WHAT A WEB WE WEAVE (CONTINUED)…

The wires report: “Italy’s prime minister rejected Washington’s version of the events leading to the killing of an Italian intelligence officer by American troops in Baghdad, saying the agent had notified the proper authorities that he was on his way to the airport after winning the release of a hostage.

“….in his first major address since Friday’s shooting strained relations between Washington and one of its biggest allies, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told Italy’s Senate that the car carrying agent Nicola Calipari and former hostage Giuliana Sgrena was traveling at low speed and stopped immediately when a light was flashed.

“Berlusconi said Calipari had notified an Italian liaison officer waiting at the Baghdad airport along with an American officer that they were on their way.

However, he added, “I’m sure that in a very short time every aspect of this will be clarified.”

Whats troubling, as we wait for that “clarification,” is the propensity for everyone to mouth off on this controversy before an investigation is undertaken/completed–that is, if one ever will be.

THE VIEW AT GIULIANA’S PAPER

I have been reporting on the sharp criticisms here of Giuliana Sgrena’s claims and an outpouring of venom and hostility by rightist bloggers out to discredit her with a combination of one-sided “analysis” of the incident, name-calling and insulting politically motivated criticism.

What does she say?

I sought a response from her colleagues at Il Manifesto. Marina Forti responded:

“I know Giuliana is now under attack: here in Italy too, with the mildest accusation being that it was unprofessional of her to visit the refugees camp where she was eventually kidnapped, and the strongest that “she sympatizes with the terrorists”, she “defend the kidnappers and now attack those who liberated her” (the Americans).

Now, the comment you quote here is so malicious it doesn’t deserve an answer: this supposed Dutch journalist reports an incident that never happened to Giuliana (that of being robbed at Baghdad airport), and all the rest is an ideological indictment: she is anti-American because she opposes the war and therefore she is not a good journalist.

It’s normal, once you criticize the Iraqi war they say “it’s ideology.”

Let them talk.

I translate here some excerpts from an interview Giuliana gave Tuesday night (on the phone) to a Rai talk show to answer to some of the things that have being said on her. We published this yesterday: feel free to use this if you find it useful. (Sorry for my English).

“I have never said they [the American troops] wanted to kill me: what I say is that the mechanic of the incident looks like an ambush”. (Both she and the surviving Italian agent have told that there was no warning to stop: they suddenly saw a light and at the same time the shooting started. They were driving in that moment at no more than 40km/h and there was no evident check point. The fire came from the right side, from some vehicle standing aside from the road. This is what the Italian minister of foreign affairs told to the Parliament, not Giuliana’s “tale”. By the way, this minister is a former fascist – how ironic. He highlighted that the American version of the incident does not fit with what we know, so Italy’s still waiting for the truth)

She then recalled the phase the kidnappers told her before the release, that “the Americans don’t want you to leave Iraq alive.” Giuliana said:

“At the moment I thought it was their latest propaganda slogans before freeing me. But then, after all what happened…”

On the kidnappers: “These have been 30 days of nightmare, every day I was menaced, every day I was thinking I could be killed. To say that I’m attacking those who liberated me and defending the kidnappers seems to me a mostrosity”.

And: “Do you know in what conditions such video are made? Do you think I was free to say what I wanted? To be a hostage means one is not free to talk freely in a video. Yes, they gave me food, drink and medicine, but I was captive, without light, without nothing. But do you think I was free to say the kidnappers didn’t treat me well?”

To Be Continued.

DANGER AT THE CHECK POINT

Roadblocks are essential to security in Iraq — yet costly in human terms reports Jason Vest on the American Prospect website:

“As soon as news broke on March 4 about U.S. troops firing on reporter Giuliana Sgrena’s Baghdad airport-bound car and killing Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari in the process, the clash of accounts began almost immediately. The Americans put the blame squarely on the Italians for driving too fast and not heeding supposed warnings; Sgrena and the surviving Italian intelligence officials, however, said the car was going at a reasonable speed, and that no warnings were given. The Americans claim it was an honest mistake stemming from checkpoint rules of engagement; the Italian Communist Party cast it as part of a dark plot to stop a reporter who knew too much. And so on and so forth.

“The day after Calipari’s death, I spoke with a veteran CIA officer who had participated in operations similar to Calipari’s. The whole affair, he ruefully said, reminded him of similar incidents from a bygone era. Speaking on condition that neither he nor the country he operated out of be named, he recalled that at one particular duty station (a place noticeably beset by sectarian strife), it wasn’t uncommon for Western citizens to end up as captives of insurgents. Oftentimes foreign intelligence services would endeavor to secure their citizens’ releases. Sometimes, he said, those services would ask the Americans for help; other times, they would mount their operations entirely on their own, or only with another country’s intelligence service, keeping their endeavors secret from the United States.

“In general, he went on, there were more happy endings than not. But sometimes things took tragic turns. Sometimes, he said, even though an intelligence team had successfully secured its citizen from the hands of one insurgent band, on the way out it would run into one of the many other insurgent factions in the country — in some cases one that the United States had relationships with. “Had we known what was going on,” he said, “we would have been able to ensure safe passage, which was something we did in other cases where we knew what was going on.”

“The veteran CIA officer says he sees shades of this in the Sgrena case, except that instead of insurgents, it was allies who opened fire on the spies. The sad irony was that the Italians’ good tradecraft in securing Sgrena was probably what got their car shot up by U.S. forces.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9296

COALITION RATTLED

SGRENA SHOOTING RATTLES U.S. COALITION?
Paulo Pontoniere, Pacific News Service

The shooting of an Italian journalist and killing of an agent is opening a rift between the U.S., Italy and other coalition partners. Observers say the U.S.doesn’t play well with others.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21452/

US soldiers accused of sex assaults

Suzanne Goldenberg of the Guardian dug up some background on the unit involved in the incident:

“Four soldiers were alleged to have raped the two women while on guard duty in a Baghdad shopping precinct. A US army investigator interviewed several soldiers from the military unit, the 1-15th battalion of the 3rd Infantry Brigade – but did not locate or interview the Iraqi women involved – before shutting down the inquiry for lack of evidence.

“Transcripts of the investigation, obtained by the Guardian from the American Civil Liberties Union, show only the most cursory attempts by the investigator to establish whether the women were raped…..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1432691,00.html

WMDS FOUND

In another undercovered Iraq story: “Information collected for a German project investigating the use of uranium-charged ammunition in Iraq shows that when Iraqi women fear for their children’s health, it is with good reason.

“After two wars where oil wells were torched, chemical factories bombed and radioactive ammunition fired, the first thing Iraqi women ask when giving birth is not if it is a boy or a girl, but if it is normal or deformed. The number of cancer cases and children born with deformities has skyrocketed after the two Gulf Wars.

“Since 1991 the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled,” said Dr. Janan Hassan, who runs a children’s clinic at a hospital in Basra in southern Iraq. “The same is the case for the number of children under 15 who are diagnosed with cancer. Mostly, it is leukemia. Almost 80 percent of the children die because we neither have medicine nor the possibility to give them chemotherapy.”

Doctors have also recorded an extreme rise in cancer cases among adults. “In 2004 we diagnosed 25 percent more cancer cases than the year before and the mortality rate increased eight-fold between 1988 and 1991,” said Dr. Jawad al-Ali of the Sadr Hospital in Basra.

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m10259&l=i&size=1&hd=0

WHO WAS MASKHADOV?

You saw the picture of Aslan Maskhadov, described as a Chechen terrorist by Russian authorities. Author Tom Goltz knew him and suggests he was a nationalist seeking self-determination for his people and a moderate.

“I speak, of course, of Aslan Maskhadov, a picture of whose naked, purple-eyed corpse was flashed around the world on March 8, a trophy product produced by a gloating Kremlin and released to the media in the same sort of way that Paul Bremer III celebrated the capture of a flea-infested Saddam Hussein from his spider-hole last year.

“We got ‘m!”

“Let me hasten to say that I am not an admirer of Hussein, dead or alive.

“But I am, even in death, an admirer of Aslan Maskhadov whose life trajectory would be a by-the-bootstraps paradigm to emulate anywhere in the world, were it not for the Russian label imposed on him and picked up by much of the rest of the world: terrorist . …

“But I do know or at least remember this about Aslan Maskhadov.

“It was a very bad time during the so-called ‘first’ Chechen-Russia war, after the massacre at Samashki, and at a time when massive Russian armor had rolled all the way across the northern plains and foothills of the Caucasus Mountains and were blasting away with tanks and aviation at the last Soviet-era industrial complex left standing in the region, which ironically was a gigantic cement factory and thus a literal symbol of reconstruction, which was also the last redoubt of a handful of Chechen resistance fighters, who periodically emerged from their bunkers to bury their occasional dead.

None of this was pretty.

“But because I happened to be there on the so-called Chechen side of the lines to film the massively destructive event — none of which has ever seen the light of day on American or international television. I also became privy to the negotiations between the bombing Russians and resisting Chechens to surrender said cement factory, known locally as the ‘Chemzabod.’ First, a neutral zone was established where lieutenants of both sides could meet and make arrangements. Perhaps there was a second stage, but if so I was not aware of it. The third (or second) stage was a commanders’ meeting at a house in the theoretically neutral town of Novi Atagi — a house, sadly and ironically enough, owned by the director of the Chemzavod, and even more sadly and ironically, the same house where two years later six Red Cross workers would be murdered in their sleep.

Anyway, a batch of Special Forces Russian soldiers cleared the house side by side with their Chechen Rebel Mujahideen counterparts. Satisfied, both teams sat down and started talking soccer. Then in came the subalterns of both sides and then finally both commanders. Aslan Maskhadov as chief of staff of the Chechen Army, and General Genadi Trochev, supreme commander of Russian military forces in the sector. It being a Muslim house, Trochev took off his shoes when entering into the special negotiation room with Maskhadov as a matter of courtesy.

The negotiations lasted about an hour, at the end of which Maskhadov and his former Soviet Army colleague emerged to address their respective constituencies: the Russian general his soldiers, and Aslan Maskhadov his people, represented by the knot of gray-bearded elders huddled in the court-yard, awaiting his word about what to do next in this hopeless situation in which they collectively found themselves. Beyond concepts such as Freedom and Dignity and Sovereignty, the essential thing was how to collect dead bodies in order to bury them according to Muslim rite, meaning in 24 hours.

Maskhadov whispered something to the elders; they nodded, exhaustion etched on every brow. Their leader had spoken, and they would obey. So would the angry young men gathered outside the door with stones in their hands (and possibly grenades) when the Russian delegation emerged to drive away. Maskhadov barked an order at them in Chechen and they put down their arms. This was a cease-fire, and the Chechens would honor it.

The Russian command did not. No sooner were we at the cement factory collecting the bodies of the Chechen dead than the Russian command began lobbing phosphorus shells into the forest, and then came and took the bodies of the Chechen fighters to use as gruesome currency for future deals.

This is the face of Russia that Aslan Maskhadov spent the last decade resisting, and I can think of very few more brave and noble men.

Read Tom Goltz’s brilliant Chechen Diary for more. This is unfortunately not the kind of contextualized reporting offered in our image driven media. How can we hope to understand events in the world without real profiles like this?.Speaking of which, I was very moved by Calivin Trillin’s profile of a soldier who was killed Iraq and the war within his own family. It is in the current New Yorker.