I think that this is a really important article that deserves heavy Daily Kos attention because it shows how dishonest the U.S. is still being and why Europe is going to hate us more than ever.
Remember when U.S. forces shot up a car carrying Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist who'd just been freed by her kidnapers? The U.S. blamed the incident on the fact that the car was on a dangerous road where people get shot all the time.
IndyMedia.org is reporting, based on an interview with Sgrena, that she wasn't on that road at all and was actually on a special diplomatic road open only to high-level embassy staffers. She was allowed to be on the road because there were embassy people in the car with her. So, the U.S. officials weren't just fudging the truth here. They were telling a huge, huge lie. (more)
Here's a
link to the IndyMedia.org article, and here are some choice excerpts:
Giuliana Sgrena would probably be the first to say that to focus on her case would be to miss the point on the extent of the daily, horrific violence Iraqis face at the hands of US soldiers. Sgrena is the Italian war correspondent that was shot by US forces as she was en route to the Baghdad airport after being freed from a month of being held hostage by an Iraqi resistance group. She knows better than most that if she and the senior Italian intelligence official killed by US troops as he tried to save her were merely Iraqi civilians, this would be even more of a non-story than it already is in the US press
....
According to Klein, when Calipari was killed and Sgrena wounded, they were on a secured road that can only be accessed through the heavily-fortified Green Zone and is reserved exclusively for top foreign embassy and US officials. "It's a completely separate road, actually a Saddam-era road, it would seem, that allowed his vehicles to pass directly from the airport to his palace," says Klein. "And now that is the secured route between the U.S. military base at the airport and the U.S. controlled Green Zone and the U.S. embassy."
"It was a VIP road, for embassy people, not for normal people," Sgrena told Klein. "I was only able to be on that road because I was with people from the Italian embassy."
...
Klein says that Sgrena is very frustrated by the US government's claim, repeated consistently by the media, that the Italians were fired at from a checkpoint. "She says it wasn't a checkpoint at all," Klein says. "It was simply a tank parked on the side of the road that opened fire on them. There was no process of trying to stop the car, she said, or any signals. From her perspective, it was just opening fire by a tank."
"It was not a checkpoint. Nobody asked us to stop," Sgrena told Klein "All the streets we were on were USA controlled so we thought they knew we were going through. They didn't try to stop us, they just shot us. They have a way to signal us to stop but they didn't give us any signals to stop and they were at least 10 meters off the street to the side."
Sgrena also says that the US soldiers fired at them from behind, which of course contradicts the claim that the soldiers fired in self-defense. ...
Bloggers did a great job of covering Gannon/Guckert and the Republican National Convention, but I think this article deserves some kind of blogger Pultizer Prize.
