Not unsurprising...most communist propaganda fails to survive the light of close examination and investigation.
Bruce http://www.nbr.co.nz/home/column_article.asp?id=11589&cid=1&cname=Media Italian media stew: Highly spiced Sgrena tale reducing under heat Francis Till Single impact on windscreen The global media storm unleashed over the 4 March killing of Italian security services agent Nicola Calipari by American soldiers at a checkpoint in Iraq shows signs of evaporating this week as facts begin to emerge from frenzy. Newly released pictures of the car in which Mr Calipari died are among the most telling indictments of the week's editorial frenzy, showing only a few bullet strikes in spite of widely repeated claims that hundreds of rounds were fired into the car. But other problems with the story are also emerging -- which increasingly appears to have been the creation of the press, running uncritically with claims from a survivor, Giuliana Sgrena, in a concert of high anti-America dudgeon. A simple story For days after the tragic killing, the only voice describing the event was that of Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter for Italy's communist daily Il Manifesto, who was in the car when the shooting took place. Mr Calipari and another security services officer were driving Ms Sgrena to the Baghdad airport when they came upon a tactical checkpoint and, for reasons still under investigation, were fired upon by soldiers from the 3rd Infantry. Over the next week Ms Sgrena suggested, with varying degrees of precision, that the United States had attempted to assassinate her and that Mr Calipari had died in her place as the result of having heroically shielded her with his own body. Mr Calipari had, apparently, only just successfully negotiated Ms Sgrena's release after a month, to the day, of captivity by a terrorist group that had kidnapped her on 4 February and demanded the withdrawal of Italian and other coalition forces as ransom. Rumours swirled about cash ransoms paid -- ranging from early estimates of $US1 million to more than $US10 million -- but the kidnappers said in a post-shooting video that they had not been paid a cash ransom and the Italian government, generally, held tight to a "no comment" policy. The claim by Ms Sgrena that she had been targeted for assassination came hard on the heels of allegations by Eason Jordan, who was forced only weeks ago to resign his job as CNN's chief news executive over claims at Davos that the US may have knowingly targeted journalists in Iraq. That idea has had a lingering currency with some media operatives and may account in part for the gullibility of so many in the press when it came to this incident. Videos Journalists are taken hostage with alarming regularity in Iraq and very little press coverage is typically directed to such events except during periods when videos of the captives appear. Miss Sgrena made two videotapes while in captivity, the first of which was aired on 16 February just hours before a critical vote in the Italian Senate on the deployment of Italian soldiers in Iraq. As the London Times reported it, a tearful Ms Sgrena appeared exhausted and extremely distraught in that video, leading her father to say he was "worried because his daughter seemed 'quite desperate.' "'I'm afraid this is going to end badly,' he said. 'At least we have seen her alive, but I don't think they will pull out the troops to save my daughter.'" In the video, Ms Sgrena described a country few dispassionate observers would recognise, leading many to suspect her statement had been scripted. "People are dying every day, thousands of people are in prison, children, the elderly, women are raped, people die because they have nothing to eat, no electricity, no water... I beg everyone, all those who have voted with me against the war, against the occupation ... please help me, these people should not suffer any more. Withdraw from Iraq, no one should come to Iraq any more ... not even the journalists," she said Despite her pleas, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to extend the troop deployment and Ms Sgrena was not heard from again until just before her release, when another video -- showing her as a far more composed captive -- was released. After her release, she said she had been treated well by her captors and even praised them for their devoutness, a picture of her captivity that would have surprised any who had viewed that 16 February video. The ransom Officially, coalition governments do not pay ransoms to kidnappers in Iraq for two reasons -- ransoms encourage kidnappings and the money can be used to buy weapons and explosives. But some governments have quietly departed from this policy and Italy is thought to be high on that list. Last year, for example, Italy paid a reported $US 5 million for the freedom of two aid workers, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta. The Sunday Times (UK) reported that, although Italian officials were denying reports of a $US6 million ransom for Ms Sgrena, "senior officials and intelligence sources have confirmed that money did change hands." Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has reportedly agreed to cease paying those ransoms, and Gustavo Selva, chairman of the standing committee for foreign affairs in the lower house of parliament, was quoted in the Sunday Times as saying: "From now on there will be no more ransoms, no more concessions. If there are more kidnappings, the Italians will act in full agreement with the Americans. Intelligence services will try to locate the hostage and a military raid will be launched if necessary." Oddly, immediately after the shooting, a group claiming to be the kidnappers released a video of Ms Sgrena in which they claimed that no ransom had been paid -- or sought -- and that they had, in fact, rejected an offer of a ransom. Patrol, checkpoint, helicopters Immediately after the shooting, the Multi-National Force website issued a terse release: At approximately 8:55 p.m. on March 4, Coalition Forces assigned to the Multi-National Force-Iraq fired on a vehicle that was approaching a Coalition checkpoint in Baghdad at a high rate of speed. The recently freed Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena was an occupant in the vehicle and was apparently injured. It appears a second person in the automobile was killed. Ms. Sgrena is being treated by Coalition Force medical personnel. The incident is under investigation and additional details will be provided when they become available. Many other sources refer to a statement from the 3rd Infantry Division, not online, which said (as paraphrased by the 3rd Infantry Division Society website): ...a U.S. patrol "attempted to warn the driver to stop by hand and arm signals, flashing white lights, and firing warning shots in front of the car,'' the military said in a statement. "When the driver didn't stop, the soldiers shot into the engine block which stopped the vehicle, killing one and wounding two others.'' Later, background briefings by the US military established that the "checkpoint" had been "temporary" in nature, set up by the 3rd Infantry as part of extra security laid on in anticipation of a trip between the airport and Baghdad by US Ambassador John Negroponte. Ms Sgrena has said -- and countless media reports have repeated her claim -- there was no checkpoint, that the shooting was done by a patrol that fired without warning. In her first report for Il Manifesto, a story titled "My Truth," Ms Sgrena said she and the others in the car were laughing when "a rain of fire and bullets hit us, shutting up forever the cheerful voices of a few minutes earlier." And in an interview with Corriere Della Sera she said: "There were no shots in the air. I heard the gunfire and the windows exploded into a thousand fragments. There was no beam of light, no small light. It was dark, and I was looking around." She also told America's National Public Radio that there were lights, but that they were turned on after the firing stopped, and she told the BBC: "We had no signal. We were just on the way to the airport. They started to shoot at us without any light or signal. There was no block, there was nothing. It was so immediate. I didn't know how I was alive after all that attack." In that BBC interview, she claimed, as well, that the fire came from "tanks" and that the car was "destroyed." But in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit, as recounted by the English edition of Der Spiegel, she said the attack involved a Humvee and that: "It rained bullets. We didn't have any way of knowing where they were coming from. They fired for a few minutes. It was the worst thing I have lived through." But there are other stories about lights and warnings. The Guardian, in a 6 March story titled, rather typically for the coverage, "Outrage as US soldiers kill hostage rescue hero," noted that Ms Sgrena had told "colleagues" the Americans "shone a flashlight at the car and then fired between 300 and 400 bullets at if from an armoured vehicle." In another, she claimed that the firing began after the Americans illuminated the car with a "spotlight." And Mr Berlusconi has said that there was a warning, to which the driver responded by stopping immediately. The shooting, Mr Berlusconi said, happened after the car had stopped. Presumably, lights played a part in that stop but Mr Berlusconi did not elaborate. Speeding or not American sources have contended all along that the car was moving toward the checkpoint at speed, but Ms Sgrena has disputed that -- and her claim has been backed by various Italian government officials, including Mr Berlusconi. In fact, the velocity does not matter. Any vehicle that refuses a command to stop at a checkpoint in Iraq will be fired upon by coalition soldiers, but the velocity issue has nonetheless commanded much press attention -- and Ms Sgrena has given many different accounts of how fast the car was going. In one of her original statements, she claimed the car was "not travelling particularly fast, given the circumstances"but has since several times attempted to quantify that by claiming the car was not moving at any great rate of speed. A 6 March Washington Post story quoted her as having said: "We weren't going very fast, given the circumstances. It was not a checkpoint, but a patrol that started firing right after lighting up a spotlight. The firing was not justified by the movement of our automobile." According to this AP story, Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini claims that the vehicle was moving "no faster than 25 mph" (40 kph) when "a bright light shone on the car from above, and the Toyota immediately stopped." But Sgrena said in her "My Truth" version of events that the car was swerving to avoid rain puddles and that she thought she might be, ironically, killed in an accident -- not the kind of thought that is normally justified by movement at 40kph under almost any weather circumstances. And in her Corriere interview, when asked about speed, she said the car had never been moving at a high rate of speed. "About 70-80 kilometres an hour," she said. But in a little noticed ABC News (US) story, an unnamed senior US military official told reporters that it was likely the car was moving "excess of 100 mph" (160kph). Bullets everywhere, even on the seats Although almost every news organisation that covered the story reported Ms Sgrena's claim that 300-400 rounds had been fired into the car and that she had scooped up handsful of spend rounds from the seat around her, it was left to bloggers to point out that rounds do not collect on seats. Even Ms Sgrena has retreated somewhat from her initial claims. In her Corriere interview, when challenged about the rounds, she said: "I saw the projectiles. I don 't know if there were 3-400 of them, but the interior was full of bullets. And I remember wondering how I was still alive with all those projectiles round about me." Her version was backed, with some differences, by Mr Fini, who said the Americans had fired on the vehicle, after it stopped, for 15-20 seconds. Bloggers weighed in heavily on this topic, with overwhelming derision. One, Confederate Yankee, noted that: "M2 heavy machine guns, M240 medium machine guns and M249 light machine guns are the only belt-fed weapons in wide deployment by U.S. ground forces in Iraq .... These are the only weapons that could lay down the amount of fire claimed by Sgrena in the amount of time she claimed. M-4 carbines, M-16 rifles and even the experimental XM-8 rifle all use 30-round box magazines, and would have had to make multiple reloads in that time period, even if several rifles were firing." Rounds from belt-fed -- or even personal infantry -- weapons would typically come to rest only when they connected with high density metal. Not seat covers. But in a 13 March interview with The Independent, Ms Sgrena said: "On the seat I could feel a mountain of bullets, and what I had in my shoulder was more than just glass splinters." It appears increasingly likely -- now that photographs show the car was almost undamaged in the incident -- that what Ms Sgrena felt all around her were fragments of glass from the one window that may have been shattered. And that raises the question -- not so far asked in any major news outlet -- about the value of Ms Sgrena's obervations on other topics. Won't go away But even as Ms Sgrena's version of events is crumbling before the evidence -- and her claims that she was targeted intentionally have drawn criticism from the Italian government -- even more sinister allegations are appearing. High among them the tabloid notion that Mr Calipari was the actual target. Other outlandish claims have made their way unobstructed into the media -- among them one in an Australian paper that Ms Sgrena's shoulder wound was from the bullet that killed Mr Calipari, hitting her after passing through his head. And there is the claim, from Mr Selva, reported in the Sunday Times (UK) that the incident "had been prompted by a satellite monitoring system. This detected that their vehicle did not have clearance from US military authorities. A signal alerted a mobile checkpoint near the airport and its soldiers opened fire. '"The Italian team should have known what to expect, but it appears they didn't realise how sophisticated the American military are,'" Mr Selva told the Times. Even CNN -- Eason Jordan's fate notwithstanding -- has fallen victim to repeating what it believes rather than sticking with the facts. Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin caught the cable news broadcaster using faked -- easily verifiable -- quotes three times in its coverage of the story, each time in an effort to give the text greater punch. 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