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May 05, 2005
Pentagon Acrobatics Can't Disguise Horrors of War
Talk about rebel technology: the Pentagon this week was not overwhelmed by a dirty bomb or a jet converted into a missile, but by a simple cut and paste job. Like anyone else, the Pentagon uses Adobe Acrobat. At first, the 42 pages of the report which would supposedly shed some light on the March 4 killing of Italian secret agent Nicola Calipari and the wounding of kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Baghdad showed up on the Centcom website as a PDF file heavily censored with large sections blacked out - including the significant omission, among others, of the names of all the soldiers involved in the shooting, as well as entire pages.
But because the Pentagon failed to save the file properly, all it took was for someone to cut and paste the document into a word-processing application to give Italy and the rest of the world access to the full, uncensored version.
That part is just laughable, typical of the stupid bureaucracy. The conclusions to be drawn from the uncensored report are not.
The uncensored Pentagon report at least allows the international public to know that there were no less than 15,527 attacks on the occupation forces from July 2004 to March 2005. In Baghdad alone, from November to March 12, there were 2,404 attacks. These numbers confirm that when US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his minions spin that the situation in Iraq is under control they are essentially lying. In the three months since the Iraqi elections there may have been fewer American casualties, but there were countless more assassination attempts against the so-called Iraqi security forces, all of them based on precise intelligence. Every day, there are at least 20 bomb attacks in Baghdad alone, and at least 60 throughout Iraq. . . .
Regardless, the Italian report is devastating. Among the most important issues: 1) American soldiers did not signal or warn the Toyota Corolla carrying Calipari and Sgrena - a fact confirmed even by a US official, who sheepishly ventured that the Italian driver did not understand the road signs "because they are written in English and Arabic". Sgrena, as well as the driver, a major with the Italian carabinieri, have always been adamant: there were no warning shots. 2) The soldiers at the checkpoint fired away due to "stress and inexperience". Specialist Mario Lozano was the man who shot and killed Calipari. 3) The Toyota was traveling at no more than 50 km/h (the Pentagon says it was close to 100 km/h). The road was wet, the major was driving with only one hand because he was talking on a mobile phone, and to top it all he was approaching a 90-degree turn. 4) The crime scene was not isolated and secured. Evidence simply "disappeared". 5) The Americans knew about Calipari, and that he was on a mission in Baghdad, even if they didn't know the details. US command was informed by the Italians of a delicate mission hours before the shooting, and they knew that Sgrena had been released 25 minutes before Calipari was killed.
(Thanks to LewRockwell.com for the link.)
Posted by Mike Tennant at May 5, 2005 11:16 AM
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