A little wild speculation on the Italian "operation"...

[Schema Thing]

Send someone with authority and a good aim to a checkpoint, and tell the soldiers there one of two things:

a) We need to stop a certain car coming up the road at approx 2030 hours; so shoot to stop, but try and take care not to kill the occupants.

b) tell them nothing until ordering them to join in stopping a certain car that this person of authority fires on.


This leaves two options for teaching gawd-damned commie journalist Eye-talian euro-weeny insurgent bargainers a lesson. The lethal bullets can come from the person of authority at the checkpoint, w/o any other soldiers really knowing who might have "misfired" or, the lethal bullets could come from a sniper hidden elsewhere.

I don't wear tinfoil often, any holes in my tinfoil theory?

[wtmusic]

1. well

it assumes an awful lot of coordination from an operation which has been notoriously uncoordinated

essentially my beef with all conspiracy theories: it assumes unrealistic levels of competence

other than that, I wouldn't be too surprised

[Enraged_Ape]

2. Occam's Razor dictates that this is just another huge fuck-up

Because fucking up hugely is about all Bush and Company ever do.

[Riding this Donkey]

3. I posted in LBN yesterday that I thought that possibly

berlusconi wasn't crying because she had been shot, but that he was upset that she hadn't been killed.

Now, there's tin hat for ya, but I gotta admit the thought crossed my mind!

I mean she was writing anti war articles, Italian citizens are not for the war. She may have know some stuff and what harm would it do if she was killed "accidentally by Americans".

He could blame america too and look like hero, but behind the scenes never waning for his support of the war.

And in America, you know for sure we would chalk this up to an accident. We would "never" do someting like this on purpose.

Works out well for both parties (italian and american), don't you think?

edited for grammar

[RBHam]

4. She had interviewed survivors of the Fallujah Massacre...

Put 2 and 2 together

[LdyGuique]

5. Carefully repairing my tinfoil hat's tears, and then placing it

firmly on my head, then covering it with a knit cap so that no one knows I'm wearing it (paranoia is my friend) --

I, too, find it odd that there were over 300 bulletholes into that car and only one person killed and another injured. Either our group needs to take lessons from the insurgents or the event was for maximum effect with a specific target.

Writing in Italy's Il Manifesto newspaper, Sgrena said her kidnappers had warned her to pay attention once she was freed, because the U.S. wanted her dead. At the time, she judged their words to be ``superfluous and ideological,'' she wrote.

``They told me to beware because `there are Americans who don't want you to return','' Sgrena wrote in the article. When she was shot, her captors' advice ``risked acquiring the taste of the most bitter of truths,'' she wrote.

Sgrena's convoy approached the checkpoint at a ``high rate of speed,'' according to Marine Sergeant Salju Thomas on March 4 by telephone from Baghdad. ``It's an extremely threatening act,'' Thomas said. ``That's the exact same thing that car bombers do.''

Sgrena denied that the convoy carrying her, Calipari and two other Italian agents was speeding when it crossed the checkpoint, and said the shots were from elsewhere, Italy's Ansa news agency said yesterday.

``It wasn't a checkpoint, but a patrol that started shooting after pointing some lights in our direction,'' the Ansa news agency cited Sgrena as telling prosecutors. Her driver was also injured in the shooting.

[libodem]

6. A few days age the threads were running wild that the "troops"

were targeting journalists, ( running wild is a bit of stretch but there were a couple) I'm sure American hearts and minds will begin to turn when some truth filters out of that hellhole. We melted people in Falujia with napalm, and gassed them, either with actual noxious gasses or the vapor coming off of the napalm. Some freeper was arguing we don't use gas. We use gas in this country. A few days ago, they tear-gassed a suspect out of a house, here in Boise. And they sure as hell gassed the people in Waco. Maybe not Sarin or mustard, but we use, gas. I'm sure they used some type of gas in Falujia. But how can we really know when we can't get any hard news?