Giuliana Sgrena Being Told To 'Be Quiet' By Italian Justice Minister

[Annie]

seems the discrepancies are becoming a bit much:

http://xtramsn.co.nz/news/0,,11965-4190767,00.html

Hostage Shot By US Was Careless - Italian Minister

12/03/2005 Phil Stewart Italy's justice minister urged former hostage Giuliana Sgrena on Friday to stop making "careless" accusations after being shot by US forces in Baghdad, saying she had already caused enough grief.

Sgrena has repeatedly suggesting US soldiers shot her on purpose and said on Friday she had little faith in a joint investigation by Italy and the United States into the "friendly fire" incident.

"She has created enormous problems for the government and also caused grief that perhaps was better avoided," Justice Minister Roberto Castelli told reporters in Bologna.

Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari was shot dead by U.S. forces as he shielded the newly freed hostage while taking her to the airport.

Sgrena herself said in interviews this week that had she been more cautious in Baghdad, she perhaps would not have been kidnapped in the first place.

The award-winning war reporter, who works for Communist newspaper Il Manifesto, was abducted as she conducted interviews outside Baghdad University and held for a month.

Many Italians have been irked by her descriptions of her kidnappers. She said they were not killers and that she may have over-dramatised her videotaped appeal from captivity for Italy to withdraw its 3,000 troops from Iraq.

She sobbed in the video and begged her family and the government to do something to save her life.

"Sgrena, I think, should perhaps be more careful. She has said a load of nonsense, speaks somewhat carelessly and makes careless comments," Castelli said.

The US army says Sgrena's vehicle sped toward the checkpoint outside the airport and ignored warning shots, an explanation rejected by Rome and the car's driver.

Italy's centre-right government, while rejecting any hint that the shooting was intentional, has until now largely refrained from directly criticising Sgrena.

Sgrena has told ANSA news agency she does not expect official inquiries into the incident to produce results "because we know how they end up".

She also complained of being treated unfairly.

"I feel like I'm being accused for being kidnapped and then saved," Sgrena said, speaking from a Rome hospital, where she is undergoing treatment for her injuries.

 

[Annie]

whoops, a bit more from the BBC:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4341387.stm

Sgrena operation 'kept from US'

Nicola Calipari died protecting freed journalist Giuliana Sgrena US forces might not have known that slain Italian secret agent Nicola Calipari was in Iraq to secure a hostage's freedom, Italian papers say. Calipari was killed by US troops' fire while escorting journalist Giuliana Sgrena by car to Baghdad airport.

But the press quotes an Italian general who liaised between US forces and Italian intelligence as saying he did not know Calipari was on a rescue bid.

His report is now in the hands of Rome prosecutors investigating the killing.

According to newspaper La Repubblica, Gen Mario Marioli helped the two Italian secret service agents obtain a special badge from the coalition forces on their arrival in Baghdad.

But Gen Marioli, who is the coalition forces' second-in-command, reportedly was unaware that the officers were on a mission to free Ms Sgrena, and so the information he passed on to US officials was incomplete.

Fatal coincidence

Gen Marioli's testimony is crucial because he is the man who was keeping the US forces informed of the car's arrival before the fatal shooting, in which a US patrol killed the secret service agent and injured Ms Sgrena and a second officer.

Gen Marioli's version, as reported by the papers, also contradicts a reconstruction by the Italian government and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who said the US military had been advised that Ms Sgrena was on board the car.

The US military have said they had no knowledge of the rescue mission.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that the US had set up makeshift checkpoints along the road to the airport the night of the fatal shooting because the outgoing US ambassador, John Negroponte, was travelling on the same road.

Italian media have been speculating that Italy might have deliberately kept the mission wrapped in secrecy because the US did not approve of the ongoing negotiations with the kidnappers.

The US-led coalition has launched an investigation into the shooting with the participation of Italian officials.

The inquiry is led by Gen Peter Vangjel, and is expected to take up to four weeks.

 

[krisy]

Thank God someone told her to shut her trap!!!
AND, I am glad to see that they are now proving that U.S. soldiers were not aware of this mission!!!!

Great article!!

 

[Gem]

Conspiracy Theory of the Week:

Sgrena went to Iraq with the express purpose of getting in touch with insurgent contacts she had because of her ties through her newspaper and friends with similar political views...she arranged to be "taken hostage" in order to bilk Burlesconi to cough up a few million to "save her," thereby taking money away from the Italian gov't that is helping the US, and giving it to her friends, the terrorists.

Proof? Of course I don't have proof, its a conspiracy theory. But think about it...think about the conflicting stories...the secrecy surrounding her release...her behavior before, during, and after...

The woman is non-religious...yet her video pleading for the Italian gov't to save her shows her praying....perhaps she was terrified by the terrorists, right? Nope...one of the things shes been saying over and over and over again was that her captors treated her very, very well. Interesting considering how many other captives (including other Italians journalists) ended up mistreated and/or beheaded!

Think about all the jumping around and cover ups that seem to be going on in Italy right now...everyone is changing stories, everyone is hushing up, people are making sure that others shut up....why, if it was as simple as: The Italian Gov't paid off the terrorists and didn't want to tell the US and things went wrong......is everyone acting so skittish??!?!


Anyway...just something to ponder over the weekend. Enjoy.

 

[Adam's Apple]

So glad to know that there are people in Italy who have not been taken in by Sgrena's ridiculous claims. The way the MSM was reporting this incident, you would have thought everyone in Italy--and I do mean EVERYONE--had swallowed Sgrena's story hook, line and sinker without so much as a pause to even consider if what this Italian communist was saying may not be true.

 

[Adam's Apple]

SE, when the cow jumps over the moon.

 

[Johnney]

yup, they told us alright. we were fully aware of it.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Italian Journo Refuses to Accept the Truth
By Jack Kelly for Jewish World Review
March 11, 2005

Giuliana Sgrena does not lack a sense of self importance. The 56-year-old journalist for the Italian communist newspaper Il Manifesto thinks she knows so many deep dark secrets the U.S. military tried to shut her up permanently.

Sgrena went to Iraq to report on the heroic resistance to the American imperialists. Dutch journalist Harald Doornbos rode in the airplane to Baghdad with her. "Be careful not to get kidnapped," Doornbos warned Sgrena.

"You don't understand the situation," she responded, according to Doornbos' account in the Nederlands Dagblatt. "The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers. The enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear." Sgrena left her hotel the morning of Feb. 4th to interview refugees from Fallujah, the resistance stronghold captured by U.S. Marines in November. The interviews didn't go well.

"The refugees...would not listen to me," she said. "I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face."

Sgrena's feelings were hurt that the refugees could be so curt to: "I who had risked everything, challenging the Italian government who didn't want journalists to reach Iraq and the Americans who don't want our work to be witnessed of what really became of that country with the war and notwithstanding that which they call elections." (Maybe it reads better in Italian, or maybe she just can't write worth a damn.)

She got nabbed on her way back to her hotel. Sgrena told her captors she was on their side, and suggested they kidnap an American soldier instead. But the U.S. government doesn't pay ransoms.

The Italian government did pay a ransom estimated by various sources at between $1 million and $10 million, and Sgrena was released into the custody of Italian intelligence officers. On the night of March 4, their vehicle approached a checkpoint near Baghdad International Airport. The car did not stop. U.S. troops opened fire. Nicola Calipari was killed, Sgrena was slightly wounded.

Sgrena said the soldiers deliberately tried to kill her, but didn't hazard a guess as to how the soldiers knew she was in that vehicle. According to the U.S. embassy and the Third Infantry Division, the Italians did not inform the Americans she'd been released. And Calipari had rented a nondescript sedan to pick up Sgrena, rather than utilize one of the Italian embassy's armored SUVs, which the soldiers might have recognized.

Sgrena and the driver said they approached the checkpoint slowly. But "slowly" seems to be a relative term for Italian drivers, and for communists. An Army officer told ABC news the car may have been going 100 mph when it was fired upon.

Sgrena claims the Americans shot without warning. "A tank started to shoot at us without any sign or any light," she told reporters March 7th.

The soldiers say they used lights, and hand signals, and fired warning shots before shooting into the engine block to stop the vehicle. The car's driver said the soldiers did shine a spotlight, but opened up almost immediately afterwards.

Sgrena said "the tank" fired 300-400 shots at her car. But photographs of it published March 8th by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica indicate the vehicle suffered remarkably little damage for such a fusillade. There is a single bullet hole in the windshield, but the window glass and the fenders are otherwise intact, as is the hood.

Perhaps the soldiers were remarkably lousy shots. But if they were trying to kill Sgrena, why did they take her to the hospital instead of finishing her off?

There are questions that need answers. The Italians say they notified the Americans of Sgrena's release, but the Americans deny it. Was the car going "slowly," as the Italians claim, or was it trying to run through the checkpoint, as the Americans say?

But there is no doubt about the credibility of Giuliana Sgrena. She entitled her story "My Truth," perhaps to distinguish it from the bourgeois concept of truth that depends on adherence to fact.

Many on the Left in America embraced Sgrena's "truth," while refusing to give their countrymen the benefit of the doubt. But hey, liberals support our troops. They say so all the time.