The author analyses the way in which Italian newspapers approached the translation of a very sensitive source text, i.e. a US military report from Iraq on the controversial shooting of the Italian security agent Calipari. The release of this specific US Report saw an outburst of translational activity in the Italian media. He shows that due to the political and diplomatic circumstances in which the event took place, the newspapers selected passages of the US report in translation and subjected them to editorial manipulations, thus reframing the discourse on the US report and undermining the source text. Whereas the US report provides a legitimization of one single perspective of the events, the author argues that the purpose-driven translations offered by Italian media aim at achieving different goals and can thus be described as “legitimizing” translations.