Does bravery depend on who's on the other side of the gun?

The 101st Fighting Keyboarders did much preening and strutting around the rumoured circumstances of the killing of one Italian hostage in Iraq last year. Here's James Taranto at Opinionjournal, approvingly citing Michael Ledeen at National Review Online:

... Italian hostage, Fabrizio Quattrocchi ... After forcing him to dig his own grave, they put a hood over his head and ordered him to kneel so he could be killed. He wouldn't go for it. He tried to remove the hood, and defiantly yelled at them "I will show you how an Italian dies." The scene was a propaganda disaster for them, and good old al Jazeera, the modern mother of lies, announced that they had the tape but wouldn't release it ... It showed Western bravery, not Arab domination, so they couldn't show it.

Indeed, for Mark Steyn, this became the gold standard for hostage behaviour, from which British-Irish hostage Ken Bigley fell well short.

So today, in a predictable consequence of the cavalier attitude of the Pentagon to collateral damage in Iraq, we have another brave Italian:

American forces fired on a car carrying a freed Italian hostage as it approached a checkpoint in Baghdad on Friday, killing an Italian intelligence officer and wounding at least two others, including the just-released journalist ...

The intelligence agent was killed when he threw himself over Sgrena [freed hostage] to protect her from U.S. fire, Italy's Apcom news agency quoted Gabriele Polo, the editor of Sgrena's newspaper Il Manifesto, as saying.

We'll update as the VRC spinners check in with their analysis.

FIRST UPDATE: the story carefully being avoided by the spinners so far. Atrios says the sensible thing. So far, it's looking like a 4-M event for Italy, but getting the typical no-news-on-Friday treatment in the US.

SECOND UPDATE (7 MARCH): It seems that the only good dead Italian in Iraq is one whose death can be spun in favour of the Exalted One. So the VRC checks in today with the spin on the Friday killing of an Italian secret service agent at a US military roadblock:

GIULIANA SGRENA [Jonah Goldberg]
Michael [sic] Instapundit has a very useful post on the awful incident where an Italian spy was killed protecting the Communist reporter.

Following his link to Instanpundit (and who is Michael anyway?), another slime phrase: "Italian ineptitude." On the other hand, the NYT and Washington Post have stories placing the deaths within the broader context of the jumpiness of US soldiers at roadblocks. Most of the Iraqi civilian victims thereof go unreported.