Word: checkpoints
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Next week, Specialist Mario Lozano of the New York National Guard will be tried for murder in absentia in Italy. The charge: the killing of Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence officer, at a Baghdad checkpoint on March 4, 2005, where Lozano was stationed as a gunner. Calipari had been escorting Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian journalist just freed from kidnappers, taking her to the airport and onward to Italy...
...Since the incident, the U.S. and Italy have come up with opposing conclusions: the Americans clearing Lozano of wrongdoing, the Italians finding fault with the way the checkpoint was set up, with the warnings their agents in the car received and disputing American accounts of the car's speed. Sgrena has since written a book about the incident entitled Friendly Fire and alleged that she and the Italians were specifically targeted and that the U.S. investigation was a cover-up, But the story has rarely been told from the perspective of Lozano, the grandson of an Italian immigrant. Now, however...
...destination, requiring the ambassador to travel by car to a dinner meeting at Camp Victory outside of Baghdad. Route Irish, regarded by many as the most dangerous road in Iraq, was the only way to the base, says Lozano, whose company was ordered to set up a temporary checkpoint to ensure a safe passage for Negroponte's convoy. After the ambassador's party had passed, Lozano and the other soldiers maintained their position with two Humvees, one blocking the road and the other a few meters behind, waiting for the order to go back to base...
...prove that they understand the complexities of Iraq and care about the continuing tragedy, mawkish sentimentality and ham-fisted didacticism join forces to drain the project of all dramatic coherence. After curfew in Samarra, in Iraq’s volatile Sunni triangle, two Iraqi teenagers approach an American checkpoint. Unarmed and submissive, the teenagers reflexively put up their hands—and the Americans respond by throwing the both off the bridge. One drowns. It’s a shocking incident, and the film sets out to unravel its repercussions. The boy’s funeral, complete with stilted expository...
...Israeli general once told me, "Jamil, these checkpoints are nothing but an invitation for the terrorists to try another way." In fact, in all the years of crossing, I've never seen the Israelis catch a terrorist or a suicide bomber at the Bethlehem checkpoint. So what is the security value of this exercise...