NEWSWEEK has an exclusive interview with Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist whose car was shot up by U.S. soldiers on her way to the Baghdad airport. The occasion for the interview is the release of reports by the Italian and the U.S. governments, reporting the results of their separate investigations of the shooting, which killed the man who negotiated Sgrena's hostage release, Nicola Calipari: he died because he threw his body over Sgrena's to save her life.

Not surprisingly, the two reports reach very different conclusions. The Bush administration's report finds that the U.S. soldiers who attacked Sgrena's car were blameless, and that the Italian authorities did not inform the U.S. military authorities that Sgrena was on her way to the airport. The U.S. has also said that Sgrena's car was driving at high speed and that the car failed to slow down or respond to warning signals from the Americans. Sgrena disputes that account.

NEWSWEEK: TO WHAT EXTENT DO YOU AGREE WITH THE U.S. AND ITALIAN REPORTS ABOUT THE SHOOTING?
SGRENA: They are very different reports even though they have some parts in common. The American report tries to justify and totally absolve American troops, while, to my pleasant surprise, the Italian one is very documented, even though some parts of it are missing because they are classified. The Italian report takes into consideration several accounts that also appear in the U.S. report, but the [U.S. report] does not highlight some of the contradictions in the accounts made by the U.S. patrol soldiers.

COULD YOU GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF THE CONTRADICTIONS?
One is, for instance, the car’s speed. There was no posted speed limit [and] the fact is that the car could not have gone at a high speed given the road conditions. Moreover, if the car had been going as fast as the U.S. soldiers claim, they would not have had time to make any of the signals they insist they made. The real problem is that the Americans did not make any signal. [Also, according to the U.S. report] only one person in the patrol was in charge of lifting the spotlight, shouting, warning us to stop, shooting warning shots and then shooting straight at us—and all of that within a few seconds. It is clear that he would not have had the time to do all this,

DID YOU SEE A LIGHT SIGNAL?
No. There was no light signal.

DID YOU SEE A LASER SIGNAL?
No. They shot straight at us.

THEY FIRED WARNING SHOTS, DIDN'T THEY?
No. The shots arrived straight at us.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE CAR APPROACHED THE ROADBLOCK?
We didn’t see any roadblock. We saw nothing. At a certain point, we were on this road and there was a curve. The driver had just said that we were 700 meters [about 770 yards] away from the airport and suddenly we were hit by a light and strafed by a machine gun.

SO THERE WAS A LIGHT?
It was at the same time we were hit, at the time we were shot. The bullets and a beam of light hit us simultaneously.

Both the U.S. report and an accompanying article by Christopher Dickey in Newsweek say that the U.S. soldiers at the second checkpoint had not been told Sgrena's car was on the way, although Calipari had informed the U.S. command authorities. Sgrena thinks that the failure of command higher-ups to pass along the information to the soldiers at the checkpoint could have been intentional. She also takes issue with the claim that U.S. soldiers were on heightened alert for terrorist incidents because John Negroponte was scheduled to be coming down the same road, and that they closed the highway for that reason and set up extra checkpoints.

THE ITALIAN REPORT TALKS ABOUT THE INVOLUNTARY KILLING OF CALIPARI. BUT YOU HAVE SAID THAT THE SHOOTING COULD HAVE BEEN INTENTIONAL.
I can’t say that the killing was intentional, but from the report it seems to me that the creation of an incident was intentional. In any case, all the conditions existed for an incident to happen. Nobody warned the patrol that we were on our way, even though the U.S. command knew at 8:30 p.m. that we were coming on that road.

WHY WOULD THE AMERICANS HAVE WANTED AN INCIDENT?
You should ask them, but the convoy escorting [U.S. Ambassador John] Negroponte had already arrived at Camp Victory before 8 p.m., so why did [the U.S. command] tell the soldiers that they could not leave their positions? … The road was not closed anymore by the time we arrived [at 8.45 p.m.]. They had closed it previously but at that point it was not closed anymore.

There is a video/audio link on the sidebar alongside the interview with Sgrena with graphic footage about another accident U.S. troops caused: Six Iraqi children whose parents were killed before their eyes when U.S. soldiers opened fire on the car. Watch it if you have a strong stomach and don't cry easily.