More secrecy to HIDE the real truth about this supposed great rescue!....wonder why Lynch isn't being allowed to TALK.....aha....MORE SECRECY....
Saving Private Jessica
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times
Friday 20 June 2003
ASIRIYA, Iraq
I've been roaming Iraq, turning over rocks in my unstinting effort to help the Bush administration
find those weapons of mass destruction. No luck yet.
But I did find something related, here in the city where it seems (contrary to early Pentagon leaks)
that Pfc. Jessica Lynch did not mow down Iraqis until her ammo ran out, was not shot and
apparently was not plucked from behind enemy lines by U.S. commandos braving a firefight. It
looks as if the first accounts of the rescue were embellished, like the imminent threat from W.M.D.,
and like wartime pronouncements about an uprising in Basra and imminent defections of generals.
There's a pattern: we were misled.
None of this is to put down Private Lynch, whom her Iraqi doctors described as courageous and
funny in the face of unrelenting pain; they said that she told Abdul Hadi, a hospital worker who had
befriended her, not to take risks for her because he was needed by his 17 children. Ms. Lynch is
still a hero in my book, and it was unnecessary for officials to try to turn her into a Hollywood
caricature. As a citizen, I deeply resent my government trying to spin me like a Ping-Pong ball.
Staff members of Nasiriya's main hospital told me, as they have told other reporters, how
surprised they were when military officers brought an American woman by ambulance. Private
Lynch was unconscious, with broken legs, a head wound and other injuries, apparently sustained in
a vehicle accident during a firefight.
"She was nearly dead," recalled Saad Abdulrazak, the deputy hospital director, who received her.
The Iraqi doctors were enchanted by this blonde warrior, who as she recovered spent her time
alternately crying and joking. I don't know how much to credit the Iraqis' claims that they gave her
the best room in the hospital, that they went to the market to buy orange juice for her with their own
money, that they brought clothes so that she would have something to wear. But they didn't
minimize Iraqi brutality. Indeed, they told of an execution of a handcuffed American male. (I've put a
fuller account of this execution and of Ms. Lynch's saga at nytimes.com/kristofresponds.)
The hospital staff also said that on the night of March 27, military officials prepared to kill Ms.
Lynch by putting her in an ambulance and blowing it up with its occupants — blaming the atrocity
on the Americans. The ambulance drivers balked at that idea. Eventually, the plan was changed so
that a military officer would shoot Ms. Lynch and burn the ambulance. So Sabah Khazal, an
ambulance driver, loaded her in the vehicle and drove off with a military officer assigned to execute
her.
"I asked him not to shoot Jessica," Mr. Khazal said, "and he was afraid of God and didn't kill her."
Instead, the executioner ran away and deserted the army, and Mr. Khazal said that he then thought
about delivering Ms. Lynch to an American checkpoint. But there were firefights on the streets, so
he returned to the hospital. (Ms. Lynch apparently never knew how close she had come to
execution.)
By the morning of March 31, all of the Iraqi military at the hospital had fled. The hospital staff
members said that they then told Ms. Lynch they would take her to the Americans the next day.
That same night, the American special forces arrived.
"I met the Americans at the hospital entrance," said Dr. Hussein Salih, adding that Mr.
Abdulrazak then led the Americans to Private Lynch. The staff members all said that there was no
resistance, and that they welcomed the Americans.
Is this account the truth? I don't know, but every time I voiced skepticism, the doctors and staff all
insisted: "Go ask Jessica! She'll tell you." The U.S. military has refused to make Private Lynch
available, although that may be out of respect for her privacy; in any case, she is said to have no
memory of her capture.
My guess is that "Saving Private Lynch" was a complex tale vastly oversimplified by officials,
partly because of genuine ambiguities and partly because they wanted a good story to build
political support for the war — a repetition of the exaggerations over W.M.D. We weren't quite lied
to, but facts were subordinated to politics, and truth was treated as an endlessly stretchable fabric.
The Iraqis misused our prisoners for their propaganda purposes, and it hurts to find out that some
American officials were misusing Private Lynch the same way.
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