US troops kill rescuer as Italian hostage is plucked to safety in Iraq

Story from the Guardian. I could hardly believe I was hearing this correctly when I caught just the tail end of the story on the news yesterday. And yet, in a way, it was a disaster just waiting to happen. It has long been noted that the demoralised American troops in Iraq (and to some extent this is true of all coalition forces), having been given an essentially impossible mission (shades of Vietnam again) have been responding by becoming increasingly "trigger-happy" and careless of suffering and the loss of human life, which is all around them daily whether they precipitate it or not. And now it has happened, and the victim is a coalition agent in a high-profile rescue operation.