"Fallujah is dying under the criminally indifferent gaze not only of the United States, but also of the Iraqi government, or at least the interim Prime Minister Allawi," she complained, in reports still available on Il Manifesto's English language Web site.

As U.S. Marines risked their lives in dangerous house-to-house searches designed to protect innocent civilians, Sgrena wrote: "The massacre in Fallujah continues."

The Il Manisfesto reporter made a specialty of interviewing Iraqis who claimed they had been tortured by U.S. troops, often relying on anonymously sourced secondhand accounts to spread the wildest charges.

One of her interview subjects claimed that women and children were being systematically tortured at Abu Ghraib by Americans, who, she said, repeatedly hurled one Iraqi woman against a wall and forced another "to separate faeces from urine, using her own hands."

"And what about children, how were they treated?" Sgrena asked. "We heard them screaming. They were tortured too. Mostly dogs were set on them," her source claimed.

The Italian reporter seldom sounded as outraged over the attacks by Osama bin Laden's operational chief in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi - who personally beheaded kidnap victims and killed hundreds with car bombs.

"Zarqawi, the man the US claims they are destroying Fallujah in order to capture ... obviously is not among those pinned to the banks of the Euphrates by American forces," Sgrena reported, before passing along the top terrorist's latest Internet message.

"[He] urged the rebels to fight on: 'Heroes of Islam in Fallujah, may your holy war be blessed. ... We have no doubt that the signs of Allah's victory will appear on the horizon.'"

After her release and medical treatment for wounds sustained when her car attempted to run a U.S. checkpoint on Friday, Sgrena praised her terrorist captors for treating her humanely.

"I was never treated badly," Sgrena told her colleagues at Il Manifesto upon her arrival in Rome, according to Bloomberg News.

Editor's note: