A U.S. military investigation into the shooting death of an Italian intelligence officer in Baghdad is expected to conclude that American soldiers generally followed instructions as they fired on an approaching car, a senior U.S. defense official said Monday.
This is the incident where the car carrying Italian journalist Guliana Sgrena, Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari, and two other Italian intelligence officers was fired upon by US soldiers as it approached a checkpoint on the way to Baghdad International Airport. Officer Calipari was killed, and Sgrena and another officer were wounded. The article on Sgrena at Wikipedia appears to provide objective and balanced information about the incident and how the people and governments involved reacted.
Regardless of your views on this incident, this probably comes as no surprise, though the reasons for that will vary depending on whose side you're on. It's not possible for someone who wasn't there to know exactly what happened, but I do have my own opinions based on the knowledge that Sgrena was a journalist for a Communist newspaper in Italy, Il Manifesto, which is certainly opposed to US operations and policy in Iraq. I certainly won't go so far as to say that Sgrena deliberately tried to get herself shot and possibly killed. However, when it happened I can't help but think that she saw a perfect opportunity to smear the United States. I'm willing to bet that, at the very least, she embellished the story to a degree to cast the US in a negative light.
While I naturally tend to side with the statements of US officials in cases like this, I would guess the truth is probably somewhere in the middle, though I think it likely it's closer to the US side than Sgrena's.
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