Checkpoint Shooting

Michelle Malkin offers a good summary of what we know about the shooting of the Italian hostage's car. It's pretty clear that the guy who was killed is a hero, but his death was the result of Italian incompetence and worse. I can't find any mistake by our troops in this event; they did exactly as they should have done.

The Italians, meanwhile, have managed to get somebody killed, hand a propaganda victory to the opposition, and support the terrorists with millions of dollars in ransom money.

Now the US is being slandered with absurd charges that we "targeted" this woman. If we had, she'd be dead as a doornail, not giving hysterical interviews to a sympathetic media.

(If someone wants to traffic in conspiracy theories, they should try the one that says that the capture, ransoming, and release of this journalist for the virulently anti-American Communist newspaper, "Il Manifesto," was a put-up job from the start: an attempt to fund the terrorists via ransom money, an attempt that unfortunately has succeeded.)

Here are AP photos of what is claimed to be the car carrying the Italian journalist, the car she claimed was hit by a hail of 300-400 bullets, which she said she scooped up in handfuls off the back seat:







The car is virtually undamaged. If this is really the car, then as one commenter wrote, there should have been an autopsy of the dead intel officer to see when and how he died. This whole thing is looking fishier and fishier. Why is it taking so long to get verifiable pictures of the car? If a car now shows up full of holes, did somebody do a little touch-up with an M16?

But, meanwhile, the media has been able to put aside the ambiguities and do their usual despicable hatchet job on the US military. Like the Jenin Massacre that never happened, the anti-US version of the story has already been given a life of its own, so it probably matters little what we find out from here on.

Byron