As Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, telephoned his Italian counterpart, Antonio Martino, to express regret for the killing, Italian government ministers and opposition politicians denounced the shooting. Gianni Alemanno, the Minister for Agriculture, said: "We need to see the guilty punished and an apology from the Americans. We are trustworthy allies but we must not give the impression of being subordinates."
Alemanno hits it right on the head here. The so-called coalition has splintered right from the get-go primarily because all nations have their national pride, and Italy doesn't want American commanders bossing their soldiers around anymore than we'd accept any sort of reversal of such a role. And the Italians have hung in longer than most of the rest of them; Berlusconi at least deserves credit for thwarting the will of the majority of his people to be a loyal friend to Bush. The question is whether Bush ever returns loyalty in anything but pelf.
At least Rumsfeld put down the Autopen for this one. It's like watching your five-year-old ride his bike without the training wheels for the first time, isn't it?
Edward Luttwak, an American military commentator interviewed yesterday in La Repubblica, said Mr Calipari's death was "the sort of thing that happens all the time in a war", and he advised Italy to "take an aspirin and go to bed, you'll feel better in the morning". But for many Italians the secret agent's death exposed a gulf of mistrust and loathing.
I don't know who this dickhead Luttwak is, but this is remarkably insensitive. Were it an American accidentally killed by Italian troops, we'd publicly humiliate them and make them bow and scrape their way back into our good graces. This is the same bullshit attitude we pulled on Canada when a couple of our amphetamined bomber pilots took out four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan a couple years ago. It's yet another reason why Canada is getting sick of our shit, and signing oil leases with China.
They passed two American checkpoints along the airport road without incident and were 700 metres or so from the airport building. The road narrowed to a single, one-way lane and took a 90-degree turn. The car was going slowly now, approaching the end of the journey.
"At last I felt safe," Ms Sgrena said. "We had nearly arrived in an area under American control, an area more or less friendly, even if it was still unsettled."
Then, turning the corner, they found their progress baulked by an American tank. They were blinded by a powerful light. "Without any warning, any signal, we were bombarded with a shower of bullets," Ms Sgrena said. "The tank was firing on us, our car was riddled with bullets. Nicola tried to protect me, then his body slumped on top of mine, I heard his death rattle, then I felt a pain but I couldn't tell where I had been hit. Those who had fired came up to the car, but before I was taken to the American hospital there was an interminable wait, it's hard to know how long I was lying there wounded but perhaps it was 20 minutes."
Was Ms Sgrena, correspondent of the communist daily Il Manifesto, who has repeatedly demanded an end to the occupation, the true target? She couldn't rule it out, she said. "Everybody knows that the Americans are opposed to hostage negotiations. So I don't see why we must exclude the possibility that I was their target. The Americans don't approve, and so they try to frustrate the negotiations every way they can."
This is where it gets into he said/she said territory, of course, which is why a competent media presence would be checking into both sides of the story. Where would one find such a media presence? Oh, they'll just tell you that it's too dangerous to do any real investigative journalism there, and they're probably right. But that brings up yet another set of problems, as that set of facts tends to undermine the putative corner Iraq turned a month or so ago. Once again, no one seems to have their story straight about this fucking place.
And it's not as if this sort of thing hasn't been ongoing:
The deadly shooting of an Italian intelligence officer by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Baghdad on Friday was one of many incidents in which civilians have been killed by mistake at checkpoints in Iraq, including local police officers, women and children, according to military records, U.S. officials and human rights groups.
U.S. soldiers have fired on the occupants of many cars approaching their positions over the past year and a half, only to discover that the people they killed were not suicide bombers or attackers but Iraqi civilians. They did so while operating under rules of engagement that the military has classified and under a legal doctrine that grants U.S. troops immunity from civil liability for misjudgment.
Again, I submit that we would not be terribly understanding either if the pattino were on the other piede, classified rules of engagement or not.
Here the Independent does a nice breakdown of the conflicting positions on what happened:
CONFLICTING VERSIONS
There are some glaring discrepancies in the Italian and American versions of the killing of the agent Nicola Calipari and the wounding of released hostage Giuliana Sgrena and two other Italian secret service agents:
The Americans say: the car was travelling at high speed
The Italians say: it was travelling at 40-50kph
US: It approached a checkpoint near the airport at speed when soldiers fired on it to force it to stop as a "last resort"
Italy: It had passed three checkpoints without incident and was 700 metres from the airport when fired upon
US: The soldiers used hand signals and bright lights and fired warning shots before hitting the car with shots
Italy: There was no warning. Three to four hundred rounds were fired, afterwards the car seats were covered in spent cartridges. The Americans forced the Italians to remain in the car without medical attention for an hour
US: There was a lack of co-ordination between the Italians and the Americans
Italy: The Americans were kept fully informed
US: It was a regrettable accident which will be aggressively investigated
Italy: Ms Sgrena claims it was a deliberate ambush to kill her, as the Italians had paid a ransom, a practice America opposes, and as she had learnt inconvenient facts from her abductors.
Here's more UK coverage of this clusterfuck, courtesy of the Telegraph.
Oliviero Diliberto, the head of the Communist party, which is in the main Left-wing bloc led by Mr Prodi, said: "I don't believe a word of the American version. The Americans deliberately fired on Italians. This is huge. All of the centre-Left must vote in parliament for the withdrawal of our troops."
You know, this is really the worst aspect of this whole fiasco, the loss of credibility and respect with our allies -- who by definition are people who want to like us. It's beyond the scope of this post, but it will be one of my more over-arching points over the next couple months. We simply cannot and do not want to function as a sole hyperpower for too long of a period of time, for a variety of reasons. At any rate, here is yet another manifestation of this principle taking concrete effect.
Meanwhile the Left-wing Il Manifesto daily, for which Mrs Sgrena works and which is strongly opposed to the occupation of Iraq, quickly sold out of all its editions yesterday.
On its front page, an article dictated from her hospital bed in Rome claimed the Americans may have targeted her because of US opposition to Italy's policy of dealing with kidnappers.
The reflexive Murkin response will be "fuck 'em; who cares what the punk Euros think; etc. etc.". We all know it pretty much by heart at this point. Say what you want about Italy's commitment to America's success, but rest assured that Britain will be watching how we handle this very closely, and they are about the last ally that still wants to like us -- and our foolish leader -- at this pivotal turning point in geopolitics. Despite what that drooling moron Robin Givhan at Pravda would have people believe, nobody gives a shit about Condi Rice and her fuck-me-pumps diplomacy.
As a final point about reliable journalism in general (and Sgrena's journalism in particular), I'd like to say that while everybody's talking about this rambling screed Sgrena penned upon her return (giving her some benefit of the doubt that she's in a highly emotional state, obviously), if this is any example of Sgrena's reportage, I have no idea just what the US would be so terribly worried about, aside from her putative anti-Americanism. It's just not very good journalism. It stands in rather stark contrast to the Sgrena article we linked to in an earlier post. Hopefully it's an aberration.
«We buried them, but we could not identify them because they were charred from the napalm bombs used by the Americans». People from Saqlawiya village, near Falluja, told al Jazeera television, based in Qatar, that they helped bury 73 bodies of women and children completely charred, all in the same grave. The sad story of common graves, which started at Saddam’s times, is not yet finished. Nobody could confirm if napalm bombs have been used in Falluja, but other bodies found last year after the fierce battle at Baghdad airport were also completely charred and some thought of nuclear bombs. No independent source could verify the facts, since all the news arrived until now are those spread by journalists embedded with the American troops, who would only allow British and American media to enrol with them. But the villagers who fled in the last few days spoke of many bodies which had not been buried: it was too dangerous to collect the corpses during the battle.
Not one bit of corroboration here, on anything. Where exactly in Saqlawiya is this mass grave? Can't Sgrena round up a photographer and a doctor to help her independently corroborate this freshly-filled mass grave, and ascertain common causes of death? Lamely she offers that "nobody" could confirm the use of napalm bombs, and that "some thought of nuclear bombs". "Nobody"? "Some"? Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, lady, vet your fucking sources. This is not a game; you're accusing the United States of serious war crimes and cover-ups here. Some fucking guy you met outside a village doesn't cut it.
I tend to agree with Sgrena's point that embedded journalists are co-opted journalists, but it is incumbent upon her to bolster that thesis with some facts. The most frustrating thing about this shoddy reportage and analysis is that there is a story to tell on the Fallujah raid, the cost in civilian lives, and the hazards of repatriation and reconstruction. We may have used napalm, but you'd never know it from the assertions in the article. There are ways in which a good journalist can responsibly analyze and report what's going on in Fallujah; Sgrena's article is definitely not one of them. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this sort of uncorroborated assertion is usually the sort of thing Faux News specializes in. Serious people do not put any stock in this bag-lady brand of reportage; she's doing more harm to her own cause with this shit than she realizes.
Sgrena says she's not going back to Iraq. That's probably a good idea. One hopes that if she really has a story to tell, and not just hysterical mash notes that can't be backed up with even the most rudimentary bits of evidence, she'll gather her notes, vet and organize them in a sensible, coherent fashion, and quit screwing around. More than ever, we need responsible journalists organizing facts, not impressionistic ninnies wearing their hearts on their sleeves.
Here and here are slightly more cogent examples of competent journalism, of organizing numbers and names. Buona fortuna, Giuliana!
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