Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: was SGRENA shot from behind?

Naomi Klein says so:
http://www.forum.zmag.de/viewtopic.php?t=291


Very few days after Calipari's Death an image has been available on site
www.repubblica.it
 for only about 2 hours.
This image showed the right side of the car, with HUNDREDS of holes of fire
shots.
Now that image is not available anywhere and all we are able to see are
photos of the front-left side of the  car, with very few holes.
This means we will never know the truth.

 front-left side of the  car, with very few holes.
Read this:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/SCA504A.html
Sgrena Sets the Record Straight
  "There was No Checkpoint; No Self-Defense"
by Jeremy Scahill
http://www.counterpunch.org/scahill03282005.html
  30 MARCH 2005
www.globalresearch.ca
   7 April 2005
The URL of this article is: 
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SCA504A.html
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.
With Terri Schiavo and Michael Jackson to cover, it is pretty difficult 
for most media outlets to find the time to report on any of the more than 
100,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the invasion 2 years 
ago. That's why cases like Sgrena's become so important-because they 
represent a chance to show the world that part of the reality Iraqis face 
every day of their lives: They are kidnapped in alarming numbers; they are 
shot by trigger-happy US soldiers; their deaths are justified-if they are 
even acknowledged-by US officials floating flimsy cover stories that would 
never stand up in any US court (except perhaps a military court).
New details are emerging about Sgrena's shooting and the death of the 
Italian official, Nicola Calipari, that bear reporting in English (this, 
of course, remains a significant story in Italy). Independent journalist 
Naomi Klein recently met with Sgrena in the Rome military hospital where 
she has been since returning to Italy on March 5.
"Giuliana is quite a bit sicker than we have been led to believe," says 
Klein. "She was fired on by a gun at the top of a tank, which means that 
the artillery was very, very large. It was a four-inch bullet that entered 
her body and broke apart. And it didn't just injure her shoulder, it 
punctured her lung. Her lung continues to fill with fluid and there 
continues to be complications stemming from that fairly serious injury."
This case has been written off by US officials as a "horrific accident" 
that occurred on what we are told is "the most dangerous road in Iraq," 
where insurgents are constantly waiting in the bushes to attack. The 
Pentagon further contends that the Italians failed to slow down at a 
checkpoint and only after repeated attempts to stop the car did soldiers 
fire on the Italians. The problem is, according to Sgrena, this shooting 
didn't happen on that road. What's more, Sgrena says that there was no US 
checkpoint for which to slow down.
"This is treated as a fairly common and understandable incident that there 
would be a shooting like this on that road," Klein says. "I was on that 
road myself, and it is a really treacherous place with explosions going 
off all the time and a lot of checkpoints. What Giuliana told me that I 
had not realized before is that she wasn't on that road at all."
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."
So when Calipari, the Italian security intelligence officer, picked up 
Sgrena from the abandoned vehicle where her captors left her, they drove 
directly to that road via Green Zone.
That explains why Sgrena said that when they drove to the airport she 
"thought we were finally safe, because the area where we were was under 
the control of the United States."
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. 
"Part of what we're hearing is that the U.S. soldiers opened fire on their 
car, because they didn't know who they were, and they were afraid," says 
Klein. "The fear, of course, is that their car could have blown up or that 
the soldiers might come under attack themselves. And what Giuliana Sgrena 
really stressed with me was that the bullet that injured her so badly came 
 from behind, entered through the back of the car. And the only person who 
was not severely injured in the car was the driver, and she said that this 
is because the shots weren't coming from the front."
"They were coming from the right and behind, i.e. they were driving away. 
So, the idea that this was an act of self-defense, I think becomes much 
more questionable," says Klein. "Because if indeed the majority of the 
gunfire is coming from behind, then clearly, the soldiers were firing at a 
car that was driving away from them."
That could explain why the US military in Iraq has blocked the Italian 
government from inspecting the Italians' vehicle, even though the car is 
the property of the Italian government which bought it from the rental 
agency after this incident. "I think they have something to hide if they 
won't give the car over for inspection," Sgrena told Klein. "It's very 
strange. If there is nothing to hide, why not let Italian justice 
officials see the car?"
"It was not self-defense," Sgrena said. "The soldiers were to the right of 
us on the side of the road, they started to shoot from the right and kept 
shooting from behind but most of the shots came from behind, Calipari was 
shot from the right and I was shot in the shoulder from behind. When we 
stopped, they were behind us. We could see that all the back windows of 
the car were broken from behind. If they are afraid, they can stop the 
car, they can ask it to stop, then you can shoot at the wheels but they 
didn't do that. They didn't try to stop the car and they shot at least ten 
bullets at the level of people sitting inside the car. If Calipari had not 
pushed me down they could have killed me."
This case sheds important light on the culture of impunity surrounding the 
US occupation of Iraq. If this is how Washington treats Italy, one of its 
closest allies in the so-called war on terror, when US soldiers kill the 
country's second-highest ranking intelligence official, imagine the 
struggle Iraqis face as they die in the tens of thousands. They don't have 
a powerful figure like Sylvio Berlusconi to advocate for them. Instead, 
they have unembedded reporters like Giuliana Sgrena who risk their lives 
to tell these stories.
"You have to protect the life of journalists who are going and speaking to 
the people," says Luciana Castellina, one of the founders of Sgrena's 
newspaper Il Manifesto. "Otherwise, the result would be that we wouldn't 
have any journalists anymore or only the embedded journalists."
Jeremy Scahill is a journalist with the radio/TV program Democracy Now! He 
can be reached at 
jer...@democracynow.org
 .