Shoot first, make up stories later...
I must confess that I'd only given the case of the Italian journalist Giulana Sgrena who was held for a month by an Iraqi resistance group, freed, and then shot by US troops on the way to the airport. The reports by US media generally soft-pedalled it, taking the US military's line about a checkpoint and an accident, and I must admit that the perspective I came away with was just that - an unfortunate accident caused by a mixture of tense soldiers in an environment that constantly threatens to turn deadly in an instant, being faced with the journalist a driver and an Italian intelligence/security agent who felt the worst was behind them and wanted to get to the airport quickly following a long ordeal. I'd heard some reports on the fringe that suggested otherwise, but those were generally framed in an exaggerated, absurd way, suggesting that the journalist's car was deliberately targeted by US troops. While I remain firmly in opposition to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and maintain the position that there is no possible outcome to this which will validate those decisions, I know that there are people who go entirely over the top and have to take every possible shot they can at the US forces. Such reports become easy to ignore -- so easy, in fact, that the next time I see one I probably should make a point of who's handing it out; that could just as easily be intentional mis-information by people wanting to keep people from looking any deeper into the situation by writing off all opinions that aren't the official ones as the work of cranks.
As best I can tell, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Happily, there are other news sources, such as this BBC interview with Ms. Sgrena from back on March 7, and a piece from today in the alternate media that drives home what happened back on March 5.
I have no reason to think that the majority of US troops serving in Iraq are anything but decent, well-intentioned people who want to both be a positive force in the world and to get themselves home safely to their families. They are in a very tense, long-term situation not of their making. They're scared. Any sane human being would be. Unfortunately, as they're both scared and armed that makes them potentially very dangerous to the people living in a land where everyone not in a friendly military uniform is treated as a potential terrorist.
Beyond that, I have little but suspicion for the true motives of the people who have set and maintained policy in this occupation. That's a larger set of issues, though. What's important about the Sgrena case is largely encapsulated in the second paragraph from the latter link above:
With Terri Schiavo and Michael Jackson to cover, it is pretty difficult for most media outlets to find the time to report on any of the more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed since the beginning of the invasion 2 years ago. That¹s why cases like Sgrena¹s become so important, because they represent a chance to show the world that part of the reality Iraqis face every day of their lives: They are kidnapped in alarming numbers; they are shot by trigger-happy US soldiers; their deaths are justified--if they are even acknowledged--by US officials floating flimsy cover stories that would never stand up in any US court (except perhaps a military court).
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