Italians, Shame On You

Which Italians are you arguing against here? The Italian Communist Journalist who the U.S. just tried to assasinate? She is apparently an arch critic of Italian forces in the occupation. Would rather not have had her interview female prisoners from Abu Graib prison?

I am sure she has some complex feelings and thoughts. She survived the assassination attempt because an agent of Italian imperialism died protecting her. Of course she is going to attend his funeral.

In all the coverage by the corporate media of the Sgrena story, one crucial element is conspicuously missing: on the day she was kidnapped Giuliana Sgrena had an appointment in a Baghdad Sunni mosque with refugees from Fallujah.

“During the attack on the city, eyewitnesses described horrific scenes that analysts have attributed to attacks with napalm, a poisonous cocktail of polystyrene and jet fuel that has the capacity of melting human flesh and bones,” writes Joel Wendland. “Inter Press Service reported eyewitness accounts describing bombs that created mushroom clouds and explosions that caused skin to burn even when water was thrown on it. Some eyewitnesses saw indiscriminate shooting and the use of tanks to drag dead bodies to mass graves.”

Giuliana Sgrena likely has a few stories to tell that will not bode well for Bush and his sock puppet, Silvio Berlusconi. Expect these stories to surface soon after Sgrena makes her recovery.
http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2034&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

So this journelist is targeted for assassination by the US. Her car is somehow tracked and riddled with hundreds of bullets(which only wound her). Then these same bloodthirsty assassins, instead of finishing her off, medivac her to an US military hospital where she is treated and sent back to Rome to tell her tale. You know, with all the tax money the US military gets, I expect better assassins. Or at least better planned assassinations. Now if I had planned this assassination, I'd have staged the attack to look like the insurgents had done it. What better deterent from negotiating with insurgents than the knowledge that they will still kill thier captives even after they free them? This would also have the added effect of inflamming the Italian people against the insurgents.
Too bad no one consults with me when planning assassinations.

[So this journelist is targeted for assassination by the US. Her car is somehow tracked and riddled with hundreds of bullets(which only wound her). Then these same bloodthirsty assassins, instead of finishing her off, medivac her to an US military hospital where she is treated and sent back to Rome to tell her tale. You know, with all the tax money the US military gets, I expect better assassins. Or at least better planned assassinations. Now if I had planned this assassination, I'd have staged the attack to look like the insurgents had done it. What better deterent from negotiating with insurgents than the knowledge that they will still kill thier captives even after they free them? This would also have the added effect of inflamming the Italian people against the insurgents. Too bad no one consults with me when planning assassinations.]

and killed one of the agents who played a prominent role in her release

but, you are probably correct, it may not have been a planned assassination, just another instance of the typical trigger happy ineptitude that has resulted in the numerous deaths of Iraqis at checkpoints ever since the war began

such as:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=602608

not surprisingly, this is the conclusion drawn by the one of the founders of the reporter's newspaper:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/07/1449232

so, they don't need your services, because they can just indiscriminately use force whenever they are feel threatened, without any concern about killing anyone in the general vicinity

--Richard

Most likely, the US didnt directly target the car because of who was in it, but it could be that anger higher up over negotiations with hostages resulted imn troops not being notified that the car was headed towards the airport. If it was a former US hostage and US Seceret Service agent in the car it would never have been targetted so there is an element of the death that was intentional (The US only bothers to call ahead and notify peopel when its US lives at stake).

While anger at the US in Italy is obviously much higher if this was not an "accident" anger in Iraq is probably made worse if this is portrayed as an accident since hundreds of incidents like this take place every month because of the total disregard the US has for the lives of civlians. The uS always claims the dead were terorists when the dead are Iraqis but in this case they cant unless they want to portray the Italisn Secret Service as terorrists.

US troops acting under classified rules of engagement at checkpoints, resulting in an unknown number of dead Iraqis:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12507-2005Mar6?language=printer

--Richard

"White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in response Monday it's "absurd" to suggest that U.S. troops would "target individual civilians.""
http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/1341827.html

Not the qualification "individual"; he didnt want to lie and say that US troops wouldnt target civlians...

The US policy makers, commanders and officials in Iraq have shone themselves to be incredibly inept and counter productive. I could easily suspect that US officials may have deliberately set the thing up in such a way that GIs would unwittingly fire on the Italians. If so, that could explain why the GIs, on realizing the mistake, stopped shooting and took the surviving Italians to the hospital.

The topics here are starting to look a lot like the ones on stormfront

The obsession with demonzing and lying about israel and 'zionists' is destroying this board

come from David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine, with other postings of Daniel Pipes' articles (you know, the ones where he says that holocaust denial is bad, but internment revisionism is good, apparently based upon the belief that Japanese Americans will have to take one for the cause so that we can have increased surveillance and possible detentions of Muslim Americans), you just might be right

there is definitely a dangerous, bigoted attitude at play there, maybe Horowitz and Pipes could engage in back channel negotiations with Stormfront (reminiscent of Kissenger's secret trip to China in 1971) and persuade them to drop their regrettable anti-semitism and open the way towards a Popular Front in support of closing down the borders to stop immigration of Latinos into the US, the promotion of Asian Americans as inherently possessing a dual loyalty (educational programs on the Japanese menace during World War II as well as the ongoing peril of Asian scientists and financial operatives at work in the US on H-1-B visas, with reference to the Wen Ho Lee case as a cautionary tale) with the ultimate goal being the surveillance, detention and planned expulsion of Muslims from the US

--Richard

Let's pullout of Iraq, they will have peace as soon as they run out of bullets or trigger pullers. Egypt is another place that does not need US peacekeepers, lets get the 1,000 US soldiers on the ARE/Israeli border back home.
Korea does not need us there.
Afghanistan does not need us, there is no real from religiuos nut jobs or tribalism in that country that concerns us.
Kosovo? They were doing just fine before we showed up. Besides most of the Serbs there are dead and gone from the new greater Albania.
Why even have a military? We can always talk our problems out, right?

as none of the countries mentioned, or the people within them, ever had the slightest interest in threatening or attacking the US until we intervened in them militarily

[Great Idea
by Joel Tuesday, Mar. 15, 2005 at 2:09 PM

Let's pullout of Iraq, they will have peace as soon as they run out of bullets or trigger pullers. Egypt is another place that does not need US peacekeepers, lets get the 1,000 US soldiers on the ARE/Israeli border back home.
Korea does not need us there.
Afghanistan does not need us, there is no real from religiuos nut jobs or tribalism in that country that concerns us.
Kosovo? They were doing just fine before we showed up. Besides most of the Serbs there are dead and gone from the new greater Albania.
Why even have a military? We can always talk our problems out, right?]

Surely you are not equating murdering with premeditation and industrial precision millions of Jewish citizen (of those 1.5 million children) with temporary internment of Japanese citizen in the US?

Although it was wrong as we know now, the US Japanese citizens were not exterminated - there is no comparison there - and a man of your intelligence should be able to see that the two events are not commensurable in the slightest.

[Richard
by spectator Tuesday, Mar. 15, 2005 at 2:47 PM

Surely you are not equating murdering with premeditation and industrial precision millions of Jewish citizen (of those 1.5 million children) with temporary internment of Japanese citizen in the US?

Although it was wrong as we know now, the US Japanese citizens were not exterminated - there is no comparison there - and a man of your intelligence should be able to see that the two events are not commensurable in the slightest.]

of course, but that doesn't mean that the collective punishment of Japanese Americans and the seizure of their property is something to be blithely condoned, either, and, hence, it doesn't affect my opinion of Pipes, and his execrable behaviour in the slightest

you'd think that someone who was legitimately outraged about the Holocaust would be similarly outraged at internment revisionism, given that they both relate to the same historical time frame, and both reflect a comparable kind of intellectual dishonesty

indeed, Pipes' willingness to exploit the internment for contemporary political purposes has to make one wonder whether he is also engaging in the crass exploitation of the Holocaust as well

--Richard

ABC.online reports that US troops shot an Iraqi general dead at a check-point in the al-Anbar province last night.

Wednesday, March 16, 2005. 8:34am (AEDT)

US troops shoot dead Iraqi general: police
The deputy commander of the Iraqi army in western Al-Anbar province was shot dead by US troops at a checkpoint Tuesday night, a police officer said.

"The US forces opened fire at 8:00 pm on Brigadier General Ismail Swayed al-Obeid, who had left his base in Baghdadi to head home," police Captain Amin al-Hitti said.

"They spotted him on the road after the curfew, which goes into effect at 6pm," the officer said in Baghdadi, 185 kilometres west of the capital.

No immediate reaction was available from the US military.

US forces have struggled to build up Iraqi security forces in Al-Anbar, where the country's insurgency is at its strongest, and many police and national guard units are suspected of having been infiltrated by rebels.