LAST MINUTE: BERLUSCONI FULLY ACQUITTED!!!
- Thread starter Berlusconi
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materia3 said:
The REASON is yet to be determined. The FACT, however, is that a car tried to run a checkpoint. No mention of anyone in pursuit, so I have a hard time imagining what legitimate reason there might be for such a choice - and it was a choice.
Perhaps it would help if they made it a policy to clearly label such vehicles "rescued hostages" in the future. It would also help if the whole world dropped the illusion that US marines are friggin' psychic.
BTW, other news services are reporting that Italian Intelligence may not have coordinated with US authority at all, so before shifting blame from the soldiers to the CIA, consider all the angles. By all appearances, the troops did exactly the right thing.
Yes, the rescue was heroic. But it appears to be an equal share of stupidity since the rescue may well have proven to be just as fatal as the captivity.
If it turns out someone on the US side didn't communicate to the troops at the checkpoint to be aware of such-and-such kind of vehicle at such-and-such at time, then I will gladly apologize. But as of this time, the SNAFU was Italian, not American.
Hutch
A broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barret
Jocko said:
Jocko, you are arguing quite logically and reasonably (how does it feel, BTW?
). But we will still fall over ourselves apologizing.President Berlusconi (outside of Tony Blair) is one of the few Europena leaders to go full-bore for us and has committed around 3,000 troops to the effort, against large-scale opposition in Italy. That opposition will now be in full cry again, and if the US response is, in effect, "Just another Italian FUBAR, those W*** can't get anything right", we may lose another willing coalition member. So my guess is that we--as mentioned in an earlier post--will apologize most profusely and humbly, promise to conduct a full investigation in cooperation with the Italian authorities and hope the months it takes for said investigation to be done lets Italian politics calm down--at least, as calm as politics ever gets in that place.
We shall see.
Mycroft
High Priest of Ed
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Has anyone checked out the paper this woman wrote for?
Il Manifesto
It looks like about 80% of everything in English is written by this same reporter that was abducted, but she didn't have anything nice to say about the US forces at all.
Il Manifesto
It looks like about 80% of everything in English is written by this same reporter that was abducted, but she didn't have anything nice to say about the US forces at all.
Brian the Snail
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Mycroft said:
Hardly surprising. "Il Manifesto" is a communist newspaper.
Jocko said:
I think it is entirely possible and a highly plausible scenario given the situation. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that the Italian agents had a contact with whom they were negoitiating who, for money paid, promised to deliver the hostage. When they delivered her their credibility went way up. At that point all it took them was to convince the Italians to speed on the airport road because of remotely detonated bombs and to run the checkpoint as it could be manned by opposition insurgents. According to Sgrena, who yes, is a reporter for an anti-American communist paper, they were not speeding past the checkpoint. Of course if she was lying on the floor in the back seat she doesn't know how far away from the checkpoint they were when they were speeding and anything she says, even as a trained journalistic observer, is tainted by the heat of the moment and her inherent biases.
Also unless or until Al Jazeera tells everyone how it got the Italian agent's picture out on the street so fast and where it got it from, they too appear to have been used in this plot.
Jocko said:Back off, I already made the "Agent Andretti" joke and got slapped for it.
Additional news coming in raises more questions. U.S. forces say it shot into the engine block of the car. It turns out there were two other Italian agents, one driving and the other probably in the passenger seat. They are both wounded but alive and expected to be okay.
Intuitively Nicola Calipari and Sgrena were in the back seat. The driver, if he's cogent, is probably at this point the best person to testify as to how fast he was driving, under whose orders he was driving fast and hopefully why he was driving so fast.