TheStar, Pity the poor PR boys at the Pentagon. It may be hard, but try.
They thought they had it made:
A pretty, blonde soldier ambushed by the Iraqis, courageously firing until her ammo runs out, shot and stabbed and carried off by the enemy who, after taking time out to rape her, deposit her unconscious body in a hospital, where she is slapped around by evil medical staff, then, nine days later, is rescued in a daring, nighttime raid that is videotaped and can be shown repeatedly around the world and who, as soon as she recovers, will tell what it's like to be an all-American hero. It was a gift from the propaganda gods.
Just two problems: It didn't happen that way, and the designated hero, Pte. Jessica Lynch, refuses to say it did.
In fact, Lynch is telling anyone who asks that she is no hero: “That wasn't me. I'm not about to take credit for something I didn't do … I'm just a survivor.”
Okay so far, modesty and all.
But Lynch is also a mite angry about the Pentagon's manipulation of events and can't seem to stop correcting the record.
She says she never got off a shot because her gun jammed. The Iraqi medical staff were kindness itself. She was out cold for three hours after her Humvee crashed in the grenade attack, so she doesn't remember any sexual assault. And shocked Iraqi doctors deny it.
As for the dramatic, Rambo-style hospital raid on April 1, she says there was no resistance, no Iraqi military in the hospital, and staff even offered the rescuers a key.
The Pentagon “used me to symbolize all this stuff,” Lynch told a fawning Diane Sawyer on ABC last week. “It's wrong.”
Yikes. Time for Plan B: It isn't our fault.
A senior military official tells Time magazine that, contrary to appearances, the Saving Private Lynch story was not, no way, a calculated PR ploy, but more a “comedy of errors,” based on patchy battlefield intelligence. The media just ran with it.
What the Lynch story actually is, say critics, is a star-spangled metaphor for the confusion and deceit that's marked the Iraq foray from the start.
“This White House believes they can spin their way out of anything and they assume reality will surrender to their spin,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a media analyst at New York University.
“In this case, they believed Jessica would play along. But she hasn't. She may not appear self-assertive, but she can clearly tell illusion from reality. Good for her.”
What irks him and other analysts is how the American media went along with the fraud for so long.
The Toronto Star's Mitch Potter was one of the first to report the actual facts of the rescue on May 4. The BBC followed up on May 15. But those stories got no traction in the U.S., says Miller. “The media here should have exposed the lie long before they did.”
Indeed, the Washington Post
