Injured journalists story ignored

The story of Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena has been largely neglected outside Italy, who was injured in an attack in the Iraq.

A man is brutally killed and his companion severely wounded in an assault of overwhelming ferocity. The attackers are members of an "army" widely regarded locally as having degenerated into a gang of thugs; they do this sort of thing with impunity. Their "superiors" engage in obfuscation and cover-up, paint the killing as an aberration and promise to investigate internally, while failing to co-operate with other inquiries. Brave women struggle to bring the truth to the wider world.

Perhaps you think you recognise the contours of the story, but Meejit isn't talking about the McCartneys. While the Belfast women have been adopted by Irish and international media as the personification of important themes – IRA "criminality", republican attitudes to justice, grassroots resistance to the Provos – the story of Italian journalist Guiliana Sgrena has wallowed in relative neglect outside Italy, despite its relevance to arguably bigger issues. Her efforts to tell her version of the truth – recently speaking to the brilliant and brave Canadian journalist Naomi Klein – have been widely ignored.

Journalistic martyrs are good copy – remember Veronica Guerin. But when a tank from the US army's Third Infantry Brigade blasted a car with the freed hostage Sgrena in it, killing her secret-service escort Nicola Calipari, it had implications not just for press freedom but for "coalition-building" in Iraq; for kidnapping and ransoming of other hostages; for the reputation of US troops; for revealing the wider truth of widespread slaughter of civilians by trigger-happy occupying forces. (As is rarely reported, even Iraq's quisling health ministry says the Americans killed many more people than "insurgents" did in the last quarter of 2004.) Most controversially, it raised potentially profound questions about her possible deliberate targeting.

But most reports have been content with the US version of events, with the best journalists (eg Conor O'Clery in The Irish Times) stretching to a telling "he said, she said" of conflicting accounts. In stark contrast to the McCartney sisters, who weren't present when their brother was killed but whose version of that incident is accepted as gospel by most media, journalist Giuliana Sgrena is apparently not regarded as a definitively credible witness to her own near-murder.

The deference to authority of mainstream journalism, and its resistance to the dirty facts of the ongoing Iraq war, could scarcely be more clearly illustrated.

The Sgrena story has had more traction in cyberspace, ranging from the right-wing sites that demonise her as a "communist harpy" who probably orchestrated that artillery shell into her shoulder herself, to the left-wing sites who view her as a hero and presume that the Americans were trying to take her out.

On the Internet the story took a new turn this week, with the publication on Counterpunch.org and elsewhere of a piece by Jeremy Scahill of Democracy Now! The Scahill piece is based on his colleague Naomi Klein's interview with Sgrena in a Rome hospital – where the journalist lay more seriously wounded than most accounts suggested, her lung having been punctured by the exploding four-inch round – and it poses a sharper contrast than ever between what the Americans say happened and what Sgrena says she experienced.

US accounts suggested the incident happened at a checkpoint on the dangerous airport road outside Baghdad, known as "Route Irish". But, Sgrena says, there was no checkpoint, and it wasn't that road she was traveling but a much more secure, VIP-only road that starts in the famous "Green Zone", and where the Americans are in relatively full control. She says the tank that shot her was sitting off the side of the road.

Furthermore, she says, her car was shot from the side and behind – she was hit from the rear – throwing doubt on any claim that it could have been construed as approaching the US soldiers with menace. As has been widely reported in Italy, Italian investigators have still not been allowed by the Americans to inspect the car, despite its being Italian-government property.

Such behaviour, along with the revelation in The Guardian recently that soldiers from the same brigade were half-heartedly investigated for raping Iraqi women, should at least raise the question of who governs Iraq.

That's a bit of an embarrassing one for most media, however, since they treated us to the images of the inspiring purple-fingered people of that country taking power into their own hands through democratic elections. The failure, as of this writing, to form a government has tended to be seen as an Iraqi failure to make use of America's electoral gift, rather than as itself a further consequence of US interference and occupation. With a form of optical US "withdrawal" potentially on the cards, it remains a crucial and under-addressed issue.