warning shots and did not slow down.
2: SNAFU: The US Soldiers shot an oncoming vehicle that tragically contained the Italians. This was not intentional murder of the Italians, but a result of miscommunication somewhere along the line, possibly a command to fire a warning shot given too late.
3: FUBAR: The US Soldiers willingly and knowingly gunned down a hostage rescue to further the political goals of the USA.
I don’t give TARFU more than a 38% chance of being true. I give SNAFU a 60% chance of being true. I give FUBAR a 2% chance of being true.
Does anyone have an opposing position, or more evidence than ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘fog of war’ to weight these statements? Is there a fourth statement I’m missing?
If your #3 in there at 2% – (i.e. the US willing murdered the agent to further goals) – (and I assume the ‘2%’ is more a place holder for the choice) I’ll add this one —
#4 : The Italian government willingly and knowingly caused the conditions for the hostage rescue to be fired upon to further the political goals of the Italian government.
I give ‘item 4’ a 2% chance of being true (rounded numbers).
Huh? Isn’t it the Italian government that’s all gung-ho about keeping their 3000 guys in Iraq? It’s most of the people who are in opposition, true, but…
This may help clarify what happened. Very interesting CSM article on what goes on at a checkpoint and why you’re liable to get killed at one.
I also urge all of you again to watch Frontline’s Report which shows a shooting at a roadblock from the U.S. soldiers’ perspective.
After looking at the two of them I can’t imagine how anyone would see this as an assassination or even a fuck-up on the part of the soldiers. This appears to be SOP of a bad checkpoint system that just plain takes lives.
US Tanks also have .30 and .50 machine guns. If they were using the .50 on her car, I don’t think there would be much of the car left, let alone occupents. The .30 would be more likely to leave survivors, but firing a .30 into a crowded car isn’t going to be fun for anyone inside.
I’m totally confused by the Italians’ descrpiton of events.
According to the driver, there was a bright light shined at him as he approached the check point.
According to the reporter there was no light and it was a partol of tanks that attacked them.
Which version are we to use?
And we’re to believe that ‘hundreds’ of shots were fired, presumably at the occupants, and only one bullet hit someone? I think history has shown that American troops are at least passibly accurate when firing their weapons.
I’m saying that the one bullet which hit the temple of the bodyguard is all we know for sure. The “hundreds” of bullets stuff has yet to be proven enough for me to believe. The only cites about this are the accounts of the Italians, and they have large inconsistencies to them.
There is a show on one of the networks (TLC or Discovery, don’t remember which) called Mythbusters…its a great show btw, reminds me of Cecil except they do it on TV. Same kind of humor, same kind of rough and ready experiments, same types of conclusions drawn. I highly recommend it for entertainment value at least.
Anyway, they did an episode to see if you really could hide behind a car if someone was shooting at you, a la Hollywood movies. They used various caliburs to test it out. The upshot was, most of them went right through the car…both sides. If a patrol of ‘tanks’ had even put a single burst of either 50 cal OR 30 cal into that car, even if they were only aiming at the engine block, it would be swiss cheese. I doubt there would be many survivors. And certainly there wouldn’t be a single killed by a single bullet (which, if I’m reading the various stories correctly is what happened). That part of the story, whether its ‘tanks’ or soldiers with M16’s hosing the car down is just not plausable IMO.
Exactly. Since 3 out of the 4 inhabitants of the car were NOT hit by a single bullet (Sgrena was injured by shrapnel, perhaps from the engine block that the Americans were shooting up) the cab of the car being sprayed with bullets simply doesn’t hold up. At the car’s engine block, perhaps, esp. since the soldiers have admitted that that’s what they were shooting at.
But XT is right, as he often is: we haven’t seen a picture of the car. We don’t know how big it was. We don’t know who was sitting in what seat. We haven’t gotten an answer as to why the driver saw flashing lights and Sgrena didn’t. We haven’t heard anything directly from the soldiers themselves. So what can we know for sure yet?
As a side note ------ Anybody want to guess what the 10 to 13.4 million dollars in ransom the Italian Government paid to the kidnappers will be used for? Come on — let’s use our imagination –
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