In an otherwise unremarkable interview with John Follain for the Times of London, Giuliana Sgrena has changed her mind again about the American motivation for attacking the vehicle which was to take her to the Baghdad airport:

A joint American-Italian investigation is due to report within a month on the shooting, but Sgrena refuses to accept that it might have been simply a blunder. “This was an ambush. No sign was given for us to stop. We were going at a normal speed and we were fired at,” she insists.

American and Italian authorities have branded as absurd the suggestion this was no accident but Sgrena remains undaunted: “The Americans don’t approve of the Italian policy on hostages, because of ransom payments, and the thing I want to know is whether the Americans tried to put a stop to this policy by preventing one of these operations from being completed,” she says. “The most important person on board was not me, it was Nicola. I don’t know what happened, but it’s impossible to classify this as just an accident,” she says — adding that she doesn’t give a damn whether a ransom was paid for her or not.

Note that now, instead of slowing down or stopping before getting shot, she now says that they were traveling at "normal speed" when the shooting began. Of course, this differs entirely from what we heard yesterday, when she and her "life partner", Pier Scolari, said that such an allegation would be "stupid":

The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was wounded by American fire last Friday soon after being released by kidnappers in Baghdad, has said that she does not think that the Americans were trying to kill her. "I never said that they wanted to kill me," she said on a television talk show, "but the mechanics of what happened were those of an attack."

In an interview with The Independent, her partner, Pier Scolari, said: "None of us is so stupid as to think the Americans did it on purpose. But the dynamic was that of an ambush and we want a convincing explanation of what happened, because the first American explanation was totally false."

Aaaaaand this is Scolari being "so stupid" in an interview with Il Manifesto after the initial reports came out:

Pier Scolari, Sgrena's partner who flew to Baghdad to collect her, put an even more sinister construction on the events, suggesting in a television interview that Sgrena was the victim of a deliberate ambush. 'Giuliana may have received information which led to the soldiers not wanting her to leave Iraq alive,' he claimed.

Oh, those wacky Communist journalists -- always something new every day!

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» UK's Times Still Attacking U.S. from g i a n t  c i t y
Today's Sunday Times "interview" of Giuliana Sgrena by John Follain is a perfect example of the sort of propaganda-disguised-as-"journalism" that I referred to a couple days ago. This piece shows the Times is marching in lockstep with the rest of the ... [Read More]

Tracked on March 13, 2005 4:36 PM

» More Of The Strange Tale from Joust The Facts
Being ensconced in NY City for the Big East took me away, largely, from the developments in the Sgrena rescue caper for about 4 days. [Read More]

Tracked on March 13, 2005 8:09 PM

» Another scalp for the blogosphere from Small Town Veteran
So long, Geronimo. On to Italy. [Read More]

Tracked on March 13, 2005 11:56 PM