The Italians had to have been tripping, right?
A few days after I wrote the previous entry, I saw a story on the New York Times website announcing that the report on the Calipari shooting would appear this week (the week ending April 22). To my astonishment - and I'm being sarcastic - it announced that it would exonerate the troops involved from the charge of having fired upon the Italians' vehicle deliberately. On April 14, the New York Post implied that the report's conclusion had also been endorsed by the Italians who were participating in the 'joint' investigation.
All this is extremely predictable. The problem is that nothing seems to have been done to reconcile the American version of the slaying with Sgrena's. (And it should not be forgotten that Sgrena spoke first, meaning that the Americans are contesting her version of the story, not vice versa.) According to the stories heralding the report's release, the Americans are still refusing to let the Italians see the car involved - if this is true, the Italians would be incredibly stupid to endorse the report - and the report is indeed going to be based upon the same scenario of an accident, the outlines of which we are already familiar. Yet the American TV programme 60 Minutes has only within the last week run a story in which Sgrena was grilled about the essential points, and she is steadfast in holding to her original account of the shooting - an account which, it must be said, was related to the public within a day or two of the event itself, meaning she had little time to concoct an anti-American fiction (if we were so uncharitable as to assume that this excellent journalist would have a motive for concocting anything and if we were to assume that she would be so stupid as to try to concoct a story which would only be contradicted by the testimony of the other Italian - the unidentified secret service agent - who survived the assault). What's more the impression that the Italians are endorsing the report was instantly altered by a short piece in the Guardian, which stated on April 15 that the investigation was deadlocked, apparently because of the Americans' refusal to let the Italians inspect the car.
Since the Americans' refusal amounts to an indirect confession of guilt - if the incident was an accident, why can't the Italians see the car? - one really has to wonder what the point of this prolonged charade can be, and why the Italians, who cannot be so stupid as not to realize that the Americans' refusal to show them the car is self-incriminating, are apparently unwilling to contest the Americans' claim that the incident was an accident. One possibility is that the New York Times and New York Post stories were planted as a means of forcing the pace - of placing pressure on the Italians to yield and endorse the report without seeing the car. If the Italians stick to their guns, as one hopes they will, then the likelihood is that the report will not appear anytime soon.
Whether the report appears this week or in two years' time, I can only say that I am really looking forward to reading it. Unless it's written in some obscure dialect of Italian to blunt its impact (dear me, I hope I don't give the Pentagon any ideas here), it will surely provide me with many fascinating insights into the apparently bottomless cesspit of lies and deception that is the U.S. government. Frankly, Israel has performed more credibly in the case of the IDF's shooting of British journalist James Miller than the Americans have performed in the Calipari case. At least in the Miller case, we know the name of the individual responsible for the crime; the problem is simply that Israel has declined to punish him. In the American case, the only way that it would seem possible for the American version of events to have been true is if it can be shown that Sgrena and the secret service agent who survived the assault were actually tripping at the time, and didn't have the foggiest notion where they were or what was really happening around them.
