Did You Hear the One About the Communist Reporter Who Faked Her Own Kidnapping?

Rusty Shackleford has been on it from day one, and he has all the important details.

Some important questions emerge from Ms. Sgrena's account of things. How did the American troops know that there was a reporter in the car that was speeding towards them, at night, in an area known for heavy insurgent activity? and, Why don't liberals think that's an important question to ask?

Question: What do Communist reporter Giuliana Sgrena and Jeff Gannon have in common? THEY'RE BOTH GAY MALE PROSTITUTES!!!



Update: In the interest of fairness, please note my retraction in the comments here. And in the interest of actual fairness, rather than just linking something that got me a chuckle, please note that Derek Rose presents the other side of the kidnapping story. Please note that my extremely limited comments on Giuliana Sgrena had to do with her getting shot at (that story has some serious problems with it), rather than the kidnapping itself. I confess I haven't looked very closely at Rusty's "faking it" theory, so I express no opinion on it. But as a matter of evidence, I'm less likely to take her version of events at face value if she's proven so willing to change her story on the shooting incident.

So, there you go. There are two sides to the story, I don't pretend to know which is the true one (and I can't say I'm terribly interested), and if you want to see Sobek Pundit get smacked down in the face of cold-hard logic, follow the link.

Update: In the comments, reader Botan says the Americans knew who was in the car because "The people in the car had phoned, among others, Italian officials to tell them that she was free and that they were approaching the airport."

I've confirmed that Sgrena claims that at least one phone call was made (Italian here). The link goes to the English translation of the article, which states in relevant part, "The driver twice called the embassy and in Italy that we were heading towards the airport that I knew was heavily patrolled by U.S. troops." ("L'autista aveva per due volte comunicato in ambasciata e in Italia che noi eravamo diretti verso l'aeroporto che io sapevo supercontrollato dalle truppe americane...") That's a poorly written sentence in both languages, because it's unclear who exactly was called. But the only reasonable hypothesis is that if anyone was called, it was the Italian embassy, which does not issue orders to American troops; certainly it doesn't order U.S. troops to murder Italian citizens.

In order for Botan's observation to hit home, we need to posit a phone call from the driver to the Italian embassy, a phone call from the Italian embassy to the American embassy, a call from the American embassy to U.S. military commanders, and a call from military commanders to the U.S. soldiers who fired. I notice that Rusty Shackleford backed down from a conspiracy theory of his when he reflected on the wild improbability of a multiple-layer conspiracy theory with that many people involved - the same principle governs here. There are simply too many places for leaks that haven't happened, too much speculation.

All of that assumes without deciding that any phone calls were made at all. Sgrena has changed important aspects of her story already, and she also makes the simply amazing claim that the U.S. forces fired 200-400 rounds at her vehicle. If you believe that's true, and that anyone, let alone three people, walked away, you underestimate the killing power of 200-400 bullets pumped into a moving vehicle.