Right Wing Nut House

I’ve been sitting in front of my Wordpress Admin screen trying to think of something clever and witty to say about the latest flip-flop in Guiliana Sgrena’s account of her run-in with Americans in Iraq and drawn an absolute blank.

While it’s true a certain kind of Abbott and Costello comedy can be found in her tiresomely changing story (”Who’s on first” today?) it’s also true that once you realize that outside of a few blogs here in the United States, her lies and inconsistencies are receiving virtually no play in the European press. It’s as if a collective state of amnesia involving short-term memory loss has gripped the press so that this self-important, propagandizing lickspittle can say anything she likes, secure in the knowledge that her words will be faithfully transmitted via the leftist rags who’ve annointed Ms. Sgrena as their Anti-American Champion du jour.

Here’s Sgrena in an interview on March 12:

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.”

And here’s Sgrena in an interview on March 13:

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.

At various times her story has included an armoured car, a tank, a patrol, a checkpoint, the car going slowly, the car going at normal speed, the car going so fast it almost went out of control, a light, no light, and on and on and…

It’s depressing. And Sgrena has given notice beforehand that she will not accept as truth any investigation by the Italian or American authorities:

What happened was just terrible. Our questions need to be addressed. And not only by the Italian government, but by Mr Bush himself. Sure, we won’t come to the truth, but let’s hope that at least this time around, they do everything in their power to have a plausible account.

Why she wants her “questions addressed” by “Mr. Bush himself” can only be construed as a propaganda ploy…and perhaps an unshakable belief in her own self-importance.

This hubris may in fact have led to her kidnapping in the first place. A Dutch journalist who flew to Bagdhad with Sgrena told her this:

‘Be careful not to get kidnapped,’ I told the female Italian journalist sitting next to me in the small plane that was headed for Baghdad. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘That won’t happen. We are siding with the oppressed Iraqi people. No Iraqi would kidnap us.’

‘You don’t understand the situation. We are anti-imperialists, anti-capitalists, communists,’ they said. The Iraqis only kidnap American sympathizers, the enemies of the Americans have nothing to fear.

Was it hubris? Or just stupidity:

She has covered fighting in Algeria and Afghanistan, and on her seventh trip to Iraq this winter she had “of course” thought she might become the target of kidnappers. “I took precautions. I never fixed appointments in advance. I never stopped a long time in one place,” she says in a voice made weak by her difficulty catching breath. But she disobeyed those rules on February 4 with disastrous consequences.

It seems pretty obvious now that she has the attention of the entire world, Guiliana Sgrena is going to milk her notoriety for all that it’s worth. It remains to be seen whether her lies and distortions will have the intended effect of damaging Prime Minister Berlusconi politically and roiling Italian-American relations to the point where Italy feels it necessary to reduce its committment in assisting the US in Iraq.