You miss the point entirely on why the US and any other intelligent thinker would have a problem with her.

It's not anti-US policy written by some random European journalist... those are all over the place. The displeasure comes from the fact that Italy is paying insurgents to let their people go. The insurgents then buy materials to blow up Americans, Italians, and everyone else. Italy has become a money tree for Iraqi insurgents.

And to turn the story around, making the nice, kind Iraqis who kidnapped her and threatened to kill her and made her plead for her life on camera look like sage heros for trying to warn her about the dangerous Americans... unbelievable. The Italians didn't alert anybody that the journalist was on her way out... maybe some should be asking why the Italians set her up to get shot and her escort killed. That's as plausible a story as the Americans knowing she was coming and targeting her.

"Why any other intelligent thinker would have a problem with her?"???

Okay, first off, are you asserting that it was because someone "had a problem with her" that she was shot at? If so, that's frankly horrible.

If you read the account of Sgrena and her colleague, Scolari, they were travelling at moderate speed, received no warning lights, signs or shots, and were suddenly and abruptly fired upon by US troops.

Is Sgrena lying?

Sgrena is not a "random European journalist." She's someone who has consistently done her job in investigating questionable practices of the US/Coalition forces in Iraq, including napalm usage and rape of Iraqi women.

Nowhere in my post or in Sgrena's articles does anyone refer to the insurgents who held Sgrena captive as "nice" or "kind." They were certainly not "heroes," and I don't know why you'd infer that. She's just saying that they warned her. Are you saying she's lying about that, too?

All these questions are all the more reason to support a UN (which is to say relatively unbiased) investigation of what went down on Friday. It has become standard operating procedure of the Bush administration to avoid asking basic "why?" questions, starting with 9/11 and "why did those men fly those planes into those buildings?" Funnily enough, Bin Laden gave straight answers to that question, and his answers had nothing to do with "hating freedom." But his answers don't play well with people because they make us rethink US international policy and the degree to which it is imperialistic.

When a crime is committed, detectives investigate. Pretty simple. But from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib to Gitmo to Falluja to Valerie Plame to Enron...and on and on...Bush & Co. do all in their power to make sure an investigation does not happen. Which story is more "plausible"? The one that the evidence supports. And until the evidence is gathered, we really don't have a clear answer.

I like to think of myself as an "intelligent thinker." But I may be wrong about me. I don't think I'm wrong about people like Will Pitt, Steve Weissman, and Reporters Without Borders. They are intelligent thinkers, and they want some answers to these troubling questions.