Route Irish and the Italian Job
At this point, all that's certain is that we cannot believe anything the Italian government says and we can believe nothing Giuliana Sgrena says. The rest is subject to an investigation. To recap: on the evening of Friday 5 March a car approached a US military checkpoint on Route Irish, the road to Baghdad Airport, which is patrolled by soldiers from New York's Fighting 69th battalion, and when it came to a halt Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent, was dead and Giuliana Sgrena, a reporter with the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, who had been held hostage by Iraqi terrorists, was slightly injured.
DESPITE a deficit of information and a surfeit of speculation about this tragic incident, the mainstream media did not hesitate to jump to all the familiar, poisonous conclusions. Typical, was the German magazine, Stern, which declared that the US troops had "murdered" Calipari. Luckily, the days when the only response to media lies was a letter to the editor are gone forever. Today, we live in the age of blogs and, whether issued by Dan Rather or Eason Jordon or Stern, falsehoods can now be nailed within minutes and displayed for the world to see. Thanks to Davids Medienkritik, Stern was compelled to replace the word "murdered" with "killed". That a blog could effect such a change is remarkable and it shows how new media activism is finally beginning to make its mark on this side of the Atlantic.
IN LIGHT OF yesterday's revelations by La Repubblica that the Italians deliberately decided not to inform the US of their plan to hand over a huge ransom to the thugs who had kidnapped Sgrena, it is time for bloggers to focus on Giovanni di Lorenzo, the editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, the German weekly, which is a long-time publisher of her work. In the conclusion to his editorial this week called "Imperial arrogance", di Lorenzo shoots from the lip:
"The circumstances of the shooting are scandalous enough. What kind of bungling occupation policy is it that allows apparently badly trained, panicky soldiers to shoot at everything that moves? President Bush promised clarification. One would like to know which instructions, which precautionary measures US soldiers must observe at their checkpoints. How many innocent Iraqis have already been regarded as suicide killers? Why in the case of Giuliana Sgrena and her killed rescuer, Nicola Calipari, did the patrol not appear to know what commanders a few hundred metres away were long informed about? So long as this clarification is outstanding, there is no excuse. One could come to terms with an accident perhaps. But not with imperial arrogance."
I DOUBT if one could ever come to terms with such intellectual arrogance. That di Lorenzo would go ahead with this kind of screed on the strength of Segrena's discredited statements and the increasingly bizarre way she keeps changing her story as well as the growing evidence of Italian double dealing is appalling. How many innocent Iraqis will die as a result of the car bombs that are going to be paid for with the millions Calipari handed over for the woman who was totally opposed to their liberation? That is the primary scandal here. The secondary one is the depressingly predictable way in which the media deals with such stories. Is it any wonder readers are turning away from newspapers?
