March 06, 2005
"300 to 400 rounds"?
Here's the car that Giuliana Sgrena was riding in when the engine block was hit. CENTCOM says that the driver refused to stop after signals and warning shots were issued at a checkpoint near Baghdad International Airport. Sgrena claims that they received no warning to stop, just a sudden hail of 300-400 bullets.
Hmm. 300-400 rounds at a moving target and not a single one even hit the hood or windshield. Assuming Sgrena is telling the truth, that's some mighty fine shooting, boys.
Of course, assuming her boyfriend was telling the truth -- that the passengers were deliberately targetted -- that's some damn lousy shooting.
(Tip o' the tam to LGF)
UPDATE: Apparently this is not the car that Sgrena et al were travelling in at the time. The AP seemed to have, at first, used an image of the car she was in when she was "kidnapped". Now it's apparent (for the time being) that the AP used an image of a car that had nothing to do with Sgrena at all.
My appologies for passing on the MSM's sloppy reportage... reportery... reporting. Yeah, that'll do.
Posted by Tuning Spork at March 6, 2005 05:53 PMSgrena suffered from "Stockholm Syndrome" even before her captivity - that's why the terrorists decided she had propaganda value if she were released. A friend sent me an AP article about Sgrena. Here's an excerpt:
As U.S. Marines risked their lives in dangerous house-to-house searches designed to protect innocent civilians, Sgrena wrote: "The massacre in Fallujah continues."
The Il Manisfesto reporter made a specialty of interviewing Iraqis who claimed they had been tortured by U.S. troops, often relying on anonymously sourced secondhand accounts to spread the wildest charges.
One of her interview subjects claimed that women and children were being systematically tortured at Abu Ghraib by Americans, who, she said, repeatedly hurled one Iraqi woman against a wall and forced another "to separate faeces from urine, using her own hands."
"And what about children, how were they treated?" Sgrena asked. "We heard them screaming. They were tortured too. Mostly dogs were set on them," her source claimed.
The Italian reporter seldom sounded as outraged over the attacks by Osama bin Laden's operational chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi - who personally beheaded kidnap victims and killed hundreds with car bombs.
"Zarqawi, the man the US claims they are destroying Fallujah in order to capture . . . obviously is not among those pinned to the banks of the Euphrates by American forces," Sgrena reported, before passing along the top terrorist's latest Internet message.
"[He] urged the rebels to fight on: 'Heroes of Islam in Fallujah, may your holy war be blessed . . . We have no doubt that the signs of Allah's victory will appear on the horizon.'"
After her release and medical treatment for wounds sustained when her car attempted to run a U.S. checkpoint of Friday, Sgrena praised her terrorist captors for treating her humanely.
"I was never treated badly," Sgrena told her colleagues at Il Manifesto upon her arrival in Rome, according to Bloomberg News.
Either that's the longest warning shot in the history of warfare (sorry guys, M60s aren't for warning shots) or they were firing with nerf guns because 300-400 rounds from even a M16 and that car would be hauled away in bite sized kibbles...
Posted by: MikeF at March 7, 2005 10:25 PM