I read, also, that the captors told the Italian group that the Americans wanted to kill her, and to be sure not to slow at a check point. That would make sense under the circumstances indicated.

However, I take whatever seeBS says with a grain of salt nowadays.

Do we have a tape of the actual incident or is it one similar that they are getting the logistics from? If it is the actual incident, it needs to be put out on tv dammit.

Do we have a tape of the actual incident...

I doubt seriously that we'll see a tape released. It involves surveillance capabilities that the military would rather not make public and should not make public.

In related info, take a look at this article from Patterico about the LA Times and how they edited the Reuters story to try to distort the truth.

The sad thing is that the Italian government appears to want to continue with this communist, anti-American dog-and-pony show.

I believe that the reason behind Berlisconi's stance is probably the fact that the Italian people, as sad as it may be, believe the communist ...... And Berlisconi does not want to loose face. Now, the question for us is whether we go along with this, securing continued cooperation from Italy, or do we go after Berlisconi and risk getting some lunatic from one of their other political parties in power, undoing our relationship, as tenuours as it may be at the moment.

Now, the question for us is...

We have investigated the incident and to the best of our abilities we have shown that the US troops are without blame in the shooting. The case has been made to the Italian government. If its leadership decides to reject it and/or remove their support from our efforts, so be it. We cannot worry about that. The Italians are just not that important in the overall scheme of things. They have much more to lose by trashing our relationship than we do. If their current leader decides to pander to the Communists then he will have made his bed.

I posted in blogsforbush.com at the time of this incident and I'll repeat this once more. The slogan 'Support Our Troops' seen on so many vehicles with the yellow ribbon means exactly that; it does not mean vacillating when some Commie lady Italian reporter tries to disparage the USA with her venom. I believed the troops from the beginning on this, and I believe them to this day.

In My view, Matt Drudge was the one who helped spiral this issue out of proportion with his blaring headline the day of the incident. He jumped to conclusions by inferring at the time that the Americans were wrong to open fire on the Italian vehicle, and by releasing sketchy reports on the incident when it was unfolding. Drudge takes a risk with this style, and this was not one of his brighter moments.

Our worst enemies in the war on Iraq are not the terrorists but our countrymen. No one wants war in their right mind, but there are many that psychologically back the underdog in fights against the US military, including a distressingly large number of American 'citizens'. The MSM feels it is their responsibility to criticize and malign the government without validating the facts they put out on the internet. The MSM's quality has declined substantially since the advent of the internet, or apparently so since their reporting can be validated by the blogging community.