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Jessica lynch raid unnecessary { May 16 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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nbc6.net
Was 'Saving Private Lynch' Story True?
Doctors At Hospital Say Lynch Treated Well; Raid Unnecessary
Joy-Ann Reid, Staff Writer
POSTED: 3:31 p.m. EDT May 16, 2003
UPDATED: 3:37 p.m. EDT May 16, 2003
It was, perhaps, the most famous story of the Iraq war: the dramatic "snatch and grab" operation that freed a 19-year-old woman named Jessica Lynch from her Iraqi captors. Lynch had been part of a convoy of support and supply troops from the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company who were ambushed on March 23 by Iraqi fighters on their way to Nassiriyah. Nine soldiers were killed in the ambush, and Lynch was whisked away to a local hospital by Iraqi soldiers and held there for 8 days, according to U.S. officials. Five POWs from the 507th resupply unit -- unexpected combatants -- became the most famous American soldiers in Iraq when videotaped images of their interrogations by Iraqi soldiers were beamed around the world by the al-Jazeera cable network, drawing war crimes charges from the U.S. government.
Lynch, of Palestine, West Virginia, was the youngest American to go missing during the war. She remained unaccounted for until April 2, when dramatic night vision video was released by the Pentagon showed members of the Army Rangers and Navy Seals staging a daring late-night raid on the hospital -- fighting their way into the compound, according to U.S. Central Command spokesman Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, and wheeling Lynch out on a gurney and onto a waiting helicopter. Initial media reports said she had been shot and stabbed, enduring abuse while strapped to a hospital gurney. Other reports, including one in the Washington Post, suggested that she had emptied her automatic weapon in a "fight to the death" as her captors grabbed her and her convoy on that dramatic day in March.
After her release, news reports credited an Iraqi lawyer named Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, for tipping off American soldier's to Lynch's location, saving her life. Before long, al-Rehaief was being called a hero, flown to the United States and given asylum -- plus a $500,000 book deal, according to the Guardian. (The Lynch family is also fielding scores of book offers, according to media reports)>
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Meanwhile, Lynch became the most celebrated American soldier to survive the Iraq conflict. Her name and image now adorn everything from buttons to bumper stickers to T-shirts. Entire Web sites and even a song are dedicated to her. NBC is reportedly at work on a television movie that will immortalize her Iraq odyssey. This as her doctors tell the media that she remembers nothing of her ordeal, and probably never will.
But now, a British tabloid and a British Broadcasting Company report are quoting Iraqi witnesses in calling the official story of Lynch's capture and rescue into question. A report in Thursday's UK Guardian by John Kampfner, a British reporter who will host a BBC special on the Lynch story this weekend, quotes Iraqi doctors who cared for Lynch as saying the rescue didn't happen the way it was portrayed by the Pentagon and the American press. And the British press is not alone in questioning the "Saving Private Lynch" narrative. Other members of the international media are pointing to what they call discrepancies in the official story.
So what really happened to Lynch during those eight days she was unaccounted for? According to Kampfner, the doctors who treated her say they gave Lynch the best treatment they could under the circumstances, even giving her the only specialist bed in the hospital, which had been heavily damaged by bombing. One of those doctors also claims he treated lynch for a broken arm, broken thigh and dislocated ankle, and that she suffered no bullet or stab wounds, facts now also backed up by Lynch's family. The doctors also said they befriended Lynch and that the relationship between the young woman and the staff at the hospital was anything but hostile.
The Iraqi doctors also told Kampfner that on the day before the rescue, the Iraqi Fedayeen paramilitary forces had already fled the town, and that the American commanders had been alerted to that fact by locals. The Guardian story quotes one doctor, Dr. Anmar Uday, in saying that the Americans were told there were no Fedayeen in the area, but that the troops staged the dramatic rescue anyway, storming the hospital in a blaze of guns and explosions -- including scores of blank ammunition rounds -- in a scene that Uday described as something out of a Hollywood movie.
A military cameraman videotaped the rescue, the Guardian report said, and the footage was heavily edited and fed to the U.S. media within hours. Kampfner reportedly asked the Pentagon for the full, unedited video, and was turned down.
If the Lynch story was part-stagecraft, the Guardian story claims it may have inspired by a master of high drama. Kampfner claims that the idea for the Lynch "reality TV" release came from the Pentagon, which had held discussions in 2001 with movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer -- the man behind "Black Hawk Down," and Bertram van Munster, of television's "Cops", to produce a primetime television series that would follow members of the U.S. armed forces in Afghanistan to tell the story of the conflict from a soldier's point of view. And according to a Friday story in the New York Times, the Bush White House is extremely sensitive to the image-making power of television, having hired former ABC producer Scott Sforza to craft the president's image, working in tandem with a former NBC cameraman, Bob DeServi, to stage-manage every public appearance of Mr. Bush with an eye toward the 2004 election.
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