Rescue of Jessica Lynch entirely “staged” by US soldiers? An extraordinary story from the BBC, which says it will supply evidence that this is so in a news documentary to air Sunday in the UK. A cover story report in today’s Guardian newspaper says that the Fedayeen had abandoned the hospital days before the ‘rescue’ and that the advance party of US soldiers had been informed of this via their own Arab interpreter. More bizarre, US soldiers had actually fired on a vehicle carrying Lynch, driven by an Iraqi doctor who had informed soldiers that he would try to bring her to them from the hospital as basically the whole place was empty anyway and she wasn’t badly hurt. Under heavy fire, he had to turn and drive her back. The Pentagon claimed that she had gun and stab wounds. But doctors at the hospital say she had no gun or other combat wounds, only broken bones and a sprain consistent with a car accident – and the Pentagon is now saying there is now some “conflicting information” about what wounds she actually has, refusing to say anything more.
The doctors also say the soldiers arrived along with their film crew and as the film rolled, started kicking in doors and shouting — though they’d been told there was no resistance and hadn’t been for days. Only a couple of doctors remained in the hospital and one patient, handcuffed to a bed frame. The doctors and the empty hospital are presumably in the military film, but only a five-minute edit of the ‘rescue’ was released (within two hours of the event itself, and rushed to US media) and the Pentagon has refused to release the full film — with the doctors in it — to UK journalists asking for it, to clear up discrepencies. Says one doctor, “I don’t know why they think there is some benefit in saying she has a bullet injury.”
Says another: “It was like a Hollywood film. They cried ‘Go, go, go’, with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions.” The Pentagon would not say what, if any, kind of resistance had been met by the soldiers at the hospital.
And on top of all this, the senior Downing Street official sent to Iraq to represent the Prime Minister’s office has complained that at the very least, the Lynch affair was overblown, a minor human interest element compared to the discovery of the bodies of her comrades. He won’t be any more specific but did complain privately to the UK government that the Lynch presentation was particularly ’embarrassing’. Further, British military Group Captain Al Lockwood, the British Army spokesman at central command in Iraq, says in the documentary that the British could not believe the pandering way in which the US military dealt with the US media, culminating in the Lynch episode, and the gushing, unquestioning acceptance of same by the US media. “In reality we had two different styles of news media management,” said Lockwood. “I feel fortunate to have been part of the UK one.”
Meanwhile, Lynch says she can’t remember anything that happened to her. Will the US media pick up on any of this? Or will it shy away from ruining a potential blockbuster action film through too many difficult questions?
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