The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Monday, May 02, 2005

News 2020

Inquiry reports on shooting incident

The US and Italian governments have "agreed to disagree" about the mistaken detrimentation of an Italian secret agent by US checkpoint personnel in Iraq last month.

The agent, Giulio Sgreno, was escorting a recently freed hostage out of the terrorist-held 90% of the country's area and into actual Iraqi territory. The US authorities say that the car failed to stop despite repeated warnings, was travelling on an unauthorised road outside curfew hours and was disguised as a weapon of mass destruction.

The freed hostage, a 52-year-old Christian nurse who waves her arms about, has never been married and is still recovering from her ordeal, insists that the freedom protection forces at the checkpoint fired without adequate warning.

A joint US-Italian inquiry into the incident concluded today with the issue of two separate reports, one in English and one not. Dr Buford J Huggins, who co-authored the larger and more extensive of the two reports, said that the American team's divergences with the Italian were over "matters of detail".

"In any account of an incident like this, there are going to be differing versions," Dr Huggins said today. "Remember, our boys are packing state-of-the-art firepower, which they often have to use on the basis of split-second decision-making. You can't really expect a non-expert witness to understand what's going on in that kind of situation. That's why we had this inquiry to clear the matter up."

The Italian president, Musso Maledetto, has been a staunch ally of the US in its fight to spread democracy, despite the unpopular nature of the war on terror with the Italian public, which lacks Britain's long tradition of liberalism in politics.

The US Commander-in-Chief, speaking from the White House bunker, said today that a line could now be drawn under "this regrettable incidence of traffic over-control by American humans acting in conditions of great stress and peril."

"Italy and the United States have had a long and fruitful relationship ever since we invaded them in 1944," the Commander-in-Chief concluded. "Now they've grown up enough to help us do for Iraq what we did for Italy all that time ago - depose an evil dictator, prevent a takeover by enemies of democracy, and provide opportunity and choice for all. It's a long road, and inevitably there are going to be a few bumps on the way."

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