 Ed
Offley, Editor of DefenseWatch magazine, has
been a military reporter and defense specialist
for 22 years in a variety of journalism assignments
throughout the United States. DefenseWatch
is an online magazine that addresses military
and security issues from the viewpoint of
active-duty and reservist component personnel
and veterans.
Offley previously served as Editor-in-Chief
of The Stars and Stripes after the civilian-owned
newspaper was acquired by Stars and Stripes
Omnimedia Inc. in March 2000. A 1969 graduate
of the University of Virginia, Offley served
in the U.S. Navy in Vietnam before joining
The Virginia Gazette, Williamsburg, Va., as
a reporter in 1972. He worked as an editorial
writer at three newspapers in Virginia during
1977-85 before joining The Seattle Post Intelligencer
as an editorial writer in 1986.
Offley, 55, lives in Panama City Beach, Fla.,
with his wife, Karen, and daughter, Andrea.
Contact: dweditor@yahoo.com.
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March 11, 2005
[Have an opinion about the views expressed in this article? Sound
off in the Hot Issues with Defensewatch Forum.]
By Ed Offley
What happened along Baghdad's "Route Irish" late at night a week
ago today was a genuine tragedy. What has happened in Rome in the
seven days since then has been a contemptible farce.
American soldiers manning a checkpoint near Baghdad International
Airport opened fire on a civilian sedan last Friday at about 9 p.m.
local time when, they reported, it approached their roadblock at
high speed and failed to stop even after the soldiers signaled the
car with floodlights and fired warning shots.
The vehicle was not a suicide car bomb nor carrying armed terrorists.
Inside were two Italian secret service agents and Giuliana Sgrena,
an Italian reporter for the communist daily newspaper Il Manifesto.
Ms. Sgrena had just been released by her Iraqi kidnapers after the
agents delivered a ransom estimated between $6-8 million. The gunfire
killed agent Nicola Calipari and wounded both Ms. Sgrena and the
other agent.
From the outset, American officials - from the young troops at the
checkpoint who quickly learned that they had fired on the Italians
to President Bush - have apologized for the mistake. Gen. George
Casey, commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq,
has appointed a general officer to formally investigate the shooting
incident, and an Italian officer will participate in the probe.
The reaction among Italian officials and journalists, on the other
hand - particularly the vehemently anti-American reporter, Ms. Sgrena
- has been as clumsily scripted as an al
Qaeda news release. Despite the fact that several weeks earlier
she appeared on video pleading for her life from her terrorist captors,
Ms. Segrena's first words after the checkpoint incident were to
accuse the U.S. military of wanting to assassinate her (never mind
the fact that she blithely noted that our troops had, indeed, profusely
apologized after they learned of the error). As The Washington Times
noted the day after the incident:
"Miss Sgrena, a reporter for the Communist daily Il Manifesto, charged
yesterday that U.S. forces might have deliberately targeted her
because Washington opposes Italy's policy of dealing with kidnappers.
'The United States doesn't approve of this [ransom] policy and so
they try to stop it in any way possible,' the veteran war reporter,
57, told Sky Italia TV."
The reaction among Italian's incumbent leadership has been understandable,
if not intellectually honest. Contending with a sizable anti-war
movement in Italy - stoked by newspapers such as Il Manifesto -
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Foreign Minister Gianfranco
Fini have attempted to straddle the divide between their laudable
support of the Iraqi mission and those Italians who prefer to blame
the U.S. military for everything that goes wrong in life.
While Ms. Sgrena's lurid and self-serving account of her foiled
assassination was too much even for Messrs. Berlusconi and Fini.
"It was an accident," the foreign minister said, but quickly added:
"This does not prevent us - in fact, it obliges us - to demand clarification,
to ask that light be shed on points that are still murky, to identify
who is responsible … and to obtain the punishment of the guilty."
Note that by the word "guilty" he was not referring to the thugs
who had dragged Ms. Sgrena out of her car on Feb. 4 and threatened
her with beheading on al Jazeera. The assassins and kidnapers were
as absent from Mr. Fini's impassioned rhetoric last week as they
have been missing from Ms. Sgrena's dispatches. Why get bogged down
with the facts when you have tens of thousands of Italian communists
to placate?
The probe of the checkpoint shooting will take several weeks to
conduct and will focus on trying to resolve the contradictions in
the different accounts put out by the checkpoint guards and the
inhabitants of the bullet-riddled Corolla. The investigation will
certainly hinge on two key points:
* Was the Italian rescue attempt effectively coordinated with the
U.S. military in Iraq, as the Italians insist? Or was the information
so restricted, as Gen. Casey noted last week, that he himself was
never informed the team had flown in to Baghdad to pick up their
wayward reporter?
* What exactly happened at the checkpoint? Did the car careen into
the kill zone without stopping, as the U.S. soldiers reportedly
told their superiors? Or did it come under fire despite the fact
that it was traveling only about 20 mph, as Ms. Sgrena insists?
Gone missing from the speeches and news analyses on both sides of
the Atlantic last week was one very unpleasant reality: In an environment
where hundreds of U.S. soldiers and thousands of Iraqis have been
killed or injured by terrorists using roadside bombs, car bombs
and small-arms fire, troops manning the checkpoints usually have
a split-second to decide whether that car or truck hurtling toward
their position is a confused civilian or a homicidal terrorist.
That such tragedies have happened is a sad reflection that Iraq
has its own version of the "fog of war."
I, for one, am confident that the command in Baghdad will succeed
in coming up with the facts. I am less certain that the Italian
government (for domestic political reasons: they have elections
next year) and news media (they have a political agenda too) will
be any more interested in the facts when the report is published
than they have shown to date.
And of course, the next time someone sets off a truck bomb that
kills American or Italian soldiers in Iraq, the American and Italian
reporters on hand will probably forget to ask whether the explosives
were purchased by the $6-8 million in ransom money handed over for
Ms. Sgrena's freedom.
Ed
Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com.
©2005 DefenseWatch. All opinions expressed in this article are the
author's and do not necessarily reflect those of Military.com.
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