The Italian Job

This is a startling turn of events, at least to me. According to the Washington Post, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is not buying the American version of the shootup of the car carrying freed Italian journalist Giuliani Sgrena, in which she was wounded and Italian intelligence officer Nicola Calipari was killed.

"Only a frank and reciprocal recognition of final responsibility" will assuage Italians' anguish over the shooting, "which was so irrational to us," Berlusconi said.

Berlusconi, who has carried water for the Bushits in Iraq, overriding the Italian majority, would have been expected to swallow the story whole--after all, Sgrena wrote for a communist paper and certainly could be no friend of his administration's. So what happened? Well...

With the inside light on, Calipari sat alongside Sgrena and made phone calls to superiors to report his success. One was to an Italian official who was standing next to an American colonel at the airport, the prime minister said Wednesday, addressing the Italian Senate.

Calipari "therefore warned the American military officials of their immediate arrival in the airport zone," Berlusconi said.

Now, keep in mind that Berlusconi is not claiming it was an ambush, but only that it was, in his diplomatic language, "so irrational." But what would cause the Prime Minister to directly challenge his good buddies' account? He knows damn well that they lied about the WMD and the Iraq-al Qaeda connection and the yellowcake from Niger business--after all, it was an Italian newspaper that found the documents about the African uranium buy to be so poorly forged as to be laughable. So what changed? Has Berlusconi suddenly realized that playing their game gives no special privileges to him or his countrymen?

And as I write this, it is being reported that the detail that shot up the vehicle was assigned to protect John Negroponte, famously known for his oversight of death squad activities in Central America.

As a veteran myself, I simply cannot accept that those troops fired on that car knowing who was in it, but if someone alerted them to a potentially "dangerous" vehicle approaching their checkpoint, I'd sure like to know who that was, who he or she worked for, and follow it up the chain of command.

It stinks. It stinks bad.