Italian journalist targeted? or just the entire Iraqi population?

Perhaps you have heard about the US troops shooting at a car carrying an Italian journalist who had just been freed from a hostage situation, along with her rescuer, a member of the Italian secret service. The secret service person was killed and the journalist was wounded. The funeral was a headlining story on the BBC this morning, but no mention of it on CNN or CNN Headline News all morning.

Anyway, there's some interesting coverage of the event on my favorite political blog, Angry Arab News Service. One commenter posted a series of links to articles written by the journalist, who regularly wrote anti-US pieces for the Italian communist paper Il Manifesto, e.g.:

Napalm Raid on Falluja? - 73 charred bodies of women and children found

Interview with an Iraqi Woman Tortured at Abu Ghraib

The same commenter also posted a link to an AP article that casts doubt on the "accidental" nature of the event:
Italian Journalist Rejects US Account
(Excerpt: "Meanwhile, an autopsy performed on the agent who died trying to save Giuliana Sgrena reportedly showed he was struck in the temple by a single round and died instantly." - doesn't go well with what I heard were the official claims that the soldiers shot at the engine to try to stop the car (would that stop a car?) and that the passengers were hit by shrapnel).

Then someone else posted this thought-provoking comment:
"Why does anyone think the US wanted to assassinate Sgrena in particular? A much more damning explanation is that firing 300-400 rounds at a car that poses no particular threat has become standard operating procedure for the US military in Iraq."

S/he has a point there.

---

P.S. Also on the international front, I was confused about the situation in Lebanon, so I did some research and posted about it on MadTeach.