There are a couple of points missing from your post though Wellard.
1) She was actually warned by her Iraqi captors that the American's might try to stop her leaving
Quote:
"Everyone knows that the Americans do not like negotiations to free hostages, and because of this I don't see why I should exclude the possibility of me having been the target," she said.
And writing in her left-wing Il Manifesto newspaper, she said upon her release her kidnappers warned her to be careful 'because there are Americans who don't want you to go back'."
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2) The other day I watched the frontline documentary (which you can find
here where their reporter was embedded with US troops for one month.
The US troops at one point were asked to set up a roadblock. They set this up at the bottom of a sliproad (which had a big curve) leading onto a motorway/freeway.
A car turned off the freeway, one or two warning shots were fired, then the troops opened fire on the car.
There were several things I noticed about this -
a) The car wasn't even fully around the bend, and was
so far away that it looked about 1cm in height on the screen, if that. I would estimate that it was several hundred metres away.
b) The warning shots were actually not that loud, and that was with the camera man standing right next to the troops. Its therefore quite possible that the car driver did not hear the shots given his distance.
c) Seeing as the car driver was still going round the bend, it is likely that he was looking straight ahead and therefore didn't even see the troops.
d) The first instinct when you hear a gunshot in somewhere like Iraq is to get the hell away from the area and drive faster.
To cut a long story short, I thought the troops opened fire on this car
far far too quickly - the car hadn't even turned off the freeway for long enough to ascertain its speed, let along that it was speeding up as the troops claimed.
Its therefore not unreasonable at all that it was a case of trigger-happiness and poor roadblock procedures rather than driver error. This would certainly account for the rather large number of innocent deaths at roadblocks where American troops have opened fire.
Quote:
Originally posted by wellard:
Well they should start by investigating the IQ of the friken driver!
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It's also quite likely that the driver was from the Italian secret service and thus has a rather high IQ and is fairly well trained.
As for paying ransom money to hostages, consider it the price for Italian support in your little coalition. Berlusconi has put his neck out for Bush and has been severely weakened domestically - if he can prevent his citizens from being killed in a war that the majority of his country thinks is injust then of course he's going to pay! It's just political sense. Every government performs morally dubious acts - this hardly ranks amongst the most terrible.
[ 03-07-2005, 07:53 AM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]